People approach the American founding with outrageous arrogance based on shallow ideologies and their reading of a few secondary sources—but the preachers & politicians of the 18th and early 19th centuries in America were far better educated than most of their commentators today.
Let's be honest: we mostly haven't done the reading. There is a ton of primary source material written by these Americans. How much have you read? And they read more widely and seriously and understood older traditions of thought (then living, but now often dead) better than us.
I spent years reading through what is available to us from the ratification debate writings alone and can only say I think I got a good sense of it. Historians like Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood did the same before they spouted off.
On top of that, you have to know what they read, which is more than what we generally do, and how they understood it. Which is why most of these debates are just Rorschach tests for people's own opinions on contemporary America and the preferences we hold today.
We are constantly using -isms from recent schools of thought to put early Americans in ideological boxes that didn't exist for them. Have some humility amidst an awful lot of assumptions.
Here's a taste of what they studied: americanmind.org/post/ethics-an…
I acknowledge there is a lot more to say at a scholarly level, and many ways to object, but this essay I wrote up a while back should complicate simplistic narratives, at least: americanmind.org/features/why-t…
Finally: "We live in a time of intellectual Babel, in want of the shared premises, definitions, history, and intellectual formation by which to engage publicly and profitably in such discussion." So let's build better educational institutions together.
americanmind.org/post/we-need-n…
americanmind.org/post/we-need-n…
