Herbert J. Storing (January 28, 1928 – September 9, 1977) was an American political scientist with broad ranging interests who is best known for reviving the serious study of the American Founding. The constitutional theorist and American politics scholar Walter Berns called him "the most profound man I have encountered in the field of American studies."
Career
Storing received his A.B. degree from Colgate University in 1950. He then attended the University of Chicago, earning his A.M. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1956. His dissertation chair was C. Herman Pritchett and he studied with Leonard D. White, Robert Horn and Leo Strauss. He was a Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom from 1953 to 1955 and also received research grants from the Rockefeller, Ford, and Relm Foundations and from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Storing served as senior research assistant at the London School of Economics; as assistant, associate, and professor of political science at the University of Chicago (1956–77) where he worked closely with Joseph Cropsey; and as director of the Telluride summer program at the Hampton Institute in 1967. He was Visiting Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Jurisprudence at Colgate University from 1968 to 1969, and part-time professor of political science at Northern Illinois University from 1969 to 1975.
Storing submitted suggested text for the bicentennial speeches of President Gerald Ford and, together with Martin Diamond, testified before Congress regarding the Electoral College.
At the time of his death in September 1977, Storing was Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, where he also served as director of the Study of the Presidency at the White Burkett Miller Center for Public Affairs. He was also a member of the President's Commission on White House Fellows.
Thought and scholarship
American Founding
Prior to Storing, 20th-century scholars tended to study the American Founding Fathers from the standpoint of historicism, contextualism, and ideological history. The approaches characterized the political thought of all of the founders as tethered to the extant practices and opinions of the late 18th and the early 19th centuries. Characteristic of that approach was Charles A. Beard’s 1913 book Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which maintained that "the structure of the Constitution of the United States was motivated primarily by the personal financial interests of the Founding Fathers."
In contrast, Storing helped create a new approach to the American founding within the fields of political science and political theory, one whose principles held that the thought of the American founders could and should be understood as relevant to the contemporary study of politics. For Storing, that meant engaging with the arguments of the founders on their own terms, as opposed to reading those arguments primarily in light of the social, political, and economic conditions that likely shaped them. Storing by no means denied the relevance of these conditions in attaining an informed view of what the founders thought. Indeed, as Storing emphasizes in his essay, "The Other Federalists," most writers from the founding period were bound to the consensus opinions of their times. What distinguished Storing's approach was his openness to founding thinkers like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, who saw further and thought more deeply than their contemporaries did about the nature of political life and institutions and so whose thought cannot simply be reduced either to personal motivations or shared opinions.