Here is my review of Alan Houston’s Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (Yale UP, 2008). It originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of the American Historical Review.
Was Benjamin Franklin a Lockean liberal or classical republican? Neither, argues Alan Houston. Rather, Franklin’s political and social thought is best understood by the concept of “improvement.” Originally an agricultural term, Houston argues that during the seventeenth century improvement was “extended to include a host of social and political reforms aimed at growth, development, or perfection” (p. 12). Indeed, Franklin employed the term constantly as a means of understanding the civilizing process. In this outstanding contribution to eighteenth-century studies, Houston shows how Franklin’s views on commerce, sociability, population growth, political union, and slavery were all tied to the idea of improvement.
Franklin’s understanding of improvement was most closely linked to commerce. Trade required the cultivation of human relationships based on personal need and interest. Economic development, in Franklin’s way of thinking, always led to sociability and mutual trust, resulting in a more civil society. In other words, there was no tension in Franklin’s thought between commerce and the virtue of society, a dichotomy that has long been a staple of classical republican thinking. But neither was Franklin a self-interested liberal. Houston’s analysis rescues Poor Richard from Weberian attempts to explain him as a man who cared only about accumulating wealth.
Houston argues convincingly that Franklin’s understanding of commerce explains his never-ending practice of forming voluntary associations. Rather than concentrating on some of the more well-known of Franklin’s associations such as the Junto or the Library Company, Houston describes his 1747 attempt to develop a volunteer militia in Philadelphia in response to the threat of pirate activity in the Delaware Bay. Franklin’s vision for this militia, known as the “Association,” was democratic in nature. It rejected the social hierarchies often associated with classical republican life, but it also required sociability and community among the tradesmen who participated in it.
Franklin believed that a growing population was essential to the development of any society. Such growth led to the increase of trade and wealth and, ultimately, human happiness. Yet, as Houston amply shows, Franklin’s“political arithmetic” also had a nativist flavor. Franklin had serious doubts over whether German immigrants could assimilate into the culture of the British colonies. Furthermore, Houston’s ahistorical attempt to discuss Franklin as foreshadowing Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection seems out of place, although it does raise some interesting questions.
Franklin, of course, is perhaps best known as a promoter of American independence. Houston reveals that Franklin was always thinking about the notion of political “union.” Whether it was his promotion of internal improvements, his proposals for colonial unity at the Albany Congress, or his arguments on the floor of the Constitutional Convention, Franklin believed that “without Union, improvement was not possible” (p. 222). His view of political union, like his belief in associational life, was driven by his commitment to democratic ideals. Franklin, for example, supported a strong federal government for the United States, but he demanded that government always be rooted in the voice of the people. His belief in a strong union embodied in the people was evident most clearly in his promotion of Pennsylvania’s controversial unicameral state legislature. Houston portrays Franklin as quintessentially
modern. He reiterates the point that Franklin had no use for the class structure inherent within a society ordered by the moral and social ideals of classical republicanism. Like commerce, society improved and the common good was strengthened through a sense of community defined by individual wants and needs.
Slavery, of course, did not fit very well with Franklin’s view of improvement. He believed that slavery was an institution left over from a previous stage of civilization. It was not until the end of his life that he decided to do something about slavery, but when Franklin finally did get involved in abolitionist causes he did so, according to Houston, based upon his longstanding commitment to societal improvement through commercialism. Slavery was an economically inefficient institution because it did not allow individuals to associate freely with one another in the kind of voluntary communities that were conducive to a civil society.
Houston’s book will be successful in convincing American political historians that the practice of pigeonholing the American founders into “republican” and “liberal” categories needs to stop. He has done early American historians a great service by offering a new approach to Franklin’s thought that is grounded in both his words and deeds. This clearly written and carefully argued interpretation of Franklin in his times provides us with a level of thoughtful reflection largely absent from the host of Franklin biographies that appeared during the recent sesquicentennial celebration of his birth.
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