“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint” (Alexander Hamilton). This common idea was corollary of human depravity.

In “What the Founders Didn’t Trust,” Barton Swaim argued, as many of our posts have, that the depravity of man determines much of our politics. Yes, sin affects the way we think and plan. Starting with a quote by Paul Johnson who styled our founding fathers as “the Enlightenment made flesh, but an Enlightenment shorn of its vitiating French intellectual weaknesses of dogmatism, anticlericalism, moral chaos, and an excessive trust in logic,” he proceeds to note the key difference.

As has been summarized elsewhere, the ideological source of these two revolutions is which Genevan Jean becomes the inspiration: Jean Calvin or Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The Founding Fathers according to modern mythology should be viewed as planning to initiate a polity “rooted in the doctrine that man naturally seeks the good.” In contrast to Jean Calvin’s view of man, the Rousseauvian French “built their revolution on his theory that man comes into the world pure and only encounters moral defilement from ‘society.’” Swaim notes: “The triumph of the American Founders lies in their having done the opposite. The doctrine of original sin—and its implication that humans tend toward rank self-interest and degeneracy—animated every part of the constitutional structure the Founders erected.”

Swaim recommends spending the rest of this anniversary year reviewing the Federalist Papers to note how Hamilton, Jay, and Madison repeatedly “base their contentions on the reality that fallen man can be counted on to conflate his own narrow interests with justice and the common good.” Those individual posts often refer to enterprise and human ingenuity as adequate without deep layers of governmental involvement.

As we have frequently cited in our Cheering Folly’s Demise, Madison in Federalist #51 virtually plagiarized Calvin (from a sermon on Galatians 5 two centuries earlier) to wit: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

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