Excerpt from The Works of Orestes a Brownson, Collected and Arranged, Vol. 15
The political writings of Dr. Brownson, collected in these four volumes, extend over a period of nearly forty years, from 1837 to 1875. They begin when the author was thirty-four years old, and end with his seventy-second year. When the earliest articles were written he belonged to the radical or movement party both in religion and politics. In those days he held that the people are infallible and humanity divine; and the main object of his writing and preaching was to throw out views however crude and erroneous which he believed would stimulate thought and arouse intellectual activity. The truth, he said, would live, and the error perish. The infallible people would always be able to distinguish between them and accept only what is true.
Accordingly there are many views and expressions to be found in the earlier writings originating, for the most part, in an erroneous theology, which the author afterwards repudiated, and which he exposed and combated in The Convert, The American Republic, and here and there in his other writings. But, as a general rule, his political opinions on all the great questions discussed, such as the origin and ground of government, the evil tendency of popular democracy, the distinction between this and our American system of constitutional republicanism, and opposition to privilege and monopoly and class legislation, continued unaltered through life. He had prior to 1837 embraced in its full extent the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of the people in their own right, and had advocated the social as well as the civil and political equality of all men. His sympathies were always with the weaker class, with the wronged and the oppressed. Accordingly in 1830 he labored in support of what was called the Working-Men's party, though in a moral and social, rather than a political, aspect. From 1831 to 1837 he paid little or no attention to politics. The Democratic party did not go far enough for him in carrying out the principle of social democracy.
The suspension of the banks in 1837, and the special legislation in favor of moneyed corporations which followed, aroused his strongest opposition, and led him to examine deeply and thoroughly the elementary principles of politics, the basis of government in general, and the character of our American government. The results of this study he published during seven or eight years following in the Boston Quarterly and the Democratic Reviews.
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