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Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson

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Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson Odsjek za anglistiku Filozofski fakultet Sveučilište u Zagrebu DIPLOMSKI RAD The American Enlightenment: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson (Smjer: Književno-kulturološki: američka književnost i kultura) Kandidat: Anja Grgurinović Mentor: Prof. dr.sc. Stipe Grgas Ak. Godina: 2016./2017. Contents: 1. Introduction …………………………………………………………………………3 2. The Enlightenment and Its Context ………………………………........................7 2.1. Liberalism and the Enlightenment ……………………………………………….7 2.2. The French and English Enlightenments………………………..........................9 2.3. The American Enlightenment……………………………………………………11 3. The Political and Economic Theories of Benjamin Franklin …….......................15 4. The Political and Economic Theories of Thomas Paine………………………..…23 5. The Political and Economic Theories of Thomas Jefferson …….........................39 6. Conclusion ……………………………………………………….........…………….35 7. Primary Sources …………………………………………………………………….38 8. Works cited ………………………………………………………………………….40 9. Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………...43 10. Key Words …………………………………………………………………………..43 2 1. Introduction The Enlightenment as an intellectual project represents a very complex, multi-layered subject, not only in the intellectual sphere1, but in the political, cultural, social and economic spheres as well, and the complexity and magnitude of the subject produced a variety of approaches in dealing with it. Some of the approaches tend to emulate the narrative which the intellectuals of the Enlightenment created themselves, presenting the Enlightenment as being a consequence of new scientific discoveries in the 17th and 18th centuries, or as being the “natural” progress of human history. Others, as for example Jonathan Israel in his A revolution of the mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy, talk of the dichotomy between the “radical” and “moderate” Enlightenments in terms of the scope of civil liberties which they proposed respectively; some say the Enlightenment project is to be blamed for all the disasters humanity suffered during the 20th century due to its instrumental rationality and emphasis on scientific progress (Horkheimer and Adorno in their famous Dialectic of Enlightenment); some postmodern historical accounts, on the other hand, tend to criticize universalism as a prominent characteristic of the Enlightenment, blaming those values “for the destructive effects we should be ascribing to capitalism” (Wood, The Origin of Capitalism 190). These various approaches focus on different aspects of the Enlightenment, depending on the political or ideological orientations of particular authors. The aim of this paper, however, and its approach in dealing with the Enlightenment in general, i.e. its American version in particular, is to describe and analyze the positions of three important figures of the American Enlightenment and the American Revolution – Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, taking into account the complex economic, social, political and epistemological changes which happened during the 18th century. What needs to be emphasized concerning these deep structural changes is that they cannot be removed from the development of a new system of socioeconomic relations of production, and that is capitalism. This is not to say that, for example, the philosophy and intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, or prominent figures of the Enlightenment, should be reduced to and be equated with capitalism, and therefore reduced to a deterministic and crude class analysis. But rather that the context of a rising capitalism system exerted its influence upon a 1 The reason for the usage of the term „sphere“ in this paper is not to connote a complete separateness of the economic/ material and the political which, of course, are interconnected and mutually dependent. Rather, it is used as heuristic concept which facilitates the analysis and the description of the central problems of this paper. 3 wide array of concepts which were either being created in the 18th century, or were being reshaped during the same period, and which are still dominant today. What was at stake in the 18th century was the reshaping of the concepts of the rights of the citizen, the concept of citizenship itself, and the rights which particular classes had in the spheres of the economic and the political. As Ellen Meiksins Wood points out in her text Modernity, Postmodernity or Capitalism? that the dominant classes in the 18th century regularly used doctrines and proclamations of equality in order to justify inequality (544). This was made possible by a process in which the economic sphere gradually came to be viewed as the “objective” sphere which exists in and of itself, it came to be viewed as something natural which functioned by its own natural laws, natural laws which should not be interfered with, but should only be scientifically studied and adhered to. This “extraction” of the economic sphere, brought about by the rise of a new and distinct socioeconomic system, in turn reshaped the sphere of the political. In other words, the rights of the individual and the concept of the equality of all men were relocated to the political sphere. What happened was that: The development of capitalism was making it possible for the first time in history to conceive of political rights as having little bearing on the distribution of social and political power; and it was becoming possible to imagine a distinct political sphere in which all citizens were formally equal, a political sphere abstracted from the inequalities of wealth and economic power outside the political domain (Wood, Liberty and Property 316). Because the revolutions of the 18th century and the intellectual processes of the Enlightenment are very often linked with the “self-evident” rise of a new democratic civil society and concept of equality, and because these new concepts emerged during the Enlightenment, it is necessary to scrutinize them critically regarding the above mentioned processes, and material and social structures. In the same manner the role of prominent historical figures and political theorists should be viewed, having in mind the above mentioned context and processes. Again it needs to be emphasized that this does not mean that the opinions or political theories of a particular thinker should crudely be reduced to his or her class position. But rather that different historical figures or political theorists were “passionately engaged in the issues of their time and place” even when they sought to translate “their reflections into universal and timeless 4 principles (Wood, Social and Political Thought 141).” When one examines the role and political attitudes of particular historical figures, therefore, one should treat them as: Living and engaged human-beings, immersed not only in the rich intellectual heritage of received ideas, bequeathed by their philosophical predecessors, nor simply against the background of the available vocabularies specific to their time and place, but also in the context of the social and political processes that shaped their immediate world (ibid. 142). Those material and social processes, therefore, affected those people, affected their political thinking, making some problems or concepts more prominent than others within their theory and their practice, according to “the nature of the principal contenders, the competing social forces at work, the conflicting interests at stake (ibid. 144). The first chapter of this paper will therefore present a brief survey of the Enlightenment in general, with an emphasis on the French and English Enlightenments, and of the American Enlightenment in particular, taking into consideration certain aspects of their economic and material contexts. Moreover, the relationship between the Enlightenment and liberalism will be explored, given the fact that the two concepts are often equated or conflated, in order to show that the Enlightenment produced not only such political doctrines as liberalism, but also other, more radical emancipatory ideas. In the third, fourth and fifth chapters the political theories and practices of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson will be described and analyzed, but in comparison to the economic ideologies they adhered to. Because of the separation of the political and the economic which is characteristic of the capitalist system and its ideological mechanisms, which tends to emphasize formal equality on the political level, but obscure real inequality on the economic level, an approach dealing exclusively with the political would not be enough to illuminate the ideological positions of the three men. The economic will therefore serve as the second part of their theory and practice, as the background and underpinning of their political attitudes, showing their visions of society in greater detail. Only by analyzing and describing those two spheres together can the true content of their attitudes be presented. After the comparison of their political and economic attitudes, their class positions and biographies will be presented in order to see to what extent their different life paths influenced their political careers and political and economic opinions. Although all of them participated in the American Revolution and were influenced by the Enlightenment, and although they 5 subscribed to political ideas which were commonplace in the 18th century, they still exhibited substantial differences due to their different
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