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Franklin's Autobiography: Politics of the Public Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Joanne Cutting-Gray
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Extract

In 1776, with the Revolution faltering, Congress sent seventy-one-yearold Benjamin Franklin to France to intercede on behalf of the fledgling republic and the “New Man.” Dressed in plain homespun, wearing a frontiersman's coonskin cap instead of a powdered wig, and carrying a staff of apple wood, the sagacious Franklin played the Cultivateur Américain to the French court, a role that satisfied their Crevecouerian image of the American as both innocent and worldly wise: the noble rustic. That role was no problem for someone who “put my self as much as I could out of sight” in promoting his own projects, “put on” Father Abraham, Richard Saunders, Poor Richard, and Silence Dowood in order to instruct his audience and, in matters of diplomacy and debate, “put on the humble Enquirer and Doubter.” Putting off the audience by putting on various personae enabled Franklin, to the extent that the Autobiography was written for an English audience, to act as American colonial “father” instructing his “son,” the British monarchy. Whether portraying himself as a gawky youth, ardent young man, civic leader, sage of practical utility, worldly philosopher, or international statesman, Franklin deliberately played to please while playing with his image and his audience.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 14 , October 1989 , pp. 31 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

NOTES

1. That Franklin was writing for a British public helps explain why he addressed his autobiography to a son already in his forties. The role of the wise father gave the upstart young colony authority with an ancient British realm.

2. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, Talcott (New York: Scribner's, 1958), p. 52Google Scholar. For other views on the selfmade man, see Parker, David L., “Sound Believer to Practical Preparationist,” The Oldest Revolutionary: Essays on Benjamin Franklin, ed. Lemay, J. A. Leo (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 67–75Google Scholar; and Cawelti, John G., Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965)Google Scholar. For the pluralistic view of Franklin, see Sayre, Robert F., The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

3. Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963)Google Scholar, henceforth abbreviated as OR. When this work was first published, it was much criticized for its then radical interpretation of key phenomena like democracy, pluralism, action, public and private, and revolution. However, recent work in political philosophy has redeemed Arendt's judgment. See especially, Sullivan, William M.'s Reconstructing Public Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar, and the communitarianism of MacIntyre, Alasdair's After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Also see Reiner Schurmann's deconstructionist analysis of action and his references to Arendt in Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. Arendt's biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, calls her work a “kind of phenomenology” of the American Revolutionary experience that begins with political terms: “She assumed that if words for distinct phenomena have come to be used synonymously there is a reason for the confusion, that is, some overriding concept has subsumed the different words” (p. 405). See Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. Arendt discusses the vita activa in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar as corresponding to three human activities: labor, work, and action. She claims that only action goes on between persons, and is, therefore, the condition for human plurality and political life. That is, labor and work do not properly partake of action in the sense of relationships between persons that lend individuals their distinction.

4. Sullivan, , in Reconstructing Public PhilosophyGoogle Scholar, says that liberalism and such modern political philosophies as that of Rawls and Kohlberg implicitly adhere to some form of the social contract, postulating “the individual self as morally and logically prior to relations with others, the desires and values of the individual are [thus] held to arise without intrinsic relation to those of other selves, so that social relationships are always and only a means to individual gratification” (p. 93).

5. Franklin, Benjamin, Autobiography, ed. Lemay, J. A. Leo and Zall, P. M. (New York: Norton, 1986) pp. 59, 61Google Scholar. All further references are cited in text.

6. Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, trans. Lawrence, George (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), pp. 512–13.Google Scholar

7. Schürmann, , Heidegger on Being and Acting, p. 91.Google Scholar

8. Bernard Bailyn documents the rediscovery that Americans of the Revolution thought of themselves as inheriting both the Puritan covenant and the republicanism of the Commonwealth in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1967).Google Scholar

9. Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 213.Google Scholar

10. Griffith, John, “Franklin's Sanity and the Man behind the Masks,” in The Oldest Revolutionary, pp. 123–38, 136.Google Scholar

11. Habermas, Jurgen, “Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power,” in Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Lawrence, Frederick G. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 173–89, 176.Google Scholar

12. “The Way to Wealth,” Preface to “Poor Richard Improved: 1758,” in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Smyth, Albert Henry, (New York: Haskell, 1970), vol. 3, pp. 407–18.Google Scholar

13. Schürmann, , Heidegger on Being and Acting, p. 91Google Scholar. To conclude from this discussion that Franklin merely promotes an individual public self (a bourgeois, public consciousness) in opposition to a private ego would be to misunderstand the argument. It is precisely the plurality of (collective) identity that both shapes and is shaped by a public world or condition of worldliness. The Autobiography, although an instance of the Cartesian biographical form (Bernstein, J. M., The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukacs, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984])Google Scholar, is nonetheless recuperated as the narrative history of a social group in Poor Richard's Almanac