Defending The Traditions of the Republic

A book excerpt from "Defending the Republic", a series of essays "honoring the eminent scholar George W. Carey of Georgetown University" who has studied the founding documents and the historical polical tradition in America. The essay excerpt explores Carey's contributions and views:

From the very outset, Carey’s writings on the American political tradition have taken issue with what he has sometimes called “the official literature” — that is, with the account of that tradition which has dominated academic scholarship during the course of his career. Basic Symbols, for example, challenges the widely held views that the American tradition’s highest commitments are to “‘freedom’ and ‘equality,’ the tradition of ‘rights of the individual,’ or, if you like, the natural rights of the individual,” and that its intellectual origins are to be sought in the thought of John Locke and the French philosophes — or, in sum, in the secularism of “the so-called enlightenment.” Basic Symbols also takes issue with interpretations (whether emanating from the left or right) asserting that the American political tradition was created de novo by the Declaration of Independence. On the contrary, it argues, the Declaration as well as other key documents of the founding era such as the Constitution and Bill of Rights cannot be understood properly if they are read through the prism of one or another interpretation of Western intellectual history. Rather, these documents must be read in their natural context of the organic unfolding of a distinctively American political tradition, a tradition that was already “old . . . when the Declaration was written.” ...

From this starting point, Basic Symbols contends that the American political tradition can be understood only by a return to its beginnings. Both historically and theologically, these beginnings lie in Puritan politics and reformed Protestantism. To be properly understood, the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights must be read against the backdrop of earlier documents such as the Mayflower Compact, Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, and Massachusetts Body of Liberties. When read in this context, Basic Symbols argues, these documents make it clear that the central commitments of the American political tradition are not to individual rights and equality but to self-government under God: to “self-government through deliberative processes” under “a higher law . . . which can be used as a standard by which to judge . . . the determinations of . . . law-making authorities.”19 Thus understood, the American tradition is not individualist or egalitarian but organic and communitarian; its supreme values are not individual rights and equality but justice and the general good. The freedom it celebrates is not the freedom of the autonomous individual but the corporate freedom of the people to govern themselves through representatives of their own choosing.

It's thought-provoking and well worth reading.