The Constitution in Their Hearts

April 10, 2025

By Michael Lucchese

“When the greatest power coincides in a human being with prudence and moderation, then occurs the natural genesis of the best regime.”- Plato, The Laws, 712a

America has never quite satisfied political theorists. On the one hand, it can seem as though the Founders were idealistic revolutionaries, committed to an abstract notion of the “rights of man” that can obliterate tradition and introduce disorder. On the other, it can seem as though they were cold-blooded realists who made cynical compromises with unjust institutions. It is difficult to explain this tension with many of the prevalent methods of political science – and therefore difficult for those in the field to understand it at all. Is it any wonder, then, that the leading ideologues of the Left and Right have both become such great critics of the Founding?

But America is not a political theory. She is a nation. The Founders did not set out to bring about heaven on earth. As Russell Kirk often observed, they were statesmen, not philosophes. Their great achievement was the practical preservation of ordered liberty in real communities against a crisis of tyranny.

This defense of the particular, though, necessitated the Founders to articulate what Abraham Lincoln called “the definitions and axioms of free society.” Something about their struggle had a universal significance, as the Railsplitter put it, “applicable to all men and all times.” In order to properly understand America, we cannot ignore the particular circumstances of the place and time when independence was achieved or the general principles to which the men who sought to achieve goal appealed. America is “not just an idea”, as J.D. Vance put it. But our nationhood does still involve ideas that we cannot and must not diminish.

Restoring our understanding of the American founding is the most important task ahead of conservatives. One mind who can show the path to recovering this heritage is the Founders’ greatest contemporary, Edmund Burke, because he understood this relationship between the particular and the universal better than any political theorist. In the Letters on the Regicide Peace, he acknowledged that all political societies are “artificial combinations; and, in their proximate efficient cause, the arbitrary productions of the human mind” and therefore concluded that “commonwealths are not physical but moral essences.” While rejecting the utopian idealism of Enlightenment thinkers, Burke understood the fundamentally spiritual nature of politics. The particular orders us toward transcendent truths, he held, through the faculty of the moral imagination.

  Among the Founders, it is perhaps John Adams of Braintree who most fully expressed this moral imagination in constitutional terms. Although certainly no utopian, he believed that a kind of ideal republic was already manifest in the American people. Republican institutions needed to be designed to preserve and cultivate these native virtues. Adams admired our Constitution because he felt it was the best particular expression of the universal moral imagination. During the Revolution, he appealed to this spirit to rally the people around Independence. As one of the new republic’s leading political figures he found meaningful ways to etch it even more deeply into our national character.

Today it seems that these imaginative virtues are fading away in America. Public debates revolve around competing interests and factional conflict, not a shared search for the common good. Demagogues appeal to the worse angels of our nature. Intellectuals wage campaigns against the ideas of the Founding themselves. Conservatism cannot rest content with simply standing athwart these changes yelling “Stop!” It must aim, rather, at the restoration of the moral imagination.

This is not simply an intellectual task, of course, but also cultural and political. Burke and Adams can serve as great inspirations, therefore, because they were both thinkers and statesmen – “philosophers in action.” Neither may have fully achieved all their practical political goals, but they still both provide enduring rhetorical models for conservatives interested in renewing the constitution of our hearts.

The balance between idealism and realism which characterized Adams and Burke’s moral imagination has never been the dominant intellectual force within modernity. Classical political philosophy – which both statesmen deeply admired – was characterized by the search for the “best regime” or the highest way of life. But as Leo Strauss argued in his famous essay “The Three Waves of Modernity,” modern political philosophy began as a rejection of that quest.

According to Strauss, the first wave of modernity begins with The Prince, in which Niccolo Machiavelli inaugurated the modern project by dismissing “imagined republics.” The Socratic attempt to found an ideal “city-in-speech” or the Christian attempt to realize the Kingdom of God struck the hard-headed realist as absurd. According to Machiavelli, this idealism teaches man “his ruin rather than his preservation.” At base, Strauss argued, Machiavelli was rejecting the ancients’ “specific understanding of nature,” namely that “all natural beings, at least all living beings, are directed toward an end, a perfection for which they long.” Machiavelli saw the teleology of the West’s theological and philosophical tradition as a great danger to affluence and peace, and therefore sought to undermine it.

The second wave of modernity, Strauss wrote, commences with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Reacting against the Machiavellian revolution, he sought to restore something of the classical conception of virtue, but without the restraints of classical natural law. If Machiavelli’s realism led to a low view of the human person, it might be said that Rousseau’s idealism adopts an astonishingly high view.

But Strauss writes that the political doctrines of the “general will” and “social contract” Rousseau advocated were alien to the Western tradition’s concept of nature. “Moral and political ideals are established without reference to man’s nature” in Rousseau’s thought, which means that “man is radically liberated from the tutelage of nature.” Elsewhere, in Natural Right and History, Strauss claims that this liberation caused a “crisis” in which “passion itself took initiative and rebelled; usurping the place of reason.” Rousseau was the founder of a kind of political madness. The crisis of his thought became most apparent, perhaps, as Madam Guillotine drowned the streets of Paris in blood.

            Following in the wake of Rousseau’s wave, countless Enlightenment philosophes began imagining new kinds of ideal republics. But instead of the natural law which oriented the broad Western tradition, these utopian schemes aimed at the “rights of man,” a freedom not just from the constraints of coercion but from any of the guardrails tradition provides. As Strauss put it, for these revolutionaries, “reason replaces nature.” They speculated about the origins of civil society because they wanted to refashion it on explicitly rationalist grounds. The radicals attempted to make their ideal republics real, to tragic effect.

Edmund Burke considered this universalizing idealism a threat not just to the United Kingdom, but all of civilization. “The British constitution will be fought for, and conquerd, not here but in France,” he wrote in one letter to his colleague Henry Dundas, “There the cause of all Monarcheis, and of all Republicks too constituted upon antient models, are upon their Trial.” He saw both kinds of modernism – Machiavellian pessimism and Rousseauian optimism – mixed together in the Jacobin republic, and he thought that free government could only survive if it defeated these tendencies.

In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke sometimes framed this critique of the Jacobin republic in terms that sound almost like the Machiavellian disparagement of imagined commonwealths. Often, he condemned the “metaphysics” of the Revolution for their speculative unreality. At one point, for instance, he contrasts its utopianism with classical realism:

The legislators who framed the antient republics knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an undergraduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life.

Critical as he was of the unreality of imagined republics, though, the Irishman was nowhere near the Florentine’s total cynicism. Throughout the Reflections, he goes to great lengths to assert his allegiance to the “real rights of men,” namely a share in the great partnership of society’s eternal contract. Burke believed that a certain kind of metaphysics should guide statesmen, but he also knew that these abstract principles could not answer every political circumstance. “The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs,” he observed. Burke went on to prophesy that the simple governments with absolute power proposed by Enlightenment speculators would result in tyranny.

Burke’s conservative project, then, can be best understood as the preservation of a virtuous liberty against a will-to-power politics. In an essay published to mark the bicentennial of the Irishman’s death, Joseph Pappin III helpfully explains that, unlike most Enlightenment thinkers, this means that Burke was more focused on the end or purpose of civil society than its origin. “A Burkean philosophy of rights requires a social context, in pursuit of a common good, in solidarity with one’s fellow human beings, to secure the good and virtuous life,” he writes, “realizing ends which belong to oneself according to one’s own human nature and not through any arbitrary, capricious self-choice.”

Burke could deploy a rhetoric of preservation because he believed that British society as it was actually constituted secured this kind of virtuous liberty. “We are not the converts of Rousseau,” he wrote, “we are not the disciples of Voltaire.” The people themselves were conscious of the real goods of their constitution, and they would not willingly abandon them for the sake of abstractions or political fantasies. Burke therefore praises the prejudice of the British people in favor of their established habits, institutions, and religion:

We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long… Instead of quarrelling with establishments, as some do, who have made a philosophy and a religion of their hostility to such institutions, we cleave closely to them. We are resolved to keep an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater.

To put it another way, Burke thought that the British constitution was intimately related to the best regime the philosophers of antiquity sought. It ordered the people toward the highest way of life – that is to say, love of God and neighbor. “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections,” he wrote. “It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.” In other words, the good character of Britons was a kind of incarnation of the ideal republic.

This faith in the people was what Burke considered to be the great bulwark against an immoderate, revolutionary utopianism. In a 1791 letter he exhorted his son Richard, then a sort of political apprentice, to remember that “we must not struggle with the order of Providence; nor contrive matters so ill, that, as Cicero says, whilst we are struggling to be in the Republick of Plato, we may find ourselves in no republick at all.” Reform, not revolution, is the proper response to most abuses and injustices in a society. As another great conservative said, “good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”

Nevertheless, as Burke himself observed, the people sometimes have no other recourse against tyranny but rebellion. As a Whig, after all, he was dedicated to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its constitutional principles. But revolution is strong medicine, only to be prescribed in the most extreme of circumstances. Burke held that one should only ever be commenced according to the strictest necessity, when it is the only option to preserve a people and their liberties. The United States was born in just such a revolution.

Of the Founders, it was probably John Adams who best understood the creation of the American republic in these terms. During the War for Independence itself, Adams clashed with the most revolutionary supporters of the Patriot cause precisely because of their tendency toward the kind of Jacobin abstraction Burke would later criticize. Rather than thinking of the new constitution as a revolutionary tool for “promoting democracy,” he thought it was better to consider it as the kind of mixed regime in the long classical republican tradition. In his political thought, “democracy,” “monarchy,” and “aristocracy” are not ideological positions so much as descriptions of arrangements of power. For Adams, then, a good constitution aims to properly balance each of these powers around a distinctive, if not always explicit, notion of liberty and the human good.

In the early months of 1776, Adams became particularly concerned with the immense popularity of Thomas Paine’s radical pamphlet Common Sense. As Richard Alan Ryerson notes in his truly excellent intellectual biography of the man who would become our second president, he approved of Paine’s advocacy of independence, but was deeply concerned about the radicalism of his proposals for new constitutions. To combat Paine’s influence on the Revolution, Adams wrote a short essay titled “Thoughts on Government” to provide a plan for constituting the republic in greater accord with pre-Enlightenment traditions and actual American practices.

Like Burke, Adams was far more interested in the real purpose of government than the speculative theories about its origins Paine indulged. “Thoughts on Government” begins with this statement of its subject’s teleology:

We ought to consider what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.

But Adams was not writing of “happiness” here in the materialist or empiricist terms used in the next century by the utilitarians. Citing both pagan and Christian authorities, he insists “that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.” Governments ought to be designed with an eye toward human excellence. “The foundation of every government is some principle or passion in the minds of the people,” he wrote. “The noblest principles and most generous affections in our nature, then, have the fairest chance to support the noblest and most generous models of government.” If America would thrive, Adams believed she first and foremost needed to be a republic of virtue.

The rest of the essay is primarily a sketch for a kind of constitution that would balance monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in a way that would best promote this republican virtue. Adams did not view checks and balances simply as parchment barriers to frustrate would-be tyrants. Indeed, he believed that the separation of powers would actually teach the people to be virtuous:

A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people, and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen; a general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprising.

  In the Reflections, Burke wrote of a similar “elevation of sentiment” in the terms of moral imagination. The Jacobins’ “barbarous” political theory seeks to undermine “all the superadded ideas... which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation.” Ideologues following in Rousseau’s wake, such as Paine, promote their vapid egalitarianism at the expense of the manners and mores—and even humanity—Burke described as just prejudices in favor of established society’s “latent wisdom.”

            Perhaps even more than Burke, Adams saw this prejudice as the constitution of an ideal republic made real. In his biography, Ryerson argues that Adams was the advocate of a kind of “provincial republicanism.” Throughout his career, Adams was deeply interested in recovering the memory of the republican past and using it to understand the best path forward for America; yet, Ryerson writes, “partially hidden behind his strategy of looking backward in order to move forward was a certain sense of loss.” He thought of his native Braintree as a kind of incarnation of the ideal republic, and specifically his father as an “ideal constituent.”

The changes happening in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – political, economic, technological – were making this vision of a republican Massachusetts increasingly difficult to maintain. Adams’s work as a statesman can best be understood as an attempt to preserve it against these threats. Adams best explained this provincial republicanism himself in a remarkable 1776 letter to his fellow delegate to the Continental Congress, William Hooper: 

The Spirit of the People, among whom I had my Birth and Education, which you know very well, was always republican, altho they never enjoyed a Constitution of Government conformable to that Spirit, as the whole of the Executive, with an enormous Prerogative, as well as two Branches of their Legislative, and the whole of their judicial Powers, were always in the Hands of the Crown. It was wholly owing to the Constitution of their Towns, which were Small Districts incorporated by an early Law, and vested with Powers to assemble frequently, deliberate, debate and act, upon many Affairs, together with the Establishment of Grammar Schools in every one of those Towns, that Such a Spirit was preserved, at all among the People.

Adams was not describing a republican theory the citizens of Massachusetts affirmed in the abstract, but rather a concrete republican reality they lived out every day. For Adams, then, American Revolution was not so much the innovation of new modes and orders, then, but rather a profound return to the principles of the civilization that had developed in the colonies over the long centuries. At this level, the Founding was the assertion of a nation which already existed in spirit – the Revolution was a fight to establish her liberties, and the ratification of the Constitution aimed to maintain her order.

As a lawgiver, Adams seemed the master of American politics in its earliest days—an American Solon. But he quickly lost relevance as the national stage came to be dominated by men like Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. In different ways, the flanks of the First Party System challenged Adams’s provincial republicanism by promoting more forceful and self-consciously modern alternatives. As Russell Kirk remarked in The Conservative Mind, Hamilton embraced industrialism, mercantilism, and nationalism in ways that unintentionally sparked radical social change, while Jeffersonian ideology explicitly embraced revolutionary doctrines that challenged the old moral imagination.

Kirk nonetheless held that Adams and the more moderate Federalists had a significant influence. “What was best in Federalism did not wholly die after 1800” and the election of Jefferson, he wrote, and “it is not extinct even now. John Adams had a great share in its perpetuation.” Adams himself was not at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. But many of his ideas influenced the Framers who were there and shaped the debate about the document’s ratification. For that reason, Kirk frequently contended, the U.S. Constitution became “the most successful conservative device in the history of the world.” By providing imaginative ways to understand the compromises behind the document, Adams’s political thought transformed it into “the sword of Federalism,” a force that would endure even the end of the party which bore that name.

In part, that success was thanks to the influence of Chief Justice John Marshall, who, Adams appointed to the Supreme Court in the last days of his presidency. He obstinately advocated for the old conservative Federalism, even when the egalitarian doctrines of the Jeffersonian faction seemed triumphant. Although Marshall’s decisions were not always initially popular, Kirk argued, they often became so when their practical implications became fully understood. “Federalistic conservatism crept into the minds of the [Republican] administration and the public by stealth, and soon mastered the national consciousness,” he wrote, even if it was “a Federalism diluted and nominally still scorned.”

  Great statesmen such as Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan may have rhetorically praised Adams’s antagonists such as Jefferson and Paine—and yet their conservatism, practically speaking, much more closely resembled their predecessor from Massachusetts. They were not attempting to revolutionize society according to some rationalist conception of equality or liberty, but rather preserve a constitutional inheritance against those who would trade it away. In his time, Adams may have lost. But in the long run, in some sense his view of the Constitution won.

The backdoor success of Adams’s republicanism proves just how well he understood the American people. Like Burke, his conservatism was inspired by something like a spirit of prophecy – they alike foresaw the dangers of Revolution, but trusted in the virtues of their peoples to resist the temptations of radicalism and upheaval. “A great part of the common people,” Kirk wrote of Adams, “revered this man who would not flatter them; they recognized his complete honesty, his indefatigable diligence, his devotion to old simplicities and loyalties.” They saw in him the high, old Roman virtues they hoped to display in their own lives. Above all, this was manifest in his unyielding patriotism – and theirs.

Now, though, the question we must ask is: Does this ideal republic still exist within the nation? Does the spirit Adams loved still predominate in America? In some ways, it is clear that the high virtues of the Founding have faded. The people’s reflex for self-government has diminished in many ways, and factional extremism eats away at our shared commitment to the Constitution. This is a moment crying out for political, cultural, and social renewal. As Kirk himself put it in one column, “It would be heartening to hear Adams’ rough and fearless tongue in Washington today.”

If we asked him for guidance, the lawyer from Braintree would surely emphasize the importance of civic education as a means of renewal. In 1763, at the beginning of the Imperial Crisis that led to American independence, Adams published his “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” a broadside against British policies tending toward despotism. Defending the principle that just governments rule by consent of the governed, the Braintree lawyer maintained that a free society necessitates a firm commitment to the highest kind of education. “Let us presume, what is in fact true, that the spirit of liberty is as ardent as ever among the body of the nation, though a few individuals may be corrupted,” he wrote to his fellow Massachusetts citizens. But he went on to warn that “This spirit, however, without knowledge, would be little better than a brutal rage.” The republican spirit must be educated by “read[ing] and recollect[ing] and impress[ing] upon our souls” the law of nature and the history of liberty.

Edmund Burke would add that a free society must not lose its confidence in the people themselves. In one speech he delivered at the height of the revolutionary crisis, Burke movingly proclaimed: “The body of the people is yet sound, the Constitution is in their hearts, while wicked men are endeavoring to put another into their heads.” Burke trusted more to the people’s sentiments than to what he described in the Reflections as the “new conquering empire of light and reason.” Love, not theory, would rescue the regime.

Ultimately, Burke and Adams both teach us that abstract theorizing will not perpetuate our political institutions – only a reinvigoration of the moral imagination can. As Burke put it in the aforementioned speech, “no moral questions are ever abstract questions.” These statesmen were not attempting to articulate a universal political theory, but rather cultivate this most deeply human faculty in service of their countries. They believed that genuine progress is not about achieving some kind of perfect social stasis in accord with one totalizing theory or another, but rather gradual reform and the improvement of moral character.

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the 2025 meeting of the Ciceronian Society.

Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.