[Note: Since the content of this posting is lengthy,
I have decided to post it over two posting spaces, today’s and that of March
15, 2016.]
I have made the claim
that our nation’s political culture has evolved in many of its elements, but
particularly in terms of its dominant perspective. The first pervading view was present during
the earliest days of the colonial period and, I would argue, held on to that
position until the end of World War II.
That view I have called traditional federalism and my sense of that view
is based on the writings of such constitutional scholars as Daniel Elazar and
Donald Lutz. While I believe this
prominence was true, I am not blind to the influence of other traditions. One such tradition is that of the natural
rights perspective. I have argued that
that tradition can first be detected during the years between the writing of
the Declaration of Independence and
the writing of the US Constitution
and its ratification process.
As with any mental
construct, elements of it were around ever since organized governance took
hold. Since it is a set of ideas that
emphasizes the rights of the individual, I’m sure that anyone who lived under
any level of oppression, from time to time, would feel that there was something
wrong with how he or she was situated.
The Great Courses program (produced by The Teaching Company) has a good
survey course on the history of how liberty has been defined through the
centuries. That history begins with the
Athenians and the Battle of Marathon.[1] But in the modern sense, those ideas that
make up what we today consider the natural rights version of freedom, rights,
and liberty can be traced to the theoretical work of the British philosopher,
John Locke. Published in 1690, his Second Treatise on Civil Government is
the work most credited with launching this theoretical radicalism. As I indicated in the last posting, those who
picked up on Lockean ideas were anointed as radicals and I’m certain that those
classes of people who were threatened by these ideas considered the upstarts as
radicals.
Mostly, the focus of
Locke’s disdain was aimed to those traditional groups who had been favored by
the old feudal order and were, by the late 1600s, trying to hang on to their
privileges. The upcoming eighteenth
century would prove disastrous to these people.
Across the channel, the French Revolution would strike a very poignant
exclamation point on this turn during the later years of the 1700s. In Britain, there had already been a king
decapitated, a republican overthrow of the monarchy, a reestablishment of a
monarchy but under a regime of political reforms (in 1688 King James II was ousted
in favor of William and Mary during what came to be known as the Glorious
Revolution). With this turmoil, the
class that supported the old regime was feeling the heat and its privileges
came under stronger attack. John Locke
wrote in the midst of these tumultuous times.
Let us consider what he contributed.
This review is
undertaken with a particular aim. I want
to look at the question of how influential Locke was on the development of our
constitution. As I indicated in my last
posting, the level of influence by Locke is a debatable topic among
constitutional scholars. One such
scholar, Isaac Kramnick, argues that early in the 1600s, American thought was
heavily influenced by the republican tradition and its ideals. These ideals included active citizenship and
were deeply rooted in the values of the classical world and the Renaissance or
what I would consider those ideals which were related to federalist
values. But the relevant point here is
that Kramnick claims that that influence had run its course by the later years
of the century when our Revolution and the writing of the Constitution took place. In
its place, he further claims, the ideas of Locke took more and more prominence
in the thinking of our founding generation. I somewhat disagree; yes, there was some
shifting toward more commercially and self-interest biases which are among the
core values of the natural right perspective, but the conscience of Americans
and much of their behavior would be very much couched with a republican,
federalist cast. Here is how even
Kramnick describes this earlier thinking:
[The
more traditional view is in] part Aristotle, part Cicero, and part Machiavelli [republican
arguments], civic humanism conceives of man as a political being whose
realization of self occurs only through participation in public life, through
active citizenship in a republic. The
virtuous man is concerned primarily with the public good, res publica, or commonweal, not with private or selfish ends.[2]
A distinction needs to
be made here; I am not saying that espousing federalist/republican values means
a person will act accordingly. We can
all attest to behaving in ways that we, on reflection, judge less than
ideal. While espoused theory has a
strong influence on behavior, I have written in this blog about the gap we all
have experienced between our espoused theories and our theories-in-use.[3] I have referred to this gap as
“sinning.” What I seriously would say is
that acting in opposition to one’s espoused theory would cause a level of shame
or guilt. So while a person might pursue
plans to advance one’s self-interest at the expense of the common good, a federalist
would feel shame or guilt; a modern advocate of natural rights would probably
not feel any shame or guilt.
But in those days of
our early republic, even those who were attracted to the natural rights ideas
of Locke were, at least to some meaningful degree, concerned with the common
good. Why? Because Locke’s ideas of the late 1600s are
not what the natural rights view is today.
Unlike how I have described the natural rights construct – as a moral
position in which the trump value is liberty and its position bolsters the
self-definition of values and behavior – the initial version of it was more
substantive when it came to moral values.
But now let’s see what
Kramnick has to offer concerning the newer Locke thinking and its moral suasion: he reports that the advocates of Lockean
ideas shared with federalists the belief that the corrupt man was the origin of
a corrupt system, a corrupt government.
But this is where, but for one exception, the similarities ended. While civic humanism (the federalist version)
castigated corruption in terms of self-interest and indifference to the public
good, the natural rights view centered its focus on the immoral characteristics
of laziness, parasitic behaviors, and dependency. Goodness for Locke’s disciples consisted of
productive behaviors, hard work, and generally advancing the general good by
advancing one’s self-interest (of course, within the confines of the law and
general moral precepts such as honesty).
But to understand the origins of the natural rights perspective, we need
to appreciate what was happening economically.
This shift took place
during very important economic changes in the eighteenth century. There was a growing tension or conflict of
interest going on. This can be detected
with our national debate concerning the Hamiltonian economic plans which
preoccupied the nation during the Washington administration. Our version of this conflict was somewhat
similar to what was happening in Britain where the interests of the “country”
faction – those interests of the challenged nobility – were doing battle with
the interests of the “town” faction – the business class. Here in the US, the fight was a bit
different. Here, there was not the
well-established “country” class of nobility.
Instead, we had the tension between the business interests of merchants
and then of industrialists against those of the farmer. But this reflected another significant
difference; both sides of the debate here were not idle and neither could be
described as defending inherited privilege.
The question here was more of how “big” the economic entities were to
be; would large commercial interests gobble up a more defensive rural class –
the yeoman farmer of Jefferson’s concern?
Both sides of this politics were not idle; both sides lived out Locke’s
call for productive behavior. So in
either case, and this accounts for the change in basic thinking between the
onset of the Revolution and the writing of the Constitution, there was a definite shifting away from the thinking
of the Patriots, the Whigs, the Commonwealthmen,[4]
to that of a natural rights posture among many Americans. But like any cultural movements, especially
before the advent of mass media and other electronic communications, the shift
was slow.
-
I N T E R M I S S I O N -
[1] Fears, J. R.
(lecturer) (2001). A
history of freedom, transcript.
Chantilly, VA: The Teaching
Company.
[2] Kramnick,
I. (1992). John Locke and liberal
constitutionalism. In K. L. Hall (Ed.)
Major problems in American constitutional history, Volume I: The colonial era through reconstruction (pp.
97-114). Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company. Quotation on p. 98.
[3] See Argyris, C. and Schon, D. A. (1985). Evaluating
theories in action. In W. G. Bennis, K. D. Benne, and R. Chin (Eds.), The planning of change, Fourth edition,
(pp. 108-117). New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. This is what I have written about Argyris and Schon’s
article: For a long time, I have been somewhat aware of
this distinction between what is espoused and what is done, but it wasn't until
graduate school that this duality became clear.
In an interesting article by Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schon, the
authors present a model for organizational planning and action. In the model, they distinguish between
“espoused theory” and “theory-in-use.”
Espoused theory corresponds, more or less, with what I have named domain
of the ideal – those values and goals we hold as preferable not at the moment
of action but prior to actual implementation of those values and goals. Theory-in-use is the dominant beliefs we hold
when it comes time to act. For example,
let us say an organization decides to perform an activity that will be held
with some disfavor by the pupil, client, or customer population the
organization serves. Those promoting the
activity believe that in the long run this action will be best for their charges
despite the short term annoyance or even hatred it will engender. The staff commits to it and each person knows
that there will be a negative response.
They might even begin their efforts in a way that is congruent with the
plan, but as the predicted negative response increases, they cave and revert to
the previous courses of action.
[4] Terms
prevalent during the Revolution days to describe those who argued for
federalist ideals and how the British power holders were corrupt in relation to
those ideals. See Wood, G. S. (1998). The creation of the American republic
1776-1787. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
