The Conservative Sensibility Read online

  As evidence of this, Coolidge cited Virginia’s Declaration of Rights which George Mason presented to that state’s general assembly on May 27, 1776: “All men are created equally free and independent.”4 Coolidge could also have cited Alexander Hamilton’s anonymous 1775 pamphlet “The Farmer Refuted,” in which Hamilton rejected the “absurd and impious doctrine” that he ascribed to Thomas Hobbes, the idea that all moral obligation “is derived from the introduction of civil society; and there is no virtue, but what is purely artificial, the mere contrivance of politicians, for the maintenance of social intercourse.” Against this, Hamilton argued that humanity is endowed with “rational faculties” to discern the natural rights necessary for “preserving and beatifying” existence. Even in the state of nature no one “had any moral power to deprive another of” those rights. So, “the origin of all civil government, justly established, must be a voluntary compact, between the rulers and the ruled; and must be liable to such limitations, as are necessary for the security of the absolute rights of the latter.”5

  As further evidence that the Declaration’s truths were “in the very air” of eighteenth-century America, Coolidge could have cited the slave petition for freedom submitted to the Massachusetts legislature on January 13, 1777, which read: “The petition of A Great Number of Blackes detained in a State of slavery in the Bowels of a free & Christian Country Humbly shuwith that your Petitioners apprehend that thay have in Common with all other men a Natural and Unaliable Right to that freedom which the Grat Parent of the Unavers hath Bestowed equalley on all menkind and which they have Never forfuted by any Compact or agreement whatever.…”6 Coolidge could have cited the 1778 Essex Result, a set of town resolutions intended to influence the drafting of the Massachusetts constitution: “All men are born equally free. The rights they possess at their births are equal, and of the same kind.” The Result continued that some resolutions affirm “the true principles of government.” They affirmed that “reason” and “the experience of all ages” confirm that “the benefits resulting to individuals from a free government, conduce much more to their happiness, than the retaining of all their natural rights in a state of nature.” Because “much happiness cannot be enjoyed” in a state of nature, men enter into political society to “remove the inconveniences” of that state.7 The mild word “inconveniences” signals a Lockean belief in some inherent sociability: Because of man’s natural reason and sociability, life in the state of nature is not, as Hobbes said, characterized solely by “continual fear and danger of violent death” and therefore departing this state by entering political society is not so urgently necessary that it justifies a sweeping sacrifice of rights that are natural and pre-exist government.8 The limited curtailment of some rights is justified in order to rectify those aspects of life that are inconvenient. The convention that between September 1, 1779, and March 2, 1780, wrote the constitution for “the State of Massachusetts Bay” declared in its preamble that the purpose of government is “to secure the existence of the body-politic; to protect it; and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying, in safety and tranquility, their natural rights, and the blessings of life.”9

  This vocabulary of natural rights was, in part, a response to Americans’ physical situation. In a 1670 sermon, a Massachusetts cleric spoke of the Puritans having undertaken an “errand into the wilderness.”10 In the next century’s imperial crisis, the idea of Americans as intrepid tamers of a wilderness was drained of its theological content and filled with political gunpowder. By 1770, more and more Americans were arguing that their rights derived not from the common law of placid, settled England but rather were natural rights that existed in the essentially pre-political conditions of the American wilderness. So, when John Adams asked, “how do we New Englandmen derive our laws?” he answered, “not from Parliament, not from common law, but from the law of nature” in an America that was “not a conquered but a discovered country.” America “was not granted of the king by his grace, but was dearly, very dearly earned by the planters, in the labor, blood, and treasure which they expended to subdue it by cultivation.”11 Americans had not brought their rights with them by ship from England. Rather, they had, as it were, found them in the wilderness.

  This, then, is the full importance of Adams’ famous formulation in his August 24, 1815, letter to Thomas Jefferson, with whom he was by then reconciled. Circumstances—the physical setting—had decisively conditioned the minds of Americans: “What do we mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.”12 The Revolution was also, however, a consequence of intellectual waves radiating from two English philosophers.

  Hobbes is usually quoted as declaring that in the state of nature life is “nasty, brutish and short,” but his description actually begins with two other adjectives: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”13 The first adjective is crucial. Because individuals in the state of nature are solitary, they are vulnerable to the force of everyone else situated in similar insecurity. Locke, however, postulated that individuals in the state of nature are not so solitary. Rather, they have a certain natural sociability. What Locke surmised, many modern biologists, anthropologists, and sociologists believe they have confirmed. They think they have identified natural inclinations for fairness, understood as reciprocity, and for duty. For Locke, this propensity for sociability meant that people did not need to cede so much of their natural freedom to a sovereign power. Mankind’s rudimentary sociability is not sufficient to obviate the need for a government to maintain order and administer justice. There is, however, enough natural sociability to limit the amount of power that must be entrusted to government. Lockean government must mediate and ameliorate, but unlike Hobbesian government, it need not dominate. So, the germ of the idea of limited government is in Locke’s tempering of Hobbes’ insistence on the “solitary” condition of the individual in the state of nature.

  Hobbes thought that the great and universal motivator for human action was fear—of insecurity and especially of violent death. Locke thought the universal incentive was happiness: Ancient philosophers “did in vain enquire, whether Summum bonum consisted in Riches, or bodily Delights, or Virtue or Contemplation.” This inquiry was as futile as arguing about whether “the best Relish were to be found in Apples, Plumbs or Nuts.” “Cheese or lobsters” are “delicious” to some but “to others extremely nauseous and offensive.” It depends, Locke said, on the “particular Palate.” So Hobbes and Locke differed—but not about the important point, which is that there is no single Summum bonum. There are as many as there are palates. It is a matter of taste. This is, in two senses, the beginning of the political philosophy of modernity, the dawn of the modern enterprise. The challenge of modernity is to argue that a broad spectrum of tastes exists, and many tastes should be accommodated, even though not all tastes are equally admirable or socially beneficial. Regarding the ultimate good, Locke said “men may chuse different things, and yet all chuse right.” This proposition was the point of embarkation for what would become what now is called classical liberalism.14

  Locke put Western political philosophy on a path toward pluralism, toward accommodating the variety of goods that people pursue as they define for themselves the worthy life. Hobbes, however, began a wonderful benefaction for humanity—the great demotion of politics from an activity invested with semi-sacerdotal grandeur to something matter-of-factly utilitarian: Government exists to keep the peace so that people can get on with their private lives in a zone of personal sovereignty protected by government. And before Hobbes wrote, Niccolò Machiavelli disturbed the Western mind as an early and vivid example of modern masterless man, obedient to no god and only to rules he wrote. But as has been well said, Machiavelli is no more “the father of power politics” than William
Harvey was “the father of the circulation of the blood.”15 With astonishing matter-of-factness, Machiavelli said that vice is needed in politics if virtue is to stand a chance. And the purpose of politics is not to make men virtuous, but to make the state (he more than anyone else gave this word currency) safe. In him was the embryo of modern politics, the individualism of self-interested strivers: every man a prince.

  The fact of human diversity—of different ways of life both arising from, and producing, varieties of human characters—is not a discovery of modern anthropology, or even of pre-modern travels and explorations. The ancient political philosophers grounded their thinking in the observable fact that politics has the highest possible stakes precisely because different polities’ laws and practices are conducive to different human characteristics. But this in no way contradicted their confidence in a constant human nature. Rather, it was by reflection about this constancy, and about human flourishing as the achievement of human nature’s highest potentialities, that they reasoned to conclusions about the nature of the best regime. The early modern philosophers whose thinking gave rise to liberal government—rights-based limited regimes—discerned unity beneath diversity in this way: Reason is often the servant of the passions, which are universal; the principal passion is the desire for security from violent death; when this security is achieved, political reasoning advances to the achievement of higher goals important for human flourishing.

  In the imagined state of nature, human beings are, Locke said, of the same “species and rank” and have “all the same advantages of nature,” meaning the same “faculties,” and therefore should “be equal one amongst another without subordination.” Elsewhere, in his Conduct of the Understanding, Locke acknowledged that there is “great variety in men’s understandings” and “amongst men of equal education there is great inequality of parts.” This inequality arises from the fact that as regards understanding, “there is a greater distance between some men and others…than between some men and some beasts.” All persons have the “seeds” of rationality, but many are “of low and mean education” and are never mentally elevated “above the spade and the plow.” So, “[i]n his own subdued way, Locke is as much of an ‘elitist’ as Plato or Aristotle.” But his way was subdued because it allowed for education to enable everyone to reach the threshold of rationality requisite for participation as equals in society’s governance.16

  Jefferson thought that the average American of his time had reached that threshold. He acknowledged that his object in writing the Declaration of Independence was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.” James Parton, described by historian Gordon Wood as “America’s first professional biographer,” wrote in 1874: “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.”17

  Politics originates in nature, in the constancy of human nature, which impels people to associate in society to avoid violent death and other inconveniences, and then to gain other, positive advantages. If, however, there is no universal human nature, there can be no universal principles of political organization and action. If what we call human nature is but the distillation of a particular people’s traditions and experiences, then nature, at bottom, has no bottom. It is merely the most durable aspect of something that is ultimately not durable—the sediment of history from transitory cultures. If so, this deals a devastating blow against America’s distinctive patriotism, which is inextricably linked to belief in the universality of certain self-evident truths, including the “proposition” to which the nation is “dedicated,” that all are created equal in their possession of certain inalienable rights. The case for limited government is grounded in the empirical evidence that human beings have something in common—human nature—but are nevertheless incorrigibly different in capacities and aspirations. From this it follows, not logically but practically, that government cannot hope to provide happiness to all. Rather, the most it can reasonably expect to provide are the conditions under which happiness, as each defines it, can be pursued, as each is equipped, by nature or nurture, to do.

  Individuals do not inherently possess rights in the empirically demonstrable way that they possess appendixes. But the concept of rights has come to be considered necessary for the moral vocabulary used in reasoning about the political demands of human dignity. The concept of rights does not require us to begin our political reasoning with a concept of the solitary individual shorn of all culturally acquired attributes. Rather, individuals’ natural rights are standards by which the conventions of a political culture are judged: Are the conventions suitable for creatures of our nature? Do the conventions facilitate human flourishing? All human beings are partially shaped by, they are even somewhat composed of, complicated social factors. The words “partially” and “somewhat” contain modernity’s dissent from the ancients’ conception of politics.

  The ancients’ conception, most powerfully presented in Plato’s Republic, was of the community as an all-enveloping, unending school for affirming, and instructing citizens in, a particular understanding of the worthy life. For the ancients, politics was a homogenizing process for a closed society. For moderns, politics is the art of accommodating differences in societies open to disagreements about the proper ends of a worthy life. For the ancients, life in the polity was an encompassing determinant of moral outlook. For moderns, life in society requires rights against the polity, rights that protect a zone of individual sovereignty in which the inherent dignity of the individual is expressed in the free exercise of agency. These rights include the right of voluntary membership in the non-state institutions of civil society. Each of us is, as Hegel said, “a child of his time,” but none of us is, or at least none of us needs to be, only this.18 Each of us is a child of our parents, but as every parent learns, every child is much more than the sum of the parenting he or she experiences.

  Man, said Hamilton, is endowed “with rational faculties, by the help of which, to discern and pursue such things, as were consistent with his duty and interest, and invested him with an inviolable right to personal liberty, and personal safety.” Because “in a state of nature, no man had any moral power to deprive another of his life, limbs, property or liberty,” any justly established government “must be a voluntary compact, between the rulers and the ruled; and must be liable to such limitations, as are necessary for the security of the absolute rights of the latter.” Said Hamilton, “Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice.”19

  When Hamilton said of the Constitution (in Federalist 84), “Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing,” he was echoing what James Wilson said at the Constitutional Convention, that the document did not invent any new rights.20 The Founders were not disciples of Hobbes, who depicted the state of nature as anarchic and barbaric because there were, he insisted, no rights antecedent to government, and there was no morality antecedent to civil society, that cannot exist antecedent to government. The American Founding is unintelligible other than as a decisive rejection of Hobbes’ doctrine. A limited government—a government whose powers are limited because they are enumerated—presupposes a reservoir of rights that pre-exist government. And Thomas Paine’s axiom that “society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness” assumes, as Locke did with his more benign view of the state of nature, that some sociability and arrangements of cooperation precede government.21

  Theories of natural law explain the necessary and sufficient elements of individual flourishing and of communities conducive to social fulfillment. Because the idea of natural law is about what constitutes worthy living for beings of our nature, natural law is inextricably connected to the idea of a constant and knowable human n
ature. The problem for natural law theorists is to square that idea with the fact that people—including honorable, intelligent, and educated people of good will—differ about what constitutes human flourishing.

  We are individual animals with passions and appetites, over the promptings of which we are only intermittently and imperfectly sovereign. If, or when, reason is, as David Hume said, “the slave of the passions,” then we, too, are slaves, lacking the dignity of beings capable of meaningful ethical behavior.22 Reason is not always autonomous; it is sometimes subservient to our animal imperatives. But reason must be capable of autonomy, even if only imperfectly and intermittently. If reason cannot be, in this sense, free, then our choices cannot be products of reflection, and the idea of an ethical life is meaningless. When, before Hume, Hobbes said that our “thoughts” serve our “desires” as “scouts and spies” that “range abroad” to “find the way to the things desired,” he, like Hume, made problematic the idea of a human capacity for real agency. The concept of natural law attempts to solve this problem.23