Today we'll spend the majority of the class period discussing three documents, The Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers number 10 and 51.  You'll find these as documents as numbers 9, 13 and 14 in The Idea of Democracy .  I want to look at two aspects of the Declaration of Independence.  First, at the way it reflects "Reasoned" thinking.  Note how the form of the document closely parallels the English Declaration of Rights of 1689.  Why this parallel construction?  We'll consider this document with relation to the view of human nature it represents.  We'll do this in order to compare it with the view of human nature in the Federalist Papers.  One's basic understanding of human nature influences one's sense of what Government is for and how it should be constructed.

Not everyone favored the adoption of the new constitution, and each essay in favor of adopting the new constitution was met by an essay opposing it.  Here is Antifederalist No. 10,  which argues that the preservation of parties is necessary as a way to preserve liberty.  Here is Antifederalist No. 51, which challenges whether the Checks and Balances of the new Constitution will indeed preserve liberty.

Washington Addresses the Constitutional Convention in this contemporary lithograph.  The classical columns and the folded draperies place this in an era which revered classicism and "reason"

The Lithograph above represents a Philadelphia interior. To the left is

the United States Capitol now.  Originally, it was designed with a shallow dome.  the tall one, using that new material "cast iron", was added in the middle of the 19th Century.  Here, too, Classicism abounds, as do references to the architecture of ancient Rome.

Week of April 2, 2001

We'll take a look at the Constitution of the United States,  which is document 12 in The Idea of Democracy.  The link above takes you to Thomas Jefferson's thinking about constitutions and constitutionalism in general, as well as to his reactions to the emerging American Constitution.

We will be trying to understand how the thinking reflected in The Federalist Papers #10 and #51 works its way into the creation of the Constitution.  It has been argued that the Constitution represents a conservative reaction to the liberal optimism represented by the Declaration of Independence.  In pursuing thinking on that, we'll probably want to think about views of Human Nature.  Are we basically "good"?