Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 53

ORESTES BROWNSON

of our Declaration, which proclaims that each of us has been created equal with inalienable natural rights, but we have slighted
Locke's nominalist method of establishing those truths. Instead
of the written Constitution, being grounded merely by abstract
natural rights and autonomous individuals, we have looked to
a prior, unwritten, "providential" constitution. Providential here,
to be clear, has nothing to do with some intervention of Divine
Providence into history. It has to do with the fact that no written constitution could emerge from nothing, but is necessarily
dependent on the various "givens" that limit and direct what is
possible for statesmen at any particular time. The "givens" from
this view aren't oppressive constraints but civilizational accomplishments that make the written Constitution and constitutional
order possible. "Providential," in this sense, means to be guided
by what one is given by custom, tradition, philosophy, theology,
and prior political experience.

I

n his 1865 book, The American Republic, Brownson rearticulates
the principles of American constitutionalism. The Civil War and
its horrific consequences showed that America's statesmen of
his time had not grasped the full truth of the American Founding. To comprehend the guarantees of American constitutionalism requires the incorporation of its unwritten constitution as a
historical and philosophical articulation of the meaning of the
written constitutional order. As Brownson writes, "There must be
for every state or nation a constitution anterior to the constitution which the nation gives itself, and from which the one it gives
itself derives all its vitality and legal force."1 The constitution of the
state is given to a people who constitute a republic in a particular
territory or geographically delimited place in the world.
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Modern Age - Spring 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Spring 2016

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