The historiography of liberalism has taken a theological turn. On one track, many scholars have embraced the Nietzschean view that liberalism as such grew from the egalitarian soil of Christian orthodoxy—indeed, that liberalism constitutes little more than a kind of unselfconscious secularization of Christianity or at least Protestantism.Footnote 1 Although these scholars have not always drawn Nietzsche’s conclusion about the viability of such a tradition after the “death of God,” their scholarship points the way to it, and there are certainly indications of a rejuvenated Nietzschean anti-liberalism in the West.Footnote 2
On a parallel track, however, a number of scholars and public intellectuals have traced the origins of liberalism to the theology of “Pelagianism,”Footnote 3 a term that comes from the fifth-century theologian Pelagius, whose teachings were “condemned by Augustine and by almost every orthodox theologian after him.”Footnote 4 According to the doctrine traditionally ascribed to Pelagius, metaphysical freedom of the will makes all persons fully responsible for their own actions, and indeed for their very moral characters, good or bad. On the Pelagian view, a transcendent power to choose between right and wrong gives every individual human being the chance of becoming perfectly righteous, without God’s grace, and hence deserving of either salvation or damnation: “Since perfection is possible for man, it is obligatory.”Footnote 5
Pelagianism thus poses a challenge to the anthropology of orthodox (i.e., Augustinian) Western Christianity, which holds that our inner freedom is vitiated if not destroyed by our innate sinfulness, absent God’s grace, and hence that no one could ever become righteous solely by their own efforts. Accordingly, Pelagius “became the whipping boy of Western theology.”Footnote 6 On the Augustinian view, in both its Catholic and its Protestant forms, only through the grace of an omnipotent God can sinful individuals be turned toward moral goodness; and only through the grace of an omnipotent God can sinful individuals be saved from eternal damnation.Footnote 7 In short, given the sinfulness and weakness of the human will, no one bootstraps their way to virtue, just as no one earns their own salvation. On the Pelagian view, by contrast, every individual is “the master craftsman of his or her own soul,”Footnote 8 and thus salvation may be fully merited rather than being freely gifted by a merciful God.
Although many others have insisted upon a connection between Pelagianism and liberalism,Footnote 9 no one has pursued the thought more doggedly than Eric Nelson. In his recent book The Theology of Liberalism, Nelson advances both a striking conceptual claim and a striking historical claim about the Pelagian roots of “dignitarian liberalism,” that is, the kind of political thought grounded “in the distinctive value of human autonomy.”Footnote 10 His conceptual claim is that dignitarian liberalism depends for its coherence on a Pelagian premise that each individual is endowed with a perfectly free will and is thus fully responsible for his or her own moral character. And his historical claim is that the tradition of dignitarian liberalism was identical with Pelagianism until precisely 1971, the year that “John Rawls produced the twentieth century’s most significant statement of liberal political philosophy,”Footnote 11 a statement that Nelson argues convincingly was motivated by passionate anti-Pelagian sentiments.Footnote 12
With admirable clarity, Nelson maintains that early-modern liberalism—the dignitarian liberalism he associates with thinkers such as Milton, Locke, Leibniz, Rousseau, and Kant—not only resembled Pelagianism but “simply was Pelagianism.”Footnote 13 His explanation of the tie between Pelagian theology and liberal politics runs as follows:
Once the religious life is redefined in Pelagian terms as the cultivation of moral virtue throughout a complete life, then what needs protecting is not simply worship and preaching, but an entire sphere of private action. If what has transcendent value is the freely chosen right, then individuals must be allowed to make choices in every facet of their lives. They must be left alone to join the fray and try to win the garland, so long as their actions deprive no one else of the like opportunity.Footnote 14
Rawlsian liberalism, by contrast, is marked by what seems to be a radically “Augustinian” skepticism about moral freedom. In Rawls’s view, “we cannot be said to deserve, or be responsible for” our moral characters, since they are merely “the products of some combination of heredity and environment.”Footnote 15 Rawls suggests that “because the internal contribution to human action is so vanishingly small, it cannot in principle ground any claims to merit or desert.”Footnote 16 To be sure, Rawls does defend a view of retributive justice that presupposes individual responsibility for “bad character.”Footnote 17 But this introduces a serious incoherence into his theory.Footnote 18 And so, according to Nelson, Rawls’s dignitarian liberalism constitutes a break with an earlier and more internally consistent kind of dignitarian liberalism, the liberalism that “was, at bottom, the theological position known as Pelagianism.”Footnote 19
What exactly is at issue in this Pelagian hypothesis? On one view, very little. Michael Walzer, for instance, insists upon the impossibility of living as a consistent anti-Pelagian, given the human propensity to attribute full moral agency both to ourselves and to others. He gives the example of his own former colleagues at Harvard:
For years, I lived among the Rawlsians, and I was not surprised but puzzled watching how much they revered and honored Jack Rawls—and thereby denied a basic tenet of his theory … [T]he high intelligence, the seriousness, and the commitment that made A Theory of Justice possible (and the humility reflected in the article “A”) were all of them, according to the argument of the book, “arbitrary from a moral point of view.” These qualities could as easily have filled any other human vessel. If Rawls therefore wasn’t entitled to the royalties that the book earned (a point, I assume, that all Rawlsians would accept), then he was also not entitled to the reputation that the book’s author earned. But we all revered Jack—how else could we relate to him?Footnote 20
So Walzer raises this “Philistine question”: “If it’s not possible to live with or act out the anti-Pelagian position, what is the point of the theoretical debates? … [W]hat’s at stake?”Footnote 21
But to show the difficulty of adhering rigorously to a given theoretical position is not to demonstrate the practical sterility of that position. (Hence Christians can easily admit the extreme unlikelihood of anyone’s living up perfectly to the commandments of Christ while nonetheless insisting that the resurgence of Christianity would have very large social and political effects.) And the theoretical question at stake in this particular debate is one with eminently practical implications: is it reasonable and just to treat individuals as self-making, responsible agents? One’s answer to this question must necessarily inform not only one’s view of the meritocratic ideal, but also one’s understanding of the proper response to crime, poverty, addiction, and so on.
At issue, additionally, is a broader question about the foundation of dignitarian liberalism. According to Nelson, to repeat, early-modern liberalism presupposed a Pelagian doctrine of perfect metaphysical freedom (and hence perfect moral responsibility), and this doctrine made sense of the dignitarian liberal commitment to a broad sphere of freedom. In his view, therefore,
The cost of accepting this thoroughly anti-Pelagian account of human agency … is prohibitive. If our actions really are completely determined in this way—not just influenced by natural endowments and social advantages beyond our control, but constituted out of nothing beyond them—then it becomes very difficult to explain why we are beings whose autonomy and choices matter in the way that liberals suppose that they do … In order to make sense of liberalism, we need to explain what is uniquely bad about my being directed by an outside force or agency.Footnote 22
If Nelson is right about this, however, then dignitarian liberalism rests on a very slender reed, given the doubts that might be raised about the coherence of the idea of a purely self-determining will,Footnote 23 as well as the vast body of social science literature calling attention to the ways in which impersonal forces radically constrain the scope of individual freedom, evidence that has contributed to a recent cross-partisan reaction against the very notions of individual merit, responsibility, and self-help.Footnote 24 In the face of these arguments, appeals to a doctrine of pristine inner freedom might seem willfully obtuse, not to say cruel. So if dignitarian liberalism presupposes “the metaphysical freedom of human beings,”Footnote 25 it is tempting to say, so much the worse for dignitarian liberalism; another kind of politics and culture (more Nietzschean, more Marxian, or perhaps more Augustinian) would seem to be in order.
By examining Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, a classic expression of early-modern liberalism,Footnote 26 and one that explicitly foregrounds the practical import of “metaphysical reasonings,”Footnote 27 this article suggests that the foundations of early-modern liberalism were less grand but more defensible than Nelson suggests. On the one hand, the narrative of the Autobiography does constitute a self-conscious critique of the Augustinian piety characteristic of Franklin’s Calvinist forebears.Footnote 28 While expressing his approval of religion as such, Franklin repeatedly distances himself from the Augustinian orthodoxy in both its Protestant and its Catholic forms.Footnote 29 More than this, he suggests that the orthodoxy tends toward a kind of metaphysical fatalism, and he presents his own perspective as the great alternative. In the words of Steven Smith, the Autobiography is “a very modern story of self-making and self-becoming.”Footnote 30 As Mitchell Breitwieser says, “Franklin … presents himself as the author of his life while it was being lived as well as the author of the life in recollection.”Footnote 31 Indeed, according to Frank Kelleter, Franklin’s emphasis on individual self-making has a very harsh corollary: “As an autonomous being, Franklin implies, you can be happy—in fact, you have to be happy, because if you’re not, you’re a self-produced failure.”Footnote 32 The Autobiography therefore offers the most eligible case imaginable for the equating of early-modern liberalism with Pelagianism—and in fact the book offers a theological creed that might seem to be a paradigmatic example of unacknowledged Pelagianism.Footnote 33
Still, to doubt one position is not necessarily to embrace its polemical adversary, and if Franklin seeks to challenge the Augustinian worldview, he challenges also the Pelagian alternative. That he was aware of this alternative is clear: one of the central questions raised by the Autobiography is whether “moral perfection” is attainable through our own efforts.Footnote 34 And whether it is possible to “arrive at perfection in this life, as some believe,” was a question considered by Franklin’s celebrated philosophical society, the Junto.Footnote 35 But the Autobiography repeatedly stresses the limits of self-making. Owing to its emphasis on the influence of nature, early education, social conditioning, and sheer luck, Franklin’s basic metaphysical outlook is incompatible with the Pelagian view that humans are radically free agents. Never once does the book endorse or even mention the idea of an unconditioned free will, not even in the parts devoted to Franklin’s metaphysical convictions.Footnote 36 Nowhere, in fact, does Franklin present anyone committing a wrong in full knowledge of the act’s wrongfulness; the Autobiography consistently presents moral transgressions as unfortunate faults or “errata,” not willful sins.Footnote 37 Accordingly, Franklin moderates his moral indignation, without abstaining from judgments about moral excellence and its opposite, and without ceasing to insist upon the possibility of individual and social improvements.
This article makes three basic points. First, Nelson is right to stress the anti-Augustinian undercurrent running through much of early-modern liberalism, and this is an important corrective to the increasingly widespread view that modern liberalism is essentially a kind of residual Christianity. Second, however, Nelson’s historical claim about the Pelagian character of early-modern liberalism is overstated, since it fails to do justice even to the text that seems tailor-made to confirm it. Third, Nelson’s conceptual claim about libertarian free will as a necessary foundation for dignitarian liberalism is mistaken, and actually risks undermining liberalism’s credibility and humanity. Franklin’s liberal politics rest not on any assumption of pure metaphysical freedom but on a claim about the possibilities for individual improvement (emphatically including moral and intellectual improvement) in a relatively free society.
Below, I first take up the Autobiography’s critique of Augustinianism, which constitutes a red thread running through Franklin’s “rhetorical masterpiece,”Footnote 38 a thread that makes sense of many of its most puzzling passages, especially in the often-neglected and seemingly artless Part III. I then turn to the Autobiography’s implicit rejection of Pelagianism, which underlies both Franklin’s lack of moral indignation and his stress upon the importance of collective and political (not merely private and individual) improvements.Footnote 39 I conclude by evaluating the ambivalence of the liberal view of human freedom, an ambivalence that makes liberalism permanently susceptible to conflicting excesses, and hence conflicting lines of attack. I also offer some critical reflections on the theological turn in the historiography of liberalism.
Franklin’s “great and extensive project”
Having given an artful account of his early life and moral reform in Parts I and II of the Autobiography, Franklin seems to lose focus in Part III (the longest part of the book), wandering haphazardly from one anecdote to the next. Mitchell Breitwieser has lamented that this part is “more a list than a narrative,” a list devoted to “registering numbers of successes and amounts of acclaim” and thereby enhancing Franklin’s reputation; it becomes “monotonous.”Footnote 40 With a similar sense of irritation or disappointment, Ormond Seavey has concluded that “no principle of exclusion permitted him to abridge” Part III.Footnote 41 “The imperfect command of dates and details that this portion of his story displays is almost certainly a result of age and poor health, as well as a byproduct of the extraordinary experiences that had filled the intervening decades,” Douglas Anderson has suggested.Footnote 42 According to Bruce Granger, “Franklin succeeds in structuring only the first part of the Autobiography at all tightly.”Footnote 43 Not surprisingly, then, scholars have paid relatively little attention to Part III.Footnote 44
But the guiding theme of the book’s longest part is announced at the very beginning. There, returning to a subject he had mentioned toward the end of Part II,Footnote 45 Franklin recalls “a great and extensive project” that he had conceived more than fifty years earlier but apparently abandoned.Footnote 46 The project was nothing less than the establishment of a new “sect” devoted to “the good of mankind,” complete with its own creed:
That there is one God who made all things.
That he governs the world by his providence.
That he ought to be worshipped by adoration, prayer, and thanksgiving.
But that the most acceptable service of God is doing good to man.
That the soul is immortal.
And that God will certainly reward virtue and punish vice either here or hereafter.Footnote 47
This was an audaciously heterodox, un-Augustinian creed in its emphasis on “doing good to man” (over any principle of faith or belief), together with its confident affirmation of divine rewards for virtue, to say nothing of the absence of any reference to Christ, the need for divine grace, or the possibility of eternal damnation. And though he never managed to execute the project, Franklin writes, “I am still of the opinion that it was a practicable scheme, and might have been very useful, by forming a great number of good citizens.” He insists, moreover, that its success would be a feasible task for “one man of tolerable abilities,” provided he made it his “sole study and business.”Footnote 48
Of course, Franklin seems never to have made any one project his “sole study and business.” Part III of the Autobiography, which covers just the period of his life between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-one, discusses (among other things) his publishing of Poor Richard’s Almanack and the Pennsylvania Gazette; his work as a clerk, postmaster, city councilman, alderman, burgess, and Justice of the Peace; his overhaul of the Philadelphia city watch; his establishment of a fire brigade; his successful advocacy for a defensive militia; his service in that militia; his invention of a new fireplace; his launching of a college; his study of electricity; his lobbying for a new hospital; his efforts to improve the cleanliness and lighting of city streets; his Albany Plan of Union; his quarrels with Pennsylvania’s hereditary proprietors; and his participation in the French and Indian War. So while he “recommends concentration,” Seavey has remarked, Franklin seems to have “dispersed his own energies widely.”Footnote 49 And yet his “great and extensive project” of moral–theological reform was never quite forgotten, and indeed constitutes a red thread running through Part III, or so I will try to show.
“About the year 1734,” Franklin writes shortly after discussing his apparently neglected project, “there arrived among us from Ireland a young Presbyterian preacher named Hemphill, who delivered with a good voice, and apparently extempore, most excellent discourses, which drew together considerable numbers of different persuasions.” As Franklin recalls, he himself became one of the new preacher’s “constant hearers,” being delighted by the fact that his sermons “had little of the dogmatical kind but inculcated strongly the practice of virtue.” This emphasis on virtue over theological orthodoxy, however, meant that Hemphill provoked opposition among “the old clergy,” who “arraigned him of heterodoxy before the synod, in order to have him silenced.” Remarkably, the typically mild-mannered and conciliatory Franklin now declares that he became Hemphill’s “zealous partisan.” The battle was finally lost, but Franklin says that he contributed all he could “to raise a party in his favour,” adding that after Hemphill’s defeat he “quitted the congregation, never joining it after.”Footnote 50
Five years later, an even more important ecclesiastical event occurred: the arrival of George Whitefield, the staunchly orthodox Great Awakener, whose pessimistic anthropology proved very appealing to the people of Philadelphia. As Franklin writes,
The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous and it was a matter of speculation to me, who was one of the number, to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers, and how much they admired and respected him, notwithstanding his common abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally half beasts and half devils.Footnote 51
As one scholar has written, “stern dictates about human haplessness were the very marrow of Whitefield’s preaching.”Footnote 52 Apparently forgetting his zealous support for Hemphill, however, Franklin notes that he himself was “employed in printing his [Whitefield’s] sermons and journals, etc.”Footnote 53
Franklin explains his “surprising” collaboration with Whitefield in two ways.Footnote 54 First, he liked him: despite many scurrilous attacks on Whitefield’s character, Franklin says that he “never had the least suspicion of his integrity, but am to this day decidedly of opinion that he was in all his conduct a perfectly honest man.”Footnote 55 Second, though, Franklin stresses that Whitefield’s popular influence was entirely dependent on his oratory. In fact Franklin admits that he himself once succumbed to this oratory, and despite his resolutions “emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”Footnote 56 Soon after, he describes a rapt crowd stretching as far as the eye could see and listening to Whitefield in “the most exact silence.”Footnote 57 But Whitefield’s published works contributed nothing to his reputation. On the contrary, Franklin says, critics “attacked his writings violently, and with so much appearance of reason as to diminish the number of his votaries, and prevent their increase.” Indeed, “if he had never written anything, he would have left behind him a much more numerous and important sect.”Footnote 58 Thus Franklin indicates that his publishing of Whitefield was a double-edged sword. If it spread Whitefield’s message in the short run, it limited and even diminished its influence in the long run.Footnote 59
Nor was this Franklin’s only line of counterattack. After all, his core anthropological claim in the Autobiography itself—his claim that humanity is afflicted not by innate sinfulness but by a combination of mistaken ideas and bad habits, and thus that we can advance toward “happiness” under our own steamFootnote 60—amounts to a repudiation of the central claim of Augustinian Christianity.Footnote 61 Accordingly, while Franklin stresses that he forged a friendship with Whitefield that was “sincere on both sides,” he stresses also that the friendship was merely “civil,” and that there was “no religious connection” between them.Footnote 62 In a neat summation of his distance from Christian orthodoxy, he writes: “One of our common acquaintance jocosely remarked, knowing it to be the custom of the saints, when they received any favour, to shift the burthen of the obligation from off their own shoulders, and place it in heaven, I [Franklin] had contrived to fix it on earth.”Footnote 63
Indeed, Franklin’s “great and extensive project”—his project of supplanting the Augustinian worldview promulgated by Whitefield—helps explain many of the most puzzling passages in Part III of the Autobiography. Consider, for example, the notorious story concerning Franklin’s meeting with a group of Ohio Indians at a diplomatic summit in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1753. According to Franklin, having struck a deal with Pennsylvania’s agents, the Indians excused a night of drunken violence—they “formed a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could well be imagined,” he says—by laying responsibility at the feet of a mysterious divinity. As Franklin writes, the next morning an Indian orator
acknowledged the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavoured to excuse the rum, by saying, “The great Spirit who made all things made everything for some use, and whatever use he designed anything for, that use it should always be put to. Now when he made rum, he said, Let this be for Indians to get drunk with. And it must be so.”Footnote 64
Franklin then adds, in a coda that has appalled readers over many generations,Footnote 65 “And indeed if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means.”Footnote 66
That alcohol was a serious problem among many tribes—one introduced and exploited by the British Empire—is corroborated by the Carlisle treaty itself, which was printed for public perusal by Franklin, and which includes the following grievance:
Your traders now bring scarce anything but rum and flour … The rum ruins us. We beg you would prevent its coming in such quantities by regulating the traders … We desire it may be forbidden, and none sold in the Indian country … These wicked whiskey sellers, when they have once got the Indians in liquor, make them sell their very clothes from their backs.Footnote 67
But Franklin, far from despising “savages,”Footnote 68 was famously one of the foremost American defenders of Indian society, even at the risk of his own life.Footnote 69 His personal intervention against the so-called Paxton Boys, the Pennsylvania frontiersmen who slaughtered twenty Conestoga Indians in 1763, is among the subjects mentioned in his notes for the unfinished Autobiography: he refers simply to the “Paxton Murders.”Footnote 70
Besides, by the time Franklin tells the story about the drunken Indians in the Autobiography, he has repeatedly drawn attention to the pervasive drunkenness of Europeans and Americans. On his first boat journey to Philadelphia, he says, “a drunken Dutchman, who was a passenger too, fell overboard.”Footnote 71 Later, he found that his boyhood friend John Collins “had acquired a habit of sotting with brandy.” Collins’s “dramming” soon led to a rupture in their friendship: “when a little intoxicated he was very fractious.”Footnote 72 Then, while Franklin was working in a London printing house, his coworkers turned out to be “great guzzlers of beer”: “My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work.” The costs of this “muddling liquor” soaked up his colleagues’ wages. “And thus,” Franklin writes (with a turn of phrase that anticipates the scene at Carlisle), “these poor devils keep themselves always under.”Footnote 73
Things were no better in America. Franklin’s first business partner, Hugh Meredith, “was often seen drunk in the streets, and playing at low games in alehouses, much to our discredit.”Footnote 74 Shortly after, Franklin noticed that the inefficacy of the Philadelphia city watch was due largely to the fact that the watchmen spent their nights “tippling.”Footnote 75 Then, in an effort to secure cannons for the defense of Pennsylvania, Franklin was able to use drink to mollify George Clinton, the governor of New York: “He at first refused us peremptorily, but at a dinner with his council where there was great drinking of Madeira wine, as the custom at that place then was, he softened by degrees, and said he would lend us six. After a few more bumpers he advanced to ten. And at length he very good-naturedly conceded eighteen.”Footnote 76 Among the supplies procured for the feckless British officers in the French and Indian War, Franklin makes clear, were large quantities of wine and “Jamaica spirits.”Footnote 77 And when Captain Denny became governor of Pennsylvania, wine played a crucial part in his clumsy attempts to try to bribe Franklin at a dinner party: “The drinkers, finding we did not return immediately to the table, sent us a decanter of Madeira, which the governor made liberal use of, and in proportion became more profuse of his solicitations and promises.”Footnote 78 As Douglas Anderson writes, “Temperance heads Franklin’s list of virtues, in part, because alcohol pervades his world.”Footnote 79
Failure to consider the Carlisle story in its literary context—as part of the unfolding of Franklin’s “great and extensive project,” and as just one in a long chain of stories centering on the problem of drunkenness in eighteenth-century England and America—has led many readers to chastise Franklin for unthinkingly “othering” the Indians. D. H. Lawrence, for example, whom Mitchell Breitwieser calls “the best reader of the Autobiography,”Footnote 80 denounced Franklin’s “specious little equation in providential mathematics: Rum + Savage = 0.”Footnote 81 It seems more plausible to conclude that the “savages” of Carlisle function as rhetorically safe stand-ins for a theological target that was precisely not the Other. (In fact the drunken Dutchman who fell overboard during Franklin’s first voyage to Philadelphia is said to have been carrying a prized copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress.)Footnote 82 Rather than raising a serious question about whether “the design of Providence” is “to extirpate these savages,” the Carlisle story makes a larger point about the attitude of fatalistic acquiescence to the will of a “great Spirit who made all things.”Footnote 83
The politics of improvement
The next story in Part III illustrates the liberal alternative. “In 1751,” Franklin writes in an apparently abrupt shift of topics that scrambles the chronology by leaping back two years, “Dr. Thomas Bond, a particular friend of mine, conceived the idea of establishing a hospital in Philadelphia for the reception and cure of poor sick persons.” Instead of resigning himself to the inevitability of mundane ills such as poverty and sickness, Bond was “zealous and active” in working to establish the hospital—a “very beneficent design.”Footnote 84 By the same token, whereas the Carlisle orator had attempted “to excuse the rum” by appealing to the providential order, Franklin now says that he “excused” himself only insofar as he “made some use of cunning” in helping to raise funds for the hospital.Footnote 85 And he now declares, “I do not remember any of my political maneuvers the success of which gave me at the time more pleasure,”Footnote 86 a remarkable statement for someone whose political maneuvers in France had been crucial to America’s victory in the War of Independence.Footnote 87
“It was about this time,” Franklin continues, “that another projector, the Reverend Gilbert Tennent, came to me with a request that I would assist him in procuring a subscription for a new meeting-house. It was to be for the use of a congregation he had gathered among the Presbyterians.”Footnote 88 Earlier, Franklin had claimed that when “new places of worship were continually wanted, and generally erected by voluntary contribution, my mite for such purpose, whatever might be the sect, was never refused.”Footnote 89 Now, however, Franklin says that when he was approached by Tennent, he “absolutely refused.” Moreover, when Tennent “then desired I would furnish him with a list of the names of persons I knew by experience to be generous and public-spirited,” Franklin “refused also to give such a list.”Footnote 90 Of course, when Tennent asked for a few words of fundraising advice, Franklin obliged; but this is the only occasion in the Autobiography where he shows himself declining—in fact declining twice—to contribute personally to a project in Philadelphia.
Now Franklin’s explanation for his uncharacteristic double refusal is perfectly innocuous: he was simply unwilling to make himself “disagreeable” to his fellow citizens “by too frequently soliciting their contributions” and harassing them with requests from too many “other beggars.”Footnote 91 But Franklin has just made clear that when Thomas Bond had commented on his amazing ubiquity in public-spirited projects, he had taken it as a compliment; and so he had eagerly and tirelessly advanced the hospital project. Indeed, it seems doubtful that Bond’s request actually predated Tennent’s: Franklin’s “Appeal for the Hospital” was published in August 1751, and he explicitly dates Bond’s request to that year, but construction of Tennent’s church apparently began much earlier, in May 1750.Footnote 92 Even stipulating that the church request did come after the hospital request, though, the question remains: why did Franklin draw the line there, having unhesitatingly supported so many other public-spirited projects (a library, a reformed city watch, a fire brigade, a militia, an academy, a philosophical society, a hospital)?Footnote 93
Tennent’s congregation, Franklin notes, had been “disciples of Mr. Whitefield.”Footnote 94 Indeed, Whitefield himself labeled Tennent “a Son of Thunder.”Footnote 95 “Hellfire Tennent,” as he was known,Footnote 96 fiercely opposed unorthodox ministers such as Franklin’s beau idéal of a preacher, Hemphill.Footnote 97 He taught that sinners are justified by faith alone, faith infused by the mysterious grace of God “without any mixture of our obedience to the moral law joined with it.”Footnote 98 He “preached ‘like a boatswain of a ship, calling the sailors to come to prayer and be damned,’ said one witness.”Footnote 99 In short, he was a purveyor of the most fatalistic variety of Augustinianism. After being struck by lightning, he “attributed the strike to God’s sovereign rule over his life.”Footnote 100
Franklin’s disgust with this theology, not a sudden onset of uneasiness about imposing too much on his fellow citizens, presumably explains why he refused to be enlisted in this particular project. And “disgust” is not too strong a word: in Part II, Franklin had criticized an unnamed preacher whose “discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments, or explications of the peculiar doctrines of our sect, and were all to me very dry, uninteresting, and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced, their aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good citizens … [I] was disgusted, and attended his preaching no more.”Footnote 101
Thus, having mentioned his snubbing of Tennent, Franklin discusses several of his own mundane projects, undertaken without any apparent qualms about making himself “disagreeable” to his neighbors. Indeed, in the paragraph directly following his refusal of Tennent, Franklin details the proposals he made for improving the cleanliness of city streets through a system of sweeping, raking, and clearance, since in London he had “observed that the streets when dry were never swept and the light dust carried away, but it was suffered to accumulate till wet weather reduced it to mud.”Footnote 102 He records these proposals at length, defends their practicability, and insists on the “weight and consequence” of such things, against those who “think these trifling matters not worth minding.”Footnote 103
According to a letter (from his friend Benjamin Vaughan) inserted by Franklin at the beginning of Part II, Franklin’s life story—with its many apparently scattered, small-scale reform projects—will help prove “that man is not even at present a vicious and detestable animal,” and “that good management may greatly amend him.”Footnote 104 In other words, Franklin’s life as he presents it in the Autobiography is a gentle challenge to the Augustinian doctrine of original sin (or the idea that we are “naturally half beasts and half devils”). And so, in a sense, Franklin really did make the promulgation of his heterodox sect—the “great and extensive project”—his “sole study and business,” notwithstanding his apparently scattershot mode of activity.Footnote 105
To be sure, Franklin’s emphasis on his friendship with Whitefield (together with the affectionate treatment of his Puritan forebears early in the Autobiography, and the fact that he did after all offer Tennent some friendly advice) indicates the modest, unhysterical character of his theological critique. Indicative of his larger cultural project, however, is his reflection at the very end of Part III concerning his boat’s narrow escape from shipwreck on a voyage to England in 1757. This “deliverance” (as he calls it) impressed him strongly “with the utility of lighthouses,” and made him “resolve to encourage the building more of them in America.”Footnote 106 The opposite attitude is represented by a “maiden lady” in London who does nothing but sit in her garret room, repenting her “vain thoughts” in prayerful contemplation.Footnote 107
The Augustinian alternative was especially consequential in colonial America when towns were rife with infectious diseases, including the smallpox that killed Franklin’s only legitimate son, Francis Folger Franklin. Early on in Part III, Franklin writes, “In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation.”Footnote 108 As Peter Thuesen notes, many of Franklin’s contemporaries rejected inoculation on theological grounds, holding “that persons should not seek to prolong the divinely predetermined lengths of their lives.” If some tried to reconcile pious submission to the will of God with support for medical intervention, this was in large part due to what Thuesen describes as the “emerging Enlightenment mind‐set”; they were “unwittingly abetting a cultural transformation.”Footnote 109 Franklin, I think, intended his Autobiography to accelerate that process.Footnote 110
The limits of self-making
Of course, the theological credo endorsed by Franklin as the core of his “great and extensive project,” with its confident affirmation that “God will certainly reward virtue and punish vice,”Footnote 111 might seem to be a perfect example of unacknowledged Pelagianism, and thus to confirm Nelson’s historical claim about the theological foundations of early-modern liberalism. Indeed Franklin, whose politics were more unambiguously liberal than any of Nelson’s exemplary early-modern liberals (Milton, Locke, Leibniz, Rousseau, and Kant), and whose Autobiography puts so much stress on the possibility of self-making, would seem to be the ideal candidate for corroborating the Pelagian hypothesis. After all, the most famous part of the Autobiography is Franklin’s discussion of his “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection,”Footnote 112 a project redolent of Pelagian optimism if ever there was one.
Yet if the Autobiography acknowledges the possibility of self-making, it also acknowledges the obdurate limits of that possibility. At the beginning of Part I, for example, Franklin stresses how much of his character he received as an unmerited gift. He begins by underlining the similarity between himself and his multitalented English uncle Thomas, who died four years to the day before Franklin was born: “The account we received of his life and character from some old people at Ecton I remember struck you [BF’s son William] as something extraordinary from its similarity to what you know of mine. Had he died on the same day, you said one might have supposed a transmigration.”Footnote 113 Men on both sides of his family, he points out, had literary and political inclinations that closely prefigured his own.Footnote 114 Shortly after, he indicates that he owed his remarkable vigor at least partly to his parents, Josiah and Abiah Franklin, each of whom had “an excellent constitution.”Footnote 115 This apparent advantage was evident at a very early age, when—in an instance that “shows an early projecting public spirit, though not then justly conducted”—he led a group of local boys in the construction of a fishing wharf, using pilfered stones.Footnote 116 And Franklin’s native intelligence was also obvious at the outset. Unlike his elder brothers, Franklin “was put to the grammar school [i.e., a school at which Latin was taught] at eight years of age.” Given his “early readiness in learning to read”—“I do not remember when I could not read,” he says—his father’s friends were all of the opinion “that I should certainly make a good scholar”; indeed he rapidly ascended to the top of the class.Footnote 117
By the same token, Franklin highlights the formative influence of his earliest upbringing. The fact that his father paid so little attention to culinary matters, to take a small but revealing example, meant that the young Franklin “was brought up in such a perfect inattention to those matters as to be quite indifferent what kind of food was set before me.” This was, he says, a great “convenience to me in travelling, where my companions have been sometimes very unhappy for want of a suitable gratification of their more delicate, because better instructed, tastes.”Footnote 118 His father also encouraged him to appreciate the virtue of industry, taking him to watch “joiners, bricklayers, turners, braziers, etc., at their work.”Footnote 119 Most importantly, though, he taught him the crucial lesson—in the wake of the stone-pilfering incident—that “nothing was useful which was not honest.”Footnote 120 Indeed, according to Franklin, his father gave him a steady supply of ethical instruction:
At his table he liked to have, as often as he could, some sensible friend or neighbour to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse, which might tend to improve the minds of his children. By this means he turned our attention to what was good, just, and prudent in the conduct of life.Footnote 121
According to Franklin, moreover, it was his domineering brother James who unwittingly inculcated in him “that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life.”Footnote 122 So the seeds of the core moral virtues were planted at a very early age.Footnote 123
At the same time, Franklin draws attention to the powerful influence of the broader society on his particular cast of mind. It was in order to secure his credit in Quaker-dominated Philadelphia, he stresses, that he “took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary.”Footnote 124 In England, where the tone was set by a leisured aristocracy, such habits would have been obstacles to social esteem; had Franklin’s character been formed there, he might well have had more in common with the “poor devils” he met in London as a young man.Footnote 125 Of course, in some sense Franklin was free to offend the Quaker order, just as he had offended the Puritan order in Boston with his “indiscreet disputations about religion.”Footnote 126 Many others adopted different habits in Philadelphia: the printer David Harry, for instance, was “very proud, dressed like a gentleman, lived expensively, took much diversion and pleasure abroad, ran in debt, and neglected his business, upon which all business left him.”Footnote 127 But given Franklin’s native intelligence, and his urgent need for credit, he was not simply free to follow in Harry’s stumbling footsteps.
Nor, finally, does Franklin ignore the role of chance in his moral formation. After all, if it is true that “procuring wealth” is the crucial means of “securing virtue,”Footnote 128 then Franklin’s finding himself in a city that had only two printers, both “poorly qualified for their business,”Footnote 129 was a stroke of tremendous moral luck. Had he been brought up to a different trade,Footnote 130 or had he decided to become a poet,Footnote 131 or had he been arrested as a runaway servant before making it to Philadelphia,Footnote 132 he might well have ended up with a less edifying character. Nor was his success in Philadelphia simply his own doing: he owed a great deal, he makes clear, to the encouragement, advice, and material assistance of others,Footnote 133 to say nothing of his happening to live in an opportunely “rising country.”Footnote 134
To be sure, Franklin suggests that the most important education he received was the one he formulated for himself, when he undertook his great project of self-reformation. As he writes, when he first “conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection,” he “wished to live without committing any fault at any time.”Footnote 135 But he “never arrived” at that goal, he goes on to say, and indeed “fell far short of it.”Footnote 136
Nor does he give any indication that he might have attained moral perfection, had he managed his life differently. He stresses, for instance, that he found himself absolutely “incorrigible” with respect to the virtue of order, in large part because he “had not been early accustomed to it.”Footnote 137 Nor could he make much progress in attaining humility; even the polite feigning of humility, he says, required “some violence” to his “natural inclination.”Footnote 138, Footnote 139 And he points to a still more fundamental difficulty when he says that, in launching his program of moral self-reformation, “I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong.”Footnote 140 The possibility of moral perfection presupposes the (humanly unavailable) existence of perfect moral knowledge, not just in the abstract but in every particular case.
Apparently because he assumes that a wise and beneficent God would have to be bound by considerations of elementary reasonableness and fair play, then, Franklin evinces no anxiety that his many wrongs (whether born of general delusions or of particular mistakes) might bring forth everlasting hellfire. On the contrary, his attitude toward his own moral failings is one of calm resignation:
though I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was by the endeavour made a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been, if I had not attempted it; as those who aim at perfect writing by imitating the engraved copies, though they never reach the wished-for excellence of those copies, their hand is mended by the endeavour, and is tolerable while it continues fair and legible.Footnote 141
The torments of hell, presumably, are reserved for a tiny handful of exceptionally malicious cases, those who do evil in full knowledge of its evil.
Or would Franklin grant even that possibility? As many commentators have noted, in the Autobiography he depicts himself as being free from ongoing moral indignation.Footnote 142 And this easygoing attitude makes sense, given the basic premises of Franklin’s moral teaching: if vice is a recipe for unhappiness,Footnote 143 “the nature of man alone considered,”Footnote 144 so that “a vicious man could not properly be called a man of sense,”Footnote 145 then no one freely chooses to do evil in full view of what they are choosing. Understood this way, vice cannot reasonably be the object of guilt-ridden remorse, on the one hand, or of retributive punishment, on the other. Thus in glossing the virtue of “moderation,” Franklin writes: “Avoid extremes. Forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.”Footnote 146 To be afflicted with “want of sense” is, after all, to be “unfortunate.”Footnote 147
Far as Franklin was from Christian orthodoxy, then, he remained almost as far from Pelagianism: the prototypical self-made man refused to present himself or anyone else as genuinely self-made. Indeed, this is one reason why the Autobiography emphasizes not simply the possibility of individual self-improvement but also the importance of broader social and political improvements. And so, I would submit, it is not the case that “all of the early-modern theorists who laid the philosophical foundations for what we have come to call ‘liberalism’ … were committed Pelagians,” united by a “shared conviction that human beings are radically free and responsible for their choices before God and man.”Footnote 148
Conclusion
Franklin claims that he became “a better and a happier man”Footnote 149 because he was free to experiment with his own life. He thus shows one way to make sense of the dignitarian liberal commitment to individual liberty without presuming metaphysical freedom in any strong sense. His suggestion is that a wide sphere of free action and inquiry makes room for immense improvements, emphatically including moral and intellectual improvements (not merely economistic utility maximization).Footnote 150 By contrast, if freedom were understood as a transcendent metaphysical property, as Nelson suggests it should be,Footnote 151 it is hard to see how it could be threatened by even the most illiberal government: on the Pelagian view, after all, one always has it within one’s power to choose between good and evil. And indeed if humans are metaphysically free to choose evil as evil, as Pelagianism holds, then the characteristically liberal uneasiness with retributive punishment would seem to be mere softness.Footnote 152
But does liberalism in some sense need free will? Franklin’s Autobiography suggests that the answer is both yes and no. On the one hand, Franklin insists that just as citizens can improve their own communities, so private individuals can improve their own circumstances and even their own minds and characters over the long run. To this extent, Franklin affirms something that might reasonably be called free will.Footnote 153 On the other hand, Franklin forthrightly acknowledges the limits of individual freedom and hence individual responsibility; no one is simply self-made or self-making. To this extent, he implicitly rejects free will.
Now it seems to me that Franklin’s ambivalence on this question reflects a broader ambivalence in liberal thought between the drive to transform humanity and a perhaps equally ambitious aspiration to affirm humanity as it is. The first tendency goes together with an insistence upon the legitimacy of universal standards, standards that all (or almost all) mature humans—precisely as free and responsible beings—can be expected to meet, irrespective of their given characteristics or histories. Illustrative of this tendency is the Autobiography’s famous catalogue of thirteen virtues, which Franklin lays out like a new table of commandments:
1. Temperance
Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence
Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order
Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution
Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality
Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself (i.e., waste nothing).
6. Industry
Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity
Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice
Wrong none, by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation
Avoid extremes. Forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness
Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes, or habitation.
11. Tranquility
Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. Chastity
Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. Humility
Imitate Jesus and Socrates.Footnote 154
The second tendency, by contrast, goes together with an insistence on the legitimacy of difference in the face of demands for conformity. Here again the Autobiography provides a vivid illustration, this time in Franklin’s discussion of his failure to achieve moral perfection. The effort to attain the virtue of order in particular, he explains,
cost me so much painful attention and my faults in it vexed me so much, and I made so little progress in amendment, and had such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the attempt, and content myself with a faulty character in that respect. Like the man who, in buying an axe of a smith my neighbour, desired to have the whole of its surface as bright as the edge; the smith consented to grind it bright for him if he would turn the wheel. He turned while the smith pressed the broad face of the axe hard and heavily on the stone, which made the turning of it very fatiguing. The man came every now and then from the wheel to see how the work went on; and at length would take his axe as it was without farther grinding. “No,” says the smith, “turn on, turn on; we shall have it bright by and by; as yet ’tis only speckled.” “Yes,” says the man, “but—I think I like a speckled axe best.”Footnote 155
From this point of view, individual liberty might be prized less as a means to improvement than as a shelter from the demand for improvement, or what passes for it.
Evidently this sort of ambivalence makes liberalism susceptible to conflicting excesses, and hence conflicting lines of attack. Liberalism can be accused of demanding too much—forcing unalike characters through the same mold; making benighted souls responsible for all of their own problems; forever expecting self-help and self-optimization in the pursuit of an always-receding happiness. All this provides fodder for a certain critique of liberalism, or else for a more “Augustinian” version of it (of the kind that Rawls offers, for example). But it can also be accused of demanding too little—asking nothing more of us than that we “be ourselves”; furnishing compassionate excuses for every vice; encouraging self-satisfied mediocrity. And this provides fodder for a very different critique, or else for a more “Pelagian” version of liberalism (of the kind offered by Nelson, for example).
Yet rather than being imperiled by this ambivalence, I would suggest, the health of liberalism depends on it. The light in which we see ourselves as private individuals can hardly be cordoned off from the light in which we see ourselves as political actors; so without regarding ourselves as responsible agents in our own lives, it is hard to see how we could regard ourselves as free and equal citizens, substantially responsible for the well-being of our political communities, and capable of effecting civic improvements. “A culture less intent on the individual’s responsibility to master destiny,” one prominent critic of the meritocratic ideal has written, “might be more capacious, more generous, more gracious.”Footnote 156 Franklin’s analysis suggests that such a culture would also be more passive, more superstitious, more despairing. It is not by accident that Franklin advocates both a politics of improvement and an ethics of self-improvement.Footnote 157 And yet without recognizing the limits of moral responsibility, it is hard to see how we could regard ourselves and our fellow citizens as genuine individuals—with fixed dispositions, capacities, and histories—for whom reasonable allowances might be made. To adopt the Pelagian spirit wholeheartedly would therefore be to risk fostering an obscurantist moralism, along with an exhausting, homogenizing focus on improvement.
Of the two dangers, however, the greater one at present is probably not an excess of the Pelagian spirit. On the contrary, it seems that young people increasingly believe that their lives are determined by forces entirely beyond their control.Footnote 158 This looks very much like a recipe not only for a fatalistic kind of gloom but also for political passivity and conspiratorialism. So today, it seems to me, liberalism really does need free will.
Another implication of this study, however, is more theoretical: notwithstanding the new insights yielded by the theological turn in recent historiography, early-modern liberalism should probably be understood neither as decayed Christian orthodoxy nor as Pelagianism, but as an independent project. And whatever the innermost religious convictions of liberals such as Franklin might have been, the goal of that project seems to have been less salvation in the next world than the diffusion of happiness in this one.Footnote 159 If liberalism is in crisis today, its retrospective identification with theology may itself be a symptom of that crisis, or the loss of confidence in its rational defensibility.
Acknowledgments
A previous version of this paper was presented at the Annual Midwest Political Science Association Conference in Chicago, on 8 April 2022; I would like to thank the discussant, Dana Stauffer, for her comments. Another version was presented at the University of Texas at Austin on 5 December 2024; I would like to thank Erik Dempsey, Lorraine Pangle, and the students for their questions. Thanks also to Modern Intellectual History’s editors and anonymous reviewers for their advice.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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