The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought.

The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought, by Barry Alan Shain (Princeton, 394 pp., $39.50)

It is a eliche among historians that each generation tends to re-shape its perception of the past to make it accord with its own biases and preoccupations: the dictatorship of the Zeitgeist. From the Progressive Period through the New Deal, for example, the American Founding was seen largely as the product of struggles between economic "haves" and "have nots," the former triumphing with the establishment of the Constitution. During the Sixties and Seventies, historians began to read the Founding in ideological terms, the most fashionable version being that the Framers were impelled by the revival of interest in the ancient republics, which were seen as militant and anti-capitalistic participatory democracies. More recently, as is exemplified by these two works, the focus has shifted again: the Founders were concerned with none of the above, but with religion and law.

Barry Alan Shain's message about the Founding is that, for all the Revolutionary generation's talk about rights and liberty, it understood those matters not in individualistic terms but collectively and communally. Indeed, except for freedom of conscience and its counterpart, individual salvation, the very idea of individualism was relatively new and not widely accepted. Even in regard to salvation it was generally agreed that - because of original sin - no one could obtain it without the reinforcing moral support of and policing by the community. The right to liberty was the right of the community to defend itself against outside interference and against heterodoxy within. Belief in individual rights did not seriously begin to emerge until the nineteenth century, and until well into the twentieth individual rights were always regarded as subordinate to the rights of the community.

Surprising as these observations may appear, they are not entirely original with Mr. Shain. Such historians and political scientists as Ron Peters, John Roche, Robert Palmer, William Nelson, and Michael Kammen have written along the same lines. Two features of Shain's work, however, make it especially valuable. One is the thoroughness with which he has built his case on primary sources, especially sermons and political tracts, as well as on secondary literature. The other is his location of the origins of Americans' values: not in classical republicanism, nor in rational humanism, but in reformed Protestant Christianity.

If Mr. Shain's analysis has a weakness, it is one that arises from a strength. He is concerned with what ordinary Americans thought and believed, not with "elite opinion," and that is to the good. But elites cause things to happen, and holders of elite opinion in the Founding period were powerfully influenced by the publication of The Wealth of Nations and its famous passage, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love." If Americans were as otherworldly as Shain depicts, such thinking could scarcely have taken root so thoroughly and so quickly.

J. C. D. Clark's study is broader in scope, dealing with both Britain and America and also plumbing the legal dimension along with the religious. It is extremely learned, describing more about the labyrinthine disputes among dissenting sects than I imagined existed. Too, the work is provocative. Thus, for instance, the "paranoid style" in our early politics, noted by other scholars, Clark interprets as growing from a tradition of rising in rebellion out of fear of popish plots. Again, the work is persuasive, to a point. To be precise, up to page 125, whereupon Mr. Clark goes off the deep end with an outlandishly misinformed proposition.

To appreciate the magnitude of the boner, a bit of background is necessary. Contrary to the old Whig interpretation that depicted England's Glorious Revolution as establishing English liberty, Clark accurately describes it as embodying the triumph of government by Crown-in-Parliament, a single constitutional entity with absolutely unchecked power (able in the Blackstonian formulation to command anything that was not naturally impossible). Accurately, too, Clark recognizes that eighteenth-century Americans failed to understand this reality, and perceived what Crown-in-Parliament was trying to do to them as if the Glorious Revolution had never happened, as if Crown, Lords, and Commons were still distinct entities, each of which had the power and responsibility to restrain the power of the others. The incompatibility of the two understandings made reconciliation in 1776 impossible.

But then Clark goes on to maintain that the writing of the Constitution in 1787 "in a fundamental sense reversed the verdict of 1776," that "Sovereignty in the United States therefore proved to be as transcendent and absolute, as despotic and uncontrollable as in the United Kingdom." He quotes Federalist 39, James Madison's famous description of the Constitution as being "partly national, partly federal," but he adds that "this was not what the authors really meant.... They adhered to the idea of indivisible sovereignty" as proclaimed by Blackstone. Actually, of course, the genius of the constitutional system was precisely that it did divide sovereignty, despite theorizing that such a feat was impossible. For as Alexander Hamilton put it in 1791, the national and state governments each were given "sovereign power as to certain things, and not as to other things." Moreover, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were not added to the Constitution tongue in cheek.

Despite this colossal blunder, there is much of value in Clark's book, and I would offer a final comment apropos of what I said at the beginning. It is true that fashions in historical interpretations come and go. But we need not recast the past periodically; rather, we can incorporate the valuable insights each generation contributes. Having been in the game for many a year, I can attest that the growth of our knowledge is cumulative and that we do understand far more now than we did when I was a pup.