The Right Side of History
Page 9
The earliest author of that concept was Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). Grotius, unlike Machiavelli, Luther, and Calvin, saw human reason as paramount and society as a way for man to develop his capacity in concert with others; his thought reflects far more the thought of the ancients. Grotius, like Plato and Aristotle, saw natural right as an extension of natural law: you had a right to do that which was in accordance with your telos. As Grotius put it, natural law is the “dictate of right reason which points out that an act, according as it is or is not in conformity with rational nature, has in it a quality of moral baseness or moral necessity; and that in consequence, such an act is either forbidden or enjoined by the author of nature, God.”20 Such right reason could be discovered by looking to the law of nations—including the Noahide Laws of the Bible.21
Grotius extended the concept of human rights further than that: he stated that human beings also had rights to do things—the right to act in pursuit of justice by capturing criminals, for example. Once Grotius combined the notion of a right to act with the idea that sovereigns were subject to the dictates of natural law, it was a relatively short step to Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).
THE RISE OF THE INDIVIDUAL
Hobbes is often considered the first rationalist political philosopher. He attempted to map out human behavior with the regularity of mathematics. In doing so, he rejected the philosophy of Aristotle as insufficiently realistic, and, following Machiavelli, suggested instead that human passions were the chief motivator for human conduct. And the chief passion, Hobbes believed, was the passion for saving your own skin. Forget the polis; forget the community. No longer was the goal of human life to fulfill the ends of reason—it was to prevent your own death, as shown by the so-called state of nature, in which men harmed one another so far as their self-interest dictated they should do so. “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death,” Hobbes stated.22
Men’s first right, then, was the right to self-preservation. Hierarchies disappear in this regime of natural rights—large, small, smart, stupid, we are all equal in our right to survive. But in a state of nature, with no one to guarantee our safety, how do we survive? We don’t rely on the cultivation of virtue. Instead, we grant power to the state. We require a leviathan—a sovereign heading a powerful state—to free human beings from the war of all against all. And that sovereign ought to be seen as representing the collective will of the people. His power is absolute and unchallengeable, granted by social contract from individuals in the state of nature.23
Hobbes, however, had opened a door that he could not close again: If human beings had individual rights, did those rights end merely with survival? Or, in a state of nature, did human beings enjoy inalienable rights beyond merely breathing and eating and not being murdered?
The philosopher who asked that question was John Locke (1632–1704). Following in Hobbes’s footsteps, Locke believed that sovereignty resided in the individual. Locke—a deeply religious Christian—believed in both natural law discoverable by reason and Hobbesian natural right inherent in human existence. Natural law, like the ancients supposed, could be discovered in nature: a law dictating through right reason both correct behavior and the purpose for life. Locke based his beliefs in human reason, sovereignty, and equality not merely in ancient philosophy but in the book of Genesis, in God’s suggestion that man is made in His image.24 Natural rights, according to Locke, were those rights that sprang from exercise of natural law: a right to property, since we had a corresponding duty not to steal; a right to life, since we had a duty not to kill; a right to liberty, since we had a duty not to oppress. Those rights carried with them duties, as well: the right to property carried with it the duty to cultivate that property, for example, since God had granted the earth to all people in common, but that our self-ownership to the exclusion of others allowed us to mix our labor with the land, thereby transforming it.
Locke radically disagreed with Hobbes about the state of nature. For Hobbes, the state of nature made life nasty, brutish, and short; for Locke, the state of nature was a place of “men living according to reason, without a common superior on earth, to judge between them.” Notice that Locke, a believer in individual natural rights, did not discount community as Hobbes did. The state of nature was not supposed to describe a sort of Eden-on-earth, but man’s status in a pre-political society—in a family or a community of voluntary association. Over time, such communities would grow, and sovereignty would have to be surrendered to a broader government to guarantee the exercise of fundamental rights.
According to Locke, then, the formation of a government requires the exercise of consent—or, alternatively, the behavior of the government in accordance with natural law, for example a government’s willingness to protect natural rights. The goal of law is to preserve freedom, not to trade freedom away for security as Hobbes would have suggested: “the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”25
Locke suggested a republic of checks and balances as the key to creating such a government. Government, he stated, required two separate powers: the legislative and the executive. Montesquieu (1689–1755) would later set down the more well-known balance of powers enshrined in the American Constitution: legislative, executive, and judicial.
Most important for American history, Locke openly recognized a right to rebel against a government that violated the rights of its citizens. Any government doing so would allow citizens to revert to a state of nature, in which the citizens could set up a new government: “whenever the legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence . . . [power] devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty.”26
Locke’s philosophy would not merely influence the Founding Fathers of the United States, as we will see—it would shape the foundations of free market enterprise. The vision of Adam Smith (1723–1790) of natural liberty almost precisely mirrors Locke’s vision of natural right:
The obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.
Smith posited that the government had but three fundamental duties: preservation of life; preservation of liberty through administration of justice; and funding for public goods. His viewpoint would be deeply influential in the formation of the greatest economy in the history of mankind.27
THE AMERICAN TRIUMPH
This long philosophical journey would come to fruition in the first country in history to be crafted based on philosophy: the United States of America. The Founding Fathers were devotees of Cicero and Locke, of the Bible and Aristotle. They’d done their reading. And they based their new national philosophy on the lessons garnered from that reading: natural law, rooted in reason and enshrined by religion; individual natural rights, balanced by corresponding duties; a limited government of checks and balances designed to protect those rights in accordance with natural law; and inculcation of virtue, to be pursued by individuals and communities, again in accordance with the dictates of natural law. The founders weren’t heedless narcissists, unconcerned with the dangers of radical individualism—they feared a society of religion-less individuals. Nor were they tyrannical collectivists—they feared mob rule and the heavy hand of government cramming subjective definitions of “virtue” down the throats of individuals.
All of this is clearly visible in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jeffe
rson attempted to enshrine the brilliance of his philosophical forebears in our founding document; in 1825, he explained, “it was intended to be an expression of the American mind. . . . All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”28 John Adams, the chief congressional sponsor of the Declaration, mirrored Jefferson’s language exactly: “the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sidney, Harrington, and Locke; the principles of nature and eternal reason; the principles on which the whole government over us now stands.”29
The Declaration begins with a ringing statement of authority: that of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” This isn’t the passivity of Hobbes or Augustine or Luther with regard to the value of the current regime. This is the unification of ancient natural law with the force of Biblical drive. It is an active statement that men can take power into their own hands so long as that power is utilized in pursuit of the natural law, and in accordance with the human right to liberty.
Jefferson quickly makes that clear. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he writes. But clearly such truths are not self-evident—they have not been self-evident for most of human history. Jefferson here references the “right reason” of the ancients: those who think properly, who look to the meanings behind nature, can discover fundamental truths that should undergird human life and human action.
What, precisely, are those truths?
First, that “all men are created equal.” Obviously, Jefferson did not mean that all human beings are created with equal capacity. He would have disagreed radically with that notion, since he wasn’t a fool. Jefferson originally worked from a draft of George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was far more specific: “all men are born equally free and independent.”30 Jefferson merely compressed these ideas into the pithier “all men are created equal.”
The notion of all men having equal freedom and independence sprang originally from the Biblical notion of man being made in God’s image, admixed with the Greek tradition of individual reason, and passed down generation after generation, transmuted over time into the understanding that not only are human beings made in God’s image with will and reason, but with the liberty to exercise that will and reason in accordance with the pursuit of virtue.
Jefferson continues by stating that men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In Locke, that phrase had been “life, liberty, and property.” Why didn’t Jefferson simply use the word property rather than pursuit of happiness? He certainly didn’t ignore the right to property because he rejected it—Jefferson routinely talked of the right to the fruits of your labors.31
Jefferson used the right to happiness because in Jefferson’s view, property and its ownership was not a full enough description of our rights. Jefferson, like Locke, believed that the pursuit of happiness encompassed ownership of our own labor, our own minds. Locke himself wrote at length about the pursuit of happiness—and he did not mean the modern misreading of his phrase, which suggests that we all define happiness in our own way. In his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” Locke wrote, “the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty.” This is Locke touting virtue, suggesting that we forgo our own subjectivism in pursuit of a higher happiness, discernible through right reason.32 As Harry Jaffa of the Claremont Institute wrote, “It is difficult to imagine a more forthright Aristotelianism in Hooker or Aquinas.”33
And the founders, despite common misperception of their religious practice, were well aware of the necessity for a community of virtue-seeking religious believers in their new republic.34 The vitality of religion was a precondition for a healthy society. No wonder the founders placed such heavy emphasis on freedom of worship.
Rights and duties, according to the founders, were simply two sides of the same coin. While some critics of the founders have claimed that they ignored duties on behalf of rights, thereby setting the course for societal disintegration, that’s a misreading of the founding philosophy: as George Washington stated in his first inaugural address:
The foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality . . . there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.35
THE CULMINATION
The founding ideology was the basis for the greatest experiment in human progress and liberty ever devised by the mind of man. But then again, it was an idea developed through Judeo-Christian principles and Greek rationality, molded and shaped over time by circumstance, purified in the flame of conflict. It was the best that men have done, and the best that men will do in setting a philosophic framework for human happiness.
Let us examine why—again, through our framework of the requirements of human happiness.
The founding philosophy acknowledges the possibility of individual purpose. That purpose isn’t to be supplied by a government, or by molding individual citizens to the service of the polis. That purpose is supplied by a Judeo-Christian tradition of meaning and value, and a Greek tradition of reason. The founders thought that reason was paramount, and virtue worth pursuing. That virtue took the form of courage—willingness to sacrifice life, fortune, and sacred honor in pursuit of defending the rights necessary to pursue virtue itself. That virtue took the form of temperance—no better founding document has ever been penned than the Constitution of the United States, the product of compromise. That virtue took the form of prudence—the practical wisdom of The Federalist Papers has not yet been surpassed in political thought. And that virtue took the form of justice—the rule of law, not of men, and the creation of a system where each receives his due.
The founding philosophy also glorified the power of individual capacity. The founders were fully cognizant that human beings had the capacity for evil as well as good, for passion as well as reason. But they had immense faith in the power of reason to impel human beings toward proper thinking. Jefferson stated in the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia in 1779, “the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint.”36 John Adams identified liberty itself with the power of reason: “It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil.” The only thing, according to Adams, that would turn reason toward good, was a societal inculcation of good, and a general pursuit of knowledge itself: “My humble opinion is, that knowledge, upon the whole, promotes virtue and happiness.”37
What of communal purpose? Communal purpose could be sought, according to the founders, in common values: in Judeo-Christian traditions and the heritage of Western rights. Culture and philosophy came together in the young United States to form a united country. And that country’s job would be to spread liberty, both domestically and abroad. “We should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation,” Jefferson wrote to Madison in 1809, “and I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.”38
The founders were well aware of the need for collective capacity as well. On the one hand, the founders believed in the individual capacity of Americans to pursue virtue. On the other hand, they distrusted human beings to do so absent social institutions that could encourage such virtuous behavior. And Americans built, cherished, and maintained those social institutions: in Democracy in America, penned in the 1830s, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wondered at the fact that “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly united . . . Thus
the most democratic country on earth is found to be, above all, the one where men in our day have most perfected the art of pursuing the object of their common desires in common and have applied this new science to the most objects.” De Tocqueville wisely warned that the replacement of these voluntary associations by government would risk the “morality and intelligence of a democratic people.”39
The founders agreed, which is why they sought to limit the power of government so dramatically. In order to protect the rights of individual human beings—and in order to ensure their collective capacity for social action—the founders refused to grant strong central powers to the government. James Madison summed up the sentiment well in Federalist #51:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.40
Never were stronger foundations set for human happiness than in the founding philosophy. Of course, that philosophy was not sufficiently universalized even by the founders: it had to be extended in practice to black Americans and women, for example. The evils of their time did not leave our founders unaffected. The founding was rife with self-contradiction: that great exponent of liberty, Jefferson, a man who called slavery “a cruel war against human nature,” was a slaveholder and the father of six children by a slave, Sally Hemings; Madison, another slaveholder, said that slavery based on “mere distinction of colour” was “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”41