America’s Rising Sun

It seems appropriate, given the National Endowment for the Humanities’ sponsorship of these reflections, that we turn to the status of the humanities and the arts at the time of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution whose bicentennial we prepare to celebrate. The founding generation’s concept of education, rooted as it was in the classical tradition, encompassed the arts within the broad rubric of humanistic learning. In the words of historian Joseph Ellis, the eighteenth century viewed “a flourishing high culture as but one manifestation of social health. . . . Politics, the arts, economic development, and demography were not separate spheres of human activity but interlaced strands comprising the social fabric.” Or as stated in the widely disseminated credo of NEH Chairman William Bennett: “I hold to the view that the humanities provide us with an indispensable framework for the civilized development of public policy. . . . They do so less by attacking current issues than by developing an intellectual, moral, and imaginative framework for thought and action.”

Let us test the assertion that the humanities, in the sense in which the eighteenth century would have understood the concept, lend a broader vision to the shaping of intelligent responses in personal and public life—a vision that surely informed the men gathered at Philadelphia’s State House in the summer of 1787.

It seems appropriate, given the National Endowment for the Humanities’ sponsorship of these reflections, that we turn to the status of the humanities and the arts at the time of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution whose bicentennial we prepare to celebrate. The founding generation’s concept of education, rooted as it was in the classical tradition, encompassed the arts within the broad rubric of humanistic learning. In the words of historian Joseph Ellis, the eighteenth century viewed “a flourishing high culture as but one manifestation of social health. . . . Politics, the arts, economic development, and demography were not separate spheres of human activity but interlaced strands comprising the social fabric.” Or as stated in the widely disseminated credo of NEH Chairman William Bennett: “I hold to the view that the humanities provide us with an indispensable framework for the civilized development of public policy. . . . They do so less by attacking current issues than by developing an intellectual, moral, and imaginative framework for thought and action.”

Let us test the assertion that the humanities, in the sense in which the eighteenth century would have understood the concept, lend a broader vision to the shaping of intelligent responses in personal and public life—a vision that surely informed the men gathered at Philadelphia’s State House in the summer of 1787.