To the source.

What Would the Founders Do? Our Questions, Their Answers, by Richard Brookhiser (Basic, 261 pp., $26)

FEW countries have a governing tradition that merits a cult of the creators. In the two centuries since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, France, Germany, and Russia have undergone revolutions, and each has witnessed the rise and fall of a number of regimes--most of them failures. America's revolutionaries, by contrast, succeeded, and did so in such arresting fashion that we reflexively look back to them as to an oracle. What can they tell us, Richard Brookhiser asks in his new book, about the questions that perplex us today?

What Would the Founders Do? is the first of Brookhiser's books on the early republic in which he writes, not about a particular lawgiver, but about the group as a whole. An interesting feature of this exercise is a certain softening in the author's attitude toward Thomas Jefferson. In his earlier books Brookhiser was always scrupulously fair to Tom, but there was an underlying unease. In Founding Father and Alexander Hamilton, Brookhiser exploded the myth that Federalism was the creed of Washington's senility, the counterrevolutionary philosophy of a rebel in his dotage; TJ inevitably played the part of foil. In the new book, Jefferson emerges as one of the revolutionary worthies, and although Brookhiser has by no means dispensed with his doubts, he gives the man his due.

Of course, in a book which builds on the idea of the Founders' talent, it is only natural that Jefferson should be a central figure. We scrutinize the Founders' parchment for clues to guide our conduct today precisely because they were smart. Their "talent level," Brookhiser writes, was "humiliatingly high": "At a time when the population of the country was under four million, and everything west of the Alleghenies was bison, if you scraped the bottom of the barrel of the Washington administration, you found Henry Knox. Some barrel."

Why were the Founders so smart? Possibly this "greatest generation" of lawgiving talent was the result of chance or providential dispensation. Those whose intellectual taste (like that of the Founders themselves) runs to the empirical seek to explain the early flourishing by pointing to the conditions of the late 18th century, when the mind was freer than it had been before, and when it was in some respects broader than it can be today. The mold of the Middle Ages had been shattered, but specialization had not yet narrowed men's horizons. A century before the American Revolution, when Oliver Cromwell emerged victorious in the English civil war, he styled himself "Lord Protector"--a patent mediaevalism. A hundred years after the Constitution was adopted (so fast did the division of intellectual labor progress), the heroic polymathy of Jefferson or Hamilton was all but unthinkable. Not even the most gifted mind could hope to master simultaneously Greek prosody, political economy, the latest scientific developments, light literature, and political hardball in the way the most brilliant of the Founders did.

Whatever the cause of the explosion of talent, it cannot by itself explain why the Founders succeeded and why we today repair to them as the ancient Greek betook himself to Delphi. France boasted figures of comparable prowess: In genius and intellect Bonaparte and Talleyrand could hold their own against Hamilton and Jefferson. Yet the French Revolution ended in disaster and despotism, while the American resulted in freedom and constitutional stability. Were the Founders superior in character to other revolutionaries? Maybe; but, as Brookhiser demonstrates, they had their peccadilloes. True, their standard of public virtue was lofty; but when has public virtue determined the success of a revolution? Brutus and Cato possessed the most complete public virtue; yet the Roman Revolution ended in blood and tyranny.

Perhaps the success of the American revolutionaries owed less to their own genius than to the mildness of the regime against which they took up arms. Few people in the 1760s and '70s were as little oppressed as the American colonists. "Why," Macaulay asked, "was the French Revolution so bloody and destructive? Why was our [English] Revolution of 1641 comparatively mild? Why was our Revolution of 1688 milder still? Why was the American Revolution, considered as an internal movement, the mildest of all?" The violence of each of these revolutions, Macaulay argued, was "exactly proportioned to the pressure,--the vengeance to the provocation." The American revolutionaries succeeded, in other words, because they had so little to revolt against.

There is, Brookhiser shows, something in this argument. The Americans, in making their revolution, enjoyed most of the blessings of English government, and they had before their eyes the example of a successful English revolution--the Revolution of 1688. By the end of the 17th century, Brookhiser writes, "Britain arrived at a stable settlement of its differences. The king who replaced James II, William III, accepted the political primacy of parliament, divided into a hereditary House of Lords and an elected House of Commons. The Church of England was recognized as the national established faith, but religious minorities, such as Catholics and Quakers, though penalized in various ways, were no longer hounded. Politicians abandoned warfare and coups in favor of factional fights; office and enrichment, not social or religious utopias, became the goals of statesmen."

The Revolution of 1688 and the Whig legislation that followed supplied the blueprint for every subsequent "Anglosphere" revolution and reform movement. In a relatively short span--between 1680 and 1720--free, stable, representative government emerged in England. Before the 1680s, the loser in a struggle for power went to the Tower, and he often lost his head. At a later date, the vanquished statesman got a medal from the sovereign and was "kicked upstairs." The phrase itself, a sign of the changing times, became current in the 1680s, when Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, was sacked as First Lord of the Treasury after a political prosecution. Instead of being attainted of treason, he was promoted to the empty dignity of Lord President. "I have seen many people kicked down stairs," quipped Lord Halifax, "but my Lord Rochester is the first person that I ever saw kicked up stairs."

The modern free state was born in late-17th-century England, and the American Founders were close enough to the English example to preserve its most sensible features. Like a lawyer who prepares a new contract by marking up the last one, the Founders lifted words, phrases, arguments directly from the English precedents. At the same time, Brookhiser observes, the Americans designed their republic in blissful ignorance of the next great moral and spiritual upheaval: The "Romantic age came too late for the Founders. It was as remote from them as Marx, Freud, or postmodernism. By missing the Romantic revolution, they missed the urge to uncover an authentic inner core, which we, as Romanticism's late children, still feel. The Founders were always either learning, via their senses, or learning to control themselves."

The pre-Romantic mind of the 18th century was, T. S. Eliot said, a "mature mind: but it was a narrow one"; John Henry Newman complained of the "dryness and superficiality" of the neoclassical sages. The poetry of the 18th century means less to us today than that of the ages that preceded and followed it; but where constitutions are concerned, the qualities of maturity and self-control valued by the Augustan temperament were wholly a blessing. Their love of order and restraint enabled the chief political actors to resist the utopian impulses that Romanticism was subsequently to nourish. When, at length, an American statesman shaped by the Romantic tradition appeared, and obtained power in a revolutionary moment, he devoted his genius not to overthrowing but to protecting the Founders'18th-century achievement. At Gettysburg and in the Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln used Romantic techniques to strengthen the neoclassical Constitution. The Romantic mind gloried in the highly colored poetry of the past; Lincoln rallied the North with a quasi-religious rhetoric derived from the Bible and the country's earliest spiritual inspirations.

By contrast, countries without an 18th-century political tradition--regimes founded solely on a Romantic inspiration--have fared less well. The difference between Lincoln and his contemporary Otto von Bismarck is instructive. Bismarck, like Lincoln, had been influenced in his youth by Byron and the poetry of Romanticism; his rhetoric, like Lincoln's, was pregnant with the figurative language of the past. The philosophy of "blood and iron" was shot through with the spirit of the primitive Teutonic myths and romances--but Bismarck used this poetry, not to strengthen free institutions, but to destroy Prussia's fledgling liberal tradition. No wonder Americans are grateful for their 18th-century revolutionaries, narrowness and all.

In speculating on the Founders' answers to contemporary questions--from WMD and American imperialism to school vouchers and the English Only movement, from gun control to women's liberation--Brookhiser has performed an important service. Ever since Sir Herbert Butterfield published The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931, historians have been absurdly afraid to connect the experience of the past to the questions of the present. Brookhiser defies Butterfield's strictures, and the result is illuminating. Though a bare list can't convey the richness of his argument, here's a sample of Brookhiser's insights: The Founders "would not have fought a war on drugs," nor would they have made guns illegal, though they would have subjected them to necessary laws. The Founders for the most part preferred self-help and private charity to public welfare; Hamilton, were he living today, would favor Social Security reform. They rejected guerrilla tactics and terrorism as instruments of warfare, but they approved of covert ops. Some of the Founders believed that the draft should be "an option," and Hamilton favored preemptive war in certain circumstances. The Founders set the terms of the immigration debate but supply no black-and-white answers; and although there is no proof "that even a minority of Founders thought that all men and all women were created equal," a carelessly drawn New Jersey statute that permitted women to vote was allowed to stand for three decades. Hamilton had a simple remedy for natural disasters such as Katrina ("he would expect mayors, governors, and the president of the United States to show 'energy in the executive'"); the Founders' notion of the "peace of families" was more sensible than Justice Douglas's dream of "zones of privacy" that emanate from the "penumbras" of the Bill of Rights.

Brookhiser builds his bridge between two eras with style and wit; in compiling a list of the blogs the Founders would be writing, were they living today, he hits every bull in the eye. Much of the pleasure afforded by What Would the Founders Do? derives from the epigrammatic sparkle of its sentences. One can learn a lot from any of Brookhiser's books about how to distill the essence of a complicated idea in a couple of sharp and picturesque clauses, but the gift is especially evident here, where even abstruse questions of finance are readily comprehensible.

America, Brookhiser observes, is a young nation, but its republic is old. "We are aged children, or sprightly oldsters. Our Founders are close by, and they cast long shadows." That the Founders are close by today is due in part to Brookhiser himself, who--in this, his sixth book on the early republic--has again cut through wig and powder to show us living men.

Mr. Beran is the author of Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind.