The name of the book we will be talking about is the the political theory of the american founding, natural rights, public passly and the moral conditions of freedom. Thanks for being here and the recent book seminar. Before we summarize what the book is about, let me ask you what the origin of this the pack was and how it fits within your larger academic agenda . Right. This is a topic, the political theory of the founding that i have been thinking about since about 19 3, so name the date, when i was invited up to a conference to write on a topic of that is correct the relationship between the founders and the classics. A topic about which at the time i knew nothing on either side. I knew something about the classics, but not about the founders. I recognized the thought of the founders is more complicated and more interesting as a student of plato, more so than i expected. It has taken me a while to develop fully my understanding of the founding. I hopefully have presented it in this pick. Why do you choose to write books as opposed to articles . Well, i have written some articles over the years. In political science, i would say that if you want people to say that you are somebody in the field who is work looking at it, you kind of have to write a book about it. Is there any particular challenge in doing a book like this from a research or writing standpoint . The most difficult thing was just to figure it all out. It turns out to be a pretty complicated subject, and it took me a while to learn. I did a book on the founding 20 years ago that issued contrast with this one, vindicating the founders, which sold a lot for a founding book. It was directed against various liberal critiques of the founding. A kind of defensive pointed. Part where they had both misunderstood the founders, or in some cases they hadnt misunderstood, and the founders were still defensively. That is the kind of book at least in Academic Circles tend to be dismissed. I came around to the idea of having to write an actual book. One of the student comments i read was that i make a passionate defense of the founders view of morality. What i tried to do was make a passionate defense that the founders cared about morality, in defense of the scholars who said no. I tried to remain relatively neutral about what i thought of the founders, although it probably came through that i liked a lot of what they said. But the book is not about that. It is not a defense. It is a description, and that took a while. What especially took a while, and it took me a long time to under, was the political theory of the founding requires a series of policy of policies that went way beyond anything that my teachers and most of the scholarly literature talked about. Everybody talks about the structure be, the structure of that. People talk about freedom of speech, slavery as topics where the theory of founding has something important to tell us about policy. But beyond that, there is a lot of things that government does beyond that at least that i realized scholars havent discussed what others do. Once i began to look at it through this idea of the founders overall concern being to secure the rights of the individual as their overall objective, the purpose of a lot of these policies fell into place in my mind. I could see better what was going on in terms of why those policies were adopted and implemented. Lets close the door so we dont get the noise in here. Why dont we turn to the thesis of the book . Maybe the best thing toe dough to do to start off with the academic premises you are challenging. One is under liberalism, and the other is republicanism. Attribute republicanism to the founder era. Maybe we can start by your explanation of just what is normally meant by liberalism, and what is normally meant by republicanism. These are two terms that dont correspondent to the way people think about them. It is a label about a tradition of thought that is oriented toward protecting individual rights. People who use the label liberalism to describe the natural right theory, which is often traced to people like john locke will argue that that it is a somewhat selfish theory of government. It is the idea that government is there to serve the interests of the individual without much concern for the common good and the overall good of the community. Tribalism in the scholars vocabulary often means Something Like that. Republicanism doesnt mean that in the scholarship view. It means a way of thinking about politics in which the citizen is primary understood in terms of his duties to the Larger Community as opposed to his private individual rights. So the reason why scholars tend to claim that republicanism and liberalism are at odd with each other. The thought of republicanism is one toward the common good over the individual. Part of governments job is cultivating the orientation of the good toward the community and to some degrees at the expense of the self. Those are the traditions. This all got started in the 1960s, starting with gordon woods big book on the founding in 1969. He made the argument that the 1776 founders were essentially republicans in this sense of the word, common got oriented. And in his book he has the astounding phrase, ideally, republicanism obliterated the individual. That is a quote from that first book. Wood saw republicanism as almost the enemy of the individual and individual rights. That is a position that he modified later. Many scholars who follow him think about this way of thinking of the founding attractive. They want to make the case that that is really what it is all about. Then you have the other scholars who kept bringing the older idea of individual rights back that had always been around the idea of individual founding. That continued to be asserted and sometimes asserted against the claims of the republican thesis the current prevailing view in academia is this idea of an amalgam of multiple traditions are to some degree at tension with each other. It is primarily that thesis, the amalgam thesis which i am challenging in this book. Here i am arguing very much that the natural rights and natural law theory of the founders very much focused on the individual, is the lends through which all Public Policies were understood in the founding, including those policies meant to cultivate citizen virtanen and dedication to the common good. That is my somewhat unique take on the founding. It can be summarized that way. So virtanen plays an Important Role in presentation. The first part of the book tries to substantiate the claim that natural rights were founding political theory. Then you move on to a substantial discussion of virtue or morality. What necessary meant by that is unless people have a disposition in their orientation and rabbits, a respect for rights, and at least to some degree a willingness and ability to perform their basic minimal moral duties in society, no matter how well organized the legal system might be that is meant to secure private right, it will not succeed because the public itself will not be willing to continue to vote and support policies that enable those rights to be protected. The common formulation was in a republican form of government based on consent, virtue is needed more than any other form of government, because in a republic, the people themselves pick the rulers. So if the people dont have basically good sense and basic attitudes of restraint and respect for each others rights, they will be putting people in office who will end up exploiting some citizens at the expense of others. I said benefiting some citizens at the expense of others. That is what i meant to say. So you need to have some minimal degree of those qualities of selfrestraint and selfassertion. You need to be able to fight and have those qualities as well. That is a summary of how they understood that relationship. Just as a warning, i am going to open it up to questions and comments soon. But let me ask a bit of a critical question at this point. In your discussion of virtue or morality, there is a bit of an ambiguity there, and i am not exactly sure which side of the ambiguity you are on. The public virtue would be what you just talked about, and that is the virtue of justice, the virtue of following the law, the virtue of respecting the rights of others, adhering to the duties that you would owe others with respect to their natural rights. That is really the evidence that you present, and most of what you discuss goes to that kind of virtue. That is actually consistent with what you just said, the precondition of a natural right republic would be people feel obligated to respect the rights of others. Then there is the noigs that we could call today maybe private morality, which is sort of moral behavior behinded closed doors. How you treat other people, who you sleep with, how much alcohol you consume, these sorts of behaviors. Now some of these practices were subject to laws at the time of the founding. They also could be characterized as relating to virtue, but virtue in a different sense. Virtue in the sense of guidelines for how you live your life. Guidelines for how society should be structured. Even though the book ask address that, and there were laws that were enacted at the time of the founding about that, they werent very well own forced. I am wondering how many of your thesis or evidence is about the first kind of virtue or first subset and how much is about the second subset of virtue . That message didnt come through the book as clearly as i might have wanted . That is a good question. The first what you are calling public virtue was i think the most urgent kind of virtue for government to Pay Attention to. For example, it seems reasonable to say it is part of virtue to respect the life, liberty and property of others from the point of view of the founders. So part of the way that kind of virtue gets taught is through the penalties of the criminal law, or in terms of private wrongs, through the civil law. You can teach people by whacking them legally. That one as poke of it. With respect to private virtues like hospitality, politeness, generosity, these were talked about things that governments should foster. The massachusetts constitution speaks to that. The thought there is that these are things that are beyond the law. You cant have laws about being polite and civil. But that is something of interest to government because people do need to be able to get along in private life. If the founders were around right now, they might point out the fact that americans today often really seem to have a hard time just getting along day to day with each other without getting into all kinds of irrational quarrels that are often destructive to their own happiness and that of the people around them that they love. So it can become a mat other of interest to the public that way. Then there are those virtues that have to do with sex and marriage that they thought were of importance to the public above all because of the importance of children po public life, not just private. Because children are future. They are not yet able to selfgovern. Something needs to be done to try to make sure as best as possible that their interests will be taken care of. Their idea was well, that is it why you need to have a married mother and father. Ideally theory biological parents. They thought that was the best arrangements. Therefore, they had a series of laws promoting that. On the other hand, private sexual activities that deviated from that norm typically was outlawed, but if it didnt come to Public Notice or was not in any way seen, no one seemed to Pay Attention to it. There is little prosecution of sex outside the marriage in founding unless a child was conceived. Then it got to be important to the public because somebody is going to have to pay for that if there is no father around. I think that is how they saw the connection between the importance of the two types of virtue. Great. Question . I went through it again, and it does have it is a very strong theory. My only issue with it is there are some aspects of the book which you lead or at least it seems to me. The issue of equality and slavery. You do say that the founders put into motion certain mechanisms which basically led to emancipation later on. It is a Frederick Douglas sort of read. It glosses over the fact that there was a law two it. There is no sense of equality for black slaves in any meaning sense at that point. There are certain aspects which i am sort of not so what you have to sort of say about Something Like that . I tried to treat the race question from two points of view. One, slavery, which is the most obvious and massive contradiction with their own principles because of the fact people are born with a right to liberty. There is no way you can get around it. That is a violation of the right to liberty. And then on the other side, how free blacks were treated in the law. There what has to be understood and what i found that liberal scholars are better at pointing out than conservative ones, they were not really part of the nation until the civil war, the 14th amendment. Free blacks had an obscure, excusing citizen status. Sometimes in the law they were called denizens. They often had limited Citizen Rights or none in some cases. There is a passage in the fred scott case where the chief justice correctly says look, if these blacks are treated as citizens, these free blacks, we have to give them Citizen Rights, like the right to keep and bear arms, the right to have public meetings, the right to freedom of speech in the press, the right to go and travel wherever they want at all times. His statement was we cant have that. That was the precivil war view among probably a majority, especially after the 1790s. Burr that is a fact of life in america which has to be understood. I touched on that briefly. I didnt get into it deeply, but that was there. My point, however, about that is citizenship for blacks or for really any group was always a possibility under the founders political theory, because the theory itself was not racial in its nature. It was about humanity, human rights, not white rights or any other group. So the post civil war settlement was always a possibility, by which i mean the post civil war settlement, meaning the now liberated blacks will have full Citizen Rights, including voting rights. That was always possible. It wasnt desired before the civil war. And to some degree, their exclusion from citizenship was justified by their political theory, which was that you have a natural right to liberty, but not a natural right to become a member of a particular political order. That is why colonization was always a big topic among precivil war americans who were talking about the slave problem and even the free black problem. That was the view that was probably most often held among the most highly educated americans from the time of the founding to the civil war. Just to be clear what colonization is, the policy of colonization would be to repatriate african slaves to africa, where there would be established colonies for them . Yes, to africa. That was why lyberia was set up. Later there was an idea that maybe central america. Lincoln had a plan to buy part of panama from colombia, and they would get the northern part of panama. He also got congress to fund a plan where he was going to purchase an island off the coast of haiti, and he had a delegation of blacks in the white house saying look, you should start on this project and set the example for your fellow blacks. We need to have separation. That was the view. That was out the window by the time you get to the 14th amendment. That 14th amendment solution wasnt the one the founders chose for whatever reason. But they didnt choose that. We today would say that was terrible, that was unjust and so on. They felt like well, it is unjust in so far as we dont allow them to have a country of their own, so we should do something about that. There so was some injustice. Is that you are getting at . Yes. On page 267 you said there was nothing in the founders principles that required a onerace society. Yes. But i mean that is what i was going at just now. I guess i am failing to see how even the idea of colonization wouldnt prove that idea to be incorrect . What i am saying is from their point of view, whether or not free blacks would become part of the United States as fellow citizens or not was a decision that didnt touch on the question of whether they had natural rights or not. The founders view was unquestionably, they are born free, and they have a right to liberty. But at the same time, most of them thought we dont want to have an integrated society. We dont want to have a multiracial society. We want a society that was predominantly european. That was the view that prevailed up to the civil war, which is what led them to think that well, we can just keep them here, ruling them without their consent. That is a violation of their rights, too, even though they are free. Free blacks. So we need to find some place where they can live as a free people. It is not going to be here though. So that is how they viewed it. They viewed the Citizenship Question as separate from the natural rights to liberty question. I think today we have a hard time accepting there is any validity to that distinction. They were living here in america. Where were they supposed to go . There wasnt any place for them to go, practically speaking. And the efforts towards colonization one could say retrospectively now, were too little and even probably somewhat insincere in a sense. Not much effort was really put into it one could argue today. Too many people were doing too many other things. One of the things maybe didnt stress in the book. I have a whole chapter on this topic. What i emphasized there was sheer selfishness played an Important Role here. They are, and they always will be. Part of the reason slavery continued to exist was people who owned slaves wanted to keep owning slaves. It was convenient for them to have that. You work, i eat. As lincoln summed it up. A great proportion of their wealth was bound up in their slaves. If their slave property was abolished, overnight they would go from some of the wealthiest people in the count to some of the poorest people in the county because of the way their wealth was bound up . Sure. So that doesnt tend to feed ones self interest to a point. The theory of the founding is a theory, how politics ought to be. The question of leading up to that theory is a separate one. A quick follow up. That was actually something i wrote in my crilt eek as well. I understand that the book was more theory based, but i was just wondering why you didnt spend maybe a chapter or some part of the book talking about how the founders themselves lived up to the theory they were trying to i guess esta