Benjamin Franklin (January 17 [O.S. January 6] 1706 – April 17, 1790) was
one of the most important Founding Fathers of the United States. He was a
leading author, political theorist, politician, printer, scientist, inventor, civic
activist, and diplomat. As a scientist he was a major figure in the history of
physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As a political
writer and activist he, more than anyone, invented the idea of an American
nation, and as a diplomat during the American Revolution, he secured the
French alliance that helped to make independence possible.
Franklin was famous for his curiosity, his writings (popular, political
and scientific), his inventions, and his diversity of interests. As a leader of
the Enlightenment, he gained the recognition of scientists and intellectuals
across Europe. An agent in London before the Revolution, and Minister to
France during the war, he, more than anyone else, defined and personified
the new nation in the minds of Europe. His success in securing French
military and financial aid was a great contributor to the American victory
over Britain. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the iron furnace stove
(also known as the Franklin stove), a carriage odometer and a musical
instrument known as the armonica (a glass harmonica). With a talent for
invention that transcended the mechanical, he also originated the tactic of
raising funds by matching grants (to establish Philadelphia’s first hospital).
He was an early proponent of colonial unity. Many historians hail him as
the "First American," and he is also regarded as the only Founding Father
who embodied the emerging American middle-class.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Franklin learned printing from his
elder brother and became a newspaper editor, printer, and merchant in
Philadelphia, becoming very wealthy. He spent many years in England and
published the famous Poor Richard's Almanac and the Pennsylvania
Gazette. He formed both the first public lending library and fire department
in America as well as the Junto, a political discussion club. During this
period he wrote in favor of paper money, against mercantilist policies such
as the Iron Act of 1750, and also drafted, in 1754, the Albany Plan of Union,
which would have created a continental legislature—demonstrating how
early he conceived of the colonies as being naturally one political unit, and
reflecting his more abstract attraction toward unity of all types as being
valuable.
Franklin became a national hero in America when he spearheaded the
effort to have Parliament repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished
diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to
Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive FrancoAmerican relations. From 1775 to 1776, Franklin was Postmaster General
under the Continental Congress; during this period, he served on the
committee of five that advised and spearheaded the drafting of the
Declaration of Independence. From 1785 to 1788 he was President of the
Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania. Toward the end of his life, he
became one of the most prominent abolitionists among the Founders.
He also played a major role in establishing the University of
Pennsylvania, and Franklin and Marshall College. He was elected the first
president of the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society
in the United States, in 1769. Fluent in five languages, he is generally
recognized as a polymath.
Franklin as Social & Political Thinker: Influences and Background
Many of the tendencies and habits of mind that later bore fruit in
Franklin’s brilliant achievements can be found rooted in his family and
youthful experiences. From a social perspective, the Franklin family
represented a sub-species of independent British property owners who were
not aristocrats, but middle-class farmers, that can be traced back to the
16th century Midlands (The word “franklin” itself from the Middle English
“frankeleyn” meaning freeholder or freeman). A harsh nine-year printing
apprenticeship to his older brother James, imposed on him late (in his
twelfth year) and featuring severe autocracy and corporal discipline,
certainly fostered his insistence on personal liberty, what Franklin called
“…that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck with me through my
whole life.” He ran away before his term was expired. By mid-life, as a
prosperous burgher of the times, he was a holder of two African slaves, one
of whom was perennially running off; Franklin saw the analogy to his own
behavior and viewed this with philosophical amusement. After a long period
of deliberation over the nature of humanity, he concluded that no difference
applied, freed his slaves, and became a firm advocate of abolition.
During his youth in Boston, he saw, in functional terms, the
continuum between the notions of the Puritan leadership (which he
sometimes mocked as a young gadfly journalist) and the spirit of the
Enlightenment in which he enlisted. Both Pilgrim’s Progress, the Puritan
cultural artifact par excellence, and the essays of Enlightenment thinkers
posited the concept that both individuals and humanity in general were
moving forward and improving, based on a steady increase in the body of
knowledge and in the wisdom that comes from overcoming adversity. The
essence was practical and positivistic. The Mathers of Boston, the Puritan
community’s church/civic leaders, set up neighborhood improvement
associations, the first in the colonies, and concurrently, Daniel Defoe,
Enlightenment intellectual across the sea in England, proposed community
projects to upgrade sanitation, enhance traffic flow, and the like.
Like the other advocates of republicanism, Franklin emphasized that
the new republic could survive only if the people were virtuous in the sense
of attention to civic duty and rejection of corruption. Indeed all his life he
had been exploring the role of civic and personal virtue, as expressed in
Poor Richard's aphorisms.
Although Franklin's parents had intended for him to have a career in
the church, Franklin became disillusioned with organized religion after
discovering Deism, which can be defined as a religious philosophy and
movement that derives the existence and nature of God from reason and
personal experience. "I soon became a thorough Deist." (Autobiography,
Chapter IV) He went on to attack Christian principles of free will and
morality in a 1725 pamphlet, A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity,
Pleasure and Pain. He consistently attacked religious dogma, arguing that
morality was more dependent upon virtue and benevolent actions than on
strict obedience to religious orthodoxy: "I think opinions should be judged by
their influences and effects; and if a man holds none that tend to make him
less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded that he holds none that are
dangerous, which I hope is the case with me." A few years later, Franklin
repudiated his 1725 pamphlet as an embarrassing "erratum"—possibly
more for its lack of philosophical rigor than its conclusions. In 1790, just
about a month before he died, Franklin wrote the following in a letter to
Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, who had asked him his views on religion...:
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I
think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the
best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has
received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present
Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho' it is a
question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it
needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity
of knowing the Truth with less Trouble...."
Like most Enlightenment intellectuals, Franklin separated virtue,
morality, and faith from organized religion, although he felt that if religion
in general grew weaker, morality, virtue, and society in general would also
decline. Thus he wrote Thomas Paine, "If men are so wicked with religion,
what would they be if without it?" Conversely, Franklin also expressed a
modicum of skepticism toward reason, stating that it had its own form of
abuse, namely rationalization, the capacity to justify what one desired, no
matter what.
Beliefs held, concepts advocated by Franklin
It is historically apt that Benjamin Franklin founded the American
Philosophical Society, because his primary tendency in thinking and in
action, most likely rooted in his development as a scientist and inventor,
was toward pragmatism in the ordinary sense. His speculative thinking,
possibly influenced by personal intellectual exchanges with Emmanuel Kant
and David Hume during his sojourns in England and France, can be viewed
as an early tributary or precursor of philosophic pragmatism, the distinctly
American school. Pragmatism per se originated in the late nineteenth
century with Charles Sanders Peirce, who first stated the so-called
pragmatic maxim.i The school came to fruition in the early twentiethcentury philosophies of William James and John Dewey. Most of the
thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists consider practical
consequences or real effects to be vital components of both meaning and
truth.
Franklin himself has been labeled by at least one prominent historian
as a “pragmatic visionary”—he thought big, in transformative sweeping
terms and with no aversion to iconoclasm, but insisted on testing
hypotheses in practice as soon as conditions made that fair and feasible.
He applied this approach not only to the physical world and its mysteries
(such as electricity or the Gulf Stream, two of his objects of inquiry), but to
the nature and behavior of his fellow humans.
For example, he very early adopted anti-sexist views, testing the antisexist advocacy found in his reading of Defoe against his own experience in
a very creative way: as a teenaged printer/journalist he wrote
pseudononymous political/social satire in the guise of a widow named
Silence Dogood. The sometimes dismissive responses to her Franklincomposed letters to the editor were marked with ad hominem thinking;
evidently the readers needed to know the age, gender, ethnicity, class
status, and so on of an author before taking his/her arguments at face
value, on their merits. (His working realization that women were of equal
intellectual capacity as men, expressed in his subsequent proposals to
educate girls, not only demonstrates his open, enlightened thinking, but,
typical of Franklin, seems to have had the practical use of making him
successful as a lover and man about town!)
In another instance, in his last decade, as the Constitution was going
through ratification and term limits compelled his retirement from
presidentialii service to the State of Pennsylvania, he turned his attention to
the unfair treatment of Native Americans and praised their cultures and
ways in a manner that we might call cultural relativism today. He focused
on the wisdom of their political organization: All their government is by the
counsel or advice of the sages; there is no force, there are no prisons, no
officers to compel obedience or inflict punishment. At council meetings the
old men sat in the foremost ranks; when one of the old men rose to speak,
everyone else observed a respectful silence. How different this is from the
conduct of a polite British House of Commons, Franklin noted sardonically,
where scarce a day passes without some confusion that makes the Speaker
hoarse in calling to order. His essay also included a story in which a
Christian missionary and an Indian leader of the Susquehanna exchanged
creation myths; the Indian found a way to respect and incorporate the
Judeo-Christian story of Genesis and the fall into his framework of belief,
whereas the missionary proved to be a close-minded chauvinist, dismissing
the Indian version in disgust. Beyond such vivid argumentation, Franklin
took practical steps to assist the Wyandot chief Scotosh in raising concerns
with the Congress about encroachment on tribal territory by surveyors. He
even suggested to then Foreign Secretary (the term Secretary of State was
adopted later) John Jay that Scotosh should be sponsored on an official trip
to France, both to impress the French and to help the Indians gain a fuller
appreciation of the power of our Revolutionary partner.
Value of Unity/Strength in Numbers Famous for the pro-Revolutionary witticism, “If we don’t hang
together, we shall all hang separately,” Franklin persistently worked for
consensus and unified action in the civic and political domain. He first saw
the value during the French and Indian War, when a number of the
colonies’ inefficiencies in coordinating military action bore a heavy cost
against a numerically inferior enemy. He saw them as lacking a unified
planning and command structure and indulging in envy and senseless
competition. The idea that became the Albany Plan of Union proposal, the
first national federal model for the American colonies, was developed
iteratively, with much input from colleagues, so that by the time the
proposal was complete it already had many stakeholders who were already
familiar with the reasoning, indeed recognized their own contributions, and
so were ready to advocate. Franklin probably could have devised an
excellent proposal on his own, but in a typical tactic, he orchestrated what
we would call ‘buy-in’ today.
Franklin and the Cosmopolitan Lineage Franklin was a son of the Enlightenment and a product of the British
Empire of the eighteenth century, as one key colony created its own
separate destiny. Would he be a cosmopolitan today? That is unclear; what
is clear is that he was a great skeptic toward the alleged inferiority of other
races, peoples, nations, and their ways. He echoed Hume in regarding no
nation as “naturally” superior, nor indeed based in an a priori natural
order.iii Humankind was diverse but equal in his view, and a matter of
appreciation, even fascination. He believed fiercely in the uniting of peoples
for the common good—their resources, their goodwill, their energies. He
loved the new country he did so much to midwife and defend, and yet it is
easy to imagine him transported in time, providing sage counsel to the
establishment of the League of Nations or the United Nations or the next
global effort to unify and provide the blessings of peace and justice to
humankind, and husband the health of our home planet that he so zestfully
studied.
We are launching this site for our foundation with a name, “One
World United & Virtuous,” that itself comes from a phrase of Franklin’s,
extracted from his May 9, 1731 note, “Observations on my Reading History
in Library”, which evidently arose from discussion in the Junto. Franklin
did not use the term “One World”, but he did speak of a party of virtue in
global terms, proposing ways that men and women of virtue could unite
political efforts across national boundaries, for the common good. We close
this profile with his words:
That few in Public Affairs act from a mere View of the Good of their Country,
Whatever they may pretend; and tho their Actings bring real Good to their
Country’ Yet men primarily considered that their own and Their Country’s
Interest was united, And did not act from a Principle of Benevolence. That
fewer still in Public Affairs act with a view to the Good of Mankind.
There seems to me at present to be great Occasion for raising an
united Party of Virtue by forming the Virtuous and good Men of all Nations
into a regular Body, to be governed by suitable and good and wise Rules,
which good and wise Men may probably be more unanimous to their
Obedience to, than common People are to common Laws.
I at present think, that whoever attempts this aright, and is well qualified,
cannot fail of pleasing God and of meeting with Success.
Sources: Wikipedia biography; The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, by H. W.
Brands; The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, w/ introduction by Andrew S. Trees;
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson; Letters of Benjamin Franklin, in
http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/framedMorgan.jsp.
i
The pragmatic maxim, also known as the maxim of pragmatism or the maxim of pragmaticism, is a
maxim of logic formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce. It was formulated as a reaction to metaphysical
theories. Although Peirce does not use the term "pragmatic maxim," in the following description of the
"first rule of reason," he expresses the same sentiment:
Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and
in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself
deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry. Although
it is better to be methodical in our investigations, and to consider the economics of research, yet there is no
positive sin against logic in 'trying' any theory which may come into our heads, so long as it is adopted in
such a sense as to permit the investigation to go on unimpeded and undiscouraged. On the other hand, to
set up a philosophy which barricades the road of further advance toward the truth is the one unpardonable
offence in reasoning, as it is also the one to which metaphysicians have in all ages shown themselves the
most addicted.
ii
iii
equivalent of gubernatorial
David Hume (1711-1776) was a skeptic, and although he was a complex and dedicated philosopher, he
shared a political viewpoint with previous Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes (15881679) and John Locke (1632-1704). Specifically, Hume, at least to some extent, argued that religious and
national hostilities that divided European society were based on unfounded beliefs; in effect, he argued
they were not found in nature, but a creation of a particular time and place, and thus unworthy of mortal
conflict. Thus Hume is often cited as being the philosopher who finally snuffed out nature as a standard
for political existence. For instance, without Hume, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s (1712-1778) 'return' to
nature would have not been so revolutionary, inventive and fascinating.