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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience - 3. Some Historical Reflections - 4. The Roots of the American Creed in the Philosophy of Enlightenment
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8 An American Dilemma
directed by a small group of skillful leaders, who, like Indian scoutS;
covered their tracks so cleverly, that only the keenest trailers can now
follow their course and understand their strategy.”’®
But the Creed, once set forth and disseminated among the American
people, became so strongly entrenched in their hearts, and the circum-
stances have since then been so relatively favorable, that it has succeeded in
keeping itself very much alive for more than a century and a half.
4. The Roots of the American Creed in the
Philosophy of Enlightenment
The American Creed is a humanistic liberalism developing out of the
epoch of Enlightenment when America received its national consciousness
and its political structure. The Revolution did not stop short of anything
less than the heroic desire for the “emancipation of human nature.” The
enticing flavor of the eighteenth century, so dear to every intellectual and
rationalist, has not been lost on the long journey up to the present time.
Let us quote a contemporary exegesis:
Democracy is a form of political association in which the general control and
direction of the commonwealth is habitually determined by the bulk of the com-
munity in accordance with understandings and procedures providing for popular
participation and consent. Its postulates are:
1. The essential dignity of man, the importance of protecting and cultivating his
personality on a fraternal rather than upon a differential basis, of reconciling the
needs of the personality within the frame-work of the common good in a formula
of liberty, justice, welfare.
2. The perfectibility of man; confidence in the possibilities of the human personal-
ity, as over against the doctrines of caste, class, and slavery.
3. That the gains of commonwealths are essentially mass gains rather than the efforts
of the few and should be diffused as promptly as possible throughout the com-
munity without too great delay or too wide a spread in differentials.
4. Confidence in the value of the consent of the governed expressed in institutions,
understandings and practices as a basis of order, liberty, justice.
5. The value of decisions arrived at by common counsel rather than by violence and
brutality.
These postulates rest upon (i) reason in regarding the essential nature of the
political man, upon (2) observation, experience and inference, and (3) the fulfill-
ment of the democratic ideal is strengthened by a faith in the final triumph of ideals
of human behavior in general and of political behavior in particular.^^
For practical purposes the main norms of the American Creed as usually
pronounced are centered in the belief in equality and in the rights to
liberty.’^ In the Declaration of Independence—^as in the earlier Virginia
Bill of Rights—equality was given the supreme rank and the rights to
liberty are posited as derived from equality. This logic was even more
clearly expressed in Jefferson’s origind formulation of the first of the
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