W. B. Allen, ed.: George Washington: A Collection. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988.

Originally published in the Washington Times, December 5, 1988.

 

In April 1789 the first President of the United States delivered the first Inaugural Address, in writing; the practice of delivering them orally in front of both houses of Congress would commence more than a century leader, when Woodrow Wilson reconceived the presidency as a platform for the nation’s ‘opinion leader.’ Washington restricted himself to more sober thoughts: “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican form of government, are justly considered as deeply, and perhaps finally, staked on the experiment trusted to the hands of the American people.” Almost two hundred years later, as another president-elect and his writers prepare another ‘inaugural,’ George Washington’s words remain true, his thoughts on the preservation of liberty and republicanism worth heeding.

Washington understood the need for republican government, and its hazards, as clearly as any among that most lucid generation of American statesmen. Political liberty means government by consent of the governed, a principle denied by the British to the Americans. “What is it we are contending against?” Washington wrote in the aftermath of disturbances in Boston in 1774. “Is it against paying the duty of three pence per pound on tea because burthensome? No, it is the right only, we have all along disputed.” Consent to taxation matters more than taxation. “We must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”

Washington considered a peaceful boycott of English goods, but judged it likely to be ineffective, requiring infeasible unanimity of American opinion. The right to liberty guarantees disagreement, making absolute unity in action impossible. Yet without a degree of union, men will never enact their right to liberty. Only warfare might unify Americans sufficiently to defend their right to thoughtful and moderate individual liberty. Washington therefore saw “no alternative but civil war or base submission,” and began the difficult, almost paradoxical act of fighting a civil war for political union, and maintaining a united effort for the rights of individual liberty and national independence.

A nation of individualists may organize itself to fight, but how well? For how long? Sunshine soldiers and summer patriots abound in this climate, and Washington had to devise a way to sustain a war with the people he had. In public, to his soldiers, he encouraged manly elevation of spirit. In the face of Congressional failure to pay them, he asked, “Is the paltry consideration of a little pelf to individuals to be placed in competition with the essential rights and liberties of the present generation, and of millions yet unborn?” He appealed to shame not to humble ordinary souls but to fortify them.

To his private correspondents and in his confidential memoranda to Congress he took an icier view. “Nothwithstanding all the public virtue which is ascribed to these people, there is no nation under the sun (that I ever came across) who pay greater adoration to money than they do.” Americans are human, only more so, and in every nation “the few who act on principles of disinterestedness, are, comparatively speaking, no more than a drop in the ocean.” Statesmen “must take the passions of men as nature has given them,” regulating and rechanneling them to defend natural, human rights. Though unalienable, those rights are always vulnerable.

To supplement appeals to principle, Washington insisted on discipline of, and pay for, his troops. Discipline rechannels the passion of fear, overwhelming the fear of death in battle with the “fear of punishment”; this latter fear “most obviously distinguishes” the trained from the “untutored” soldier. Pay rechannels the passion for gain; without it, soldiers will look elsewhere to support themselves and their families—often back to farm and hearth, where musket balls seldom fly.

Discipline and regular pay for troops require a Congress willing to back up its military officers, and able to raise money. This gives political union its practical urgency. Washington had advocated colonial union as early as 1756, during the war against the French. He intensified his call during the War of Independence. Disunion from England and union among the American states complemented one another, as both served the cause of peace; union with England and American disunion would prolong war. Union with England would mean “a peace on the principles of dependence.” This “would be to the last degree dishonorable and ruinous”—”if I may be allowed the expression, a peace of war.” Here Washington follows John Locke’s insight; tyranny is a form of war, and to fail to resist tyranny with arms actually perpetuates a peculiarly inconvenient war in which only one side has firepower.

American disunion frustrated Washington during the war and, in his view, would make Americans “instruments in the hands of our enemies” even after victory. To forge a political union, the bulwark of national liberty, independence, while protecting individual liberty and other unalienable rights, Washington participated in the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The delegates there sought to frame the world’s first sustainable republic. Washington regarded their successful Constitution-making as America’s real revolution, not the war. Changing a regime is one thing, sustaining the change another.

He considered a just government as consisting of three elements: a foundation supporting “pillars,” and a “fabric” supporting by them. Liberty—in political terms, consent—is the foundation of republican government. Its four pillars are union, a “sacred regard to public justice” (especially the willingness to pay debts), a “peace establishment” (that is, a reformed militia), and a “pacific and friendly disposition” among the people for each other. The materials of these pillars are enlightened minds and manners—”above all” the religious spirit that teaches us of “human depravity” and its malign effects on government, thereby adjuring citizens to restrain themselves and maintain a spirited vigilance toward their governors.

The fabric upheld by these pillars consists of independence and national character. Washington balances the ends of foreign and domestic policy, denigrating neither at the expense of the other. He can do this because he conceives of America’s revolution as the first practical, political step toward achieving not only the purpose of Americans but the purpose of mankind. He expresses two hopes for the future: First, he hopes that “that period is not very remote, when the benefits of a liberal, and free commerce will, pretty generally, succeed to the devastations and horrors of war.” But commerce alone will not suffice. He also hopes that human beings “will not continue slaves in one part of the glove, when they can become freemen in another.” Commerce or consent-based economics, and republicanism or the content-based politics of representative government, together can bring genuine peace to the human race.

There are dangers. Washington imagines no inevitable progress; the project can derail. Commerce and industry generate more wealth than all the gold and silver mines of Spain, he writes, and “in modern wars the longest purse must chiefly determine the event.” Yet commerce can also bring greed, and the destruction of that modest degree of military spirit needed to defend its very wealth; greed can also bring union-threatening faction.

On the problem of faction, Washington deferred to the brilliantly-conceived remedies described by his friend and collaborator, James Madison, in the tenth Federalist. On the military spirit, he spoke for himself. “If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.” He thus connects military strength, which requires financial sacrifices, with the prosperity that only peace can secure. That this is a verbal not an institutional solution, that it depends for its success on enlightened statesmen to enunciate it and enlightened citizens to heed it, suggests is perpetual precariousness. Were it not precarious, spiritedness and statesmanship could be rendered obsolete, and men something like Washington could retire forever behind the neatly clipped hedges of administration.

Washington saw no prospect of such retirement. “It is to be regretted, I confess, that Democratical States must always feel before they can see: it is this that makes their governments slow, but the people will be right in the last.” Republican government, taking human beings as it finds them, rechanneling their passions into juster courses without crushing human liberty, defending itself against tyrants without and would-be tyrants within, by means provided by this modestly improved human nature, sets humanity on a race between its demons and the better angels of our nature. By doing what it can to make the people feel so that they can see, republican statesmanship appeals to those better angels without forgetting the demons. Having succeeded in this statesmanship, Washington earned the right to view America’s prospects with measured optimism.

 

Thomas L. Pangle: The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, December 1988.

 

Americans’ very familiarity with the Declaration of Independence distances us from it. To us, sonorous phrases about the self-evident truths that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with such unalienable rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, seem statements of the obvious—common-sense arguments in support of independence from king and mother-country.

If we draw ourselves back, we can begin to see the strangeness of this. If you don’t want your tea taxed, or your liberties abridged, why bring philosophy into it? Why appeal to first principles in order to send Tories packing, and maybe attract the support of monarchists in France (who needed very little philosophic motivation to aid a rebellion in a rival empire)? What were the American Founders thinking?

Thomas L. Pangle, author of the most illuminating commentary on Montesquieu published in this century, comes to his study of the moral foundations of the American republic with a clear and profound understand of the philosophy of modern liberalism—not to be confused with the unpalatable hash of pop-psych feel-goodism that passes for liberalism today. More, he sees how this philosophy has worked itself out in America, how it lives in our lives now. “The culture of the modern West is, in large measure, the result of theory and theorizing.” And the modern West itself takes its guidance from the kinds of political institutions first established by the American founders—some of whom saw “the philosophic roots and the distant goals of the new political culture being generated.” Philosophy, then, “is embedded in the very soil of the modern liberal republic.”

Most scholars who look at the American regime see that philosophy matters in it, but fail to appreciate the way it matters. They try to explain the founding in terms of the tradition of constitutionalism, or the forces of economics, or even the classical republicanism of antiquity. Pangle examines these explanations, redeeming some insights of reach, finding none entirely sufficient. The Founders’ republicanism, indeed constitutional and commercial, and alive to the need for the stern virtues exemplified by the citizens of republican Rome, nonetheless does not fit traditionalist, economic-deterministic, or classical paradigms. When the Founders wrote of a new secular order, they meant it, and were right to say it.

In their writings, the Founders “tend to treat virtue… as an important instrument for security or ease, liberty, self-government, and fame.” Busy productiveness, not warlike ambition or theological disputation, will characterize Americans. Our form of moderation more successfully opposes fanaticism than it disciplines self-indulgence. Our form of liberty serves individual, private interests first, the public interest through them; thus America liberty must end in the abolition of slavery, whereas Spartan and Roman liberty depended upon its perpetuation.

Those victory-loving souls among us will seek fame more than they seek the sometimes dangerous independence of virtue. The emphasis on privacy and sociality, not politics, requires a regime based upon economic and political consent—that is, commercial republicanism. To the Founders, ‘rational’ means reasonable in much he same sense we mean it today: avoiding passionate extremes, respecting the rule of law out of self-interest, and associating self-interest with a regime founded on the sovereignty of the people, governed by their elected representatives—that is, democratic republicanism.

Many of these principles resemble those of the English political philosopher, John Locke. Parts of the Declaration parallel sentences from his Essay Concerning Civil Government, although the Constitution amounts to a considerable improvement over the institutions Locke proposed. Pangle devotes over half the book to Locke’s conception of human nature.

Locke takes pains to emphasize the reasonable side of Christianity, emphasizing Nature’s God, from whom reliable rules of everyday conduct can be said to emanate. That ‘God helps those who help themselves’—in free commerce and in self-government—epitomizes Lockean folk-wisdom. Even in education, Locke promotes a decent, self-respecting sociality: “Children should not be made mere slaves to opinion, or taught to be concerned with good reputation among all sorts of people. They should be taught to respect calm, reasonable, and deliberate opinion.”

Pangle observes that Locke downplays the two ‘extremist’ elements of the human soul: spiritedness and love. This leads to a problem. Being a philosopher, Locke himself needed the spiritedness to stand firm against popular opinion ‘in his own mind’ if not openly; as a philosopher, he uncompromisingly loved wisdom. “One cannot help but feel that Locke has mysteriously left out of his account of human action his own action as a philosopher.” The emphasis on ‘getting on and getting along’ makes Lockean man, praised and damned for his individualism, not quite individual enough for real independence.

Hence the persistence into our time of the old traditions: strong, Biblically-based religion and, occasionally, courageous “republican statesmanship and citizenship.” Unmoderated by Lockean common sense, these might veer into fanaticism. Uninformed by them, however, Lockean common sense cannot defend itself against modern tyranny, tellingly called by Mussolini ‘totalitarianism,’ that new fanaticism designed to conquer the commercial republics.

In order to defend republican government and the advantages it gives us, we must understand the spirit of modern republicanism and the institutions it animates. Pangle’s contribution to republican self-understanding will endure as a tribute to real liberalism. Whether even this best form of modern liberalism adequately explains men who mutually pledged to each other their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, and whether these men themselves would have found Pangle’s account accurate, will remain the most serious point of contention between Pangle and his thoughtful critics.