James W. Ceaser. "Alexis de Tocqueville and the Two-Founding Thesis." APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper.

Excerpt:
Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first thinkers in the nineteenth century to challenge the prevailing historical account of the American founding. According to that account, which was well on the way to becoming solidified when Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, America’s polity or regime was established in the period that began with the Revolutionary War and ended with the ratification of the Constitution. The principal leaders during this time, referred to as “founders” or “fathers,” were celebrated for having decisively shaped the character of America’s way of life. An illustration of this position can be found in Timothy Pitkin’s widely-read A Political and Civil History of the United States, published in 1828. Pitkin begins by promising “a more intimate knowledge and recollection of the difficulties which their political fathers had to overcome,” so that his readers might better appreciate the “great charter of their union, as their best and only security against domestic discord and foreign force.”

Tocqueville, by contrast, presents an account of the founding that identifies not one but two formative moments. The Puritan-New England tradition, in his view, was every bit as consequential in constituting America as the founding of 1775-1789. From the Puritan colonies come “the two or three principal ideas [that] were combined [and that] today form the bases of the social theory of the United States.” New England’s “civilization” – Tocqueville helped introduce this sense of the term to America – was like one of those “fires” set on a high slope whose light “still tinge[s] the furthest reaches of the horizon.”

These two interpretations of America’s origins are strikingly different. Although it is possible to imagine how Tocqueville might have brought them more closely together, perhaps by refining the meaning of the concept of “founding,” he made no effort to do so. Without either acknowledging or criticizing the prevailing view, Tocqueville proceeded simply to sketch his own narrative, with the evident aim of having it modify or replace the existing one. His version will be referred to here as the “two-founding thesis.”

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