Frank S. Meyer: In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1962.
In considering the egalitarian civil societies that were ruining the landed aristocrats of Europe and which already prevailed in the United States, Tocqueville observed that such societies had a political choice. Without aristocrats to resist central power, the regimes most likely to be founded in the future were republics and despotisms. To found and maintain republics, citizens will need to prize liberty, to resist encroachments upon it. “I believe,” he wrote at the beginning of the final chapter of Democracy in America, “that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government in a people where conditions are equal than in any other, and I think that if such a government were once established in a people like this, not only would it oppress men, but in the long term it would rob each of them of several of the principal attributes of humanity. Despotism therefore appears to me to be particularly dreaded in democratic ages. I would, I think, have loved freedom in all times, but I feel myself incline to adore it in the time we are in.”
In the next century, Frank S. Meyer took up Tocqueville’s challenge, putting liberty at the center of his political thought and strategy.
“My intention in writing this book is to vindicate the freedom of the person as the central and primary end of political society.” By the time he wrote, the term ‘liberalism,’ which names liberty as the central purpose of politics, had been taken over by democratic socialists who “denied the validity of moral ends firmly based on the constitution of being”—that is, on natural rights. They justified this by turning to new philosophic foundation for politics which combined utilitarianism and historicist progressivism. “With this denial of an ultimate sanction for the inviolability of the person, liberalism destroyed the very foundations of its defense of the person as primary in political and social matters,” preferring instead to claim that individuals can truly fulfill their being by subordinating themselves to the democratic-socialist state. If, as the slogan goes, it takes a village to raise a child and, further, if the village in question is the modern state, an entity considerably larger than a village, the child as a person will be melded into an impersonal, administrative structure, in the name of self-enhancement. Meier calls this “collectivist liberalism” and considers that a contradiction in terms.
The nineteenth-century liberals who argued against natural rights “failed philosophically, deeply misreading the nature of man.” Human beings by their nature make choices. This being so, “acceptance of the moral authority derived from transcendent criteria of truth and good must be voluntary if it is to have meaning”; to coerce acceptance of those standards denies human nature in the very act of attempting to improve it. This is true not only of the ‘Left,’ of socialists democratic and dictatorial alike, but also of the ‘Right,’ fascist and traditionalist alike. As a liberal in the original sense, Meyer pays particular attention to what was then called the “New Conservatism” of Russell Kirk and Peter Viereck, who held that society resembles a living organism, that the individual is rightly subordinate to that organism, and consequently deny “that the freedom of the person is the decisive criterion of a good polity.”
Meyer takes the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution (along with the arguments made in its defense at the Philadelphia Convention) as the central documents that American conservatives should conserve because they form the foundation of the American regime of “limited government,” the “criterion for a good society, a good polity” in the United States. But the mere historical existence of these documents justifies nothing. We need proof that the principles enunciated in them “are grounded both in the nature of men and in the very constitution of being.” He proceeds to offer such proof.
He understands that equality is also central to the American regime. But this is not the “equalitarianism which would forbid men the acquisition of unequal good, influence or honor, and the right to pass these ‘inequalities’ on to their heirs if they can”; it is rather “the equal right of all men to be free from coercion exercised against their life, liberty and property.” Nor does he claim that the American regime of “representative democratic institutions combined with constitutional guarantees of freedom” could be implemented everywhere in the world. He does claim that the modern tyrannies of Nazism and Communism (Nazism’s “older brother”) have proved and will continue to prove ruinous wherever they are instituted. There can be “no common ground for theoretical discussion” with Nazis and Communists; “determination and force will decide the issue.” Against these ideologies and the regimes their advocates found, in dialogue with the traditionalist conservatives, Meyer “propose[s] the claims of reason and the claims of the tradition of reason”—claims the Declaration and the Constitution embody.
He begins with a critique of contemporary political science, which exhibits “a fundamental derangement of our way of thinking about the world” because it attempts to apply the methods of modern empirical and experimental science to human beings and their political societies. Modern political science consists of two parts: “policy science,” animated by the spirit of what the Germans of the nineteenth century called Realpolitik—a stance taken by James Burnham in such books as The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians—and “behavioral science”—seen in countless articles and books published by numbers-crunching analysts of polling data, opinion surveys, and other attempts at measuring political action mathematically. Contemporary political science thus “has no relationship to moral or philosophic enquiry,” although it does take “its underlying assumptions from the empirical and naturalistic position of Machiavelli and Hobbes, “reinforced in the past hundred years by the prestige of the natural sciences and their methods.”
The problem with this approach—shared in various ways by all of the social sciences—is that “the sphere of natural studies contains no element of consciousness with its innate corollary of freedom and moral responsibility.” The two spheres are not analogous. “Men’s knowledge of themselves is first of all direct: that which they know of their own consciousness from their own consciousnesses.” He who would talk me out of that knowledge may mean me some harm. After all, the social scientist who designs the statistical studies, who frames ‘realist’ policies is a human being. “In view of the non-independent character of the questions” the pollster asks, “the answers can reflect little more than the value system and the judgment of those who constructed them.”
And “only when it is assumed, in sycophantic imitation of the natural sciences, that there is no valid knowledge except knowledge of that which can be objectively observed, manipulated, and measured, can the study of behavior be substituted for the study of man and glorified as the only possible form of the study of man.” It is “the power to make choices, this innate freedom,” which “lies at the center of the drama of human existence.” “No objective methodology, however strict, can disprove the existence of the autonomous self and validate determinism, as no intuitive outlook based upon the subjective, can disprove the existence of the external world and validate solipsism.”
Instead of social science, Meyer begins with “man as he exists, a complex whole.” This is not man in the ‘state of nature,’ however conceived. It is man as a choice-making person. That being so, “social and political organization is…a condition, not the end, of the life of the individual person”—not “a determining factor” to “the worthy consummation of each man’s drama,” a drama played out not simply within a political ‘constitution’ or state but within the ‘constitution’ of being itself. “The art of politics at its best is guided by fundamental principle, but operates by judgment, by prudence,” by reasoned choice. “Society and the state were made for individual men, not men for them.” True, human beings are social by nature. But this does not mean they are creatures of humanly constructed social and political institutions. Traditionalist conservatives do not go so far as to make that claim, which they leave to the socialists. But they do claim that “society is an organism” and, if so, “the men who make it up can be no more than cells in the body of society; and society, not they, becomes the criterion by which moral and political matters of judged,” reducing “the moral claims of the person…to nothingness.”
The extreme, and extremely dangerous, manifestations of these claims usually derive from “the most influential schools of contemporary sociology” and of social psychology, in America typically the province of the Left, not of New Conservatives. The behavioralist determinism of B. F. Skinner, for example, leads to “social engineering,” unscientifically placed at the service of “human welfare” but often masking the libido dominandi of the social scientists and rulers trained under their tutelage. “The New Deal itself which was decisive in the triumph of liberal collectivism in the United States, proceeded without any observable over-all theory,” animated by “a sentimental mystique of welfare and a constant insistence upon the virtue of the pragmatic as over against the traditional.” But this marriage of sentiment and pragmatism does have an underlying “body of dogma”: “relativist, pragmatic, positivist, scornful of absolute criteria, of all strictly theoretical though, of all enquiry not amenable to the methods of the natural sciences.” And this body of scientistic dogma comports poorly with sentimentalism of any kind. “Politically, it attributes virtue in strict proportionality to power,” including but not limited to power over economic transactions. While “it preaches ‘the end of ideology'”—the title of a widely-taught book by the sociologist Daniel Bell, published two years before Meyer’s book—it “admires experts and fears prophets, fears above all commitment to value transcending the fact.” Yet the underlying ‘fact’ of modern science, the mastery of fortune commended by Machiavelli, the mastery of nature commended by Bacon and affirmed by the political science of Hobbes, is libido dominandi. The desire to rule, like all other desires, exists in human beings by nature; it coexists, nonetheless, with the human power to make reasoned choices respecting the limit to that and to other desires. Desires are not self-justifying; the choice to gratify one or more of them requires some criterion of judgment beyond the desires themselves because the desires can collide with one another and ruin the human being who allows himself to be driven by them. What is the human being animated by desires but still free to choose the extent to which he pursues them.
The New Conservatives, of whom Russell Kirk is “the most influential,” point to the traditions of Western civilization not only as the criteria for judging the desires but as a ‘better guide than reason.’ “This attitude toward reason…elevates the historical process, the venerable, the established, the prescriptive, as the touchstone of the good and the true.” In this, New Conservatives share the historicism of the not-really-liberal ‘Left,’ while hearkening not to Marx but to Edmund Burke and to a conservative interpretation of Hegel. Unfortunately, “these men are not statesmen like Burke”; their ‘politics of prudence’ is more literary than political or prudential. Burke could depend upon a reliable tradition, the British constitution being its political framework, whereas American New Conservatives are surrounded by “positivist and liberal-collectivist doctrines which are already far advanced in authority over the minds and hearts of men.” An appeal to tradition in contemporary American circumstances puts them “at the mercy of the very forces they are proposing to combat”: “Either the whole historical and social situation in which they find themselves, including the development of collectivism, statism, and intellectual anarchy, is providential,” or “there is a higher sanction than prescription and tradition,” “in which case reason, operating against the background of tradition, is the faculty upon which they must depend in making that judgment.” And if reason is conceived as Hegel conceives it, as the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit,” that “all that is real is rational,” then they have conceded the main theoretical point to their opponents, who are fully prepared to deny, on the basis of either Marxist or positivist ‘social science,’ that they are vulnerable to the same charge, in reverse. Mayer adds, not without reason, that “Burke himself was too much the hard-headed Englishman to have sought such a solution, had he faced the sort of problem his soi-disant heirs do,” as “his fundamental belief in natural right and in reason” inoculated him against such niaseries.
To separate one tradition from another, to separate a good element of a tradition from a bad one, “requires recognition of the preeminent role (not, lest I be misunderstood, the sole role) of reason in distinguishing among the possibilities which have been open to men since the serpent tempted Eve, and Adam ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” By refusing to recognize reason’s preeminence “is a central attribute of New Conservative thought.” “The dread of definition, of distinction, of clear rational principle is characteristic of the New Conservative”; unsurprisingly, Kirk and Viereck were literati, one a novelist (even when presenting himself as a historian) and the other a poet. New Conservatives treat God’s Providence as if it were “immanent,” “operating within the flow of historical experience.” As with Hegel, this claim “is always in tension with the concept of God as transcendent, as the Ground and Standard of truth and good.”
To affirm that preeminence is the central attribute of “the conservatism of principle.” While “it is true that abstract theoretical principles cannot be applied without consideration of circumstances, of the possibilities which in fact exist at a given time,” this “does not mean that prudence can successfully function without the guide of reason”—by which Meyer means theoretical reason, inasmuch as prudence is itself a form of reason, namely, practical reason. Theoretical reason does not foreclose prudential or practical reason. On the contrary, “Only if there exists a real choice between right and wrong, truth and error, a choice which can be made irrespective of the direction in which history and impersonal Fate move, do men possess true freedom.” “Unless [man] can choose his worst, he cannot choose his best”; “no philosophical position that looks to the flow of existence as the sole standard of judgment has any place for true choice.” Hegel’s definition of freedom as “the recognition of necessity” is sophistical, as “this is not freedom” but a claim (quite possibly bogus) about external reality that ignores the ‘internal’ reality of choice; freedom is “the power to choose”. “The human being can say quite simply—and literally: to Hell with it; it is wrong and false, and in my inner being I will have no part of it, whatever may be forced upon me physically.”
New Conservatives attempt to define their way out of the problem by distinguishing freedom from license, by saying that true freedom aims only at good ends, license at bad ends. Against this, Meyer argues that freedom is “an integral aspect of the highest end” and of the lowest end, “not subordinate to moral and spiritual ends” but “concomitant with them, for without freedom no moral end can be achieved by the particular kind of man is.” That is, the truly achieve what is morally and spiritually good, a human person must choose it, exercise his freedom as a person. “Freedom to choose is the very essence of the pursuit of virtue.” Once human beings know what good and evil are, good and evil become matters of choice. A political regime cannot be good unless it “make[s] possible the greatest exercise of freedom by the individual,” since coerced good behavior is not fully good (because it isn’t chosen). “Freedom is essential to the being of man.”
Political life—rule, governance, constraints on freedom in recognition of the human inclination to choose evil—rightly supposes that “men can live as men only in some relationship with other men,” some social and political order. But “the key word is ‘some'”—the question of “what kind of order.” What regime. “The task of political theory is to develop the criteria by which differing political orders can be judged in the light of principle.” Political rule, which includes coercion, necessarily restricts freedom of choice. Of that coercion is sometimes necessary and justifiable, what are those ‘times’? In most political theories, “freedom has been subordinated to the eds designated as good by the theorist.” And although Utilitarians reverse this claim, arguing that the exercise of freedom will result in doing right, this “evades rather than faces the contradiction.” The dilemma is that “freedom is essential to the nature of man and neutral to virtue and vice,” while it is also true that “good ends are good ends, and it is the duty of man to pursue them.”
A dilemma it is, but not a contradiction, an indication of the irrationality of human existence itself. Freedom and the good are rather “axioms true of different though interconnected realms of existence.” Human freedom is embedded in human nature and is indispensable to both the achievement of virtue and the achievement of vice. Good and bad are also embedded in human nature. To incline persons to choose good, to minimize the coercion which denatures virtue, a regime needs “intellectual and moral leaders” who “have the understanding and imagination to maintain the prestige of tradition and reason, and thus to sustain the intellectual and moral order throughout society.” To put it in Aristotelian regime terms, a regime consists not only of its purpose, its telos, which might be good or bad, and of institutional barriers to vice, including laws ‘with teeth in them,’ but more importantly with respect to freedom, in who rules and in the way of life they embody and advocate.
New Conservatives, by contrast, deny that the rights of individuals are unalienable, asserting that rights “must be subordinated to the performance of duties.” Meyer replies that I have a duty to others only insofar as their “moral claims” must be respected, reciprocally loving my neighbor as myself, under God. To subordinate the person to “society or the state” as if an ‘it’ was a person, betokens confusion. “In such a scheme of things, ‘rights’ would obviously be dependent upon duties performed; but they would not be rights, they would be privileges.” “Duties and rights both derive from the same source, the moral ground of man’s nature.” Coercion, then, derives what moral justification it has because “one man’s freedom can be used to inhibit another man’s freedom,” that “the rights of others have no protection from these predators unless they are restrained by force.” To coerce predators in no way denies “the absolute rights of the person”; it is a prudential adjustment “in actual historical existence,” an adjustment “necessary to reach the closes possible approximation to that ideal for each individual person” in the given circumstances. Rights “are obligations upon the state to respect the inherent nature of individual human beings and to guarantee to them conditions in which they can live as human beings, that is, in which they can exercise the freedom which is their innate essence.” “Freedom remains the criterion, principle the guide; but the application of principle to circumstances demands a prudential act.” One can act “intelligently” without protecting freedom, as Machiavellian statists do; one can act “morally in the political sphere” without regard to prudential reasoning, refusing to think politically, as one sort of Kantian does. Neither stance is good, choice-worthy.
Hobbes famously calls the modern state ‘Leviathan.’ It is “a definite group of men, distinct and separate from other men, a group of men possessing the monopoly of legal coercive force.” The state is not genuinely impersonal but a ruling body consisting of persons. In the small ancient polis, the rulers and those ruled were more tightly related, especially when ‘the many’ ruled, as in both democratic and ‘mixed’ regimes. This is why Aristotle thinks that a polis is a community “which is the highest of all and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a higher degree than any other, and at the highest good.” It is true that Aristotle and some of the other Greek philosophers recognized “an immense chasm between a social order blow and a cosmic order above,” between what is and what ought to be. So did the Israelite prophets. However, both “stopped short of the stark confrontation of the individual person with the ultimate source of his being,” regarding the regimes as “the fundamental moral agents whose actions might be judged by transcendent standards.” Exceptions there were: Socrates in Greece, Abraham in Israel. But Socrates is also the Socrates of the Republic, a regime that denies individual freedom. In this, Meyer is insufficiently alert to Socratic irony. He also does not consider that the criticisms philosophers and prophets aim at human communities and not only at individuals make sense insofar as those individuals have chosen to bind themselves into a community. As he himself has remarks, regimes can be good or bad, and if the community organized by consenting individuals is bad, they have committed a wrong both individually and collectively, as a group.
This set of claims enables Meyer to distinguish Christianity very sharply not only from ‘Greece,’ including Greek philosophers, but from Israel and most of its prophets. “The Incarnation, and the Christian doctrine of the person that flows from it, breaks finally and forever the unity of cosmos and person” because it instances “the penetration of the Divine into the immanent world” in God’s loving sacrifice, a sacrifice that “made it possible for men to face each his indissoluble identity and accept its responsibilities.” God is not immanent in that world (as Hegel claims); He is transcendent but gracious, lowering Himself to dwell in a human body in order to offer human beings the choice that is the condition of their salvation, the choice to be ruled by Himself. This means that “only the person can be the earthly pole of the discharge between the transcendent and the immanent,” that only persons, not communities, states or associations, “can receive the beatific vision or be redeemed by the divine sacrifice of love.” God’s sacrifice “drained out” the supposed “sanctity of institutions,” and Christians were adjured to render unto Caesar only the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. To do so is “neither to turn one’s back on the world, nor on the other hand to consider the political institutions that from time to time well or ill serve human needs as in any sense themselves divine.” This argument evidently elides the divine origin of the Mosaic law—which, as Jesus insists, still applies to His Jewish brethren. It also elides the law He gives to the Gentiles: love God and love your neighbor as yourself, which he describes as the summation of the Mosaic law.
At any rate, Meyer comes on safer ground in maintaining that the potential of Biblical revelation has “not been realized.” The Tower of Babel, the Pharaoh Akhenaton, Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Anabaptism, Puritanism, Faust, and such modern philosopher as Bacon and Rousseau, such modern ideologies as Communism, Fascism, socialism and collectivist liberalism have all distorted the Biblical teaching. Those “who conceive that the nature of men can be changed to meet the specifications of a design of earthly perfection, need perforce some mechanism through which to act.” That mechanism is of course the state, which they then seek either to make or to capture, extending force “beyond its natural purposes.” “Against [this] classical political theory is helpless, because classical political theory shares with it an apotheosis of the state,” and “it is upon classical political theory that the New Conservative view of the state” is founded. Meyer again paints “classical political theory” with too broad a brush. According to him, “the collectivist liberal and the New Conservative are agreed”—and in agreement with classical political theory—in “refusing to accept the state as an institution which is the expression of the power of a specific group of men, power which can only be justified in terms of a specific function.” While this may be true of collectivist liberals and New Conservatives, it is not true of classical political philosophers, who clearly identify rulers as a specific group of men whose power can only be justified in terms of a specific function, namely, whether or not they act justly. They do in fact distinguish between rulers and ruled.
Even if Meyer does not adequately describe the regime theory of the Greeks or the regime of the Bible, he is nonetheless ‘on to something’ when it comes to utopians, and especially when it comes to the modern utopians who intend to develop the means to transform human nature with or without the consent of the governed. The modern state, as distinguished from the ancient polis, is too large for a tight connection between those who occupy its ruling institutions and those who are ruled in ‘civil society.’ Modern states have regimes just as much as ancient poleis did, but their rulers emit commands less knowingly than the rulers of Greek antiquity did because they rule from a greater distance, a distance that precludes personal knowledge of those they rule. And in terms of regimes, “the development of democracy” under conditions of modern statism “has made the critical recognition of the dichotomy between the state and those whom the state governs particularly difficult.” The institution of representative government lessens but does not eliminate this problem because the power to choose who governs isn’t the same as the power to govern. Anarchists address this problem wrongly, ignoring the dangers posed by those who “use their freedom to interfere with the freedom of others,” initiating a war of all against all; they also ignore the need to adjudicate cases in which a “conflict of rights with rights” occurs; and, finally, they ignore the existence of hostile foreign regimes. That is, they ignore the need for an executive branch of government wielding a police power against domestic violence, the legislative power that establishes law and the judicial power that judges cases under the law, and finally the legislative, executive, and judicial powers that all come into play in what we somewhat tepidly call ‘international relations.’
State power wielded for those purposes can be justified. Any more state power is dangerous. Meyer cites public education, social insurance, and rules on “how men shall live that go beyond the preservation of the essential conditions of a free order” as unjust extensions of state power over persons. Echoing Lord Acton’s famous aphorism, he writes, “There is in power an impulsion to more power, which can only be limited by counter-measures” guided by the theoretical standard he has illuminated. This, he readily warns, is hard to do.
The major impediment to such counter-measures are the theoretical standards now prevalent. “The dominant motif of political though today is the denial of a principled theory of politics based on philosophical consideration of the nature of man.” Whether it is the neo-Hobbesian political science of Harold D. Lasswell, which reduces political life to a matter of “who gets what, when, how,” or more generally a combination of moral relativism and collectivism, “a peculiar mixture of historical determinism with moral and methodological relativism in the philosophical sphere,” it has been “possible to proclaim that God—and with Him the transcendental foundation of value—is dead” while incoherently deriving value from the facts of the modern regime, which consists of the people, “the state which rules in their name, and the bureaucratic elites which in effect control the state.” The elites resent “independent centers of power in society” and work diligently to subordinate them.
Nor are civil associations, those “independent centers of power,” the only or even primary target. Moral relativism attacks “the image of man as an autonomous center of outgoing will.” Under the collectivist dispensation, whether Marxist or ‘democratic,’ “men are atoms and must be organized in the proper pattern,” a pattern to be determined by the elites. The rulers are not confined to the government. To be sure, government bureaucrats wield substantial power, but so do trade-union and corporate bureaucrats, mass-communications bureaucrats (needed for “the engineering of consent”), and academic bureaucrats (replacing the traditional “collegium of scholars”). Political philosophers from Aristotle to some of the earlier modern liberals regarded “an independent and differentiated middle class” as indispensable for “provid[ing] a stable center to the social order,” but the ‘massification’ of politics, first seen in Rousseau’s notion of the “General Will,” has given philosophic excuse for “eliminat[ing] such a middle class without terror or physical liquidation” by means of inheritance taxes and “a steeply graduated progressive income tax.” These “will in the space of a few decades destroy all independence, except that of a few very wealthy families.” The policy amounts to “destroy[ing] the independent” and “spend[ing] to create the dependent” in order to “maintain the power of the bureaucratic elite” in its several sociopolitical perches.
Meyer emphasizes the role of the academic bureaucracy. The “long history of ideological development…prepared the way for this transformation of the scholar into the bureaucrat,” beginning with Bacon’s dictum, “Knowledge is power.” “If knowledge is no longer conceived as the search for and the acceptance of truth…but as the acquisition of power to control and manipulate nature and man, it logically follows that an attempt will be made to realize that conception in the political sphere.” Well before the New Deal and its “Brains Trust,” American ‘progressives’ “prepar[ed] the way for that revolutionary transformation of the American state”—the new republic, as one of the movement’s flagship publications called itself. Control academia and you will control or at least decisively influence the next generation of persons who involve themselves in government. As of the early 1960s, when Meyer is writing, the scholar has become “the committeeman in a multi-million-dollar, foundation-financed ‘team’ research project, or a cog in a government department,” even as “the artist, the writer, is bound to the feverish pace of the mass-communications industry.” These men and women “have exchanged the independence of thought and action which is the proper activity of a free being for a minute share in the power of an immense machine.”
The error Rousseau committed in positing the General Will as the core of authority in the modern state inheres in the fact that “the corporate sense of the Greeks, which made it possible for Aristotle to say that man is a political animal—an animal of the polis —no longer existed in a civilization which regards each individual man, not as an animal whose being rests in the state, but as a person whose being takes meaning from free personal choice of good and evil, a choice dictated by no institution.” That is, the moral anthropology of the Bible replaced the moral anthropology of classical antiquity. Against that, modern philosophers retained the Bible’s focus on the individual but subtracted God, leaving “Western man” a being who “regards himself as the center of his own earthly existence.” Under that rubric, “no corporate earthly deity can be recreated form a vast civilization to play for [man] the ego-absorbing function that the polis did for the Greek spirit.” This is why “Rousseau’s attempted re-creation of the polis in the form of the General Will could not recreate the classical principles of political order which had been destroyed by the attack of Machiavelli and Hobbes.” In the modern state, unlike the tight-knit, traditionalist polis, the General Will lacks “specific moral content” and consequently could be appropriated for the use of the scientistic elites, “first to raise themselves to power, then to destroy their enemies, and finally to gain consent from the governed”—thereby affirming that the elites were following the General Will! Whether in the malicious form of Nazi or Communist rule, or in the milder form of social democracy (as Tocqueville famously anticipated), although internecine struggles among rival elites continue, sometimes to the point of worldwide wars, a new oligarchy consisting of a scientistic bureaucracy suppresses liberty.
Meyer regards the New Conservatives as inadequate to meet this problem because they, too, give society “a moral status superior to persons.” Under modern, statist conditions, this can only be accomplished by “the unlimited Leviathan state”—repurposed, to be sure, for decent morality but nonetheless broadly coercive and therefore dangerous to personal freedom and political liberty. “Therefore, resistance to the growing collectivist tyranny of the century requires a theory of society and of the state that has as its first principle the vindication of the person,” not laments over “alienation” and “loss of community” voiced by such writers as Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet, a lament they share with ‘the young Marx.’ “Putting the individual person at the center of political thought is to them the greatest of political and social evils.” This stance prevents them from effectively “combat[ting] the essential political error of collectivist liberals: its elevation of corporate society, and the state which stands as the enforcing agency of corporate society, to the level of final political ends.” That is why New Conservatives get nervous about the Declaration of Independence, with its affirmation of unalienable rights inherent in “all men” as individuals first, as “a people” second. “The enforcement of virtue” by a centralized modern state overrides human nature by limiting freedom to choose beyond the protection of those rights; because it is contra naturum, it is a “delusion”; because it is at least a temporarily effective means of seizing and maintaining the power of ‘the few,’ it is a “persistent” delusion. It is an Aristotelianism that ignores one of the main ethical teachings of Aristotle: that founders of regimes and the political men who rule within those regimes must take account of the circumstances that prevail when and where they rule, and the character of those whom they rule. And while it is true that freedom “is not the end of men’s existence,” it is “a condition, a decisive and integral condition” of that end, “which is virtue,” which requires the effort only choice can trigger.
“By recognizing the absolute authority of truth in the intellectual and spiritual realm, while at the same time remaining aware of the contingency of institutions in the social realm and their consequent subordination to the transcendent value of the human person,” the West had, until very recently, flourished, distinguishing “between the fundamental truths that constitute the structure of man’s being as a creature with a supernatural destiny, living in the natural world, and manmade certitudes, where authority can only be tyranny because truth is uncertain.” The West has often if not always distinguished between political rulers and philosophers, scholars, priests, and prophets. The love of truth pursued in the several ways of life led by philosophers, scholars, priests, and prophets requires a substantial degree of freedom from political rule, even as prudently limited political rule serves as an indispensable condition of their pursuits. To be love, love must be free from excessive constraint.
Aristotle regards the family as an irreplaceable part of the polis. Meyer accords to parents the rightful power to impose upon their children “the values of their tradition and their culture,” while observing that “it is not the institution of the family as such that inculcates virtue” but “the persons who constitute the family, elders who “decide the issue of the moral and intellectual direction that children take.” “The form of institutions has no power to make bad men good or good men bad”; “at their best, they can create favorable conditions—and that is all. “Ominously, “an increasing majority of parents shrug their shoulders of this responsibility and turn their children over to the state and other institutions for ninety percent of their waking hours”—to schools, ‘after-school activities,’ and clubs. Many of these quasi-parental institutions are themselves creatures of the state, the persons ruling them hirelings of the state who stand apart from the traditions espoused by parents. Public schooling today operates as “the direct consequence of the instrumentalist philosophy of John Dewey.” Instrumentalists regard “virtue as an end of human existence” as “a superstition left over from the Middle Ages.” They define the “right and good and true” as “what serves as an instrument for adjustment to the society around one,” a society held to be in a condition of constant change registering social progress. What in fact happens, “what is happening,” is that the teacher teaches “the current prejudices of his environment,” which “are certain to reflect the prevailing value nihilism and political collectivism.” Such education also impedes intellectual and moral excellence alike, given the expansive notion of equality, the egalitarianism that ‘puts the cookies on the lowest shelf’ or, at best, the middle shelf.
Libertarians of course take a position against statist collectivism. They fall into a similar error, however. Instead of attributing the power of inculcating virtue to the state, they attribute it to the free market, supposing “that a free economy is itself a guarantee of a good and virtuous life.” It isn’t. Economic freedom does leave the power to determine “what should be and what should not be produced” to individuals, not statist ‘planners,’ and that is good but not sufficient for the development of moral strength. Like political liberty, economic liberty is a condition of virtue.
At the end of his book, Meyer praises the American regime constituted by the Founders as a regime founded “upon the freedom of the person as its end, and upon firm limitation of the powers of the state as the means to achieve that end.” He deplores the “process of retrogression” that began, first with Andrew Jackson’s “mass democratism,” then “the undermining of the sovereignty of the several states by Abraham Lincoln,” finally by the “collectivist principles and methods [of] Franklin D. Roosevelt.” The inclusion of Lincoln in the list of villains and the exclusion of Woodrow Wilson likely reflects Meyers’ immediate interest in forming a broad-based political coalition of American conservatives, a coalition that would perforce include Southerners, still more than a bit touchy about Lincoln and perhaps a bit ‘defensive’ regarding Wilson, a Virginia boy. Surely the slavery defended by the Confederacy contradicted the unalienable right to liberty the Declaration and the Constitution uphold, the latter admitting it only as a result of a compromise necessary to preserve not the states but their Union.
This and other errors respecting the history of political thought withstanding, Meyer rightly insists, “Nothing in history is determined. The decision hangs upon our understanding of the tradition of Western civilization and the American republic, our devotion to freedom and to truth, the strength of our will and of our determination to live as free and virtuous men.”
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