George Thomas has written a fine book about an idea that never came to be—the proposal for a national university—but one that is important because it indicates, by his telling, the Framers’ capacious understanding of what it takes to build and sustain a vibrant liberal constitutional order beyond the mere laying down of constitutional text. Central to his argument is a bold, negative thesis, that “the Constitution, set in motion centuries ago, does not simply run itself” (p. 233). “Constitutional principles,” he argues, “may become articles of faith to unite (and truly create) the polity” (p. 154). The words in parentheses are instructive because they indicate Thomas’s view that words, contrary to Hannah Arendt, in and by themselves do not have performative power. Rather, they only kick-start an ongoing consolidation of a polity’s identity that cannot occur without civic education and cultivation.

The intellectual and practical puzzle for Thomas is this (p. 228): “[H]ow do we shape (and enlighten) the public mind in a manner that sustains the political order?” Following Jan-Werner Müller, Thomas proposes the cultivation of “constitutional patriotism” (pp. 195, 210) by way of political education, operationalized as mandatory courses in universities and colleges on the essential principles and institutions of the American constitutional order (pp. 230–32). And so this is also a book about the necessity of nurturing the “foundational” (p. 151) principles that sustain any constitutional order, and in particular, in the case of the U.S. Constitution, that of religious liberty, a principle Thomas posits as a possible “first freedom” (p. 149). Since he advocates constitutional partisanship, or a bias in favor of the Constitution, he also takes on, as a foil, liberal defenses of “neutrality” (pp. 194, 221), and laments of the curricula of the top 10 universities and liberal arts colleges that “there is little sense at these institutions that cultivating certain ideas and habits is central to sustaining the American constitutional order” (p. 220). He worries that “[a]lthough many of these institutions may be committed to democracy, to civic engagement of some sort, or to global citizenship and justice, their curricula are not aimed at constituting the mind and political culture in a manner that will help carry forward the American experiment (p. 221). He rejects neutrality in favor of an “assimilationist” constitutionalism, which positions American political principles lexically prior to, but not to the exclusion of, “other forms of thinking (including religious beliefs)” (p. 149).

While Thomas is unapologetic that to tend to the Constitution is to be an advocate of its ideas, he recognizes the potential tension between liberal education and civic education, or at least civic education with a bias in favor of the American constitutional order. To this objection he offers “a more capacious understanding of liberalism” turning on “a powerful difference between compulsion and cultivation” (p. 197). While the state should never compel citizens to accept any particular conception of the good, he envisions the state educating citizens on “a bundle of liberal principles on which the vitality of liberal politics depends” (p. 198). Thomas acknowledges that all civil religions are vulnerable to sectarian capture, which is why, he argues, taking the lead from James Wilson, that the curriculum of a national university “should also include material than is critical of” the American constitutional order (p. 157). He advocates “political education of a rational Enlightenment variety” (p. 233).

The Founders and the Idea of a National University will contribute richly to debates on constitutional studies because it adopts a clear stand on the importance of ideas above and beyond institutions and the need to attend to them. Most of us can agree to Thomas’s call to cultivate a people’s commitment to a core set of principles critical for a constitution’s survival and maintenance; but the devil could appear in the details. He calls the principles that need to be taught and cultivated “‘first order’ political principles; civic dispositions and traits of character” (p. 50), though he might underestimate how even “first order” principles, or “liberal virtues” (p. 203), may be essentially contested. To some, the Founders’ idea of a national university may well be partisan in the conventional sense, over and above the “patriotic” sense that Thomas conceives it. To believe in national education is to deny the intrinsic, self-generated virtues of a people living together in civic harmony in their existing communities. And the idea that the political elite would have to be trained to share a set of principles they could then disseminate to those below them (pp. 140, 156) would of course chafe against some Anti-Federalist, and later, Jeffersonian-Republican, and nineteenth-century Democratic ears.

Key to Thomas’s argument on the importance of nurturing foundational values is consensus on these foundations: that “critics of the national university . . . were not necessarily at odds with the political creed” and/or political end of “national unity” or the “public good” (pp. 61, 70). But words like “unity” and “good” tend to have contested meanings in a nation committed to E Pluribus Unum. In at least one major strand of American political thought evident during the ratification debates, the civic is not the national, and the two are polar opposites of each other. Those who objected to the national university, as Thomas notes, quoting Congressman John Nicholas, espoused the Anti-Federalist belief that “the further children are from home . . . the more their morals would be injured” (p. 67). As he further notes, the establishment of a national university would have been considered an “internal improvement,” which is why in proposing the national university in his 1806 annual message to Congress, Jefferson also proposed a constitutional amendment to that would “clearly give Congress the power to establish such an institution” (p. 44). The University of Virginia accomplished “in a single state much of what the national university was supposed to do for the nation” (p. 123) because this comported with the Anti-Federalist conviction that education was a matter best left to the states. There may well not have been a “shared constitutional mind-set” (p. 79) until the Civil War, and maybe even after.

Even today, there remains, arguably, a recognizable strand of Anti-Federalism among those who support home schooling as the best means of imparting moral and religious instruction to children, and in the opposition to Common Core and No Child Left Behind. Indeed, a sizable portion of the nation, operating under the banner of the Democratic Party in the long nineteenth century, deliberately adopted a procedural understanding of the constitutional order and quashed any attempts to invoke matters of principle to preserve intraparty unity (Douglas W. Jaenicke, “The Jacksonian Integration of Parties into the Constitutional System,” Political Science Quarterly, 1986). Nineteenth-century Democrats resisted the idea that the Constitution created a single substantive core of creedal commitments. If there is no foundational core, then there is nothing to cultivate (except, perhaps, patriotism simpliciter).

This seemingly nihilistic outcome may not, however, be all bad; for there are dramatic implications to Thomas’s story linking constitutional design and predicating it on a properly cultivated constitutional mind: At the crudest level, it is that the text of, and the institutions created in, the Constitution in and by themselves are not enough. “Madison,” he says, “viewed the constitution as an imperfect document in much need of support” (p. 154). Thomas argues that “[t]he national university was offered as a supplement to the institutional design of the Constitution. . . . [It] was meant to address problems that were not only exacerbated by constitutional design but may represent a partial failure of that design” (p. 191). In doing so, Thomas takes the side of ideas first, then institutions, in the perennial chicken-and-egg debate between the two (p. 226). He conceives of “the American constitutional order as broader than the text of the Constitution” (p. 224), and he is probably right that “[t]he project of maintaining civic life is ongoing” (p. 209).

This is a bold stand, and certainly a plausible one. Yet it is worth noting that the Constitution has survived and thrived in spite of the failure to establish a national university. And so, perhaps its scaffolding was all that was required, and this may be something we ought to celebrate. Bruce Ackerman (We the People: Foundations, 1991) reminds us of the potential cost of (rights) foundationalism, such as is exemplified by the German Basic Law: To affirm and entrench foundations, even creedal commitments, is to hold back and put limits on what is democratically possible. The more we tend to a set of foundational principles, the less, arguably, can a living generation amend a constitution.

Whichever direction we highlight, this book will encourage scholars to rethink the dynamic relationship between foundationalism and development, which is an important accomplishment. Thomas’s argument will have implications beyond the academy as well. If it is true that every constitution comes attached with its own specific “‘worldview’ with its own set of principles and values” (p. 154), then exporting constitutionalism and, in particular, American constitutionalism to the rest of the world becomes a doubly challenging enterprise. If a text and a set of institutions are not in and by themselves enough, then constitutional engineers will do well to create institutions that will complement existing cultural norms and traditional principles, because the success and longevity of any constitution will, according to Thomas, turn on the nurturance of its soul.