In 1885, a young Woodrow Wilson declared, “We of the present generation are in the first season of free, outspoken, unrestrained, constitutional criticism.” The progressive critique of the Constitution that Wilson and his peers inaugurated has had real staying power. To its critics today, there is no room to doubt that the Constitution was a charter reflecting the worldview of oppressors and slaveholders who sought to suppress the masses.

In American Covenant, Yuval Levin proposes that the progressives old and new who have accused the Constitution of making our politics dysfunctional, endangering majority rule, and separating citizens from their government are fundamentally mistaken. Instead, he sees the Constitution’s political theory as a resource citizens can draw upon to learn how to act together to achieve the common good.

Though it’s often mistaken for “liberalism,” Levin explains that the Constitution’s “essential republicanism” is a distinct ethos, one whose basic values and vocabulary have been lost to us. Republicanism shares with liberalism a dedication to individual liberty. It adds, however, a recognition of the extent to which public-spiritedness, a devotion to the common good, and a commitment to civic and moral virtue make a free society possible. The basic tenets of the Constitution’s political theory are at odds with the radical individualism that prevails today. 

In contrast to those scholars of the American Founding who stress the Constitution’s indebtedness to modern political philosophy—especially as found in the thought of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes—Levin believes its theory is rooted in an essentially classical mode of thinking. The basis of the Constitution and the institutions it established was not simply the fear of violent death or the desire for self-preservation. Rather, the Constitution had its origins in the Founders’ devotion to civic friendship, their desire to foster social harmony, and their shared attachment to a politics of the common good. Levin makes much of a brief but critical letter written by George Washington to the Confederation Congress in which he intended to explain the work of the Philadelphia Convention. He wrote that the Constitution was the “result of a spirit of amity and of that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable.”