RATIONALISM

Rationalism was a cultural movement from 1750 to 1820 that questioned social and intellectual traditions. Although rationalism did not reject tradition completely, it encouraged criticism of traditional laws, ideas, and social practices. Such criticism helped precipitate social and political change after 1750. One such change concerned the traditional privileges of aristocracy. Most rationalists were not aristocrats but were associated with the trading or commercial classes of the bourgeoisie. As such, rationalists often criticized aristocratic practices such as using birth or family lineage to determine a person's social position. In his Autobiography of 1771, the rationalist and American Revolutionary Benjamin Franklin boasted that his talent and merit, not his lineage, determined his social position in late-eighteenth-century Philadelphia. He suggested that talent and social mobility, not birth and traditional privilege, should characterize American society.

In addition to aristocratic practices, rationalists criticized intellectual traditions. Rationalists particularly opposed traditional religious ideas about human nature. The most influential of these ideas in 1800 were the orthodox Protestant ideas of Calvinism. Although originating with the sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin, Calvinism remained influential in America even after 1800. Calvinists held that human nature was inherently sinful and that human beings depended on God's grace for moral improvement. Rationalists scorned such ideas. They even replaced the traditional religious language of sin and grace, which suggested human dependence on God, with secular words like virtue and vice, which suggested human free will. One such rationalist was the American Founder Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson argued that human beings were not inherently sinful because they possessed "moral sense." This sense, he maintained, was part of human nature, enabling human beings to recognize virtue and pursue moral improvement without special grace or redemption from God.

For rationalists, such particular criticisms of aristocratic convention or traditional religion were not unrelated. They both derived from the rationalist principle that society was of human origin. Rationalists argued that the laws and institutions of society were not of divine origin or reflections of God's will, as many traditional writers had asserted. Instead, rationalists argued that society's laws and institutions were the product of human history, or the result of human decisions in history.

This emphasis on the human origins of society informed rational criticisms. By insisting that society's institutions and laws were the result of human decisions, and not part of an immutable order, rationalists challenged those institutions and laws as mere human creations. Rationalists thus challenged the legal privileges of aristocracy as merely the product of aristocratic decisions in political history. The aristocracy, they charged, made the laws of aristocratic privilege. Rationalists similarly criticized the clergy. They viewed the clergy as possessing power and prestige because clerical leaders had influenced the political decisions of history. One rationalist who expressed these critical views was the American Revolutionary John Adams. In 1765 Adams published A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, in which he condemned the history of aristocratic and clerical power as a history of "civil and ecclesiastical tyranny."

The rational view of society also promoted confidence in reform. By describing institutions and laws as the product of past decisions, rationalists expressed confidence in the human ability to change those decisions and reform their society. Such confidence was evident in the writings of Thomas Paine. In Common Sense, published in January 1776, Paine characterized the long-established institution of monarchy as merely a form of tyranny. He thus sought to convince Americans to reform their politics not simply by declaring independence, which they did in July 1776, but also by creating a new kind of government based on rights rather than kings.

Rationalists expressed a confidence in human ability both in their religion and their politics. By the early nineteenth century, religious rationalism developed into Unitarianism. Unitarians were optimistic about human nature and encouraged individuals to use reason and moral sense rather than traditional doctrines as guides to individual and social life. Unitarians thus sought to replace the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity—God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—with a "united" or indivisible notion of God, which they viewed as more rational. Unitarianism was particularly influential among the merchant classes of Boston. The leading Boston Unitarian was William Ellery Channing (1780–1842). In 1819 Channing published Unitarian Christianity, in which he expressed many essential features of rationalism. He emphasized the human ability to use the free and rational faculties of human nature for moral self-improvement and social reform.

See alsoAdams, John; Franklin, Benjamin; Jefferson, Thomas; Paine, Thomas .

bibliography

Jefferson, Thomas. Thomas Jefferson: Political Writings. Edited by Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Paine, Thomas. Political Writings. Edited by Bruce Kuklick. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Sanford, Charles B. The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984.

Zuckert, Michael P. The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996.

Christopher S. Grenda