Two days ago, someone asked me what my favorite American historical text was. It wasn’t that weird of a question: This is the time of year where I start to plan out my next semester’s courses and figure out the themes I want to teach.

Something that has been on my mind since the Amy Comey Barrett hearings has been the position of Constitutional Originalism. Although made fun of endlessly by the left – mostly revealing the shallow nature of political conversation these days – I am much more intrigued by the nature of this position as a hermeneutic. How do you read this ancient document? Surely you can’t just read it like you are this post? Can you read it like an older book, “Oh that was a good view for back then, but now . . .” – How are you determining that it was a good view? I have so many endless questions about this hermeneutic, and I have to resist the urge to buy a bunch of books on it and just lose myself in figuring it out.

I assume it’s a hermeneutic, but it’s more likely a practice. Joseph Ellis in his recent book American Dialogue: The Founders and Us shows that there is no such thing as being able to read these ancient documents without the practice of engaging the archive and positioning one’s read among the documents that exist there. Although we can never know the minds of the founders, we have many of their expressions of belief, feeling, and attitude about things, and we can assign convincing motives to them that will then apply to other matters. His book is masterful in how to use archival documents to create contemporary arguments.

Originalism, if it makes any sense at all, would be a practice in continuous re-reading of the archive. I doubt that’s what most originalist justices do. Re-reading is a notoriously unstable and threatening practice that people whose credibility rest on them being THE interpreters of something would not be willing to accept. Credibility of the Supreme Court is based on them being the last word, not one word among many (perhaps one of the best reasons we shouldn’t have a Supreme Court under democratic governance, which, is many things but most commonly ‘some words among other words’).

One of the themes I thought about teaching my debate class under would be the Constitution. Read the Federalist Papers (not all of them), Ellis’s book, and perhaps some of the originalist stuff (conservative and progressive texts on originalism [yes, there are progressive originalists]). Traditionally I have just taught the course based on examining the Presidential Debates, Malcolm X’s debate at Oxford Union, James Baldwin’s debate with Wiliam F. Buckley, Jr. at Cambridge Union, and John Quincy Adams’s many debates in the House on the question of abolition. Could still do this course, but would cut the Presidential Debate part out I think. Maybe wishful thinking that the Commission on Presidential Debates will be irrelevant after this election.

So I have been thinking about this list, here it is in no particular order:

The Federalist Papers

Who wouldn’t love a collection of arguments aimed at the public about why the Constitution is a really good idea and not a trick to enforce tyranny and absolute rule on everyone? These were all published in New York newspapers, and well, like we see today, the Federalists had the upper hand because their opponents didn’t own as many great newspapers as the Federalists did. All of them are great, but there are a few standouts, notably 10 and 51, but I’m sure you’ll put your favorites in the comments. A great way to teach this is to have students read the Constitution without the Bill of Rights, since those were not a part of the document being debated – they came along after ratification, and mostly due to the work of James Madison.

Notes on the State of Virginia

The only reason I like this collection of really, really weird observations about Virginia is that they reveal what a messed up person Thomas Jefferson was. Imagine being smart enough to understand the deep connections to scientifically gathered data to agriculture and national/global politics, but also being able to predict the hazards and benefits of a globalized economy. Now imagine you can see all that, but you can’t accept for one second that your slaves are human beings. What a mind?

Common Sense

Thomas Paine was a madman. Not only did he write this document knowing full well that if the revolution didn’t happen or was lost he’d be executed, that wasn’t enough for him. Later on he wrote Age of Reason, an argument against Christian thought in governance while waiting to be executed for being a foreigner involved in the French Revolution. I think I’d be a bit distracted. Anyway, Common Sense is fantastic, making a direct, public argument for why the colonies have a unique duty to resist British rule as they are one of the last safeguards of the concept of liberty (not just liberty, but the concept of it, which is a pretty cool argument).

Civil Disobedience

Henry Thoreau, according to all scholars, was an edgelord, but even edgelords sometimes have a really good point. This is pretty far removed from the earlier documents (which really don’t have that clean of a temporal relationship) but probably wouldn’t exist without the historical sediment of all the rhetoric of the earlier documents. Thoreau writes masterfully here on the duty we have to not obey or follow unjust laws, and that resistance can be many things. Would be nice to assign students to re-write the argument in the contemporary context of police violence and America’s role internationally in making many people’s lives miserable so we can have cheap sneakers.

That’s the list I came up with but I am sure there are many others that I could add here if I thought more about it, but that was my initial reaction. Some other ones that really matter would be Leaves of Grass and of course Adams’s Lectures on Rhetoric which might make fragmentary appearances in any course.

I think an examination of America as a country that was founded on really intense, high-stakes debates would be a nice contrast to all the calls for civility, logic, and empathy that we are seeing from people who really should know better. People don’t have long public debates about things that they aren’t passionate about, and our feelings have just as much right to expression as the cleanest logical formulation. Argumentation and debate are human activities after all.