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 .

FROM INTOLERANCE TO INSTITUTIONAL ACCEPTANCE

 

Overall, one can judge that religion was fairly diverse in the American colonies.  Actually, the main motivation that spurred initial colonization was to seek religious freedom especially in the case of Puritans in what would become the New England Colonies and the Quakers, an off shoot Puritanical denomination, in the settlement of Pennsylvania.  And given the hazards one encountered in making the trip to the North American shores, that motivation must have been quite strong.

          Now, whether these early settlers, usually victims of intolerance in England, were in turn tolerant of other religions, is a bit complicated.  There were the famous cases of intolerance in the Puritan settlement led by John Winthrop.  In their perceived aims, these Puritans sought to establish their ideal religious arrangement; that being the Congregational Church to establish that “city upon the hill.”  And such an image did not tolerate wayward religious views.  The exception was in Rhode Island that led the way to more accommodating policy.

          In Massachusetts, there were famous cases of intolerance such as the case of Roger Williams who was banished from the colony and fled to the area he established as Rhode Island in 1636.  Anne Hutchinson was banished two years later and also made her way to Rhode Island.  Along with banishment, there were other punishments such as jailing, flogging, and other harsh punishments meted out to those who were found guilty of not conducting themselves in acceptable religious ways.  The famous case of the Salem Witchcraft trials, in which over a hundred arrests were made, resulted in the hanging of 19 colonists and the stoning of a couple of men.  But this harshness had a limited history as its impracticality became apparent as new settlers with other beliefs started to arrive.

          In addition, as indicated above, other sects began establishing other colonies and with them other nationalities began showing up.  Among these other settlers were Roman Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, Anglicans, Quakers, and Presbyterians.  As the years rolled by, this became a prominent feature of the establishment and settlement of the various colonies.  This blog has already commented on the role the Quakers played in establishing Pennsylvania and how its founder, William Penn, advocated religious tolerance.

          And in this, despite the initial intolerance of Puritans, it turned out that congregational churches began to be more tolerant than hierarchical churches.  That is, churches such as Puritans and Quakers tended to allow for other religions and perhaps it was their more local, communal structures that lent themselves to accepting neighbors of other faiths whereas with religions that place ultimate allegiances to some far-off figure, be it a monarch or a pope, this was not so easily accomplished. 

This was particularly the case under the rule of King James II in England.  His Catholic bent had a double effect when he tried to switch England back to Catholicism.  This did not only sit poorly with the English population, but with colonists as well who were mostly, by a wide margin, Protestant.  Of course, this upheaval ended with the Glorious Revolution that replaced James with King William III and Queen Mary II.  The lasting effect was to undermine the unquestioned authority among the colonists of a king or a queen, but also to establish a more general bias toward tolerance especially in terms of religion.[1]

This is pointed out to make the claim that, first, a basic tenet of federalism – almost definitional – is inclusion.  One cannot speak of being federated with others if others are excluded.  Yet, second, when it came to races and to some degree nationalities and non-Christian religions, early Americans were exclusive and, in terms of race, for too many that is still the case. 

But to the extent they were inclusive, this development should be considered as a version of federalism among Americans.  It is a version this blogger calls parochial/traditional federalism.  And a place to start considering how federalism gained in its ability to influence colonists, one can start with religious tolerance.  Even in this social domain, the path toward acceptance was not always smooth and considered inevitable; it had its “bumps in the road” as the above overview indicates. But the path toward religious tolerance was inevitable.

And here, ironically, it was not religious thought that led the way, but the more secular bent among Enlightened thinkers that pushed Americans to realize that their common welfare hinged on being tolerant, especially in this domain of religion.  One finds a general transition from a fairly intolerant postures among various colonial settlements to functional levels of inclusion especially as the jurisdictions of evolving polities grew in size. 

And it is in this form of development that congregational – the more federalist arrangement – functioned to almost insist that tolerance be part of the necessary foundation of such unification.  Surely, this historical development provided evidence of the functionality religious tolerance could play to those who would become the leaders of the new nation Americans would establish toward the end of the eighteenth century.

Those leaders included Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.  Each of these and others actively fought for provisions to be drawn up and enacted into the founding documents of the nation.  Religious freedom for all denominations, majority and minority sects, was seen by these founders as an essential property right.  In addition, this was not only seen as an individual right but a communal element that the past had demonstrated was an essential factor in establishing and maintaining peace and mutual well-being.

And the growing sense of tolerance was eventually legalized by various provisions in law, most notably by the ratification of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, but also at the local level as exemplified with the adoption of the Connecticut Constitution of 1818 which finally killed any consideration of having an “established” religion for either a state or the nation.

And this more secular turn reflected Enlightened thinking that objected to any traditions of aristocracy while turning to republicanism as the preferred mode of governance.  This blog has already shared a list of Enlightened writers, both from the colonies, but also from Europe and Britain, that provided the theoretical guidance leading the way to republicanism. 

Those names include John Locke, David Hume, but also should include Charles-Louis Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Adding to these names is those of the Scottish Enlightenment, Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid.  There are others such as Samuel von Pufendorf, a German thinker who wrote about the ideas of Thomas Hobbes’ dealings with natural law.  But with these works, what became contentious was the conflicting ideas between republicanism and liberalism.

The term republicanism is somewhat new to this blog.  Related terms the blog has utilized are federated polities (a form of republicanism) and democracy (republicanism being a form of democracy).  America’s form of republicanism includes a commitment to a list of governing attributes.  They are the consent of the governed, doing away with any remnants of aristocracy, and a deep-seated antagonism to corruption especially in the public domain. 

Such writers as New Zealand historian, John Greville Agard Pocock, write of the rich political literature upon which American republicanism is based.  Pocock shares the following:

 

[Those political writings] formed the authoritative literature of this culture; and its values and concepts were those with which we have grown familiar:  a civic and patriot ideal in which the personality was founded on property, perfected in citizenship but perpetually threatened by corruption; government figuring paradoxically as the principal source of corruption and operating through such means as patronage, faction, standing armies (opposed to the ideal of the milia); established churches (opposed to the Puritan and deist modes of American religion); and the promotion of a monied interest – though the formulation of this last concept was somewhat hindered by the keen desire for readily available paper credit common in colonies of settlement.[2]

 

And this has led to a current debate between those who see the prominent thinking among the founders as being predominately that of republicanism (of which this blogger can be included) or those who see them being influenced by liberalism (that being a reflection of natural rights’ ideas and ideals).

The next posting will delve into this debate since it has a profound effect on contemporary politics.  That is, liberalism has become the central rationale for many conservative arguments and a foundational cause of what is being called polarization.  Republicanism can be seen as both supporting non-Trumpian conservativism and many left-of-center liberal advocacy of today.  The verbiage can be confusing, but hopefully, the next posting will shed some light on these foundational concerns.

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[1] For a simple overview of this history see “Religion in the Colonies,” (no author or date), https://www.landofthebrave.info/religion-in-the-colonies.htm .

[2] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1975), 507, emphasis added.