Gregory Ablavsky (Stanford Law School) has posted "Why We Should Stop Saying 'The Founders,'" forthcoming in Volume 173 of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. The abstract:
This short Essay—part of a symposium on Jack Balkin's Memory and Authority—argues that we should stop using the term "the Founders" in legal-academic writing. I understand the appeal; I have used the term myself. Nonetheless, I highlight five limitations of the term. It is vague because it is not clear who is in and who is out. It stresses uniformity over disagreement. It embraces filiopietism and ancestor worship. It transforms the study of institutions and ideas into biography. And it is exclusionary—not just in the sense of the widespread critique that the conventional Founders were elite white men, but also, more broadly, in the sense that the term conscripts its subjects into the project of building the United States.
If we don’t use “the Founders,” what should we use instead? In a word: nothing. That is, there are lots of terms that might capture with more specificity what we mean in any given instance when we say, “the Founders.” But we do not need a new collective noun that describes this amorphous group of late-eighteenth-century politicians. We manage to speak coherently about lots of other moments of significant historical and constitutional change—including, most notably, the “Second Founding,” the Reconstruction era—without a term analogous to “the Founders.” We could surely do so for the late eighteenth century, too.
Read on here.
-- Karen Tani
