UNLOCKING LOCKE’S VIEW

 

This blog has often described the national disagreement between those who lean toward republican values and those who lean toward liberalist values.  And here begins a problem with language.  One might think, from these “titles” that republicanism refers to the beliefs of the Republican Party, and liberalism favors the Democratic Party. 

But as the terms are being used in this posting, and in the related literature, the opposite is true.  Here, liberalism does not refer to left-of-center political thought, but actually reflects the natural rights view.  And republicanism, of which federalism is one form, refers to communal biases as expressed by a representative governmental arrangement.  With that, this posting can report on a debate among scholars who study the history of American political thought.

And this debate centers on how at the time of the colonial years and through the beginning of the nation the Enlightenment affected American leaders and the constitutional model they hit upon to establish the nation’s governance.  Those who favor liberalism argue that the Enlightenment led the founders toward a polity that put in place the arguments of John Locke. 

Often cited is Thomas Jefferson’s phraseology of the rights of the individual:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

This mirrored, so the claim states, Locke’s natural rights of life, liberty, and property.  And for the bulk of the years this debate has been carried forth, those who favor liberalism cite this bias,[1] but roughly since 1960s, led by such historians as J. G. A. Pocock, that republican ideas were at least just as important as liberal ideas.[2] 

There are other scholars who support the republican bias, and this blogger leans toward the political scientist, Daniel J. Elazar, who this blog often cites for his contributions to explaining this history.[3]  Another historian this blog has cited is Gordon Wood along with his work on the founding generation.[4] 

This is how this blog described Wood’s account of the founders,

Gordon Wood argues that in the years surrounding the writing of the Declaration of Independence there was an especially strong popular commitment to federalist ideals.  Particularly, the political group of that time, known as the Commonwealthmen or Whigs (not to be confused with the nineteenth century Whig Party), demonstrated an inordinate level of support for republicanism which can be described as a type of political beliefs that include federalist thought. 

The Whigs are credited with leading popular support for independence from Britain.  They emphasized citizen participation, – especially at the local level – representative government, liberty, equality, and public virtue.  In other words, citizens bound to this cultural view lived their social lives [in the 1830s] as Tocqueville described them [in an earlier posting].[5] 

 

So disposed, a lot of the colonists’ thought took on a reactive mode to changes in British rule as the 1700s progressed.  That is, they began to see the British as corrupt since they were instituting policies that flew in the face of colonials’ biases.  That particularly targeted British taxing policies, their interference with American politics, and their on again-off again promotion of Anglican religion seemed contrary to what Americans were judging to be good governance. 

What the colonists began to emphasize – both as result of the Enlightenment but also due to their Puritanical background – was that a person’s value, in intrinsic terms as well as in his/her financial standing, was based on property[6] (and its entailed rights), but that value also included his/her communal sense of citizenship. 

Beyond these sensitivities, they saw governmental corruption by means of faction, patronage, standing armies, an established church, and excessive support of monied interests as growing under their colonial existence and attributed to British influence or policies.  Summarily, one can classify these growing concerns as those of republicanism. 

These feelings were not limited to the elites but made their way across the American colonial population.  And this grew as Britain attempted to exert its presence within the colonies and as the 1700s wore on.  Most Americans can readily remember their school lessons of British taxation and Americans’ call for “no taxation without representation.”

As for Jefferson’s phrase, such writers as Gary Will credits not John Locke (Will argues that Jefferson did not even own Locke’s work from which the famous phrase was credited), but was much more influenced by common sense philosophers, such as Thomas Reid.  Others attribute the actual Declaration quote to William Wollaston. 

In Wollaston’s 1722 book, The Religion of Nature Delineated, he provides “the pursuit of happiness” phrase and attributes its prudence to reason and truth.[7]  Yet others look to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.[8]  So the Locke source – which in his Two Treatises of Government is “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” – does not turn out to be a “slam dunk” source of Jefferson’s phrase. 

As a matter of fact, when one reviews Locke’s position on natural rights, he is reigned in by something called natural law.  Steven Forde makes an important related distinction between Locke and Thomas Hobbes – who should be the philosopher cited by natural rights advocates.  Forde writes,

Locke’s claim is that individual have a duty to respect the rights of others, even in the state of nature [that state that exists before a people organize a polity].  The source of this duty, he says, is natural law.

          The difference with Hobbes is clearest in Locke’s argument about property.  Hobbes and Locke agree that individuals have a right to property in the state of nature, but Hobbes denies that individuals have any duty to respect the property of others.  This makes property more or less useless in Hobbes’s state of nature.  Locke says individuals have a duty to respect the property (and lives and liberties) of others even in the state of nature, a duty he traces to natural law.  Natural law and natural rights coexist, but natural law is primary, commanding respect for the rights of others.[9]

Forde goes on to clarify this a bit further.  He claims that an individual’s rights are in the context of this duty, in that that duty is always present with the exception when one’s life is in jeopardy.

          This posting will, of course, not end this debate, but this blogger wishes to take this opportunity to explicitly state an underlying message this blog has tried to communicate.  Most of American history, not only the years surrounding the birth the nation, was guided more so by the republican train of thought.  More specifically, that being the form of republicanism Americans followed, federalism.

Everyone knows that that bias determined the structural makeup of the national and state governments.  But beyond that, Americans had held as almost sacred to federalism’s processes.  That included a reliance that the nation saw, at least as a basic espoused value, the worth of its population being federated within themselves.  At least to the degree that a sense of communality, collaboration, and cooperation by those who were accepted as part of the national partnership served to establish what was right in terms of governance and politics. 

Its only shortcoming – and it was and has been an immoral and unjust shortcoming – was the exclusion of nonwhites.  That is why federation theory, what this blogger promotes, is not this earlier version, parochial/traditional federalism, but a newer version.  That is liberated federalism, which is inclusive of all Americans. 

As for what today holds in regard to the allegiance of most Americans, that would be the natural rights view.  Some hold onto the ideals of Locke, but too many are holding onto Hobbes’s dystopian vision – a social existence without any sense of duty or obligation.  With that insight, one can begin to understand the sorry state of the polity today.

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[1] See Isaac Kramnick, “John Locke and Liberal Constitutionalism,” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I:  The Colonial Era Through Reconstruction, edited by Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 97-114.  Ironically, a value this blogger cites making up what one can call republicanism – or more specifically federalism – is civic humanism.  In making his argument, Kramnick admits that up until the development of the founding documents – the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights – American elites tended to rely on republican values such as civic humanism.  Civic humanism, as Kramnick describes it, is a political being realizing his/her fulfilment through participation in public life and a concern with public good above selfish ends.  This is a republican value. 

[2] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1975).

[3] Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States, (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966) AND Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, AL:  The University of Alabama Press, 1987).

[4] Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969/1968).

[5] Robert Gutierrez, “What Was the Original Intent?”, Gravitas:  A Voice for Social Studies – a blog (May 30, 2017).

[6] Life was considered an element of one’s property.

[7] James W. Ely, Main Themes in the Debate over Property Rights (Milton Park, England:  Routledge, 1997).

[8] Paul Sayre (ed.), Interpretations of Modern Legal Philosophies:  Essays in Honor of Roscoe Pond (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1947).

[9] Steven Forde, “John Locke and the Natural Law and Natural Rights Tradition,” Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism (n.d.), accessed June 3, 2021, http://www.nlnrac.org/earlymodern/locke .