A New Nation, a New Idea: Personal Responsibility
Mark Riebling at City Journal has an amazing piece about the uniqueness of American thought.
As he explains, the word “responsibility” and the phrase “personal responsibility” did not enter written English until the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
Of course, the Framers did not pioneer the concept of man as a personally responsible agent. That notion, arguably the greatest of all Western ideas, dates to line 32 of Homer’s Odyssey, where Zeus asks people to stop blaming their bad choices on the gods. But the Federalists turned this ancient moral idea to newly practical ends. Of their first ten phrases involving responsibility, four dealt with the executive power, three with the legislative, two with the judiciary, and one with the general basis of good government.
Thus personal responsibility is not just an originally American formulation but a uniquely political one. The Federalists invented the phrase as they invented a nation. Presumably, the words floated through alehouses before they flowed from any statesman’s pen. But among politically active men who wrote prolifically, the oral probably did not long precede the written use. “Responsibility” was a new word for a new world.
Something to think about when reading the news of the day.
Something to teach for as an important part of education for democratic citizenship.
