Table Of ContentFounding Visions
Founding
Visions
The ideas,
individuals,
and intersections
that Created America
Lance Banning
Edited and with an Introduction by
Todd EsTEs
Foreword by Gordon s. Wood
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Copyright © 2014 by The University Press of Kentucky
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serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky,
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Contents
Foreword by Gordon s. Wood vii
Introduction 1
Part 1. The enduring issues of the american Revolution, 1776–1815 11
The Problem of Power: Parties, Aristocracy, and democracy
in revolutionary Thought 13
Part 2. Republicanism, Liberalism, and the great Transition 33
Jeffersonian Ideology revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in
the new American republic 37
The republican Interpretation: retrospect and Prospect 57
some second Thoughts on Virtue and the Course of revolutionary
Thinking 81
Quid Transit? Paradigms and Process in the Transformation of
republican Ideas 101
Part 3. The constitution 107
The Constitutional Convention 111
The Federalist Papers 133
1787 and 1776: Patrick Henry, James Madison, the Constitution,
and the revolution 145
Part 4. James Madison 173
James Madison and the nationalists, 1780–1783 177
The Hamiltonian Madison: A reconsideration 211
The Practicable sphere of a republic: James Madison, the Constitutional
Convention, and the Emergence of revolutionary Federalism 237
Part 5. The First Party conflict 265
Political Economy and the Creation of the Federal republic 269
The Jeffersonians: First Principles 313
Acknowledgments 343
Appendix: Bibliography of Published Works by Lance Banning 347
Copyrights and Permissions 357
Index 359
Foreword
Gordon S. Wood
Lance Banning was no ordinary historian. Indeed, he was one of the most
distinguished American historians of his generation. not only has he had an
important and lasting effect on our understanding of the ideas and politics
of the early republic, but, more important, his writings (the best of which
are collected in this book) have become a model of what historical schol-
arship ought to be. In his approach to the past he had no present-minded
political agenda, no desire to browbeat the past for the sake of reforming an
oppressive present. All he sought to do in his scholarship was explain as care-
fully and as scrupulously as possible what the ideas and politics of the early
republic were like.
not that he was uninterested in the present. nor did he deny any connec-
tion between then and now. In fact, he always believed that the discussions
that the Founders had among themselves were worth listening to. Perhaps if
we listened closely enough to the past, he said, we might be able to see our
present problems from fresh perspectives. He was convinced that we could
learn something from the Founders, that their ideas and values, though com-
ing from a different world, still had relevance for us. He realized that the
Founders he studied and admired, especially James Madison, knew only too
well that political power was dangerous and that it had to be separated and
balanced but not repudiated. Ultimately, however, Lance respected the integ-
rity and separateness of the past. He was a historian’s historian; he took the
fears and fantasies of the participants in the past seriously and always sought
to be objective and fair to the figures he studied. And he never wrote his his-
tory with any crude didactic purpose in mind.
I first met Lance in the early 1970s when he became executive director of
the American Civilization Program at Brown University, where I had been
vii
viii Foreword
teaching since 1969. He had just received his Ph.d. from Washington Uni-
versity, where he had encountered two of the most stimulating scholars of
the early modern Anglo-American world, John Murrin and J. G. A. Pocock.
Interacting with those scholars helped prepare him for a fresh approach to
intellectual history in the writing of his dissertation, “The Quarrel with Fed-
eralism: A study in the origins and Character of republican Thought”(1971).
He soon developed that dissertation into his book The Jeffersonian Persua-
sion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (1978). In this work Lance did not neglect
the great minds of political theory. James Harrington, John Locke, and david
Hume were present. But his work was not a traditional study of the influence
of the ideas of these great thinkers; it was not a history of ideas abstracted
from their social and political circumstances. Instead, his work moved along
the borderland between ideas and politics, where ideas interacted with poli-
tics and became what he labeled ideology. His book was the cultural history
of politics at its best, and it profoundly influenced our understanding of the
early republic.
since in the early 1970s when we first met Lance was preparing his dis-
sertation for publication and I had recently published my book The Creation
of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969), we discovered that we had a lot
in common. Indeed, we could scarcely keep from seeking out opportunities
to talk about the history of the early republic. I still recall our many conver-
sations with excitement and pleasure. We marveled at the emergence of what
was already being called the “republican synthesis,” little realizing at the time
what a monster that “hypothesis,” as Lance labeled it, would become. It was
an intellectually stimulating time for me, and I only wish that Lance could
have stayed at Brown. But his administrative position at Brown was tempo-
rary and carried no tenure. In 1973 he became an assistant professor at the
University of Kentucky, where he spent the rest of his career.
We kept up our intellectual relationship, of course, but it was more hit or
miss. Because we were interested in the same material, our scholarly paths
crossed more often than most. We were invited to nearly every conference
on republicanism or the Founding and had many opportunities at these
meetings to renew our conversations about the early republic. Although we
occasionally differed on some points (I thought he played down Madison’s
nationalism in the 1780s too much, which he needed to do in order to make
sense of Madison’s states’ rights position of the 1790s), we both agreed that the
supposed opposition between a republican tradition and a liberal tradition
maintained by many historians, political theorists, and law professors was
wrongheaded. We both believed that a sharp dichotomy between two clearly
Foreword ix
identifiable intellectual traditions could not be supported by the complicated
reality of the Founding era. But it was Lance who produced the series of
articles that undermined that dichotomy. In his work, much of which is col-
lected in this book, he showed the scholarly world how the Founders, grap-
pling with an ever-changing political reality, linked and blended together the
two seemingly incompatible traditions. Few bodies of scholarship have had
as great an impact on the study of the political thought of early America as
has Lance’s.
What in my mind is most impressive about Lance’s scholarship is the care
and honesty he brought to it. nothing for him was ever simple about the past.
He thought through every problem and wrestled with every issue concerned
with the ideas and politics of the early republic. For him, everything about
the era of the Founding was more complicated, more nuanced, more filled
with tension than most scholars were willing to admit. Where others saw
simplicity, he saw complexity. Where others lumped things together, he drew
distinctions. He had a subtle and scrupulous mind. no one in my opinion
was a more painstaking scholar than Lance.
Lance always worried that he was too slow in bringing his work to press,
that he was not productive enough. He should not have worried. When the
works of other scholars will be long forgotten, Lance’s scholarship on the era
of the Founding will continue to be discussed and plumbed. We are indeed
fortunate to have much of that important and insightful scholarship brought
together in this book.
