Constitutional-Democratic Man
The Declaration didn't invent its ideals — it crystallized centuries of medieval natural-rights theory, Christian consent doctrine, and British common law into a defining statement for a new kind of self-governing citizen.
In his Republic, Plato famously elucidates the nature of different types of polity by describing a certain type of “man” that best corresponds with that polity: Oligarchic Man, Democratic Man, etc. 1 Whether Plato only intends these “men” to be analogues for the polity, or also representative of a typical person of that polity, is open to debate. 2 I am inclined to think it is both, even if this creates some difficulties for his account. Limiting this notion to that of a typical citizen of a regime, I would like to apply this idea to that political “man” presupposed by the Declaration of Independence, with his/her ideals, hopes, customs, norms, and anthropological vision: “Constitutional-Democratic Man.” I will argue that the emergence of Constitutional-Democratic Man is the product of diverse, contingent historical factors and that this development has ultimately been a blessing to both Americans and the rest of the world, teaching the rest of the world new possibilities for man.
Constitutional-Democratic Man Is a Literate Man
One thing that stands out about the American founding generation, which makes it distinct from prior attempts at republican government, is the almost unprecedented literacy of its populace. Prior to the Reformation, the highest literacy rates in even the most advanced cultures were around 20 percent, but they were usually much lower. With the invention of the printing press and the educational reforms of Protestant reformers (teaching everyone to read the Bible), followed by the Counter-Reformation reforms of the Jesuits, the literacy rate in Western Europe rose to unprecedented levels in the 1500s. England and the American colonies were particularly affected by this trend, with literacy rates in the American colonies, in some places such as New England, perhaps the highest in the world or in all history at that point (though the Netherlands also had a very high literacy rate).
Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich emphasizes in his discussion of the “WEIRD” psychology of Westerners how literacy has changed the way our brains process information. He notes that literate people are more prone to perceive things analytically, breaking them down into smaller parts, and have better verbal memory. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan (followed by Neil Postman) saw specifically in the rise of book literacy a new kind of man, a “Literate Man.” For both McLuhan and Postman, the Literate Man was more prone to individualism, that is, to transcend his tribe and adopt a cosmopolitan vision.
Whatever one thinks about McLuhan’s other claims, there is a good deal of plausibility to this one. Reading books takes us outside our cultural context, forcing us to commune with the thoughts of those unlike us and think in more universalistic terms. It also helps us distinguish between arbitrary and reasonable conventions in our environment. This is conspicuous in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass when Douglass relates how, when he was a slave, his recognition of his slave masters as bandits, and his thirst for freedom, began with learning how to read, and how the clandestine Sunday school that he led was aimed at instilling that same thirst in his fellow slaves.
Colonial Americans were mostly literate men (and women). They were descendants of religious exiles, seventeenth-century British Whigs, and the patriots of the Glorious Revolution. They were also compelled by the contemporary controversy to think deeply about political regimes. Even today, the idea that The Federalist papers were read in pubs, by common people, impresses us. As highly literate people, along with the British and Dutch of their time, they represented a new type of citizen.
Constitutional-Democratic Man as Democratic
Another central claim of Henrich’s work on WEIRD psychology is that the Catholic Church’s efforts to prohibit cousin marriage, sometimes even between third and fourth cousins, served to break up kinship bonds and force people to go outside their own kin for a mate, with the effect of leading people to form institutions of trust between strangers. Economist Jonathan F. Schulz provides strong evidence that this contributed to the formation of more inclusive, democratic institutions, an idea with roots dating back to St. Augustine’s City of God.3 These more democratic communes contributed to the economic growth of medieval Europe.
On the side of ideas, this change in the institutional and political landscape corresponded indirectly with the development of a kind of medieval consent theory, which initially was not particularly democratic in the institutional sense, but which would, with time, contribute to an emphasis on democratic representation. In the Declaration of Independence, this is evident in the famous line, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Thomas Jefferson did not need to consult an Enlightenment philosopher for this (though he could), because these ideas were among those that he and his readers took to be self-evident, at least self-evident to the Constitutional-Democratic Man of colonial America.
This idea of legitimacy of governance based on the communal consent of the governed had a long history. Before John Locke and Algernon Sydney, one could already see this idea expressed in a 1638 sermon by Thomas Hooker, a preacher who inspired the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut: “The foundation of authority is laid firstly in the free consent of the people.” As I have noted elsewhere, he was Cambridge-trained at a time when Catholic scholastics were read by Cambridge divinity students just as much, if not more, than Protestant authors. 4 One can also see these ideas at the turn of the seventeenth century in the writings of Richard Hooker, whose works on consent and social contract were closely aligned with those of Spanish Catholic authors such as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez, as well as Robert Bellarmine. These ideas had already, in fact, been retrieved by Catholic papalists from conciliarist authors, applying them to temporal authority but not Church authority.5 Already in the 1400s, one sees the foundation of this idea expressed by Nicholas of Cusa: “For if by nature men are equally powerful and equally free, the valid and ordained power of one man equal in power with the others cannot naturally be established.”6 This strand of thought was complemented by the Calvinist social-compact theories that also developed in the 1500s.
Elsewhere, I have defended my interpretation of this, calling it mere consent theory, the idea that people with no natural authority can, in most circumstances, only receive the authority to govern a political community from the communal consent of the community itself.7 This theory, that had floated around since the Middle Ages, and had traces before that, was not about individual consent or an explanation of political obligation, but it was based on the idea that people prior to incorporation into a political community are natural equals (“all men are created equal”) and that it is usually only from delegation of authority by the community itself that one or another person has authority to rule over the others (outside parental authority). At first, this idea had little to do with democratic governance but over time, especially as it was understood by the masses following the advent of mass literacy, it would give rise to demand for democratic representation, and, later, universal suffrage.
Constitutional-Democratic Man as Constitutionalist
It might seem strange to call the man of the Declaration of Independence “Constitutional-Democratic.” After all, the emphasis in the Declaration is on representation and government by consent, and thus more obviously relates to a kind of “Democratic” man. But the Declaration also emphasizes the limits on government and the natural rights of man (“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”), and there are abundant signs that what was unique about the man of 1787 was already there in 1776. As Daniel E. Burns argues in a recent essay at Civitas Outlook, behind their specific call for revolution was already a new understanding of “constitution” unknown in prior times.8 According to this vision, the disgruntled American colonists recognized not only a need for representatives to check the executive power, as emphasized by the Whigs in the seventeenth-century English debates, but also a need for a higher written law to check the legislators. That this was so is evident from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written about a month before the Declaration, and from the new state-written constitutions that followed independence. The man of 1776 was democratic, yes, but he was a new and specific variety: he was constitutional-democratic.
There are two roots to this constitutionalist side of Constitutional-Democratic Man that I will emphasize here. One is the medieval Christian emphasis on natural rights, and the other is the emphasis in the British common-law tradition (especially in the commentarial tradition) on institutional limits on executive authority, which, as Burns points out, is then extended to concern for limits on government authority taken more broadly.
There are various popular Manichean accounts, distinguishing the natural-law emphasis of the Middle Ages from the natural-rights emphasis of modernity, from Leo Strauss to Michel Villey. It seems to me Brian Tierney has effectively refuted that claim.9 Whether traced to Hobbes or Ockham, both accounts overlook the fact that discussions of “subjective” natural rights, which we typically associate with natural rights, were present in the writings of medieval canonists and theologians prior to Ockham, including the Dominican Thomist Hervaeus Natalis.
The discussion of alienable/inalienable rights, moreover, stemmed from connecting this idea of rights, popular among the scholastics, including Thomist scholastics such as Vitoria and Suarez, with the social contract/consent theory of those same scholastics. Still, inalienable rights are implicit in the orthodox position, defended by Thomas Aquinas, that some types of acts are intrinsically wrong. Therefore, if it is wrong to kill an innocent person intentionally, an innocent person has an inalienable, or even absolute right, not to be intentionally killed by another human being. Before the French Revolution, and the reactionary attitude that followed, Catholics were at home with talk of inalienable rights. Consider this statement by the English Jesuit John Floyd in the 1620 work God and the King: “slaves, (to speak nothing of humane lawes that have appointed limits to their miseries) have some rightes and liberties by the law of nature inviolable, which (if they be able) they may defend by force against even their owne Maisters” (emphasis mine).
The institutional implications of these doctrines were not well realized in the relatively new territorial states of continental Europe. Even stark critics of absolutist kings like the Jesuit Juan de Mariana had little to contribute to a realistic institutional response to absolutism beyond defending a right of resistance, education for monarchs, and restoring greater power to the Church and feudal lords. But in the British tradition, things were more hopeful. Already from the time of Henry of Bracton, a tradition of British common-law commentators, which also included John Fortescue and, later, John Blackstone in the eighteenth century, had emerged that emphasized institutional checks on executive power. In the writings of these commentators, there was always an element of idealization of the British constitution, which, nonetheless, influenced the ideals and rhetoric of British legal thinkers. What in the Magna Carta were mainly checks on the monarch in the interests of feudal lords, had already by the seventeenth century become the seeds of more inclusive political institutions. Later, Montesquieu, like a French Polybius, would also see this —perhaps idealizing Britain’s constitution again, but contributing to the tradition of elucidating British institutional ideals.
Turning back to the time before the Glorious Revolution, and even before the English Civil War, in 1611 Chief Justice Edward Coke had already ruled in the Case of Proclamations that “the King has no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him,” which is at odds with the absolutist principles modern continental European monarchs would draw from Roman Law (e.g. “whatever pleases the princeps has the force of law). Certainly, seeds of all this can be found in the ancient world in Polybius and Cicero, and in the constitutions of various republics starting with the Roman Republic, but for the new bureaucratic and territorial states of modern Europe, the British tradition stood out, even if the ideals and rhetoric usually exceeded the reality.
What the modern British unwritten constitution was able to achieve, based on the momentum of these principles, was to begin institutionalizing the right of resistance, a right of resistance that had already been emphasized by earlier thinkers, such as the afore-mentioned Catholic scholastics. This institutionalization was a goal that the American Constitutional-Democratic Man sought to perfect in 1776.10
Therefore, what Thomas Jefferson achieved in only a few beautiful words, words which have resonated with people for the last 250 years, was to articulate what was unique about the ideals of American colonists, and to teach the rest of the world about a new possibility for man.
¹ Plato, The Republic, Bk. VIII, 545a-c.
² See Mark Johnstone, “Anarchic Souls: Plato’s Depiction of the ‘Democratic Man’,” Phronesis 58, no. 2 (2013): 139–59, at 140n2.
³ “Kin Networks and Institutional Development,” The Economic Journal 132, no. 647 (2022): 2578–2613, at 2578.
⁴ Thomas D. Howes, “Catholic Scholasticism at the Threshold of Constitutionalism,” The Vital Center 1, no. 1 (Fall 2023): 26–32.
⁵ Katherine Elliot van Liere, “Vitoria, Cajetan, and the Conciliarists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58, no. 4 (1997): 597–616.
⁶ Translation by Francis Oakley, “Natural Law, the Corpus Mysticum, and Consent in Conciliar Thought from John of Paris to Matthias Ugonius,” Speculum 56, no. 4 (1981): 786–810, at 798, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.2307/2847363.
⁷ See Thomas Howes, “Retrieving Scholastic Consent Theory,” Public Discourse, October 14, 2025, https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2025/10/99182/.
⁸ Daniel E. Burns, “What Americans Mean by ‘Constitution’,” Civitas Outlook, October 31, 2025, https://www.civitasoutlook.com/research/what-americans-mean-by-constitution-49392b65-e78d-45e5-8ddb-6eb9b6238ca1.
⁹ See Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law 1150–1625 (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1997).
¹⁰ On modern constitutionalism as an institutionalization of the right of resistance, see Heinrich Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought: A Treatise in Political Theology (St. Louis, Missouri: B Herder Book Co., 1945), 476, and Martin Rhonheimer, “St. Thomas Aquinas and the Idea of Limited Government,” Journal of Markets & Morality 22, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 439–55, at 445.
