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.
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