Perhaps more than any of the American Founders, Benjamin Franklin has long endured simplistic depictions of his moral and political philosophy that range from the deifying to D. H. Lawrence’s derisive claim that the pedagogue set up “the first dummy American.” Scholarship on Franklin since the 1990s has largely retired such polarized representations; discussions among political theorists and others have increasingly offered more nuanced portrayals of a figure whose ideas and involvement in the revolutionary period were at times complex, contradictory, and contentious.
Kevin Slack joins this conversation with his new book, a comprehensive reading of Franklin’s ideas that takes as its starting point the often contradictory relationship between the thinker’s politics and his philosophy. Throughout his life, not only did Franklin occasionally do one thing while arguing another, but in early experimenting he also wrote and published on a variety of contested positions. Most notably, Franklin’s dabbling with Deism in his Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity (the printing of which he called a youthful “Erratum” in his Autobiography), as well as his widespread use of pseudonym and satire have led scholars to disagree deeply on his final beliefs. Slack’s goal is to get Franklin right with a new textual analysis linking the thinker’s earlier writings together into a coherent history of his intellectual development and political philosophy, with careful attention to his most important intellectual inheritances as a young man. He argues that “Franklin was a philosopher of natural right in the Western tradition, and he was a political theorist in the Whig natural rights tradition.” Such a focus on natural rights culminates in Franklin’s efforts “to discover man’s place in the natural order, and how this knowledge of nature could lead to the individual and collective good” (p. 5).
Benjamin Franklin, Natural Right, and the Art of Virtue is organized less as a series of claims to warrant that thesis than it is a chronological explication of the Founder’s work up to the early 1760s. Slack arranges chapters historically, weaving together the works that track Franklin’s developing political and philosophical views. With some exceptions later in the book, relatively little ground is given to his biographical or political contexts, as understood by historians or reported by the autobiographer himself. Early chapters focus on his developing moral and philosophical views as he moved from Bernard Mandeville’s private vice to the third Earl of Shaftesbury's public spirit, whereas middle and later chapters explore Franklin on self-examination, virtue, and the influence of such ideas as he confronts the impending war with Britain. By the book’s end, Slack’s Franklin is one committed to natural rights and for whom politics and philosophy demand one another.
The major strength of this work is its scope and attention to detail across a wide swath of Franklin’s canon. Slack’s explications are thorough, and early chapters on necessity and common sense draw strong connections to his intellectual contexts; he also adds several new works from Franklin for future study. Whereas recent monographs, such as Lorraine Pangle’s The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin (2007) or Alan Houston’s Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (2008), begin with the assumption that he was not a systematic or consistent thinker, Slack’s book makes a valuable pitch for a coherence to Franklin’s development across his writings that does not sacrifice detail to such generalities. In contrast to recent works like Jerry Weinberger’s Benjamin Franklin Unmasked (2005) that seek to reinvent him through fairly liberal interpretations, Slack’s analyses are grounded and attuned to Franklin’s intentions and beliefs.
The result is that this book will be of greatest appeal to specialists with knowledge of ongoing debates over Franklin’s political thought and the context in which he wrote, or those interested in his lesser-studied works. General audiences, however, will learn much of Franklin’s writings but have a harder time recognizing the author’s claims and contributions to those debates, due to Slack’s tendency to prioritize explication over argument and relegate useful discussion of secondary authors to footnotes.
Whereas some chapters (such as the second on “Truth and Usefulness”) explicitly connect their contents to the book’s overall argument, others, like Chapter 4, “On the Providence of God in the Government of the World,” begin with at best a brief overview of the chapter’s claims: Though the interpretations that follow are fascinating, Slack’s voice often disappears among the details. On some occasions, his writing underplays his more insightful ideas. Though much ink has been spilled on Franklin’s “Art of Virtue,” Slack’s observation that Franklin arranged his virtues in groups of three in keeping with his definition of happiness is a fresh take (p. 130). Unfortunately, he conceals this contribution by leading the paragraph with Paul Anderson’s earlier reading in The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin (2012) and inadequately distinguishing his position from Anderson’s. Whereas these moments obscure Slack’s stake in debates over Franklin, readers will also find that no case is ever made for Franklin’s importance beyond these interpretive debates. The author need not foist Franklin into our present moment, yet his argument would benefit greatly from drawing some connection to other areas of scholarship in political theory or history. Given scholars’ considerable efforts in past decades to move beyond the normal cast of characters in American political thought, it seems all the more necessary to explain why a careful reading of Franklin is warranted in today’s scholarship, especially when Slack has given attentive readers so much to think through.
Thus, general readers may finish this book better informed but hungry for the broader implications of Slack’s study. Other scholars have studied similar contradictions between the politics and philosophy of early Americans in their complicated relationship with chattel slavery: For example, David Waldstreicher’s Runaway America (2004) offers a nuanced take on Franklin’s imperfect transition from slaveowner to abolitionist. Slack’s few mentions of race might have been expanded to consider how Franklin’s views on natural rights contributed to his evolution. Other works like Carla Mulford’s Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire (2015) cast a wider gaze across Franklin’s political ties and inspirations. Although Slack investigates Franklin’s dealings with various forms of colonial governance (again adding new works to the canon), more could be done to connect Franklin’s political philosophy to his evolving views on the British Empire and the colonies’ role therein. Again, these suggestions speak both to a thoroughness of method that could be productively applied elsewhere and to the need to clarify the claims and categories that frame Slack’s chapters. The author’s defense of his decision to stop in the 1760s to show that “neither Franklin’s philosophical nor his political thought changed significantly after that time” seems unwarranted if we consider Franklin’s developing contributions to revolutionary ideas as equally political (p. 2).
John Adams famously worried that later stories of the American Revolution would “be that Dr. Franklins electrical Rod smote the earth, and out sprung General Washington,” that “these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislation, and war” (Adams to Benjamin Rush, April 4, 1790). Although we are thankfully past the hagiography and harangues that once distorted scholarship on Franklin, Slack might nonetheless have risked Adams’s worry and gathered our eyes more firmly to what of his insightful analysis should impress us today—for there is certainly much to see.
