Education and the American Founding —Part 1 

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.  He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

While virtually everyone has agreed that the American founding and the generation that achieved it were extraordinary, of towering significance and formative importance in modern history, what besides blind good luck and raw talent in able men somehow disposed to collaborate and to act at a propitious moment lay behind the achievement?

Thus, in looking for at least a few explanatory clues, I propose to approach this large subject by raising a further (no doubt preliminary) question: What spiritual and intellectual resources enabled the founding generation to achieve what it did? That question, in turn, requires a brief recollection of their achievement, the founding itself. This I would venture to summarize roughly as follows.

The founding was the rearticulation of Western civilization in its Anglo-American mode.¹  It was essentially anti-modernist in resisting absolutism in the form of perceived parliamentary exercise of unlimited arbitrary or tyrannical power. It thus stands substantially in line with the great seventeenth-century struggle against the Stuart kings whose monuments are the Petition of Right and the Glorious Revolution understood as Burke understood it—as a revolution not so much made as one avoided, thus resting on an appeal to the prescriptive Ancient Constitution.

Primary characteristics of self-consciousness or identity include: constitutionalism or rule of law, consent, limited powers of government, popular sovereignty, individual dignity and liberty, metaphysical equality of all men with political consequences, a Creator-creaturely understanding of the compass of reality, the source of human law and rights in the experienced human tension toward the transcendent Ground of being as the core of human participation in reality, a historic as well as a natural jurisprudence, and a sense of being a particular community that yet embodied and served universal truth and justice under divine Providence—an exceptional, favored, perhaps chosen people (e.g., Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, and Ezra Stiles).

The pertinent "education question," then, is: How did Americans get that way? The manifold of reason and experience contributed, and the question is a larger one than can adequately be answered here, but a number of elements can be noted as especially important. To begin with, there is direct instruction by tutors (often clergymen) in schools and colleges. Then, of cardinal importance, creation of the civic consciousness from a long history of independent or quasi-independent self-government, capped by a great political and existential debate during the fifteen-year struggle against tyranny leading to independence.