Novus ordo seclorum: the intellectual origins of the constitution.

Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the constitution

THE STATURE of Forrest McDonald as an interpreter of the confluence of language, thought, and action that issued in the United States Constitution was extraordinary even before the publication of his most recent consideration of that subject. Now, with Novus Ordo Seclorum (a title taken from the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States), his authority is unequaled--magisterial. That the production of this book was inevitable is, in retrospect upon its author's career as an American historian, apparent. But it is an especially fortunate conjunction that the maturity of his reflection upon the sources, generation, and meaning of our fundamental law came in the season naturally set aside by his countrymen for commemoration of the fons et origo for our national identity. At a time, moreover, when the very possibility of understanding our origins is, for the first time, in dispute: denied for essentially partisan reasons, as a license for judicial arrogance disguised as modest skepticism, by such influential jurists as Justice William Brennan.

The rediscovery of our constitutional inheritance is, of course, a continuing process, a labor regularly interrupted by anachronism and ideology. It is a battlefield where the cost of being misled or misinformed is the loss of those liberties for the protection of which our forefathers raised up a frame of government, a shelter that has almost miraculously survived the rigorous pounding of these last two centuries. An academic undertaking with such potent implications for partisan politics is never easily accomplished, and yet no other intellectual enterprise is of such importance to the internal order of the Republic (and therefore to our survival as a nation) as the study of our political beginnings. In pursuing it through several phases (some of them detailed in the preface to his new work) McDonald has produced six significant volumes, bringing his work to a new level of sophistication and thoroughness in Novus Ordo Seclorum. For that reason the book is of inestimable value to any responsible citizen who cherishes a structure originally well made by the members of the Great Convention but now concealed by the special alchemy of "construction." Or at least this is true for those among us who continue to believe that it is possible to "gauge accurately the intent of the Framers on the application of principle to specific, contemporary questions"; and who also believe that with such possibility comes the obligation to anchor judges in law, not law injudges.

Professor McDonald cuts the ground from beneath the feet of those (Ely, Tribe, Perry, Dworkin, Miller) who would read the Constitution as a "blank check"--as the product of a "spirit of system" that would not accommodate "public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people." He makes short shrift of the theory that the Union came together in an agreement to fulfill, over time, "the buried promise of the political religion of equality"; an agreement to fall back, on a regular basis, to "first principles" or (as the modern apologists describe them) "higher values." He also finishes off the related theory that the Constitution is an aspirational unfolding toward the New Jerusalem of anterior, abstrack truth concerning human nature: a footnote to the Declaration of Independence. In answer to such tendentious blather he reasons as did Pierce Butler of South Carolina, who said of overly ambitious proposals for the Constitution, "the people will not bear such innovation," and "it is better to follow the example of Solon, who gave the Athenians not the best government he could devise but the best they would receive."

McDonald's masterpiece is the reconstruction of an intellectual milieu, which leads to an explanation of persons and events and thus to a commentary on the nature and significance of what was agreed upon in Independence Hall and later approved by the states. He begins by detailing some of the limitations on the ingenuity of the Framers that are either acknowledged by implication in their conduct or overtly rendered in the language of their debates, in their writings, or in the anti-Federalist literature of their critics. The most important purposes of the Framers were, of course, those announced in the Preamble to the Constitution, to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity"--a promise that carried with it a protection for life and property, a preparation for common defense, and a devotion to justice, peace, and the common good. These purposes in some respects excluded other objectives, but required of the Framers their commitment to some species of republicanism, even though they wanted only "government of the sort to which they were accustomed" and came to republican forms "as the nation did, which is to say late and willy-nilly, with neither a historical nor a philosophical understanding of what they were embracing."

Another authority whose shaping influence on the discourse of the Constitutional Convention is acknowledged is that of history as precept, heritage, or process. Political, social, and economic theory reinforced these elements of a "given" intellectual situation surrounding the discourse of the participants. Within such boundaries was the Constitution crafted, despite the fact that ingredients related in fostering its composition were in their own right incompatible: a "compact among political societies," a "government that would itself be governed by laws, and laws that conformed to the genius and circumstance of the people."

McDonald is at his best in summarizing the relevant political theory of the eighteenth century; and on the political economy known by the Framers he has, among American intellectual historians, no equal. But even more important than his command of this literature is his awareness of just how useful such materials were in drafting the Constitution--how important and how insignificant. What he says regarding the impact of the teachings of Adam Smith on the political behavior of American readers characterizes the attitude of the Framers toward explanatory systems and philosophical propositions in general: that they "blended the parts they approved with ideas and biases they had previously entertained, and thus ended up with something different from the original."

Theory was a necessary part of the idiom of the original American politics, a component that affected but in no way controlled the results of the long conversation held in Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1787. But more essential to that process, and to the 55 men who had a part in forwarding it, were the lessons of common experience, "both their own and that of the mother country," which "provided a surer guide" for prudent men naturally suspicious of rationalist abstractions. To demonstrate what he intends by this distinction, McDonald follows the operation of major concepts through the period leading up to the Great Convention and then into the formation of parties within that assembly: the influence of ideas interacting with the institutional and personal realities of an American society already in place and functioning for more than 150 years when these sages took thought to make out of it something new: but, because James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and James Wilson did not have their way--because wiser and more temperate spirits prevailed--not too new.

The fruits of McDonald's labors will now stand as obstacle and impediment in the path of those who would reconstruct the American past into a sanction for present mischief and worse tinkering yet to come. The authors of such malice will have to get around Forrest McDonald--if they can. Conservatives in particular shoudl therefore salute his achievement as not merely an intellectual feat but an unparalleled act of service to the Republic, looking toward the kind of national self-understanding which the Fathers hoped we might someday achieve within the great edifice they left in our keeping.