User:Robbie/Franklin here: Difference between revisions

</p>We ask such questions wanting to construct in our own ideas about what Franklin might have had in mind, thereby wanting to achieve some insight or comprehension that will help us hone and expand what we actually think about our own present situations. Can we, informed and imaginative, a part of the American people circa 2025, better understand how to keep our republic by speculating about why Benjamin Franklin, just after he and his colleagues signed the draft Constitution, said that it established a republic, if you the people could keep it?</p>  

<p>Let's attend to what he said, engaging both his words and noting important implications as we go along, but let's do that with our speculative efforts foremost in mind. Given Franklin's prominence as a Founding Father, the function of the speech on the culminating session of the Convention, and the mystique the Constitution gained in 19th and 20th century American history, interpreters have paid much attention to his words. But they have done so either by situating it in its immediate historical context, encouraging the few delegates whose support wavered to sign and to prepping all in a gameplan for the coming ratification debates, or by celebrating the basic collaborative commitment to the public good essential to American exceptionalism. Let's read the speech speculating that Franklin wrote it for us, we the people at an historical juncture in which the risk to the republic is actual that we may not keep it.</p>