The Australian Constitutional Framers and the Languages of Virtue

Abstract

The historiography of the political concept of virtue has been dominated by examinations of western European and North American sources. This article aims to widen the historical scope for our understanding of the influence of the concept of political virtue by examining how Anglophone conceptions of virtue were employed by the framers of the Australian Constitution during the Federation debates and the impact of those conceptions on the Constitution itself. It examines the strands of thought that provided the backdrop for the colonial adoption of the Victorian‐era British conception of political virtue, subsequently showing how the Australian constitutional framers adopted these languages and concepts in their own writings and speeches. The Australian framers were concerned with the virtue of both the people and their political leaders, applying this concern in their contributions to legal and political discourse in the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, rather than a direct transfer of the more typical languages of republican virtue, the colonial context examined here offers evidence of a shift of emphasis from virtue into the concept of “character”. The framers demonstrated an interest in the question of character as they wrote and deliberated around the constitutional problems of political parties, bicameralism, and responsible government. So, too, they showed an acute concern for the importance of character in their institutional designs for a future federal commonwealth. This article demonstrates that the framers existed within the tradition of thought which held virtue, or character, to be central to the vitality of the polity, and that the framers adapted that language in their deliberations and the institutional design of the Constitution.