For more than a century, what’s called ‘liberalism’ in the United States consists of an overlay of ‘German’ or historicist ideas on a natural-rights constitutionalism. Contemporary American liberalism is a theoretical and rhetorical justification of the regime of commercial republicanism, with a substantial, Bismarck-style ‘welfare state’ added. In theory usually and in practice almost always, this liberalism combines two elements. First, there is a respect for such core principles as the equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—which, in the original formulation, are held to be principles held to be universally valid, independent of political or social conventions. Second, there is a congruent set of political and social conventions (“inventions of prudence”), designed to secure the enjoyment of those principles in practice. These conventional agreements typically include the rule of law, culminating in a written constitution; a political economy regulated but not dictated by the national government; and a federal government characterized by the separation and balance of powers. American liberalism esteems self-government—government by consent understood as reasoned assent. The institutions this liberalism favors recognizes the sovereignty of the people, not the sovereignty of government.

More pertinently for present purposes, American liberalism asserts in its fundamental law certain civil rights intended to parallel and secure natural rights. The civil rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, ranging from freedom of religion to federalism, give practicable legal form to universally valid but perpetually vulnerable natural rights.

American liberalism has been complicated if not rendered incoherent by an overlay of ‘German’ thought. The Hegelian concept of a ‘recognition’-driven historical dialectic—whether based upon class, race, or some other ‘identity’—exists in tension with natural right. German idealism goes beyond the prudential securing of natural rights, conceiving of political ideas as objects of achievement and construction. This constructivism lends itself to social activities defined as movements and to an ‘activist’ and bureaucratic government. In politics ‘from below’ and politics ‘from above,’ self-determination replaces self-government, very often replacing such moral and civic virtues as prudence and moderation with individual and group self-assertion. Utilitarianism, pragmatism, ‘class analysis’ forms of socialism, and nationalism number among these auto-determinist ideologies. All of them have influenced contemporary liberalism in complex ways.

This later form of liberalism may sharpen the tensions between ruler and ruled. American bureaucracy or ‘corporate liberalism’ has an ambivalent effect on citizens and liberal institutions. Statism or quasi-statism in a liberal setting very often secures rights but does so at the expense of the vigorous citizen participation genuine self-government requires. Statism threatens to make popular sovereignty very attenuated in practice, as acknowledged by many prominent historians and social scientists, including Daniel Rodgers, Robert H. Wiebe, David Plotke, Stephen Skowronek, and Samuel Huntington.   Hegelianized liberalism runs up against the Hobbesian paradox: really to secure equality, do we not need one ruler—or perhaps a well-trained few—to make the rest of us civilly and economically equal, and to keep us that way? If so, how secure are we against that one, or those few rulers? Can the Crolyean promise be kept? Can (faux-)Hamiltonian/ ‘monarchist’/neo-Hegelian means really secure ‘Jeffersonian’/popular/democratic/’Whiggish’ ends? And how will such ends transform commercial republicanism, if rights are reconceived as founded upon ‘History’ instead of nature?

 

Martin Luther King

King avails himself of many of he principles and practices of American liberalism. However, his thought changes its emphasis during the course of his career, in part responding to changing circumstances. In the 1950s he spoke and acted as if he expected his movement to bring the South to racial justice ‘Whiggishly,’ by bringing local citizens to solve local problems. By the early 1960s, he turned to the federal government and the nation at large (through skilled use of the news media) in order to force reforms upon white Southerners. (In this, he recapitulates the movement of American politics generally from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.) By the end of the decade, King sounded much more like a radical than a liberal, although it is fair to say that he never sounds illiberal, dictatorial.

Several of King’s major initiatives in the South had a distinctly liberal, even Whiggish, flavor. He demanded voting rights for blacks in order to get rid of the need for statist protection (TOH 198). After winning those rights, he spearheaded a voter registration drive (Garrow, 303). The Southern Christian Leadership Conference-sponsored citizenship schools (Garrow, 309) featured not only the political equivalent of ‘assertiveness training’ but self-criticism by blacks of habits unconducive to freedom (STF 173); self-criticism, insofar as it isn’t the phony, ultimately statist sort practiced in Maoist China, goes well beyond ‘German’ autodeterminism to the original idea of self-government. King engaged in forthright partisanship in defense of civil rights (TOH 303) and in coalition-building with other interest groups (e.g., “If the Negro Wins, Labor Wins,” TOH). His critique of the Vietnam War as a statist act of violence (TOH 233) belongs to the Whig tradition, as inflected by King’s own combination of Christian and Gandhian pacifism.

King repeatedly cites the Declaration of Independence (although he mistakenly supposed that Jefferson mean ‘all white men are created equal’ (WDWGFH 77). Not to be judged by the color one’s skin but by the content of one’s character is of course an excellent restatement of the core Jeffersonian thought. Against race prejudice, King cites Jefferson (and, behind Jefferson, Algernon Sidney) in declaring eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man: This means that prejudice interferes not only with the self-government of blacks but that of whites, as well (STL 11; TMOM 35).

In his much-neglected “An Appeal to the President of the United States for National Rededication to the Principles of the Emancipation Proclamation and for an Executive Order Prohibiting Segregation in the United States of America” (May 17, 1962), King cites the American liberal principle of equality before the law, connecting the current civil rights struggle to the principles of the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration, now to be more fully brought into practice—”a democratic heritage so painfully won” (MLKT 294). “Enforced segregation is but a new form of slavery—an enslavement of the human spirit and dignity rather than of the body”(MLKT 296). By the mid-1960s, however, King’s understanding of the Constitution is decidedly not Jeffersonian but Crolyean; he advocates use of the supreme law of the land and due process clauses to break state laws on segregation. In this document also holds up the example of Woodrow Wilson—a Crolyesque move, to be sure—as an example of presidential leadership (MLKT. 311-312).

This notwithstanding, King does not directly endorse ‘German’ liberalism in principle. Famously, in the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” King presents an old-fashioned American liberal account of the distinction between conventional and natural law. Conventional law is unjust if “not rooted in eternal law and natural law” (WWCW 82). Nonviolent resistance against an unjust conventional al asserts the Thomistic and Lockean right to revolution; King may very well have known that some writers link Whiggism to Thomism. Also in the Letter, King cities the liberal principle of toleration: “Unity has never meant uniformity. If it had, it would not have been possible for such dedicated democrats as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, a radical such as Thomas Paine and an autocrat such as Alexander Hamilton to lead a unified American Revolution”(WWCW 133). that is, in his most famous call for a kind of revolutionary and civil war on behalf of American liberal principles, King eschews political sectarianism and vanguardism, and ignores the historicism or ‘progressivism’ of ‘German’ liberalism.

It is in the means King advocates for fighting this war that he adds something new—although not necessarily something contradictory to—the American political repertoire. Nonviolent coercion is “a weapon unique in history”; “a sword that heals” (WWCW 26). This is in part the theme of Christian warfare—bringing not peace but the sword (STF 32, 67). But he adapts it for specific political purposes as well as spiritual ones. Nonviolent coercion requires a tough mind and a tender heart—the wisdom of serpents and the innocence of doves (STL 1). It is a politically savvy expression of agapic love, the love of redemptive goodwill that is neither erotic nor philiac/affectionate. The significance of nonviolent coercion in America is twofold. It is a means of asserting the right to revolution without the anachronistic means of an armed militia movement, or the self-destructive means of rioting, ‘urban guerrilla’ action, and so on. It is also, perhaps more importantly, potentially a way of solving the core problem of rights-based government, a problem no ethnic group has as much reason to see clearly as African-Americans. How to reconcile the protection of rights with the need for consent” If ‘consent’ means reasonable assent, there is no problem, in theory. But what if the majority of the people are unreasonable, prejudiced? Or what if they are reasonable, but do not assent to the protection of minority rights because they reasonably calculate that such assent might tear the society apart? This problem has been with us since the Founding. Nonviolent coercion depends upon mass support but not majority support. A program of nonviolent coercion can be well designed to swing majority support in its direction. Can nonviolent coercion be the practicable ‘missing link’ between secure enjoyment of rights and the need for majority consent?

King’s political Christianity is decisively influenced by the thought of Gandhi. Although much ink has been expended in showing the influence of Christianity (specifically, Quakerism) on Gandhi’s thought, such exercises are ethnocentric; Gandhi has had far more influence on Christianity than Christianity had on Gandhi. King’s theme of “soul force” overpowering physical force, thanks to “the ultimate morality of the universe” which, in the end, rewards righteous action (TOH 257), comes right out of Gandhian Hinduism.

This is where things get interesting. The theme of the progressive ‘ensoulment’ of the world is of course not only a Gandhian theme but a theme of German philosophy, of idealism, as mentioned above. The bigoted Alabama sheriff “Bull” Connor “didn’t know history. He knew a kind of physics that didn’t relate to the transphyics that we knew about” (TOH 281). This is Gandhian. It is also transcendentalist, and thus a theme of American ‘Germanism’ starting at its source, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is likely that King came to German philosophy at Boston University, where he studied the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, qualified it with the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr (both profoundly influenced by German thought) and also encountered Hegel—whose dialectic is explained in precisely the terms that would galvanize King’s attention: the master-slave relationship—as well as Marxism and ‘personalism’ or Christian Kantianism (Garrow 64).

Thus, indirectly King does indeed strike many characteristic chords of ‘Germanism.’ He does so more insistently or at least more openly in his later career. The call for a “revolution in values,” rejecting orientation in terms of things and embracing orientation in terms of persons (TOH 241) is a Kantian motif. The emphasis on “psychological freedom” or noumenalism goes with that call, while the demand that “the Negro must rise up with an affirmation f his Olympian manhood” (TOH 246) more nearly resembles such later philosophers in the German tradition as Marx and Nietzsche. (But was Nietzsche an advocate of nonviolence? Consider Nietzsche’s Aphorism 284 in Human, All too Human, “The Wanderer and His Shadow”: “And perhaps there will come a great day on which a nation distinguished for wars and victories and for the highest development of military discipline and thinking, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices on behalf of these things, will cry of its own free will: ‘we shall shatter the sword’—and demolish its entire military machine down to its last foundations.”) King’s worries about technology—that our ends means have outrun our ends, that industrialism and automation are threats (TOH 211), are standard themes of German Romanticism, repackaged in King’s century by Heidegger. They are also quite Gandhian. In fact, the interplay between German philosophy and Hinduism dates at least to Schopenhauer’s The Fourfold Root and may be seen in Nietzsche, as well.

King consistently thinks in the ‘German’ terms of constructivist dialectic (as distinguished form the analytical dialectic of the Greeks). Nonviolent coercion for “social revolution” (Garrow 418) or “social transformation” (TOH 225), for “a change as far-reaching as the American revolution” in opposition to America’s “inner core of despotism” (TOC 17) seen in its persistent racism, depends upon a dialectic in action, a dialectic that exploits the ‘antithetic’ stupidity of a Bull Connor to achieve a desired ‘synthetic’ end. Further, the end itself will be a synthesis of capitalism and communism, the individual and society (TOH 251). This Hegelian constructivism parallels Gandhian/Hindu syncretism (as seen, for example, in King’s relaxed attitude toward Marxist allies, very much in accordance with Gandhi’s example).

Capitalism is materialistic and in King’s opinion tends toward atheism or the worship of the self (STF 25, STL 93). Communism is equally materialistic and atheistic, as well as relativist and tyrannical (STF 73-74). Their synthesis, seen in the social democracies of Scandinavia (Garrow 364), “a modified form of socialism” (STF. 382) enforcing “economic justice” (STF 367), is really a German-idealist ensoulment or progressivist spiritualization that subordinates material means for spiritual ends.

King thereby breaks with the older American liberalism, with its emphasis (seen in the tenth Federalist, in Jefferson’s writings, and elsewhere) on the broad definition of property advanced by Locke: property not only as external possessions but natural faculties. This is the core of self-government in Locke, and King is right to suspect it of materialism; Locke’s emphasis on human property clearly undermines tradition, theistic ideas of the world and indeed of the human mind itself, as rightfully the property of the Creator-God.

King’s revolution would both fulfill American liberalism, the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation, but ‘synthesize’ them into what he conceives as a much grander vision. Pacifism, for example, goes beyond the principles of the Declaration, as King says (STF 18). The only just war is nonviolent coercion. This war must be America’s firstly genuinely civil war, fought within civil society with ‘civil’ or nonviolent methods. It is, however, to be supplemented by the genuinely civil methods of public argument and political organizing. King opposed Jim Bevel’s unrealistic ambition of using nonviolent coercion to overthrow Alabama Governor George C. Wallace (Garrow Ch. 6). “Direct action is not a substitute for work in the courts and the halls of government” (WWBW 42). Nonviolent coercion is indeed coercive, and can too easily comport with decidedly uncivil discourse. Dr. King was an eminently prudent man. He made errors, but never descended to crankishness. Although theoretically problematic, King’s appropriations of disparate and even contradictory ideas were often fruitful in practice. He is easily the most politically successful American pacifist, and one of the most successful American social activists.

At the end of his career, King was increasingly radical, and quite isolated from the Progressive/New Deal type of liberalism seen in the Johnson Administration. Had he been granted a full lifespan, it is impossible to say where he would have taken his thought and his movement. It is reasonable to think that the American Left has missed him—a real link to a genuinely heroic past, and a real link to American religiosity.

 

Malcolm X

Malcolm X’s political thought is a moving target. An autodidact, but much smarter than most, his thought was still maturing when he was murdered. His father was a Garveyite, and Garveyism has a somewhat attenuated but still discernible connection to American liberalism; with its doctrines of self-help and race-consciousness, it might be described as an African-American Whiggism. The Whig theme of anti-statism sounds early in the Autobiography: “If ever a state social agency destroyed a family, it destroyed ours…. [T]hey looked at us as numbers and not as human beings.” (A 22)  This succinctly expresses opposition to a neo-Hobbesian strategy of equality through atomization, and might easily be quoted in a polemic by some latter-day Jeffersonian ‘conservative.’ The Garveyite advocacy of business ownership by blacks, for blacks, echoes the Whig esteem for the self-sufficient farmer (A 275). Malcolm X’s advice to foreign countries sounds much like some of Jefferson’s strictures on the menace posed by British international bankers: “Don’t escape from European colonialism only to become even more enslaved by deceitful, ‘friendly’ American dollarism” (MXS 77).

Malcolm X also has a strong notion of self-government, not merely self-determination. His account of the Nation of Islam’s way of curing men of heroin addiction well exemplifies this (A 260-261). An Islamic man must engage in “no lying or stealing, and no insubordination to civil authority, except on the grounds of religious obligation” (A 221); this is, if anything, more ‘conservative’ than Whiggism. Strict moral self-government translates into political self-government: “Whenever any group can vote in a bloc, and decide the outcome of elections, and it fails to do this, then that group is politically sick” (A 314)—no conflict with liberalism there. His advocacy, at some points, of black separation, as distinguished from the dominance-game of segregation and the hypocrisy of integration, mirrors Jeffersonianism exactly (a 246).

Overall, however, Malcolm X is a firmly anti-liberal thinker. M. S. Handler, author of the introduction to the Autobiography, calls him “a born aristocrat” (A ix), and truer words were never written. If there ever was a man of thumos in American public life, it was Malcolm X. He hadn’t a democratic bone in his body, and this traits remains constant throughout the course of many changes in his life. “I love too much to do battle,” he admits, rightly (A 205). And in a humorous moment: “I do believe that I might have made a good lawyer” (A 205)—lawyers being an aristocratic exception to American democracy, in Tocqueville’s just aperçu. Only a fool would deny that Malcolm X would have made a very good lawyer, indeed.

“More wives would keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men” (A 92). “All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak; they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength” (A 93). Islam endorses, but does not bring him, this thumotic and masculine insight (A 226).

On the streets, “Red” followed a kind of aristocrat’s code. “For a hustler, in our sidewalk jungle, ‘face’ and ‘honor’ were important” (A 127). He lived and thought “like a predatory animal” (A 134)—more lion than fox, but not devoid of the fox. “Deep down, I actually believed that after living as humanly as possible, one should die violently” (A 138)—precisely the choice of the warrior-aristocrat, Achilles. (And, given Malcolm X’s wide reading, I should not be surprised if he knew that.) In prison, where he read Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—critics of ‘Lockean liberalism,’ all—his nickname was “Satan,” a being of pure thumoerotic ‘negativity.’

His conversion to the Nation of Islam simply reversed the direction of these passions. Instead of demonizing himself, he demonized whites (A 163). Satan means ‘enemy’: “Our enemy is the white man” (A 257). At this stage he proposed a sort of revolutionary Mackinderism, or race-based Marxism: Whites are a minority, worldwide, and the Nation of Islam minority within the U. S. minority community could ignite a worldwide revolution (MXS 46; see also A 275). In describing Nation of Islam’s ‘Prophet’ Elijah Muhammad’s hypocrisy, he writes, “I could conceive death. I couldn’t conceive betrayal.” (A 305) Loyalty is the eroticism of the man of thumos.

The turn to a more traditional Islam seen in his trip to Mecca rechanneled his thumos yet again, although this time it also moderated it. Islam is the most thumotic of the Bible-based religions, exalting the warrior simply, and not only the ‘warrior of the spirit.’ “All honoring the same God Allah, all in turn giving equal honor to each other” (A 323, emphasis added). This is a step toward democracy, but it is a democracy couched in ‘aristocratic’ terms—pure ‘recognition,’ with no admixture of ‘bourgeois’ easygoingness. If racism is “psychological castration,” Islam re-masculinizes the world, bringing absolute loyalty and fraternity. It is therefore “the one religion that erases fromits society the race problem” (A 340). This re-masculinizing of the world opposes something fundamental in liberalism, the Lockean strand of which nearly begins with a critique of Filmer’s patriarchalism and, by implication, the patriarchy of the Biblical God. “Human rights!” he exclaims indignantly. “Respect as human beings! That’s what America’s black masses want.” (A 272). Could this dismissal of human rights, coupled with a pure ‘politics of recognition,’ ever be genuinely democratic? Is traditional Islam, with its sha’ria, likely to be democratized, commercialized, or republicanized?

After the widening and deepening of his Islamic faith diluted his racism, Malcolm X “was no less angry than I had been, but at the same time the true brotherhood I had seen in the Holy World had influenced me to recognize that anger can blind human vision” (A 375). I can make no confident guess about the possible fate of this extraordinary man, had he lived. I am willing to bet he would not be chairing Americans for Democratic Actions, People for the American Way, or some other progressive-liberal body. He surely would have attempted to channel the anger of young black men away from crime, drugs, and other means of self-destruction, aspects of life he knew firsthand far better than King did.

 

Concluding Brief Comparison

For most of his career, King publicly stayed within the confines of American liberalism, as it existed in his time. He harbored—perhaps since his graduate student days, perhaps later—radical misgivings about that liberalism, particularly with respect to its commercial character. As long as he did not put his misgivings front-and-center, his movement made remarkable progress, although it is not certain that it could have gone much farther. Would he have been able to think of a way out of the tension between statist liberalism and Whiggish (and Gandhian) localism and self-government generally? It is more likely that he would have become a revered elder statesman of the Left, unable to find a practical counter to the increasingly ‘Rightward’ tendency of the American population at large during the two decades after his murder. He would not have endorsed the violence of the Black Power movement, and in fact condemned it as late as 1967: “The weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man” (WDWGFH 52). Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is no substitute for the Bible; “violence will not work” for American blacks (WDWGFH 56).

For much of his career, Malcolm X claimed that violence could work for American blacks, if in conjunction with a worldwide revolution of peoples of color. This strikes me as even less likely than King’s democratic socialism. Unlike King, Malcolm X could point to no concrete achievements other than the strengthening of the Nation of Islam and, at the end, the founding of his own breakaway sect. With maturing judgment, he might have been able to build a new organization, linking it with Islamic groups in other countries. The future of Islam in the United States will be fascinating to watch: How will it interact with commercial republicanism? Malcolm X might have played a major role in that collision.

 

Works Cited

Garrow, David J.: Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986.

A: Malcolm X (with Alex Haley): The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

MLKT: Cain, Alfred E., ed.: A Martin Luther King Treasury. Yonkers: Educational Heritage, Inc., 1964.

MXS: George Breitman, ed.: Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1966.

STF: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Stride Toward Freedom. New York: Ballantine Books, 1961 [1958].

STL: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Strength to Love. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

TMOM: King, Jr., Martin Luther: The Measure of Man. Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1968.

TOC: King, Jr., Martin Luther: The Trumpet of Conscience. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

TOH: Washington, James Melvin, ed.: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writing of Martin Luther King. San Francisco, HarperCollins, 1986.

WDWGFH: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Where Do We Go From Here? New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

WWCW: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Why We Can’t Wait. New York: New American Library, 1964.

 

 

 

Abraham Lincoln: “Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society.” Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859. Speeches and Writings 1859-1865. New York: The Library of America, 1989.

 

The audience at the agricultural fair sponsored by the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society probably did not expect that their invited speaker would address them not only on the cultivation of the soil but the cultivation of the human mind and heart. Readers today might be equally surprised. They know Lincoln’s great themes of political union and human liberty, without suspecting his prowess as what we might now call a ‘culture warrior.’

He begins not with culture but with institutions. Agricultural fairs “are becoming an institution of the country,” and “useful” ones. The Declaration of Independence identifies governmental institutions as means of securing natural rights. Agricultural fairs are institutions that address the distinction drawn a century later by Carl Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy. But while Schmitt valorizes the distinction, making it central to his conception of political life, Lincoln aims to ameliorate it, on the eve of civil war in his country and with an eye toward peace among nations. Agricultural fairs are civil-social institutions that secure natural rights by doing what institutions do for any regime, channeling human thoughts and activities in directions that serve the purposes of the regime—here, a democratic and commercial republic.

“From the first appearance of man upon the earth, down to very recent times, the words ‘stranger’ and ‘enemy’ were quite or almost, synonymous.” Whether among individuals or nations, “it was deemed no offense, but even meritorious, to rob, and murder, and enslave strangers.” Tamed, the inclination nonetheless persists in the modern world, even among men of “the highest cultivation.” Social and political institutions serve as ‘pathways’ of authority, thoughts, and sentiments in any community; agricultural fairs advance “civilization” in the United States by “mak[ing] more pleasant, and more strong, and more durable, the bond of social and political union among us.” Quoting Alexander Pope, Lincoln identifies happiness as the “end and aim” of human being, human nature. Most immediately, happiness consists of pleasure, the pleasure of “recreation” marked by “virtue and advantage, and free from vice and disadvantage.” In this way they afford fellow-citizens pleasure without pain.

Agricultural fairs have as their “chief use” the improvement of work, not recreation: “the great calling of agriculture.” The pleasant sociality of recreation comes as a side-benefit of the serious sociality of work, “mak[ing] mutual exchange of agricultural discovery, information, and knowledge” general, no longer the preserve of one or few. In doing so, the fairs excite “emulation” not only for material rewards but “the pride and honor of success—of triumph, in some sort.” These institutions redirect ‘thumotic’ passions, especially the love of victory, away from war and toward peace and prosperity. In this, they are the social equivalent of the patent clause of the United States Constitution, which guarantees that the inventors who design the useful implements displayed at such fairs will be secure in their ‘intellectual property.’

Before elaborating on these themes, Lincoln needs to address the speaker’s perennial problem: Why should you listen to me? Why am I here before you, today? He assures them that he does not come bearing flatterery—something a likely presidential candidate might well be suspected of doing. Farmers “are neither better nor worse than other people,” although in the America of 1859 they are “more numerous than any other class,” and therefore much flattered by vote-seekers. He concedes that the most numerous class justly lays claim to being “the largest interest” of the many interests in the country, “that if there be inevitable conflict between that interest and any other, that other should yield.” The question of majority rule and natural right, the possibility of a tyrannical majority, had formed the centerpiece of Lincoln’s debates with Senator Stephen Douglas, only a year earlier. How will a majority that knows itself to be a majority in a democratic republic bring itself to self-restraint, to that degree of self-government which refrains from trampling the natural rights of minorities? That is as much a task of civilization as the sociality cultivated by agricultural fairs, and requires a similar disinclination to view others as strangers and enemies.

Lincoln doesn’t flatter himself, either, another thing politicians are wont to do; admittedly, he is “in no sort a farmer.” He will not pose as an expert. He comes as a fellow citizen, inviting farmers to think along with him, not as an authority claiming the right to tell them what to do. Neither ‘the many’ nor ‘the one’ rule without consideration for the other.

What he can offer, without arrogance or irrelevance on this occasion, in front of this audience, amounts to a general framework of how to think about agriculture. American farmer have a problem. Their acreage now yields much less produce than it did, quite recently. And even at its peak, crop yields were below the land’s potential. Farmers need to know how to reverse this. New techniques of working the soil, analysis of soils themselves, fertilizers, varieties of seed, meteorology: all these need investigation if farmers are to obtain more produce on their acreage. As the population increases, land prices will go up and there will be more mouths to feed. Without discoveries in agronomy, farmer will need to cultivate more land just when land becomes scarcer; moreover, larger farms will increase costs for maintaining property boundaries and for transporting equipment in the race against time that farming entails.

Only renewed economy of means toward the ends will meet the problem. Improved cultivation of the land thus requires a more “thorough cultivation of the farmer’s own mind” and heart. By doing “what he does well” a man feels proud; failure humiliates. “With the former, his heart in in his work, and he will do twice as much of it with less fatigue,” giving energy to his labor, whereas failure makes him look at his work with “disgust,” “imagin[ing] himself exceedingly tired.” Even as agricultural fairs give happiness in the form of pleasure, work well done gives happiness in the form of “satisfaction.” A satisfied mind and heart benefits the land that has rewarded the farmer’s economy—feeds back into it, as it were—by spurring him to protect and care for his land.

Agricultural fairs display new inventions. Lincoln invites the farmers to consider the steam-powered plough, which, if feasible, will “afford an advantage over plowing with animals.” Again he claims no expertise in the matter, instead inviting his audience to think with him about the technical problems that need to be overcome, including the size and weight of the machine, its fuel supply, and the supply of water needed to produce steam. He connects investigation into the feasibility of the steam plow to the honors bestowed at agricultural fairs: “Our thanks, and something more substantial than thanks”—namely, profit—”are due to every man engaged in the effort to produce a successful steam plow.” Even those who try and fail “will bring something to light, which, in the hands of others, will contribute to the final success.” Lincoln understands how scientific experimentation and discovery work.

The topic of thoughtful work provides Lincoln with an opening for addressing the fundamental moral and political issue facing Americans in 1859: free labor versus slavery. If farmers constitute the majority interest in the country, they will need to be persuaded that free labor is better than slave labor, that the kind of labor Wisconsin farmers do and use makes better sense than the kind of labor seen in, for example, South Carolina. “The world is now agreed that labor is the source from which human wants are mainly supplied,” not climate or soil. But what kind of labor? Some assume that capital is prior to labor, “that nobody labors, unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow, by the use of that capital, induces him to do it.” The only question then becomes, Which kind of labor is better, that provided by hired men who “work by their own consent,” or that provided by slaves, who work because compelled? Such thinkers also assume that once a laborer, always a laborer; that such a man’s condition “is as bad as, or worse than that of a slave.” Not only will the poor always be with us, but the same people will be poor, all of their lives. Named by South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond only a year earlier, this “‘mud-sill’ theory” of free labor conceived as wage slavery was held by both Southern plantation owners and and in a different way by Karl Marx, all contemporaries of Lincoln and his audience. Whether consisting of chattel slaves or wage slaves, for the plantation owners the “mud-sill” serves as the indispensable foundation of every social ‘house,’ and the house will be fatally ‘divided’ if that foundation crumbles. Marx thinks so, too, but looks forward to that crumbling, envisioning a new, egalitarian society in which there will be no such miserable foundation.

Others take the opposing view. Following John Locke, they hold labor as “prior to, and independent of, capital,” that “capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.” (Marx takes up this ‘labor theory of value,’ which is why he expects the oppressed working-class foundation of modern societies to hold firm while the oppressive social and economic structure above it collapses.) These thinkers point to the fact that most laborers are neither hire laborers nor hire themselves out. “Even in our slave States, except South Carolina, a majority of the whole people of all colors, are neither slaves nor masters” but men who work the land with their families. Lincoln does something both subtle and indispensable here; he associates white and black men as members of the majority, the rulers of the democratic republic. He well knows how virulently prejudiced many whites are, when it comes to blacks; Stephen Douglas had exploited these prejudices in their debates, race-baiting Lincoln’s supporters as “black Republicans,” to which taunt they raged back in self-defense, “White! White!” Just as Lincoln asked the majority class of farmers to think along with him to discover the first principles of agriculture, so he suggests that they and black farmers are together in the same class of industrious American workers.

The “mud-sill” theorists also err in assuming that hired laborers constitute a permanent class. On the contrary, “the prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Prudence and labor overcome poverty, so long as “the just and generous, and prosperous system” of liberty can defend itself against the unjust, ungenerous and impoverishing system of slave labor ruled by ‘the few.’

Here is where education returns, education reconceived for the new regime of democratic republicanism. Under the old oligarchic regimes, called aristocracies, educated persons “did not perform manual labor.” So long as education remained the province of the very few, this regime could survive, even prosper, at least for the benefit of the few. But Wisconsin numbers among the states arising from the old Northwest Territory. The Northwest Ordinance establishing that territory also established a system of public schools. Today, “especially in these free States, nearly all are educated.” This being so, the educated must work; if education were seen as part of an ‘aristocratic’ title to live off the work of others, the educated nation will starve. “Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil.”

How, then, “can labor and education be the most satisfactorily combined?” The “mud-sill” theory cannot help us, here, separating as it does the head form the hands. The free labor theory distinguishes the head from the hand, but notices that “the Author of man makes every individual with one head and one pair of hands, it was probably intended that heads and hands should cooperate as friends; and that that particular head, should direct and control that particular pair of hands,” directing them to feed the “particular mouth” in that particular head. To better effect this elementary, indeed alimentary, form of self-government, the head will need an education that “add[s] to its capacity for performing its charge”—the “universal education” provided in the Northwest Ordinance. Such education is the “natural companion” of free labor.

Having brought agriculture to intellectual and moral culture, Lincoln brings culture back to agriculture, observing that “no other human occupation opens so wide a field for the profitable and agreeable combination of labor with cultivated thought.” A mind “already trained to thought, in the country school, or higher school,” will find in agriculture “an exhaustless source of profitable enjoyment,” with “every blade of grass… a study” in botany, chemistry, and physics.

The thoroughness of “cultivated thought” directed at cultivating the soil and every useful species on it meets the needs of the regime of commercial republicanism. The more commercial republics there are (America’s old enemy, Great Britain, was transforming itself into one, during and after Lincoln’s lifetime), the less the world will be “inclined to wars,” and the “more devoted to the arts of peace, than heretofore.” This means that the world’s human population will “increase rapidly.” With population increase comes the need for better cultivation of the soil, inasmuch as land for agriculture may decrease as the human population increases, and must in any event produce more food. A prosperous nation in which free farmers remain the majority will never “be the victim of oppression in any of its forms”—”alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings [the financial oligarchs of banks and stock exchanges], and land-kings [the plantation oligarchs of the South].” Such a nation will preserve the moral and political habits needed to sustain a democratic and commercial republic.

In his exordium, Lincoln good-humoredly remarks that his audience may be eager to stop listening to Lincoln and listen instead to the award of prizes. He parts with advice on how to think about this new, more peaceful form of competition, the competition in producing things useful to the American regime. Winners should reflect that they may be losers next year, if they “relax in [their] exertion”; meanwhile, “the vanquished this year, may be victor the next, in spite of all competition.” The old maxim, “true and appropriate in all times and situations”—”And this, too, shall pass away“—chastens us “in the hour of pride” and “consol[es] in the depths of affliction.” It is a maxim good for  a way of life animated by liberty, economic and political. What need not pass away is the progress of “individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness” sustained “by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us,” and “the intellectual and moral world within us.” Like the Founders, Lincoln wants progress without being a ‘progressive.’ Progress will come not from some necessary unfolding of an Absolute Spirit, biological evolution, or class conflict, not from a supposed law of ‘History,’ but from the free, undetermined and intelligent labor of human beings living in regimes of liberty.

 

Judith N. Shklar: American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

 

Early modern political philosophers often avail themselves of ‘natural-rights’ theories, in part to counter ‘divine-right’ theories. Divine right was associated with two serious problems: despotism, Catholic and Protestant; bitter religious warfare, civil and international. With modern natural rights theories in hand, along with republican institutional proposals, philosophers such as Locke and Montesquieu sought to tame uncompromising passions and to channel human energies into the peaceful bays of commerce and civility.

This ’embourgeoisement’ of the world succeeded all too well, in the estimation of some later moderns. From the ‘Left’ came Rousseau’s strictures against this demi-citizen, demi-man, the bourgeois; from the ‘Right’ came Burke’s fulminations against sophisters, bankers, and atheists. A rich variety of Germans—Idealists, Hegelians, Marxists, Nietzscheans—sought to revive the spirited or ‘thumotic’ passions in modern man, much as, centuries earlier, Machiavelli had sought to re-masculinize a world made ‘effeminate’ by Christianity.

The American Founding displays a fascinating mixture of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘thumotic’ elements. This is modern natural right, all right: equality defined as the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness reminds one decidedly of Locke, as do many other phrases in the Declaration of Independence. However, the Declaration’s peroration invokes spiritedness, as the Signers mutually pledge to each other their lives, fortunes, and “sacred honor.” That has an aristocratic ring, not a bourgeois clatter. In its subsequent history, the regime the Founders founded has often deceived its more thumotic enemies—the war-horses of the Confederacy, the fascists and communists of the next century—who supposed that no commercial republic would stand and fight. This bourgeois regime cultivates some unbourgeois passions on the side, and did so, at least in its first century without the aid of the ‘Germans,’ and their thumotic critique of natural right.

Judith N. Shklar’s succinct and graceful essay well captures this dual character of American citizenship, although at the price of apparent theoretical confusion. [1] She explains American citizenship by turns in Hegelian and natural-rights terms, that is, in terms that are theoretically opposed. A Hegelian will explain citizenship as the outcome of a historical dialectic seen in the master-slave relationship; a natural-rights thinker will explain citizenship in terms of consent and contract founded on certain natural principles—i.e., principles discovered by unaided human reason, not by divine grace or by some illumination or ‘consciousness-raising’ experience issuing from concrete historical situations unavailable to previous thinkers.

To say this is not to claim that theoretical difficulties necessarily play out directly in practice. A theoretical error may not make a bad citizen. In fact, it better not: we all make so many of them. Publius’ argument in the tenth Federalist shows that even persons intent on being bad citizens can be governed with the help of well-designed institutions. Surely such a regime can survive well-intentioned mistakes of an ‘academic’ sort, as well. As in religion, so in theory, it often matters not if my neighbor believes in one god or twenty, so long as he neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. It is true that mistakes in political theory may result in practical catastrophe—as when John C. Calhoun asserts that the phrase “all men are created equal” is “a self-evident lie”—because while one may ‘bracket’ religion from politics it is hard to bracket a theory about politics from politics. But not all such errors are damaging.

Further, I am not at all sure that Shklar is mistaken. The theoretical contradiction or tension in her essay may be more apparent than real. She may deliberately set it in place. I shall leave the possibility open. In order to highlight both the tension and the question of its deliberateness, I shall pay some attention to the way Shklar unfolds her argument. Her essay seems to me very carefully crafted, deserving every benefit of the doubt when it comes to apparent contradictions.

 

Shklar on Natural Right

Slightly more than one-third of the way through her essay on American citizenship, Shklar for the first time explicitly mention the natural-rights foundation of American republicanism, enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. [1] Her earlier references to “the promise of equal political right contained in the Declaration of Independence” (13) to “an unacknowledged ideology of equal political rights” (28) are ambiguous and somewhat misleading. The Declaration does not mention equal political rights at all, much less promise them.

The only promise made in the Declaration occurs in the final paragraph. The representatives of the United States “pledge to each other”—not to the people they represent or to the “candid World” they address in the name of the people—”our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” for “the support of this Declaration.” This is not an egalitarian promise. Although “lives” and “fortunes” have an egalitarian sound—everyone has one of each—as noted above “sacred Honor” has a decidedly thumotic/spirited, even aristocratic ring. While Hegel may be right to think that everyone seeks ‘recognition,’ it is not to be supposed that every person holds honor sacred.

The Signers of the Declaration never conjoin the terms “equal” and “equality” with “political.” “Political” first comes to sight in the first sentence: “political bands… have connected” one people with another, Americans with English. It is in dissolving these bands that Americans assume “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” among the “Powers of the earth.” Equality exists by nature and by God, not necessarily by politics. Natural right and political arrangements are distinguishable.

The lapidary sentences immediately following reaffirm this. All men are created equal, that is, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. People constitute governments, engage in foundational political activity, in order to secure these unalienable or natural rights; unalienable rights are natural, and precisely because they exist not by grace of consent, assent, or politicking of any kind. Governments derive their just powers, those that secure natural rights, by consent. This can only mean that consent is not mere assent, but rather agreement consistent with unalienable rights—rational agreement, agreement that takes cognizance of the self-evident. [2]  To give an example from everyday life, if some fellow in a bar approaches a woman of republican virtue with the proposition, ‘I want to be your love-slave,’ she is entitled to remind him that his desire is inconsistent with rational or consensual behavior rightly understood. Consenting adults—at least in the chaste and sober language of the Declaration—do not attempt to contradict their very natures by attempting to alienate the unalienable. Such attempt are either slavish or tyrannical, minor or major variant of King George III and his “design to reduce [the People] under absolute Despotism.” Equal political or civil rights may or may not conduce to the security of equal natural or unalienable rights. The former must always be tested in the light of the latter, not confused with them. Such confusion (as in the contemporary phrase, ‘human rights’) may weaken the standard by making it contingent on consent or even mere assent.

Shklar’s initial imprecise phrasing directly bears on an important point concerning the structure of government, particularly republican government. Several of the charges on which the Americans indict their king (and, sotto voce, their parliament) refer to government by law and representative government: e.g., the attempt to get Americans to “relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature”; the calling together of legislative bodies “at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records”; the repeated dissolving of colonial legislature and foot-dragging on permitting their reelection; and, most famously, “imposing taxes on us without our Consent.” No taxation without direct (rather than ‘virtual’ representation)—indeed, representation itself—is not on the face of it a matter of equal political right. Representation requires the (usually temporary) elevation of certain citizens above others, in order to constitute a government. Representation does not necessarily proceed according to the principle, ‘one person, one vote,’ or even ‘one citizen, one vote.’ Even direct representation can be decidedly inegalitarian. Further, as an instrument of government, representation partakes of the inegalitarianism of all government, which involves telling people what to do. As Publius writes, “In administering 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” (The Federalist, No. 51). Republican or representative government is still government, even if government of, by, and for the people. Lincoln’s formulation is a touch vague with respect to which among the people will be doing the actual governing at any given time, although his actions as president, particularly as Commander in Chief, were anything but vague with respect to the perennial political question, ‘Who’s in charge, here?’ The Signers of the Declaration and the Framers of the Constitution are not at all vague on this point. Both documents clearly identify the governing actor: the Congress versus king and parliament in one instance, and the several branches of government in the other. Once you step out of the ‘state of nature,’ you’ve left behind the situation in which no one has the right to tell you what to do. It will be a rare, indeed hitherto uninvented, political constitution that somehow arranges for thoroughgoing political equality.

Shklar emphatically rights her careless phrasing, as noted above, and additionally makes a sound observation on the relation of natural rights theory to republican practice. “No historically significant form of government or of citizenship is in principle incompatible with the exclusion of large groups of people, but natural-rights theory makes it very difficult to find good reasons for excluding anyone from full citizenship in a modern regime” (37). She cautions that “only after long and painful struggles, the inherent logic of American representative democracy, based on political equality, did prevail” (38). It is important to see that by “political equality” she means, first and foremost, voting rights, which are civil and not natural rights, but are civil rights designed to secure natural rights. It is moreover eminently arguable that equal voting rights are extremely useful political security for equal natural rights. But not all equal political right are necessarily so conducive, as the tenth Federalist argues, with its well-known strictures on “pure democracy.”

In this matter Shklar echoes Abraham Lincoln. In the words of his friend and law partner, William Herndon, “Again he said and said often… that, though the Declaration of Independence at that time, 1858, was not just yet a practiced fact here in all circumstances, and yet that it was a grand truth set up as a standard, an ideal standard, it may be, but to be ever worked for, struggled for, and approached….” [3]  According to Herndon, Lincoln was thinking of slavery and its eventual abolition, which also serves as the centerpiece of Shklar’s essay, even more than the civil condition of women, manual workers, and foreign nationals. It is to Shklar’s rhetorical approach that I now turn, picking up her argument from the beginning.

Slavery, the Acid Test

Shklar considers a habitual but nonetheless pertinent complaint against the American Founders—that these apostles of natural equality tolerated slavery and a considerable degree of civic exclusion of persons not enslaved. She shows how and why that is and is not a just criticism. In her introduction she points to sociology, history, and law, not to natural right. In one sense this is appropriate and necessary: If natural right is distinct from civil right, then citizenship belongs in the realm not of nature but of “human events” (to use the Declaration’s phrase) and human consent. To be born within a given territory may or may not confer citizenship; obviously, this natural event acquires civil right or privilege only through human legislation. Slaves are born, but they are not born civilly free. Similarly, the right to keep the fruits of one’s labors, a natural right, may or may not enjoy civil protection. Shklar’s rhetoric proceeds effectively by citing, if not stirring, the thumotic or spirited passions; she speaks initially not of natural right but of “civic dignity” (3), the demand for respect—what Charles Taylor, following Hegel, calls “recognition.” Indeed, even her emphasis on “the promise of equal political rights” evokes the thumotic, as anyone who has witnessed the moral indignation of a child (‘But, you promised!) will attest. Consistent with her ‘thumotizing’ strategy, Shklar emphasizes social standing among the four meanings of citizenship (social standing, nationality/membership, participation, and “ideal republican citizenship” (3). She goes so far as to agree unqualifiedly with Aristotle that a change of regime changes you as a citizen without changing your nature, at least your physical nature; the same person could live through the Third, Fourth, and Fifth French republics, as well as the Vichy regime, with no physical change beyond the wear and tear of years (8). This claim overlooks the problem that a Jewish citizen of the Third Republic might not physically survive into the Fourth; regime changes can kill you. Thus in her introduction Shkalr abstracts from or downplays the natural consequences of politics. By so ‘abstracting,’ she wants to avoid another sort of abstraction the theoretical abstraction from the ‘historical,’ that is, from economic, social, and political conditions (see p. 9). American citizenship has changed since 1787, at least in the sense that a far wider portion of the population enjoys citizenship rights. Shklar wants to show how this happened, but she does not make her position clear at the beginning. It is not at first clear whether she means to argue that “democratic ideology”—which can exclude from citizenship as well as include—is somehow at tension with itself, that the Founders’ principles were therefore inadequate, or whether she simply means that there was a mismatch between theory and practice, that “a profoundly democratic society… was actively and purposely false to its own vaunted principles” (14).

Her first glance at this question is not encouraging. She claims that “the value of citizenship was derived primarily from its denial to slaves, to some white men, and to all women” (16, emphasis added). The most authoritative statement on the value of citizenship, the Declaration of Independence, disproves this. The value of citizenship was primarily derived from the assertion of self-evident natural rights, and secondarily from the denial of those rights by means of seriously compromising the civil rights of the American people as a whole, among whose numbers the freeborn white men who signed the Declaration were conspicuous examples. The Declaration makes no mention of slavery; as is well known, Jefferson wanted to charge the king with imposing the institution of chattel slavery on the colonies, but even his proposed language did not compare the conditions of slaves to the condition of subjects. This is not to deny that such comparisons were made—George Washington made one [4]—but it is to deny that the ‘negative’ derivation was primary.

“What gave citizenship as [social] standing its historical significance is not that it was denied for so long to so many, but that this exclusion occurred in a republic that was so overtly committed to political equality”—not exactly so, as discussed above—”and whose citizens believed that theirs was a free and fair society” (17)—again not so, else Lincoln would not have won the presidency, nor would anti-slavery arguments have gained sympathetic hearing from the beginning, as seen in the writings of Washington, Jefferson, and other prominent members of the founding generation. Nor would arguments for voting rights for manual workers, women, and freemen have obtained any purchase in the nineteenth century, had Americans who enjoyed full citizenship believed that theirs was a free and fair society, simply. Nor would slave manumission have occurred throughout the northern states. These objections notwithstanding, Shklar’s rhetorical approach has the great merit of bringing early Americans into the reader’s imagination as real men and women in real circumstances: “The word slavery used to express fears of oppression in a country where slaves were constantly before one’s eyes or at least are a living presence has a different meaning from its use as merely a figure of speech” (22-23)—as in the writings of many English Whigs.

Self-Government, Political and Economic

After the introduction, Shklar divides the remainder of the essay into two sections, “Voting” and “Earning.” That is, she discusses citizenship in the modern commercial republic first in accordance with its republicanism, then in accordance with its commercialism. (If you prefer ‘liberal democracy’ to ‘commercial republicanism,’ she may be said to discuss citizenship first in terms of democracy, then in terms of liberalism—the latter first in the older and then in the newer sense of the word.) She continues her ‘historicizing’ strategy at the beginning of “Voting,” where she claims that Americans fought hard to get the right to vote and then often failed to exercise that right because citizenship was a matter of social standing defined negatively as ‘I-am-not-a-slave.’ Once won, voting rights are not seen primarily as a positive means of asserting rights, she argues; consequently, the right often rests in peace, unexercised. This explanation depends upon her not-quite-just dismissal of Aristotelian citizenship (ruling and being ruled) as “citizenship for members of a master class” (29) or “participatory aristocracy” (30). In fact, Aristotle advocates the expansion of the middle class as ballast for the typical ancient regime of many poor and few rich. Her dismissal of citizenship as ruling and being ruled is also not quite just to the Americans. With her equation (following the formulation of a North Carolina judge) of U. S. citizenship law and English common law (33-34), she misses the interplay between representative government and popular sovereignty—the American equivalent of ruling and being ruled. As James Monroe, following Madison, discusses at length in his book The People the Sovereigns, the American regime is not constructed along any (ancient) Greek, Roman, or (modern) English or Dutch model. Only the people, not the government, are sovereign, constrained only by natural right—i.e., by their own nature, as distinct from their passions-of-the-moment. The people are self-governing, in the sense that they are sovereign. they rule directly when they vote, serve on juries, run a business or organize a labor union. They are in turn governed by their law-making, law-enforcing, law-applying representatives, who come from them and must abide by the same laws they, as governors, make, enforce, and interpret. If the people are sovereign, ultimately limited in their action only by natural right, and if human beings are free to act against natural right, this means that majority tyranny is a serious possibility, as the Founders, Lincoln, and Tocqueville all recognized. These statesmen also agreed on the basic features of the solution to this potential problem: republican institutions that work to slow down popular passions, refining and enlarging the public views; a complex civil society providing ‘mediating institutions’ between the individual citizens and the government; a virtuous citizenry. (This last item is prominent in the much-misrepresented Madison, whose ‘institutionalism’ is intended as an —auxiliary precaution. [5]  The Americans may be said to use non-Aristotelian means to achieve at least one Aristotelian end: moderation. They need such means because their circumstance differs from Aristotle’s. They live in a modern state, not an ancient polis.

It is now—not a moment too soon—that Shklar corrects her course and cites the American regime’s natural right foundations. She proceeds through a good account of voting rights as civil protectors of natural rights, although she occasionally slips and confuses the two. (For example, “It is only citizenship perceived as a natural right that bears a promise of equal political standing in a democracy” (57). Not exactly: it is the equal political standing in terms of voting rights that mightily helps to secure the natural rights that citizenship, membership in a civic order, is intended to secure.) Perhaps the polemical highlight of her account is her criticism of nineteenth-century feminists for abandoning natural rights arguments in favor of such “notably undemocratic paths to progress” as Social Darwinism, health and hygiene-oriented reform, and the Social Gospel (60-61). This “evolutionary historicism” (88), ‘Left’ or ‘Right,’ typically requires a revolutionary or at least evolutionary vanguard, supremely ambitious personalities who do not merely refine and enlarge the public views but redefine and transform them. Such individuals have tended to appeal not to prudential reason (how can we best secure natural rights?) but to the thumotic passions that the American constitution is designed to moderate.

In “Earning,” Shklar describes the way independent work has embodied a (tamed) spiritedness. This account, with its sharp refutation of Weber (91), deserves praise, although it should be noted that the Jacksonians were only elaborating the labor theory of value propounded much earlier by John Locke. [6]  She must mean that the work ethic was “forged” in practice in Jacksonian America (65). She also errs (again because she is thinking in sociological terms) in claiming that the economic portion of the public sphere, unlike the political portion, is “entirely unequal” (64). This is not even exactly true in terms of income levels; about two-thirds of American families fall into the ‘middle class’ range of household incomes, although the increases at the lower and upper ends of the income scale in the past fifty years are significant—especially the increases at the upper end. On the legal as distinguished from the socioeconomic level, the natural right to keep what you earn is in fact equally protected by civil laws, except of course that the incomes of the wealthy are taxed (with representation) at rates higher than others. (Lest one shed an idle tear for the wealthy, it may be noted that they also enjoy more exemptions and better accountants; more pertinently, they also enjoy more money at the end of the day.) This means that, overall, the American intention to break with European society, “for centuries separated into three orders: those who pray, those who fight, and those who labor” (69), has been largely successful in practice and in theory. America is successfully bourgeois. As always, practice doesn’t measure up to theory, but if Americans don’t always enjoy the economic independence of the Jeffersonian yeoman, they often act as if they do. Shklar’s proposed “right to work” not as a “primary human right” but as a civil right “derived from the requirements of local citizenship” (100)—defended on the grounds that one must earn in order to be a full citizen in terms of social standing—is an important attempt to re-yeomanize contemporary workers to the greatest extent possible. Like any such proposal, this one will be subject to the exigencies of politics, inasmuch as civil rights are alienable, tradeable, compromisable, and generally subject (as the Declaration states) to prudence, to be deliberated on by legislators, executives, judges, and other citizens.

The Ambiguity of Modern Liberal Theory

On the level of ‘pure’ political theory, modern liberalism often involves not-quite-plausible attempts to reconstruct natural right or, rather, to gain the benefits of natural right without actually endorsing it. These attempts often amount to elaborations of the Kantian project, exemplified recently in the writings of John Rawls. Rawls’s “original position” argument, which assumes that no one operating behind the “veil of ignorance” will have the guts to roll the dice and say, ‘Give me tyranny or give me slavery, because to my soul equality is worst of all,’ requires a rational will with no rational object or subject (older writers would say ‘soul,), and hence leaves itself vulnerable to Allan Bloom’s joke, that Rawls has given us a first philosophy for the Last Man. Shklar, no less liberal than Rawls, proceeds more concretely and probably more wisely, calling attention to the real conditions of citizenship and to the natural rights to be secured by citizens for themselves and for one another.

The difficulties with proceeding as Shklar does—perhaps for reasonable rhetorical purposes—have been canvassed. In sum, they involve a failure to recognize the subtlety of the interplay between theory and practice. Specifically, Shklar does not clearly account for the way in which practical reasoning or prudence must guard the discovery of theoretical reasoning, natural right. The Declaration states this matter explicitly and The Federalist shows the operation of prudential reasoning for that purpose on every page. Shklar often seems to assume that equal natural rights will best be guarded by equal civil rights, at least with respect to voting and earning. This comes, first, from her ‘Hegelian’ contention that recognition, rather than natural right, opens the door to understanding human equality and, second, from the (democratic, not Hegelian) corollary, that equal recognition, embodied in equal political rights, is the antidote for the tensions generated by unequal recognition. If it were true that equal natural rights are best guarded by equal civil rights, there could be no natural rights argument for civil inequality. But there is, and it is an argument concerning one of the most extreme cases of the denial of natural rights, slavery—the centerpiece of Shklar’s argument.

Jefferson often receives a polemical bruising over the apparent contradiction between slaveholding and natural equality. Jefferson himself was of course fully aware of the problem, and attempted to devise various schemes for slavery’s gradual abolition. This was not simply a matter of finding a practical formula; any practical formula also raised a serious theoretical issue. Government that guards natural rights is government by consent, that is, rational assent. Government by consent in practice entails popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty, while often consistent with consent, is not always consistent with consent; the majority may vote to oppress the minority in an exercise of passion or prejudice. Theoretically, there is no problem; a majority vote to violate the natural rights of the minority is not genuinely consensual, not consistent with the self-evidence of natural rights. But what if the majority vote to violate the natural rights of the minority does have a serious rational element? That is, what if the attempt to vindicate the natural rights of the minority would involve a serious threat to the natural rights of the majority?

This might seem impossible, but Jefferson did not think so. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson discusses a proposal for emancipating slaves born after a certain time, after they have reached their majority and have been educated at public expense. These young ex-slaves would be emancipated, but they would not be made citizens of Virginia; they would be sent out as colonists to settle elsewhere. “It will probably be asked,” Jefferson writes, “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State, and thus save the expense of supplying by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep-seated prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” [7]  Citizenship exists to secure natural rights. But if the expansion of citizenship is likely to endanger natural rights even more than the refusal of such expansion will do, citizenship should not be expanded. Such predictions are a matter of prudential judgment. (In fact, the emancipation of slaves did not lead to the extermination of any race in America, although deep-rooted prejudices of whites and bitter recollections by blacks have indeed divided us into parties and produced convulsions). Not only does natural equality not translate easily into civic equality in practice, as Shklar knows, but it need not invariably translate justly into civic equality, either. The quest for inclusion can run afoul of the quest for justice, although, as Shklar cautions, you need a very good argument to offer proof ‘how so.’ Such an argument requires practical reasoning and the test of experience, and will in the end be probabilistic not demonstrative, undogmatic not ‘thumotic.’ It is both the merit and the problem of liberalism that it tames but also democratizes the thumotic—a point, however, which takes us away from Shklar, toward Francis Fukuyama and Perry Anderson. The tension seen in Shklar’s argument instances the difficulties in attempting to synthesize the American Founders’ understanding of natural right with the Hegelian ‘politics of recognition.’

Conclusion

Liberalism is a species of political rationalism. Liberalism’s viability depends crucially upon the kind of reason that the rationalist employs when thinking about politics. Political rationalism can involve deductive/demonstrative reason, practical or prudential reason, dialectical reason, or all of these in a variety of combinations.

For example, Hobbesian political rationalism gives heavy emphasis to deductive/demonstrative reasoning, following from Hobbes famous ‘discover’ of Euclidean geometry in middle age. Hobbes uses demonstrative reasoning not only to establish the first principles of natural right but for constructive purposes. His monarch is a ‘first principle’ or ‘prince’ from whom all subsidiary powers are derived. Hegel and Marx, by contrast, emphasize the use of dialectical reasoning for purposes of political and social deconstruction and reconstruction. The result oddly resembles that of Hobbes, at least in the sense that the practical result of each theory has been monarchy.

The American Founders use demonstrative reason in order to establish the first principles and theoretical corollaries of natural right. John Marshall also uses it for legal purposes, to deduce implied powers from stated constitutional principles (McCullough v. Maryland). They use dialectical reasoning for its classical purpose of persuasion, but never in an attempt to establish ‘laws of history.’ (They do not even use the term ‘history’ to refer to what they call in the Declaration “the course of human events.) They use neither demonstrative nor dialectical reason primarily for the purpose of political construction or deliberation. For that, they use prudential reason.

It may be that Shklar, too, finally uses the dialectical reasoning of the Hegelian ‘politics of recognition’ for persuasive purposes. It may be that the foundation for her, too, is natural right and the prudential defense thereof. But this is not clear. The rhetorical advantage in not making it clear is to get a fair hearing for natural right from scholars who eschew it, to introduce what to them is a bitter food in a palatable, if mushy, mixture. The disadvantage is that she elides a serious schism in American political history and in political philosophy itself, a schism that confuses politicians and ordinary citizens to this day, and has civic consequences, immediate and potential.

On the one hand, Shklar’s tendency to conflate equal natural right and equal political right misapplies deductive reason to a practical problem. This is likely to lead to a doctrinaire approach to politics, and to a consequent disillusionment when recalcitrant reality fails to bend obediently to the results of the rational deduction. This, it seems to me, is most likely in Shklar’s approach to political economy, where any locally-enforced ‘right to work’ might tend to inhibit the social mobility needed in a large-scale commercial economy. If I have a civil right to a job in the town I live in, will not local labor surpluses be perpetuated, and the labor needs of other localities be starved thereby? Such prudential questions must be raised and answered before a new civil right is established. If not, economic dislocation and political frustration will likely result.

On the other hand, Shklar’s evocation of a democratized Hegelianism or ‘politics of recognition,’ with its use of dialectical reason for purposes of political construction, resembles, albeit in a very mild form, the moves made by well-known American progressives in the late nineteenth century, moves that issued in the characteristic political themes of the twentieth century: the call for ‘leadership,’ the denial that the Constitution provides an adequate framework for government in the modern world, the establishment of large bureaucracies on the state and national levels, and so on. These themes have had important civic consequences, particularly with respect to the matter of self-government in the sense of civic participation, as many writers ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have observed. It could not have been Shklar’s judgment to dig into these matters too deeply, in this brief essay. She is surely aware of them, which is why I’ve been so insistent in leaving open the possibility that she evokes the democratized version of Hegelian dialectic for reasons having to do with the original, persuasive, use of dialectic.

 

Endnotes

1. Judith N. Shklar: American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 13. All subsequent page references to the text.
2. For a fine use of the distinction between consent and assent, see the statement by the labor union leader, p. 21.
3. Emanuel Hertz, ed.: The Hidden Lincoln: From the Letters and Papers of William Herndon (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1940), p. 407.
4. On the Boston Tea Party, Washington wrote, “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” (Letter to Bryan Fairfax, August 24, 1774, in John C. Kirkpatrick, ed.: The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1931), Volume III, p. 242.
5. See James Monroe: The People the Sovereigns, Being a Comparison of the Government of the United States with Those of the Republics Which Have Existed Before, with the Causes of their Decadence and Fall (Cumberland: James River Press, 1987). See, for example, pages 5, 12-13, 31-36 (on the contrast with the first French Republic); 41-55 (on ancient Greek ‘city-states,’ generally); 68-69 (on modern Britain); 80-102 (ancient Athens). For Madison’s ‘comparative regime’ analysis, see The Federalist #63. For Madison on “auxiliary precautions,” see The Federalist #51.
6. See John Locke: An Essay Concerning the True Original, State, and End of Civil Government, sections 32-51.
7. Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia, Question XIII (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 131-132.