美国宪政的意识形态起源
Ideological Origins of American Constitutionalism
佩尔森
【全文】
As one of the earliest republics of modern times and certainly one of the most successful, the United States has elicited considerable world-wide interest in its constitution, constitutional system, and ideological origins of that system. This is the subject that I shall be addressing in this lecture.
Late eighteenth century Americans were acutely self-conscious of their deviation from the predominant pattern of political organization then known in Europe. Most Western peoples simply assumed that monarchy was both normal and preferable. Even American advocates of republicanism such as Thomas Jefferson spoke of republicanism as an experiment. The question facing Americans in their revolutionary era had two aspects. On the one hand they felt compelled to search through history as well as to explore the depths of human psychology in a search for a republican pattern that would actually work. On the other they were required to defend this pattern as a viable alternative to monarchy.
In the process of dealing with this question, some Americans turned to the democracy of ancient Athens or the Roman republic. Both of these offered impressive evidence for the antiquity of non-monarchical governmental forms, and Americans never tired of citing these examples. Yet neither seemed entirely relevant to the American scene, and it was to other ideas, more British and more modern, that Americans generally turned both in defining and in defending their new constitutional system. These modern sources of American constitutional ideas were essentially derived from Puritanism and from the political theories of John Locke. Indeed, Locke himself, though a latitudinarian Anglican, was the son of a Puritan father; and one could plausibly argue that the Lockean theories themselves were shaped to a significant degree by Puritan ideology.
The myth of Puritan origins of American society is so strong that, though the vast majority of the American people today are not of Puritan or even of English ancestry, we all tend to identify with the sturdy and courageous New Englanders who braved stormy seas and a frontier wilderness to establish their ideal community in America. The Puritan community established in seventeenth century Massachusetts has been praised as the cradle of American democracy providing the ideological bulwark for those Bostonians who first resisted the British and, in our own century,
those Americans who resisted fascism in Europe and Asia. However, the Puritan community has also been described as feudal and unamerican, a theocracy or, at the very least, an oligarchy, persecuting dissent and imposing a moralistic reign of terror on its own people and subsequent generations of Americans. In my lecture today I would like to turn an historians eye on the American Puritans, examine their complex ideas and experiences, and suggest to you how such disparate images of these people can exist simultaneously today. In the course of my analysis, I shall also indicate several significant Puritan contributions to American political thought and to American constitutionalism. I shall not argue that Puritanism is the only source of American constitutionalism but rather that it is a critical source without an understanding of which the development of American constitutionalism becomes unintelligible.
