5 - The American Founding as a Particularistic Achievement

Summary

Montesquieu offers his readers a political education. This education teaches that both great and small esprits should favor particularism over universalism. Montesquieu intends for this framework to be useful for legislators as they seek to refound or enact changes in a state. Legislators gain tools to promote security, liberty, and prosperity. The politics of place also helps us evaluate better the nature and outcome of political events. We gain tools to judge the actions of legislators. Here we use the politics of place to evaluate a pertinent case: the American founding.

Montesquieu was undoubtedly the most influential philosopher during the American founding period. Recall that no other thinker was cited more from 1760 to 1805 in America; Montesquieu leads by a wide margin in the 1780s, the time when the founders were constructing institutions. Montesquieu is the only political philosopher delegates cited during the Constitutional Convention, according to James Madison's Notes on Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. The founders turned to Montesquieu to develop the principles and structure of their government. They explicitly adopted Montesquieu's theory of a distribution (or, as they would call it, separation) of three powers, and then made it more republican. The American founding was a successful affair. Many subsequently hail the writing and ratification of the Constitution as a “great rehearsal” for the “end of history.” The American founding and its principles then appear as universal and, even, exceptional. And since Montesquieu was the philosopher to whom they turned more than anyone else, it seems that his teachings may be universal too.

In this chapter I use Montesquieu's politics of place to consider whether the American founding was exceptional. How are we to assess the accomplishments of America's Founding Fathers, above all the United States Constitution? To what extent, if any, should America—and its founding in particular—serve as an example to other countries? Might the founding be universally exceptional?

The question of whether or not America is exceptional goes back to the early colonists, and continues through today. America might be exceptional in religious, economic, or empirical terms. Christianity's central influence throughout America's history has led some to view America as religiously exceptional.