The American Republic : constitution, tendencies and destiny

by Orestes Augustus Brownson

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Genres: Politics, Philosophy, History, American History, Nonfiction, American

174 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1865

About the author

Orestes Augustus Brownson was an American intellectual, preacher, labor organizer and writer.
He was the father of Henry Francis Brownson.

Reviews

[Drew Norwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Orestes Brownson writes this in 1865, immediately after the end of the Civil War, and he reflects on America’s unique system of government, its beginning, its formation, its constitution, and its growth as a republic. His frame of reference is incredibly valuable and his careful thinking makes several important contributions to our understanding of American government.

(1) The Vital Need for Americans to Understand Their Form of Government. “Among nations, no one has more need of full knowledge of itself than the United States, and no one has hitherto had less.” He frames the importance for our self-knowledge: “The great problem of our statesman has been from the first, How to assert union without consolidation, and State rights without disintegration? Have they, as yet, solved that problem? The war as silenced the State sovereignty doctrine, indeed, but has it done so without lesion to State rights? Has it done it without asserting the General government as supreme, central, or national government? Has it done it without striking a dangerous blow at the federal element of the constitution? In suppressing by armed force the doctrine that the States are severally sovereign, what barrier is left against consolidation? Has not one danger been removed only to give place to another? But perhaps the constitution itself, if rightly understood, solves the problem; and perhaps the problem itself is raised precisely through misunderstanding of the constitution.”

Brownson states up front his view of America: it is an exceptional nation, though flawed. Recognizing its strength and its identity is the first step toward combating the corrupting influences. “The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea. It has been chosen not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and Rome, but to accomplish greater work than was assigned to either. . . Its idea is liberty, indeed, but liberty with law, and law with liberty. Yet its mission is not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the state, which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual—the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. In other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the dialectic union of authority and liberty, of natural rights of man and those of society.”

(2) All Government is Ordained by God For the Common Good. “Man is a dependent being, and neither does nor can suffice for himself. He lives not in himself, but lives and moves and has his being in God. He exists, develops, and fulfills his existence only by communion with God, through which he participates of the divine being and life. . . Communion with God through Creation and Incarnation is religion, distinctively taken, which binds man to God as his first cause, and carries him onward to God as his final cause; communion through the material world is expressed by the word property; and communion with God through humanity is society. Religion, society, property, are the three terms that embrace the whole of man’s life, and express the essential means and conditions of his existence, his development, and his perfection, or the fulfillment of his extended, the attainment of the end for which he is created. . . As society is a necessity of man’s nature, so is government a necessity of society.”

Brownson has a very high view of government, even though he is fully aware of its potential for great abuse.  “Next after religion, [government] is man’s greatest good; and even religion without it can do only a small portion of her work. They wrong it who call it a necessary evil; it is a great good, and, instead of being distrusted, hated, or resisted, except in its abuses, it should be loved, respected, obeyed, and if need be, defended at the cost of all earthly goods, and even of life itself.”

He affirms government as both a fact and a right. Something necessary and natural to human life but also something possessing authority and power. Government’s “origin as a fact, is simply a question of history; its origin as a right or authority to govern, is a question of ethics.”

(3) Republicanism contrasted with Barbarism. “The characteristic of barbarism is, that it makes all authority in private or personal right; and the characteristic of civilization is, that it makes it a public trust.”  Republicanism is the vessel of civilization. “Republic, respublica, by the very force of the term, means the public wealth, or, in good English, the commonwealth; that is, government founded not on personal or private wealth, but on the public wealth, public territory, or domain, or a government that vests authority in a nation, and attaches the nation to a certainty definite territory. . . The distinctive mark of republicanism is the substitution of the state for the personal chief, and public authority for personal or private right.”

In this framework, barbarism can exist even in democratic nations. Such as when we hear of the  “right” to vote: “when democrats assert that the elective franchise is a natural right of man, or that it is held by virtue of the fact that the elector is a man, they assert the fundamental principle of barbarism. This says nothing in favor of restricted suffrage, or against what is called universal suffrage. To restrict suffrage to property-holders helps nothing, theoretically or practically. . . The barbarism, the despotism, is not in universal suffrage, but in defending the elective franchise as a private or personal right. It is not a private, but a political right, and, like all political rights, a public trust.”

(4) A Refutation of Social Contract Theory and Liberalism. The social contract, or compact, theory of government is sophistical (one of Brownson’s favored terms). The social contract is a fiction that doesn’t fit reality. No man or group of men ever live outside of society. Rousseau’s noble savage is a misleading fiction. Even if men were to form a social contract, it could not last more than a generation. Rather, all are born into, and live under, government. “Man in civil society is not out of nature, but is in it—is in his most natural state; for society is natural to him, and government is natural to society, and in some form inseparable from it.”

(5) A Refutation of  All Man-Centered Ideologies. Whether it’s socialism, naturalism, materialism, or any other ideology, Brownson shows that they are each of them deficient. They cannot make up the hole left by God’s absence. Authority itself, which government must assert, requires something above nature.  “All government has a governing will; and without a will that commands, there is no government; and nature has in her spontaneous developments no will, for she has no personality. Reason itself, as distinguished form will, only presents the end and the means, but does not govern; it prescribes a rule, but cannot ordain a law. . . So something above and beyond nature must be asserted, or government itself cannot be asserted, even as a development. Nature is no more self-sufficing than are the people, or than is the individual man.”

Try as they may, there is no alternative. “Government cannot exist without the efficacious presence of God any more than man himself, and men might as well attempt to build up a world as to attempt to found a state without God. A government founded on atheistical principles were less than a castle in the air.”

(6) A Defense of the Proper Foundation for Government. The proper view of government is that it is ordained by God through the people collectively. Civil authorities hold their power through the people and the people hold their power from God through natural law. “The right of government to govern, or political authority, is derived by the collective people or society, from God through the law of nature. Rulers hold from God through the people or nation, and the people or nation hold from God through the natural law.” This is a truly federal approach. By way of covenant, God relates himself to his creation, and by way of covenants the people rule through representatives. Government is made up of interconnecting covenants—government is federal. All sovereignty flows from God, but it flows to two places: to men as the governed, and to men as governors. Rulers hold their charge from God and from the people.

“This doctrine is not mere theory; it simply states the real order of things. It is not telling what ought to be, but what is in the real order. It only asserts for civil government the relation to God which nature herself holds to him, which the entire universe holds to the Creator.”

(7) An Understanding of Nations and of Two-Fold Constitutions. Woven into the fabric of social relationships is a two-fold constitution. “The Constitution is twofold: the constitution of the state or nation, and the constitution of government. The constitution of government is, or is held to be,  the work of the nation itself; the constitution of the state, or the people of the state, is, in its origin at least, providential, given by God himself, operating through historical events or natural causes. The one originates in law, the other in historical fact.”

Each nation must exist before it can act. So each nation perforce has an unwritten constitution before it can enact the written one. This goes with Brownson’s organic view of nations. There are laws of nature, which come to us apart from our will. One of these laws is the fact that peoples live and are judges collectively. Every “nation holds from God, under the law of nature, but only by virtue of the fact that it is a nation; and when it is a nation dependent on no other, it holds from God all the rights and powers of any independent sovereign nation.” On this basis, the people collectively then draw up laws to govern themselves. But, “[i]n the political order, the fact, under God, precedes the law. The nation holds not from the law, but the law holds from the nation.” Brownson stands opposite of Thomas Paine and others who see government as merely a convention.

And it is for this reason that Brownson maintains that American is sovereign as United States, not as individual States. The Articles of Confederation failed because they tried to divide what had already been united in the unwritten constitution of the colonies (who had won their independence form Britain together). “The Confederation was an acknowledged failure, and was rejected by the American people, precisely because it was not in harmony with the unwritten or Providential constitution of the nation; and it was not in harmony with that constitution precisely because it recognized the States as severally sovereign, and substituted confederation for union. The failure of confederation and the success of union are ample proofs of the unity of the American nation. The instinct of unity rejected States sovereignty in 1787 as it did in 1861. The first and last attempt to establish State sovereignty have filed, and the failure vindicates the fact that the sovereignty is in the States united, not in the States severally.”

(8) The U.S. Constitution and the Locus of Sovereignty in the States United, Not the States Severally.  Brownson rejected both the nationalist theory (Daniel Webster, Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists) and the compact theory (Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, Robert Hayne). He instead paved a via media that might be called the organic theory.

He views the evidence from the written Constitution itself. “The written constitution, in its preamble, professes to be ordained by ‘We, the people of the United States.’ Who are this people? How are they constituted, or what the mode and conditions of their political existence? Are they the people of the States severally? No; for they call themselves the people of the United States. Are they a national people, really existing outside and independently of their organization into distinct mutually independent States? No; for they define themselves to be the people of the United States. If they had considered themselves existing as States only, they would have said ‘We, the States,’ and if independently of State organization, they would have said ‘We, the people,’ do ordain, &c.”

This may look like the nationalist theory of government, but Brownson took a different path. He saw the federal constitution not as conventional but as organic and real. The nationalists such as Alexander Hamilton, and later James Madison and Daniel Webster, saw national solidarity to be “conventional, originating and existing in compact, or agreement, [but Brownson] supposes it to be real, living, and prior to the convention, as much the work of Providence as the existence in the human body of the living solidarity of its members. One law, one life, circulates through all the members, constituting them a living organism, biding them in living union, all to each and each to all.”

Again, Brownson’s federalism is evident: “The life is in the body, not in the members, though the body could not exist if it had no members; so the sovereignty is in the Union, not in the States severally; but there could be no sovereign union without the States, for there is no union where there is nothing united.” This may sound like a very centralized view of things, but that would be a wrong way to view it. It is united, but not centralized. The point of the federal constitution is to divide power—between the federal (General) government and the States (particular) governments—not to unite it. “The powers of each are equally sovereign, an neither are derived from the other. The State governments are not subordinate to the General government, nor the General government to the State governments. They are co-ordinate governments, each standing on the same level, and deriving its powers form the same sovereign authority. In their respective spheres neither yields to the other. In relation to the matters within its jurisdiction, each government is independent and supreme in regard of the other, and subject only to the convention.”

(9) Political Tendencies to be Avoided in the United States: Individualism and Socialism. Brownson saw seeds of trouble sown in the American republic. One was the “personal democracy” of the South, which emphasized individuality and dissolution, as seen in the nullification and state veto controversy and ultimately to secession and the Civil War. Brownson saw that though the Civil War had laid to rest most of these issues, the tendencies towards division and disintegration was still present. We still see this tendency today, with many confusing States’ rights with State sovereignty.

Another unhealthy political tendency was the “humanitarian democracy” of the North, which Brownson saw as ultimately leading to socialism and despotism. “The humanitarian is carried away by a vague generality, and loses men in humanity, sacrifices the rights of men in an vain endeavor to secure the rights of man.” Brownson foretold what would come from these “humanitarian” principles: “Having obliterated all distinction of sex in politics, in social, industrial, and domestic arrangements, [the humanitarian] must go farther, and agitate for equality of property. But since property, if recognized at all, will be unequally acquired and distributed, he must go farther still, and agitate for the total abolition of property as an injustice, a grievous wrong, a theft. . . It is unjust that one should have what another wants, or even more than another. What right have you to ride in your coach or astride your spirited barb while I am forced to trudge on foot? Nor can our humanitarian stop there. Individuals are, and as long as there are individuals will be, unequal: some are handsomer and some are uglier, some wiser or sillier, more or less gifted, stronger or weaker, taller or shorter, stouter or thinner than others, and therefore some have natural advantages which other have not. There is inequality, therefore injustice, which can be remedied only by the abolition of individualities, and the reduction of all individuals to the race, or humanity, than in general. He can find no limit to this agitation this side of vague generality, which is no reality, but a pure nullify, for he respects no territorial or individual circumscriptions, and must regard creation itself as a blunder.”

(10) America’s Mission: Liberty Under Law. All nations have a task, something to accomplish to move forward God’s will on earth. Brownson saw the Greeks as excelling in arts and sciences, the Romans as excelling in the rule of law and public virtue, and he saw America as destined to express more fully the concept of liberty under law. Placing church and state in their proper roles and each being founded on religious truth. “The effect of this mission of our country fully realized, would be to harmonize church and state, religion and politics, not by absorbing either in the other, or by obliterating the natural distinction between them, but by conforming both to the real or Divine order, which is supreme and immutable. It places the two powers in their normal relation, which has hitherto never been done, because hitherto there never has been a state normally constituted.”

Sadly, our mission has not been fully realized. If we have any hope of persevering and prospering as a nation, it will be because we relearn these old truths. “Man, as we have seen, lives by communion with God through the Divine creative act, and is perfected or completed only through the Incarnation, in Christ, the Word made flesh. True, he communes with God through his kind, and through external nature, society in which he is born and reared, and property through which he derives sustenance for his body; but these are only media of his communion with God, the source of life—not either the beginning or the end of his communion. They have no life in themselves, since their being is in God, and, of themselves can impart none. They are in the order of second causes, and second causes, without the first cause, are nought. Communion which stops with them, which takes them as the principle and end, instead of media, as they are, is the communion of death, not of life. As religion includes all that relates to communion with God, it must in some form be inseparable from every living act of man, both individually and socially; and, in the long run, men must conform either their politics to their religion or their religion to their politics.”

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The American Republic was published in 1865, just after the conclusion of the American Civil War, at a time when Brownson believed the United States needed to clarify its national and political self-understanding in light of the secession crisis and the war between the Union and the Confederacy. The war had not only been a struggle between North and South, but a dialectical antithesis between centralizing and confederating forces that had both attempted to ground their legitimacy in the American constitutional order. Though the Union forces had prevailed on the battlefield, Brownson believed that the underlying constitutional antagonism could only be resolved if the American people achieved a greater consciousness of the ideational foundations of their republic. Brownson’s book was to be a means to that end.



Orestes Brownson, though hardly remembered today, was a brilliant autodidact and one of the most prolific and best-regarded American intellectuals of the nineteenth century. With less than a year of formal education, he published volumes of essays, monographs, and novels on politics, economics, and religion. Much like the United States at large in the early decades of the century, Brownson spent the first half of his life as a discontented spiritual seeker. At various points during his twenties and thirties, Brownson was a Congregationalist, a Presbyterian, a Universalist, a Transcendentalist, and a humanitarian, before finally converting to Roman Catholicism in his forty-first year and remaining with the Church for the rest of his life. Though controversial among Irish Catholic immigrants in the United States, Brownson became a celebrated figure for European Catholics. The French theologian Alphonse Gratry hailed him as “the Newman of America” and as a sage who was “as sharp as Aristotle, [and] as lofty as Plato.” Lord Acton (of “absolute power corrupts” fame) met Brownson and considered him the greatest American intellect of the age.

Brownson believed that the American people, though by instinct and tradition non-conforming in the religious and intellectual realms, were for that very reason uniquely suitable to Catholicism because it is the universal, original, natural, and reasonable faith of humanity. Catholicism, according to Brownson, is simply the communion with God that is man’s purpose and destiny. Like Tocqueville, Brownson observed that the sectional diversity of the American people, coupled with the universality of their egalitarian ideals and their cultural tendency to reject inherited dogmas and to earnestly seek truth, gave their political culture a kind of shadowy catholicity. E Pluribus Unum, the national motto which describes the simultaneous unity and diversity of the Union and the states, could also be used to describe, albeit in a generalized form, Catholic political teachings. The mission of the Church is singular and universal, but instantiated in multifarious forms within each national or cultural context. The political nature of the United States articulates an aspect of the Catholic faith; and because political authority can and should play a didactic role to complement that of the Church itself, the example of America’s political regime could play a facilitating role for the advancement of the faith, even if the American Constitution recognized no state religion.

According to Brownson, the Framers, through no design of their own, created a written Constitution that articulated deep truths about the nature of God; but they failed to give the legitimacy of this Constitution its proper grounding. Jefferson and Madison legitimated the Constitution in the contractarian terms favored by eighteenth-century liberal political philosophy, claiming that the United States was created solely by the consent of the governed. The American state was nothing more than a contract between autonomous agents, and that contract could be revoked if one or more of those parties withdrew their consent. Brownson, conversely, believed that political authority could not be derived from the willful consent of autonomous individuals, because individuals do not completely “own” themselves in the first place—like everything else, the source of their being is God—and thus cannot “give” themselves away to the state; and also because the state itself is something greater than the sum of its parts, with a life, spirit, and political agency of its own.

For Brownson, the legal constitutions of states are undergirded by what he calls a “providential constitution”: a pre-legislative “organic” constitution defined by the actually-existing human and territorial makeup of the state. All political authority rests in God as its primary source, and God raises up nations through his providence by gathering people together in particular places and giving them a sense of national solidarity and purpose. Whereas the absolutists of the seventeenth century spoke of a divine right of kings, Brownson believed in something like a divine right of the state, which is constituted by its people. The people, for Brownson, are never regarded individually, but only in the collectivized and abstracted terms of the demes.

Far from being a necessary evil, as Madison conceived of it, the nation-state is one of the highest positive goods. Government is not a product of our fallenness, but was with us even in the Garden of Eden. Statehood is our natural and appropriate condition, because it reflects both our radical dependency on God and on one another, and our potential in corporeal solidarity. Loyalty to the state is a consummate act of love and a high Christian virtue; Brownson even writes that the patriot who sacrifices himself for his country is equal to the martyr who dies for his faith.



Every nation, according to Brownson, is a “chosen people of God”. Just as the Israelites were chosen to preserve the primitive revelations of God, maintain a proper theocratic state, and receive the Messiah, so too were other nations chosen to realize an idea in history. God, through His providence, forms nations from the vicissitudes of history and appoints to them a providential mission. Every nation, under its own circumstances, recapitulates the story of Israel; each nation, at its best, articulates something about God to the world. Ideologues who would oppose the providential constitution with a legal regime that is incompatible with it or offensive to its nature do so at their peril.

The Greeks were chosen to realize the beautiful in the arts and the true in science and philosophy; the Romans, to develop law and jurisprudence. The mission of the United States is to continue and perfect the work of Graeco-Roman republicanism by realizing “the true idea of the state”, which entails a dialectical synthesis of authority and liberty: the rights of the individual and those of society. The Greeks and Romans made the critical advancement of conceiving of the state itself as the fount of authority; the state itself was supreme, and power was wielded only as a public trust.

For Brownson, this public ownership of the nation through the state is the essence of republicanism, and republicanism is the only civilized form of government. Barbarism is typified by the private ownership of the state as a personal fiefdom of a chief or landlord. The transition from the republican institutions of the Roman Empire to the feudalism of the Middle Ages was thus a decline from civilization to barbarism. The France and Britain of Brownson’s time, though monarchical, were essentially republican because the governments of both recognized the supremacy of the state; yet they realized the republican ideal only imperfectly, because neither country could unify the central government with local or factional estates. France, like Rome, became excessively centralized after Louis XIV, while British history was characterized by a tumultuous struggle between king, lords, and commons.



The United States was to achieve a kind of trinitarian union-within-distinction between the central authority and the liberty of the states of which the nation is comprised. Only in the United States are the two unified pre-politically, in the organic, providential constitution which precedes, in both a temporal and prerogative sense, the written Constitution of 1789, the Articles of Confederation, and the American Revolution itself. The dialectic of centralism and provincialism, of the authority of the state and the liberty of the estates or demes that form its constituent parts, was not resolved by the written Constitution of Madison or the contractarian theories of Jefferson, but instead by the preexisting organic constitution of the people themselves.

The American people had begun to think of themselves simultaneously as citizens of their respective colonies and as Americans—and to see these two identities as indivisible and mutually-dependent—before the achievement of American independence provided a political order that aligned with this organic sense of nationhood. To be an American is to live in a state (unless you’re one of those creeps who lives in D.C.), and to live in a state is to be an American. The states are in the Union and the Union is in the states. If the American nation hadn’t already been formed this way by providence, our written Constitution would not have succeeded.

The failure of the Confederacy was rooted in its erroneous vision of the American republic as a mere confederation of states bound together by mutual consent and thus dissolvable by the revocation of that consent by one or more parties. It failed to recognize the national identity that made federation possible, and in so doing it ran afoul of the providential constitution and lost any claim to legitimacy. But Brownson also saw an equal and opposite temptation on the part of the victorious Union forces. In 1860 the pendulum had swung too far in the direction of decentralization, but in 1865 the Union threatened to overcorrect itself in the direction of centralization, which would be just as unfounded and injurious to the true constitutional order as the secession crisis had been. There was a desire to punish the defeated South and to snuff out any remaining embers of regional autonomy or state loyalty that could provoke another rebellion. In the first year of Reconstruction, there was spirited debate about whether the states of the former Confederacy should readmitted to the Union at all, or whether they should retain their original names and borders. Brownson argued movingly that the Southern states should be treated as if they were a wayward tribe of Israel or an apostle who had stumbled in his faith: that, their error having been acknowledged and rectified, they should be restored to the Union to which they are as integral as the stars to the firmament.



Long live the Union! Hail, Holy Trinity!

[Elijah Newcomb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this work written by the man St. John Henry Newman called “by far the greatest thinker America has ever produced.” I am currently embarked on a project to see whether my political theology and the American system can be reconciled or harmonized. Orestes Brownson attempted to do just this in this book. It must be noted that this book speaks to its particular time and place, namely, immediately post–Civil War America. Brownson writes in a sort of stream of consciousness; while brilliant and often exciting, it can at times be a slog. There are reviews on this website more insightful and helpful than I could hope to be, from people who likely grasped the arguments better than I did. Still, for what it’s worth, I will share a few thoughts.

In this work, Brownson is trying to tell the American people, who had only recently torn one another apart, who they are. Not who they could be or should be, but who they already are. Much like Tocqueville’s work, this book holds up a mirror to an existing people. He says America is exceptional and has been given by God a unique task: to demonstrate to the rest of the world one of the demands of natural law, unity through diversity. Here there are strong resonances with the best articulations of subsidiarity. Larger orders of society are comprised of and in service to lower orders of society. The child is born into a particular family, the family belongs to a particular block, the block to a particular city, and so on. If these levels of order are just, they are ultimately in service of the individual person and their union with God.

This deeply Catholic principle, Brownson says, is summed up in the motto e pluribus unum—“out of many, one.” America is unique in that she is the United States. She is not merely “states united,” nor simply “a union of states,” but at once united and yet states. He says the states exist in the Union, and the Union exists within the states; at the time of the Revolution, Americans thought of themselves as citizens of both their states and the Union at once. The great error of the South was to think they were merely citizens of several states, which could leave the nation at any time. This is like a man who believes he can leave his family and be merely an individual, no longer a son or brother. Such a person is mistaken. The family exists within him as much as he exists within the family. These are not parts that can be added or subtracted without doing violence to the constitution of all parties.

The written constitution, Brownson thinks, if it is just, is only a projection of the lived constitution of the people, the shape of the life of the people that already exists. A written constitution, if it is to work at all, must fit the people as a shoe fits the foot. Politically, a people that can accept a king as legitimate must be, in fact, the kind of people who would accept a king as legitimate. Theologically, for Christians, the new law is written on our hearts. The universals of the natural law remain, but as Christians we are free to instantiate them in regenerated societies. Natural law demands that we honor our father and mother, but what that looks like in Nigeria and in America will be quite different. Nevertheless, if a particular instantiation is legitimate, it is real.

It would be unjust, imprudent, and therefore sinful (provided I knew it was disrespectful) for me to go to Nigeria and ignore their legitimate custom by making direct eye contact with my elders. In the same way, in the United States it would be disrespectful not to make eye contact. The “living constitution” is, in fact, the way of life that exists between a people, and a Christian way of life is the way of life that exists between Christian people.

One of the great dangers to this is the centralization of power and the construction of European-style nation-states, which in their own minds must challenge rival sovereignties of both greater and smaller magnitude, such as cities and towns. Centralization guts networks of solidarity at lower levels and absolutizes the relationship between the state and the individual. I am no longer a Jefferson who lives in Birmingham, which is in Alabama, in the United States; I am merely an American, and all other relationships are secondary. Brownson raises alarms about centralization as the error to which the Union would be susceptible after the war. In this way, he was prophetic. However, his idea of “barbaric” and “republican” civilization seems to contradict this, and his conception of sovereignty is, to me, confusing.

[Coyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly thoughtful and theoretical approach to politics, given that it's written by one of us Americans :)
Brownson discusses America in the context of:
1) what a "nation" is
2) what a "constitution" is, both written and unwritten
3) the relationship between the individual and the nation
4) the relationship between the states and the federal government
5) the place of God in thinking about politics.

Some quotes from the book:
-"Church and state, as governments, are separate indeed, but the principles on which the state is founded have their origin and ground in the spiritual order -in the principles revealed or affirmed by religion- and are inseparable from them. There is no state without God, any more than there is a church without Christ or the Incarnation. An atheist may be a politician, but if there were no God there could be no politics. Theological principles are the basis of political principles." (257)
-"Its [the United States':] mission is not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the state, which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual- the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy." (3)
-"Tyranny or oppression is not in being subjected to authority, but in being subjected to usurped authority- to a power that has no right t ocommand, or that commands what exceeds its right or its authority... Liberty is violated only when we are required to forego our own will or inclination by a power that has no right to make the requisition; for we are bound to obedience as far as authority has right to govern, and we can never have the right to disobey a rightful command." (16)
-"Parties have no conscience, no responsiblity, and their very reason of being is, the usurpation and concentration of power." (175)
-"Failure in this world is not always a proof of wrong; nor success, of right. The good is sometimes overborne, and the bad sometimes triumphs; but it is consoling, and even just, to believe that the good oftener triumphs than the bad." (133)

[TD · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour de force of immense proportions. A more worthwhile read than the Federalist Papers as Brownson efficiently shows his understanding of the nation’s founding is both more grounded in reality and disciplined than the vast majority of the founding fathers. My views of my country and the world have been changed in multiple key ways throughout the joy of reading and studying this work. America is unique in constitution and destiny; a nation primed to give its Lord and Savior immense glory. I am humbled to have been chosen to be born in such a state as this one. To God alone the glory forever and always.

[Kenneth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Orestes Brownson in his classic political essay on the origin, constitution or nature of government, lays out a general framework to interpret debates over sovereignty or secession.

Living in the north, Orestes came from a modest background. He went through various religious transitions from Unitarian to Presbyterian to Transcendentalist then finally to the Roman Catholic Church where he stayed. He wrote profusely on nearly every subject.

The American Republic is a brilliant book that clearly defines the nature or purpose of government, root and branch. Often read for arguments concerning the Civil War, the book is more interesting in terms of providing the general framework for the origins of the government. For the first part of the book Orestes spells out theories in this regard:

1: Government originates in the right of the father to govern his child.

2: It originates in convention, and is a social compact.

3. It originates in the people, who, collectively taken, are sovereign.

4. Government springs from the spontaneous development of nature.

5. It derives its right from the immediate and express appointment of God.

6. From God through the Pope, or visible head of the spiritual society.

7. From God through the people.

8. From God through the natural law.

Orestes studies each of these articles in turn. He rejects the paternalistic understanding in addition to the divine right of kings.

He admits that sovereignty lies with God. Therefore, natural law or social contract alone are out. However, government authority comes through the people who constitute the nation-state. So, the people directly or God through the Pope Orestes likewise disputes. He interprets the American Civil War through this lens.

America is an established people prior to the conventions of the State. The conclusion follows that when part of the State tears apart the original people who constituted the foundation, the government that existed before the institution of the State is compromised.

The State exceeds proper authority on both sides of civil conflicts. A fine line is tread here between the North and the South with regard to the Civil War.

Orestes concludes with the North against succession, whereas he acknowledges the grievances of the South. According to Brownson, the Northern states aggressed by State means beyond the authority of the truly sanctioned government, provoking the South to break the covenant that represented immutable authority of God through the people to constitute in the first place.

An interesting book that deserves time to understand in the entirety of breadth or depth.

[Josiah Hasbrouck]

i probably read like 25% of this ngl

[Jeff Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really a very interesting book. This book which was published after the Civil War is far more ranging than just discussing the American Republic. The first half or so of the book discusses the nature of government and it's authority. It takes a historical look at the subject and views it from multiple angles include as seen by the natural law and by theology. The last half of the book takes on what was certainly the subject of the time regarding whether the individual states were sovereign. His take on it is fascinating as he marshals up his support and talks along peripheral issues.

Another interesting aspect is his Catholicism. I recently became interested in him as I have seen him mentioned a couple of times and most recently in Russell Shaw's new book "American Church" Brownson was a convert during a time when that was quite a rarity. A public intellectual who became unabashedly Catholic. The introduction of this book alludes to this and he talks about how Catholicism contributed to his analysis and viewpoint of this book. The last chapter of this book makes more connections along this line. I found many things he had to say dead on and born out by history after he died. His influences were very rich and was able to take multiple sources from history to make his arguments along multiple lines.

This is available on Project Gutenberg

[Naomi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing. I had read that Brownson was a constitutional conservative, and wondered exactly what that meant. He reveals himself in finding theological doctrines expressed through the form and constitution of the republic.

[Trenton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introduction by Peter Lawler is worth the price of the book.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Seemed to be more of a ramble about religion, with the stuff about the constitution buried so deep that it was hard to find. Tedious.