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From A Preface to American Political Theory (1992)

By Donald Lutz

Although there is no sure and easy way to summarize the relative impact of
these various influences on the founders, a count of the citations in the political
literature produced during the founding era provides a useful overview. The general
sample used here covers the period from 1760 to 1805 and includes more than 916
pamphlets, books, and newspaper essays with 3,154 references to 224 different
individuals. The sample includes virtually all the pamphlets and essays from the 1780s
by Federalists and Antifederalists concerning the Constitution.
Even though the definition of intellectual traditions is not entirely efficacious and
granting that the assignment of authors and citations to a given category will vary
somewhat, depending upon who is doing the assigning, one can conclude that no
apparent basis exists for identifying any category of thinkers as dominant or decisive in
its influence on the founders (see Table 5.1). Also, the members of a given category
might be construed as contributing to one or more other categories. For example,
Blackstone supplemented and extended classical liberalism, and at the same time he
saw himself engaged in a quasi-scientific enterprise, much as those thinkers in the
fourth subcategory of the European Enlightenment. Hume belongs squarely in the
Scottish Enlightenment, but he too was pursuing ends similar to those in this fourth,
“politics as a science,” group of the European Enlightenment.
 If we break Bernard Bailyn’s Enlightenment category into the three subcategories
describe by Lundberg and May, the results are not significantly altered. The First
Enlightenment, dominated by Montesquieu, Locke, and Pufendorf, comprises 16
percent of all citations. The more radical writers of the Second Enlightenment, men like
Voltaire, Diderot, and Helvetius, garner 2 percent of the citations. The Third
Enlightenment, typified by Beccaria, Rousseau, Mably, and Raynal, includes 4 percent
of the citations, to bring the total back to the 22 percent listed on Table 5.1 for all
Enlightenment writers. Bailyn’s scheme is one of the most prominent but still subject to
controversy. For example, where should Locke be placed? Shifting Locke to the
category of Whigs, as many or most of the founders perceived him, changes the
percentages to those in parentheses on the table.

One major conclusion we can draw from this table is that the impact of religion
and biblical sources on American political theory needs to be examined carefully.
Notwithstanding the importance of separating church from state in our politics, it would
appear that students of American political theory ignore the impact of religion only at the
cost of missing an important influence. The sample here is designed to illustrate the
relative impact of European secular thinkers, and therefore it largely excludes political
pamphlets and tracts that were reprinted sermons, even though at least 80 percent of
the political pamphlets during the 1770s and 1780s were written by ministers. Even
excluding the majority of sermons that had no references to secular thinkers, as we
have done here, Deuteronomy is the most frequently cited book, followed by
Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws.
 The works of the thirty-six men listed in Table 5.2 drew one half of the citations,
and those of twenty-two more writers virtually tie for thirty-seventh place and together
account for another 10 percent of the citations. The list of secular authors has more
than 180 additional names; those just below the cutoff for Table 5.2 are Burlamaqui,
Godwin, Adam Smith, Volney, Shaftesbury, Hooker, Burlingame, Hoadley, Molesworth,
Priestly, Macaulay, Goldsmith, Hutcheson, Burgh, Defoe, Paley, Ferguson, Fortescue,
Virgil, Polybius, Aristotle, and Thucydides. There is a certain asymmetry since the first
four names in Table 5.2 account for one-third of all the citations attributable to the top
fifty-eight names, which implies that the contributions of these four need to be
considered more carefully. Otherwise, the apparent parity among a large number of
names from supposedly different intellectual “traditions” and the almost random mixing
of the names reflect the way we find them in the literature. One does not find
references grouped in a given pamphlet according to republican, liberal, or
Enlightenment categories but scattered over many names in a seeming haphazard
fashion.
An unusual aspect of the list, one that deserves emphasis, is that Locke’s
prominence is due largely to reprinted sermons by ministers. The forty-one sermons
that cited at least one secular author amounted to a little less than 5 percent of the
items in the total sample and about 9 percent of the 446 pamphlets in the sample.
These sermons together accounted for almost 20 percent of the citations to secular
authors, including just about half of the references to John Locke. If we exclude the
references to Locke generated by ministers, his count falls to about 1.5 percent of the
total, which places him between Beccaria and Trenchard and Gordon, whose positions
in the ranking are not affected by dropping the sermons. The rank of no other name in
Table 5.2 is affected by more than one or two places in the order by excluding the
reprinted sermons. One interesting implication is that those defending the importance
of Locke will probably also have to defend the importance of biblically based theology
for American political theory during the founding era.
The relative importance of a thinker or a group of thinkers varied according to the
time of the founding era in question (see Table 5.3). For example, John Locke was
profound on the basis for civil society and the grounds for breaking with a government
but had relatively little to say about specific institutions; thus it is not surprising that his
influence was most direct on those founders writing the Declaration of Independence
and only indirect on those writing the Constitution. The Whig historians and theorists
were most directly influential during the time that the early state constitutions were being
adopted. The Whigs were joined in importance and to a certain degree supplanted by
Blackstone, Hume, and Montesquieu by the time the federal Constitution was being
drafted and debated. The earlier influences were still present; but because each of
these three theorists had much to say about specific institutional designs and each had
a deep and coherent analysis of republican government in general and the British
political system in particular, they had a special, independent impact upon the thinking
of those who framed the Constitution.
 One basic point to stress is the similarity the Federalists and Antifederalists
shared in their intellectual heritage. Not only do we not find the Federalists inclined
toward Enlightenment writers and the Antifederalists away from them, the Federalists
sometimes cited Enlightenment writers only to disagree with them. For example, many
Federalists argued against Montesquieu’s dictum that republics must be small and
homogeneous if they are to survive, but the Antifederalists cited Montesquieu with
approval. One could argue that the Antifederalists agreed with Montesquieu on this
point because it expressed the wisdom of the ancients, which they were more likely to
agree with, given their “republicanism,” than the more “modern” Federalists; but in fact
Federalist literature was more likely than Antifederalist writing to cite the ancients. This
tendency and a stronger inclination by the Federalists to use scientific metaphors and to
seek a science of politics were the most noticeable differences between Federalist and
Antifederalist use of their common intellectual heritage. Still, the differences were more
in the nature of tendencies than in distinguishing characteristics.
 The similarity in the intellectual heritage used by the Federalists and
Antifederalists implies two important possibilities. One is that there was a core to
American political theory during the founding era that represented a commonly
accepted synthesis of the various strands of thought and of the thinkers available to the
founders. This synthesis would go far in explaining, for example, why the Antifederalists
so quickly turned to supporting a Constitution that they had so bitterly opposed at first.
A second possibility is that instead of deep theoretical differences, the division between
Federalists and Antifederalists was based upon more ordinary political considerations.
One might construe the struggle, for example, as competition between a national,
cosmopolitan elite and a set of state-based, localist elites. This interpretation would
make the ideas and arguments advanced by the many European thinkers and traditions
a coin of the realm to be used in a political debate where the currency was indeed
common and therefore possibly spendable, or persuasive.
The founders ransacked these various intellectual traditions for ideas that they
appropriated and blended in the service of solving American problems in a manner
congruent with their own constitutional tradition arising from their own experience. In
short, they tended to use history and this history of ideas just as we do today-
sometimes in the service of political or ideological goals but often in the service of a
search for enduring truth about how to create and maintain a government that has the
power needed to be effective as well as the justice needed to preserve popular consent.