This is a response to three papers presented at the Southwestern Political Science Convention, New Orleans, Louisiana, March 30, 2002.
The papers were:
Lee Ward: “Thomas Jefferson on Natural Rights and Empire.”
J. David Alvis: “A Plan for Reform: Herbert Croly’s Critique of American Democracy.”
Patrick J. Bernardo: “Ortega y Gasset on Rights and Self-Government.”
The papers before us raise the question of the American regime in the twenty-first century, although none of them concerns a thinker of this century.
The American Founders claim that popular self-government best secures our natural rights. Like Great Britain, America too will be an empire, but one of unprecedented character. This will be an empire of liberty, a place to which men and women will want to immigrate, and never again need to exercise their natural right of emigration. That is the original “promise of American life.”
In so claiming and so promising, the Founders follow Locke in two ways. They are ‘individualists’ in the sense that life, liberty, and property are rights held by individuals. But almost to a man, and also following Locke, the Founders regarded human nature as social. Even in the state of nature, human beings live in families. This natural fact encompasses a moral fact. Jefferson, for example, calls “the natural sense of justice” or “sense of right and wrong” “as much a part of [our] nature” as the senses of hearing, seeing, feeling. Dismissing the spiritual claims of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson lauds his moral claims, which contradict the claims of the form of modern individualism stemming from Machiavelli, an individualism tout court which leaves no place for genuine sociality or morality, and therefore with no real place for natural rights.
The natural sense of justice makes popular self-government possible; reason alone would never suffice to rule l’homme moyen sensuel. This natural sense cuts through the conventional claims of aristocrats and monarchs, enabling the people to see and feel their way to self-government.
In addition, this new kind of empire can flourish because the principle of representation extends popular self-government across big places. As Jefferson writes, “No constitution was ever before so well-calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.” With such institutional backing, and with the kind of commercial ties commended by Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu, human sociality makes ‘friendship’ among self-governing regions possible; it makes a non-bureaucratic political whole possible, countering the centrifugal human passions sufficiently to allow reason to rule where it would otherwise be too weak.
The natural rights of social animals must differ fundamentally from the natural rights of solitary animals. Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau all deny the sociality of human nature. The Founders depart from their fellow moderns in this. They reconcile individuality and sociality by first seeing that life, liberty, and property are always someones; there can be no life of a community without the lives of the individuals who compose it. Liberty and property, indispensable to life, similarly require individual fulfillment. However, the Founders also see that individuals must defend themselves together; this takes more than calculated contractarianism, although it does take that. The calculating contractarian rescues no one from burning buildings, nor does he give up his life for his friend—much less for his political friend, his fellow citizen, that intimate stranger.
Whatever else they were, the Founders were hardly Croly’s naïve “pioneer democrats.” The Progressives offered a new promise of American life. Seeing the old one broken, injured by artificial persons called ‘corporations’—unnatural bodies—they turn not only from America’s constitutional foundation but from its natural-rights foundation. They turn instead to the subspecies of utilitarianism called ‘pragmatism’ (Croly) or to instantiated ‘idealism’ (Wilson), or to their unholy and unstable combination, dialectical materialism (Lenin). All these progressivisms endorse forms of the ‘leadership principle,’ a principle admitted by the Founders only in military affairs. Croly’s elevation of ‘History’ over natural right and his consequent replacement of statesmanship with leadership is really neither Hamiltonian nor Jeffersonian, with respect to ‘means’ or ‘ends.’ Eschewing an account of natural rights republicanism, Croly instead tells a story, a tale of American political and social development.
But absent natural right, why are the economic and social inequalities the progressives deplore wrong? Why should democracy preserve itself, with or without expert ‘leaders’? Does Croly’s misconception of American liberty as “individual self-determination” not simply find a loud echo in the progressives own grander, collectivized triumphalism? Croly’s historicist vitalism, issuing in his call for “a continual process of internal reformation” —what Trotsky later and more forcefully calls permanent revolution—animates much of twentieth-century collectivism, but in this Croly speaks past the American Founders, not to them. As a historicist, he must.
Croly replies to this ‘why’ question by saying that “the democratic scheme of moral values” is a “religion” of “loving-kindness” (albeit one with technical-administrative efficiency), preparing the American landscape for “the crowning work of some democratic Saint Francis.” “Democracy,” he contends, “cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility.” Actually, the Founders had rather thoroughly disentangled their democratic republicanism from any such aspiration. Croly takes Jefferson’s Jesus and brings His millenarianism back, this time without a God to back it up. It is the failure of the progressivist promise in all its forms, its lack of sustainable religiosity and statist loving-kindness—the compassion of the cold monster—that brings us to Ortega’s version of the ‘last man.’
Ortega cites Nietzsche, Hegel, and Comte, but not Tocqueville. Yet his problem is the Tocqueville problem. Democracy, a social condition of long gestation, has been born and it is growing. It releases immense energy, “a fabulous increase of vital possibilities,” strength not decadence. But so far it is rather too much like a college sophomore—long on potential, short on actualization. It doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. It’s all revved up with no place to go.
Progressivism is not vital but fatal, Ortega argues, because at bottom it is fatalistic. “We are not launched into existence like shot from a gun.” Our potential can issue either in liberty or in the worst despotism, as Tocqueville foresaw and Ortega sees before his eyes. Our democrats begin to care only for anesthetics and motor-cars. With the new tyrannies, “there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions,” under “the right not to be reasonable.” Genuine liberalism requires the nobility of the aristocrats that democracy inundates. “The great sin of those who directed the nineteenth century” was their “lack of recognition of their responsibilities”—their failure, I should say, to heed Tocqueville. Oddly, Ortega fails to see the threat to philosophy in all this, but he sees the threat to liberty clearly enough. “Modern technicism springs from the union of capitalism and experimental science,” and both capitalists and scientists are mass-men, ignorant of the whole, hermetic and self-satisfied individuals who do not understand the conditions of their own ways of life. Unlike Tocqueville, however, Ortega calls not for an inspiriting recognition of “the natural greatness of man” but for popular recognition of human limitedness.
Unfortunately, like so many European writers, Ortega has only the weakest understanding of America, which he dismisses as “the paradise of the masses.” “America has not yet suffered; it is an illusion to think that it can possess the virtues of command.” Had Ortega never heard of the American Civil War, of Lincoln? He does see that the bourgeoisie can fight, which is the beginning of wisdom in such matters.
On the theoretical level, we need an account of natural right understood as characteristic of a social and political animal. I say “natural” because Kant’s categorical imperative doesn’t work, being too deeply embedded in the Rousseauian wing of the Machiavellian fortress. Specifically, what does it mean to wed Lockean natural rights to sociality and not only to political institutions but to politics as a way of life?
On the practical level, we need a constructive reply to Croly and his allies. The Progressives saw clearly that the American regime faced the challenges of ever-increasing scale and complexity. They failed to show that the American regime as designed by the Founders and amended in the wake of the Civil War could not meet those challenges, but no one has shown that it can, either. The mixture of the original design and the progressives’ design that prevails today has met with challenges from a position more radically to the ‘Left’ than anything the old progressives intended, and the result has been a hash.
In 1650, Europe, having embarked on the nation-state system, the system of the Peace of Westphalia, could consider fundamental political-philosophic alternatives when understanding that system. One was that of Hobbes’s Leviathan, that vast blueprint for the modern state, home of the mass-man. The other was Grotius’ The Laws of War and Peace, which looks at exactly the same political phenomena through neo-Aristotelian eyes. Europe chose the systematic Machiavellianism of Leviathan. Americans may still have the other choice available to them, the choice of self-government. But we will need to start using the old political science of Aristotle and the new political science of the Founders and of Tocqueville if we are to make that choice in the real world, and keep ‘the promise of American life.’
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