The “United States of America” was never a consolidated unitary nation but was from the beginning, from colonial times, a disparate collection of ethnocultural and ethnoreligious peoples of different beliefs, backgrounds, and values. The Framers recognized this. The US Constitution created a decentralized federal republic of independent sovereign states who delegated explicit powers to the general government, reserving the bulk of their powers to the states and local governments. Their intention was never to create a ubiquitous European-style centralized nation-state, a leviathan with unrestrained tyrannical reach and power. There are many excellent books which outline this. Here are three: Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America; The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty: How Americans Resisted Modern State, 1765–1850; and Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government 1776-1865.
David Hackett Fischer, in his seminal, highly acclaimed book, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, details the folkways of four groups of people who moved from distinct regions of Great Britain (Albion) to the United States. The argument is that the culture of each of the groups persisted, to provide the basis for the political culture of the modern United States. Fischer explains “the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws and individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture.
Luigi Marco Bassani, in his superb volume, Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government 1776-1865, traces in his first chapter, “State or Federation: A Framework of Analysis,” the theoretical development of the modern state as discussed by Eugen Weber in this video lecture on the Reformation.
Ivan Jankovic, in his excellent book, The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty: How Americans Resisted Modern State, 1765–1850, traces the great impact that two countervailing theories had on the Founding generation. One the modern European tradition of centralization and state-building since the time of the Reformation, and the other the ancient and medieval tradition of localism, decentralization, and protection of liberties against such state-building. The nationalists adhered to the former statist theory. This set of mercantilist ideas mimicked what was happening in Europe and led to the formation of American nationalism and the impetus behind the Coup d’état of the Constitution and subsequent centralization of political control.
The untold story continues however, in the following decades with the War for Southern Independence or Lincoln’s War for Coercive National Unification (at the same time Bismarck was consolidating the imperial German state), and could be traced to the Progressive era, the New Deal and Fair Deal, and the National Security Act of 1947 which formally created the deep state.
This other ideological tradition existed before the Revolution, and was decentralist, libertarian, and antistatist. It was strongly influenced by centuries of Medieval political thought and centuries old traditions (especially concerning localism, individual freedom, and representation in Parliament) and later the British “country party” writers who opposed centralization and consolidation of statism in the early 18th Century.
These authors were the primary influence upon the Founding Fathers. It continued through the Revolution in the hearts and minds of a large sector of persons engaged in that struggle against efforts of the British imperial state to centralize and control what for centuries had been essentially a state of anarchy and spontaneous order.
This ideological tradition continued after the Revolution with the Anti-Federalists, the Democratic Republicans of Jefferson and Madison, the Tertium Quids or Old Republicans such as John Taylor and John Randolph, the libertarian elements of the Jacksonian Democrats, John C. Calhoun etc. up to the modern libertarian movement of today.
Check out the Amazon descriptive blurb on the book:
6:17 pm on December 16, 2021This book presents the case that the origins of American liberty should not be sought in the constitutional-reformist feats of its “statesmen” during the 1780s, but rather in the political and social resistance to their efforts. There were two revolutions occurring in the late 18th century America: the modern European revolution “in favour of government,” pursuing national unity, “energetic” government and centralization of power (what scholars usually dub “American founding”); and a conservative, reactionary counter-revolution “in favour of liberty,” defending local rights and liberal individualism against the encroaching political authority. This is a book about this liberal counter-revolution and its ideological, political and cultural sources and central protagonists. The central analytical argument of the book is that America before the Revolution was a stateless, spontaneous political order that evolved culturally, politically and economically in isolation from the modern European trends of state-building and centralization of power. The book argues, then, that a better model for understanding America is a “decoupled modernization” hypothesis, in which social modernity is divested from the politics of modern state and tied with the pre-modern social institutions.
