Topics Philosophers

Question Why aren’t the Founding Fathers of the U.S. Constitution - James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Alexander Hamilton, etc., people who wrote the Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, The Anti-Federalist Papers, and a lot more - considered great Philosophers up there with Locke and Rousseau? The Federalist Papers were used to justify the constitution, and the anti-federalists papers used to justify a bill of rights are great philosophical works, with more completing arguments than anything Locke tried to say (which is a whole different question, with its many flaws - and how Locke wasn’t as much an influence on the Founding Fathers as people once thought). What these people wrote has had as much influence over the world as any other "great" philosopher - but they are not taught as philosophers and are only learned about in history class. Any reason for this?

Accepted:
June 11, 2006

Comments

Not everything influential counts as philosophy, any more than it counts as science or literature.

Yes, of course, the Federalist Papers and the like have had enormous influence, but they do not contain arguments for the same kinds of positions that you find in Locke's Two Treatises on Civil Government, Rousseau's Social Contract, or Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The Federalist Papers are much more concerned with concrete political matters—questions about how government should be organized—than with abstract philosophical ones. True enough, of course, the boundary between these is vague, and it is obvious that there are profound "philosophical" differences between the authors of these documents, some of which are made explicit. But that does not make them works of philosophy. It makes them, rather, works of political theory, and so it seems appropriate that they should be studied precisely where they are extensively studied: In political science and in law.