Adams, Wilson, and the American Res Publica

This chapter considers the final stage of the Ciceronian tradition: the American founding. Insofar as the American founding is influenced by John Locke, it is indirectly indebted to Cicero. However, John Adams and James Wilson recognize the profoundly Ciceronian character of American liberal republicanism. Both argue that the prevailing understandings of natural law, justice, liberty, and what it means to be a republic derive from Cicero’s formulation. Moreover, Adams and Wilson see the American experiment as proving Cicero right, that a republic tethered to natural law could be realized. They also see the American Founding as contributing its own innovation to this tradition: written constitutionalism. The self-conscious writing of a regime’s constitution enables the principles of a natural law republic to be fixed and formalized in a way that Cicero’s original formulation did not provide for.

Gun violence, phenomenal reality and parallel worlds: Christina Kallas’s multi-protagonist narratives in The Rainbow Experiment

The second film in writer–director Christina Kallas’s New York trilogy, which includes 42 Seconds of Happiness (2016) and Paris is in Harlem (forthcoming), The Rainbow Experiment (2018) portrays the powerful but flawed American experiment. Its script chronicles the desires and tawdry failures of teachers, administrators, parents and students of many hues, ethnicities and gender preferences tearing at each other on one horrific day, beginning with an explosion and ending with a double shooting – or so it seems. The implication is that gun violence has become so familiar that it almost fades into the background of collective despair. However, with a world-view that recalls David Lynch and a narrative that imbeds this school saga within its densely urban setting, Kallas counters the seemingly inevitable choices available in this fractured system. An evolving alternative scenario rests its faith on the arrogant but potentially redemptive young. The comically inflected, tragic linear story is scripted in non-linear flashbacks, crosscuts and elaborate split-screens. The film provides portals to an internal reality that posits that life choices, like a movie plot, can be reversed. Overall, The Rainbow Experiment reinforces Kallas’s emergence as a potent and bold voice, redefining and recontextualizing modern film genres.

The Verdict on the Founding

Robert R. Reilly’s America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding argues that the intellectual roots of the founders’ political theory are found in the Christian understanding of man, society and the world, and in the tradition of natural law thinking that emerged under its aegis. The American founding, he concludes, must be understood as an attempted “re-establishment” of “the principles and practices” of medieval constitutionalism. While finding the broad outlines of Reilly’s argument persuasive, the author worries that Reilly does not adequately take into account the eclectic character of the founders’ thought, the influence of the Enlightenment and Reformation on it, and the long-term implications of the latter influences for the historical trajectory of public order they created. The contrast between Reilly’s understanding of the founding and John Courtney Murray’s more nuanced account (which recognizes the predominant influence of Christian natural law tradition on the American experiment, while acknowledging the presence of less wholesome influences as well), the article argues, underscores both the strengths and weaknesses of this book. While both Reilly and Murray would agree that the founding was “good,” Murray, unlike Reilly, recognizes that “the seeds of dissolution” were present from the beginning and worries whether it is ultimately “good enough” to sustain the American experiment in self-government and ordered liberty.

Two

This chapter examines the meaning of America, which is present as much in the great books written about the American experiment as in the most practical elements of its politics and economic life. It considers Alexis de Tocqueville's theory of the American experiment and looks at how the image of America as a representative of European civilization was built over two centuries by thinkers and writers for whom no alternative was yet conceivable or for whom a transatlantic community offered a distinct promise of happiness. Wealth and power will not be enough to provide Americans with a new understanding of their place in the history of civilization. Only a new-—equally full and vast—-system of thought can do that, and this new system cannot be imported from outside. It must be built from the actual experience of American life, even and especially when that experience seems most random and unintelligible.

America, Biblical Religion, and Covenantalism

Steven D. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City is an important and unique contribution to the vast literature on the American culture war. Smith’s distinction between immanent and transcendent religion refines and deepens James Davidson Hunter’s famous analysis of this conflict. As illuminating as this volume is, however, it fails to fully appreciate the religious dimension of the American founding. Specifically, Smith does not acknowledge or account for the covenantal nature of the American founding, and thus does not recognize the full degree to which the American experiment was informed by the transcendent religions of the Western world, namely, Judaism and Christianity.

A Brief Comment on American Exceptionalism

This Comment concerns itself with the concept of “American Exceptionalism.” More specifically, following Stephen M. Krason, this Comment lays out the different variations of American Exceptionalism (religious, secular, utopian, and realistic) and provides a preliminary critique of these options from the perspective of the Natural Law and Catholic social science. It also addresses its outright rejection by such modern worldviews as Marxism and radical feminism. This Comment also includes a brief discussion of the long range viability of the American Experiment and the prospects of American civilization developing and sustaining a realistic version of American Exceptionalism. This Comment is intended as an initial foray into the topic, hopefully leading eventually, I hope, to a fuller and more adequate treatment.