PROPERTY AS SELF

[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.

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[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.