"First Principles"

A thoughtful Christmas gift from the elder daughter was First Principles: What America's Funders Learned form the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country by Thomas Ricks (HarperCollins 2020). Ricks is a journo and the book reads like good journalism. Short, clear sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Quick and clear transitions and an engaging style. But unlike many in his profession, Ricks clearly spent serious time in the sources.

                                                                                                  Ignoring over-worn panegyrics to the influence of Locke and the Enlightenment (or the Bible) on the founding of the American republic, Ricks turned to the Classical influences on four leading personages: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. However, having elbowed the Enlightenment from center stage in favor of classicism, Ricks failed to give attention to other influences such as English common-law constitutionalism and the moral and political-structural afterlives of the local governments of the New England Puritans and the Quaker regimes of the Middle Colonies. Still, First Principles was about the educational and literary influences on the founding four, not a full intellectual history of the revolutionary period. For that I could recommend the classic The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 by Gordon Wood (1969), Inventing the People by Edmund Morgan (1988), and the more recent The American Founding: Its Intellectual and Moral Framework (David N. Robinson and Richard N. Williams, eds., 2012).

Ricks's deep dive into the educations of the founding four enlightened me. The initial place of Classicism and its quick decline as a formative influence in American civil and political life are well-presented. On the other hand, Ricks is less sure-footed when it comes to analyzing the the democratic impulses that came to the fore by the turn of the nineteenth century. The sources of the turn to democracy were, to be sure, more diffuse, regional, and even contradictory than the original focus on the Classicism of the the founding four. Even so, Ricks seems tone deaf to the democratizing effects of the First and Second Great Awakenings.

A bone to pick: quoting Perry Miller on the decline of Scottish Common Sense Realism in the early nineteenth century. Miller notwithstanding, Scottish Common Sense Realism fit well with the democratic and pragmatic turns of that era, must better than the idealism of a few of the intellectual elites. Its continuing influence in the influential nineteenth Presbyterian theology of Charles Hodge is well-attested.

Even though the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was the initial impulse for First Principles, Ricks does a good job of avoiding Trump Derangement Syndrome until the very end. Ricks concludes with an epilogue in which he lists ten suggestions for "what we can do." Most are anodyne and have, regrettably, little likelihood of influencing American popular culture (and thus public culture since the popular and the public are nearly synonymous in the digital age). His program proposed to answer to his very important suggestion 9 ("Rehabilitate 'Happiness'") was unsatisfying. The Enlightenment's "broader, richer notion of happiness" was parasitic on the longstanding Classical/Christian tradition. Unless carefully cabined, turning to Enlightenment folk could just as easily lead to the Reign of Terror as the sturdy yeoman of the Jeffersonian mythos. In any event, getting contemporary Americans to appreciate happiness as a virtue instead of as a surfeit of distracting pleasures has little chance of success.

In short, I can recommend First Principles. For most of what Ricks sets out to accomplish, he does quite well.