'First Principles' Review: Classically Constituted

John Adams attended Harvard; Thomas Jefferson, William and Mary; James Madison, the College of New Jersey (subsequently renamed Princeton). Of the first four presidents only George Washington had not received a university education: he spoke no foreign or ancient languages and was not much of a reader. Yet even he was steeped in the classicism of the Enlightenment era, and as he matured into his role as the father of his country he came to be seen as the personification of ancient Roman virtue—his country’s Cato, its Fabius, its Cincinnatus.

“Virtue” had a somewhat different meaning in the 18th century than it does today: in Mr. Ricks’s brief formulation, “it meant putting the common good before one’s own interests,” and looked specifically back to ancient exemplars like Cato, Cicero and Socrates. Adams modeled himself on Cicero as Washington did on Cato. Montesquieu, the Enlightenment theorist who had a greater influence on the founders than any other, famously stated in his “Spirit of Laws” (1748) that virtue was the one indispensable quality in a republic. Washington and Adams, at any rate, heartily agreed with him.

Jefferson brought the architecture of ancient Rome to our shores: Monticello, the University of Virginia campus and, finally, the distinctly Roman look given to Washington, D.C. “Almost single-handedly,” wrote the historian Gordon Wood, “he became responsible for making America’s public buildings resemble Roman temples.” But as Mr. Ricks proves, Jefferson was always “more Greek than Roman, more Epicurean than Ciceronian.” Indeed, he openly admitted to being an Epicurean, a philosophy he called the “most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients,” and Mr. Ricks points out that his replacement of John Locke’s “life, liberty, and estate” (that is, property) with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” indicates a specifically Epicurean outlook.

Madison, who more than any other founder was responsible for the shape that the U.S. Constitution would finally take, immersed himself in the history of ancient republics and confederations to see what good ideas they could bring to ours. The Roman Republic, which lasted almost five centuries, was of particular interest, but so too were the various Greek confederations, such as the Amphictyonic League, in which the states had the same number of votes (like our Senate today), and the Lycian confederacy, which had proportional votes (like our House of Representatives). Twenty-three of the 85 Federalist Papers cite classical authorities; interestingly, they are more often Greek than Roman.

But Madison took a crucial step to lead the country away from the most important classical precept: he decided that public virtue couldn’t be counted on, and looked for an alternative. The failure of the Articles of Confederation had made it painfully obvious that self-interest usually trumps disinterested virtue. “The present System,” complained Madison, “neither has nor deserves advocates; and if some very strong props are not applied will quickly tumble to the ground. No money is paid into the public Treasury; no respect is paid to the federal authority.” Now Madison took inspiration from Enlightenment ideas, most memorably formulated in Bernard Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees” and Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” that private vices might, when taken together, positively benefit the public. In Federalist 10 he attacked the classical republican idea that the pursuit of self-interest necessarily violates the public trust: “The causes of faction cannot be removed . . . relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.” This must be done by involving “the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.” Here Madison departed from Montesquieu by claiming that a large republic would be more durable than a small one; the more individual interests in play, he claimed, the smaller the chance that any one will prevail. (Of course he could not have dreamed of the possibilities opened by mass communications and social media!) Washington still thought the new republic could not exist without public virtue, and said as much in his Farewell Address; but, writes Mr. Ricks, that was “old think.”

Madison’s departure from classical precedent marked a turning point. The 1780s saw the high-water mark of American classicism; the 1790s would be, in Mr. Ricks’s phrase, “the decade when the classical model ran out of steam.” The new nation was changing at a rate incomprehensible to old-school politicians like Washington and Adams. It was pluralistic and dynamic, democratic in a way the classical republicans had not foreseen. Suddenly, “elites could no longer shape how the broad mass of Americans would think and speak.” (A surprising number of people still seem to have a hard time grasping this fact today, in spite of everything.) Alexander Hamilton, that man of the future, had already expressed his opinion that “it is as ridiculous to seek for models in the simple ages of Greece and Rome, as it would be to go in quest of them among the Hottentots and Laplanders.” Rising industrialism called for a more practical, technical education; the classics seemed both irrelevant and elitist. By the time of Tocqueville’s arrival in 1831 he could observe that “democratic peoples hold erudition in very low esteem and care little about what happened in Rome and Athens.”

“In many respects,” Gordon Wood has written, “this new democratic society was the very opposite of the one the revolutionary leaders had envisaged.” This is surely more true now even than it was after the 2016 election that set Mr. Ricks off on his project. If classical culture helped the new nation coalesce, what serves the same function today? Money? Pop culture? Political activism? And what about virtue? Does it still have a place in our society, and if so how might one define it? Interestingly, Mr. Ricks points out that for the Revolutionary generation, “silent virtue almost always would be valued more than loud eloquence.” Of course the opposite is true today.

The founders would be pleasantly surprised, one imagines, to find that their system is still working 230 years later; they would not have given it so long. But, Mr. Ricks argues, they would have been appalled by how money has come to dominate our politics, by the “bizarre American legal fiction that corporations are people,” and that property rights of the individual so often prevail over the rights of the people as a whole. And where in 2020, and what, is virtue? James Madison might have downplayed its necessity in the workings of government—but he probably could not have imagined a political world in which it doesn’t even receive lip service.

—Ms. Allen’s books include “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.”