J. E. Parsons, Jr.: Essays in Political Philosophy. Preface by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. Washington: University Press of America, 1982.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Vol. 13, No. 2, May 1985.
A bland, unspecific title covers a well-focused yet wide-ranging set of essays on the problem of modern liberalism. Parsons sees that liberalism both tends toward and is threatened by historicism. He suspects Mill has this tendency and he identifies Dewey as a victim of it. Nine chapters contain interpretations of writings by eight political thinkers; the final chapter contains a discussion of liberalism’s severest problem, belief as reflected by the problem of consent. As Mansfield writes in the book’s informative preface, all the chapters “take their bearings from the author’s reflection on liberalism.”
The first two chapters concern a pair of thoughtful statesmen who advanced liberalism in Britain. A ‘modern’ “regarded as a prime mover and shaper” of the 1688 settlement, Lord Halifax espoused a restrained Machiavellianism. An “ancient in temperament and philosophy” who espoused Epicureanism, Sir William Temple shared Halifax’s preference for mixed regimes over monarchies. Both men also shared an interest in diluting the religious passions that wracked the England of their time. In practice, ‘the battle of the books’ featured some soldiers on opposite sides who nonetheless collaborated for the sake of civil peace.
The next two chapters concern La Rochefoucauld and Hobbes—not an ancient and a modern but two moderns apparently separated by another divide, the one between France and England. La Rochefoucauld views human nature with “Christian (even Augustinian) ‘pessimism’ while espousing a tamed Machiavellianism similar to Halifax’s. But his modernity bears some resemblance to Temple’s Epicureanism: “[H]is evident partiality to private virtues exceeds his concern for public ones. In this sense he is a liberal, a lover of privacy.” Hobbes, who viewed human nature ‘pessimistically’ if not religiously, by using a doctrine of political sovereignty to attack the religiously based sovereignty of ecclesiastics.
John Locke is perhaps the first liberal political philosopher easily recognizable as such today. Parsons devotes his two central chapters to Locke’s teachings. He shows the importance of economics to Locke, “who attempts to exorcise the still lingering phantom of theology in economic matters” and, one is tempted to say, in almost everything else. “[C]ivil society must provide for the institutionalization of the right to property in such a way as to make nature, not theological teachings, the guide to survival.” But nature guides Lockean men only so long as it takes to overthrow religion. Civil rights in the civil society replace the natural rights of the state of nature. Locke confesses that nature has little intrinsic value, that human desire imposes value and human labor realizes that value. “Locke’s homo faber does not seem to be indebted to any other power but the strength of his mind and the force of his labor.” As Parsons observes, Locke follows Spinoza. Locke believes reason “an adding, subtracting and calculating faculty… the organization of consciousness, as consciousness is but the organization of sense experience.” This “nominalist reductionism” yields “relativism as to ultimate truth” leaving a doctrine whereby only materialism can be certain.
Obviously, thoroughgoing materialism rules out any epistemology but empiricism, and Parsons next turns to Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. “The rational principle subsisting in things is more probably the product of generation than the cause itself of things being generated.” The telling phrase, “more probably,” suggests that radical empiricism yields skepticism. But empiricism always aims doubt more toward ideals than toward itself. Indeed, “the Humean deity tends to resemble Hume as he wished to think of himself”—no skepticism there. Still, materialism exacts its price. Hume believes that instinct is more powerful than reason even in the philosopher. The Humean god cannot be thought thinking itself but only sense sensing itself. The ‘conservative’ Hume contributes to liberalism’s anti-religious enterprise even as he calls into question liberalism’s own rationale.
Mill and Dewey the subjects of the next two chapters, both attempt to rescue the liberal regime by recasting that rationale. According to Mill, industrial society moves toward stability, liberating citizens “for moral and intellectual productiveness”—”not an abatement of competition but the transference of competition to a higher social and perhaps moral plane.” He turns Hume’s skepticism on relativism itself. But he cannot entirely overcome relativism. Mill insists on “the ultimacy of truth, but not on its completeness or transcendence.” Dewey espouses a full-bodied historicism. He believes all human thought “provisional or circumstantial,” all ideas “plans of action.” He replaces liberalism with a centralized democratism or socialism dedicated to that vague notion, growth. But even growth is mere hypothesis: “postulating hypothetical values, none of which is choiceworthy in any definitive sense, can only lead to an infinite regression in regard to the choiceworthiness of any one of them. The fact of this infinite regression precludes the possibility of rational decision.” What Parson is describing in Dewey is a historicism in which there is no ‘end of History,’ no conclusion to the ongoing historical process. This puts the leaves the very notion of progress in doubt; the impasse of earlier liberalism oriented by natural right returns in the newer liberalism oriented by historical right.
The very rationale of modern science, the ‘conquest of nature,’ becomes questionable in the writings of the philosopher who praises science as unreservedly as any philosopher of modernity. Modern liberalism ends in, of all things, faith. The “attempt to rationalize matters which are not amenable to rationalization” yields “irrationalism.” Nietzsche awaits.
Given all this, why obey the demi-authorities of the liberal order? Liberals find it difficult to say. In his final chapter Parsons offers “reasons for civil obedience.” Distinguishing moral, civil, and political obligation as pertaining to family, non-constitutional law and legal procedures, and constitutional law, respectively, Parsons recalls liberalism’s sturdy political root; Americans could justify refusing political obedience only if “the American government could no longer protect most citizens by transforming their right of self-defense into public security.” Liberty should therefore be “understood as forbearance, not as license,” and freedom should be understood as “the search for excellence.” But if in modernity the “measure of differentiation” among men has “tended to be” wealth, not virtue, freedom understood as the search for excellence points beyond modern liberalism as understood by almost all of its proponents. Mill without historicism begins to resemble a student of Aristotle.
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