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How Liberal Was Liberalism
Every year, I have two encounters with John Locke. The first comes when I go to the American Political Science Association, where I try to understand the arguments of the hardcore political philosophers brought in by Claremont and Institute for Humane Studies, and so on. The second comes about a month later when I teach the Founding to a group of Freshmen at my university. A point I try to drive home to my students, and which, given the recent discussions regarding Sohrab Ahmari around here, is relevant to Ricochet, is that the world of 17th Century England, and especially the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, doesn’t look much like the United States of today, and that properly understanding Locke and Montesquieu requires thinking in terms they would have known.
At APSA, there’s always a debate between the philosophers between three basic positions. Position one is the view that Locke is an individualist radical who intended to completely up-end society. However, given that he was writing in 1688, he couldn’t rightly say that, so the message is hidden in the text. This is the dominant Straussian position. Position 2 is the “Built Better than He Knew” position, which is similarly related to the same named position on the Founders held by, for example, Harry Jaffa. In this telling, Locke was trying to justify the Glorious Revolution, but he -and later Adam Smith -actually had found a better way to place civil government and civil society to produce a virtuous and free nation.
Then there’s my position, which I find frankly under-represented. Locke was writing in 1687-89, addressing the particular issues of that time period, and while he does appeal to universal constants and laws of nature (that just makes him modern), he is neither creating a novus ordo secularum nor is trying to tear down the society in which he is a part. Rather, he is trying to explain what just happened in the crazy world of the Glorious Revolution and explain how his society actually worked.
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Locke starts his two treatises with an extended dismantling of the divine right of kings. His critique is thorough, pointing out that God never said anything about divine right, even if He had, He hadn’t said anything to any of the ancestors of any of the current kings, and even if He had done that -there are far too many extant kings to claim that all of them held divine right. No one actually operates as if the Divine Right of Kings was true.
So, in his second treatise, he looks at how governments actually operate in England and the rest of the world.
So how did they operate? It’s easy to take modern social structures and back-lay them on 17th Century England, but this would be a mistake. The past is a foreign country -they do things differently there.
A few years back I read A Quarrel with the King, a history and quasi-biography of the late 16th and early 17th century England, told through the relationship of a prominent northern English family (the Earls of Pembroke) and the Kings from Henry VI to Charles I. Along the way, there’s several chapters on how England actually worked.
At the heart of the English society was the commonwealth -the term applied broadly and narrowly, but in this case, really meaning something approximating “the village.” England at the time had only a limited idea of private property -at least as far as land and livestock went. Both were held in common by the entire village, and this was because the relationship between livestock and land was necessary for the continued survival of the village. The land was marked off into fields and chalks. The livestock was grazed every day in the chalks, and every night was kept in a different field. The sheep droppings would fertilize the fields. Each family would be given a plot of land, the shepherds would guarantee its fertility, and this allowed the growing of enough food to feed the village, and then to trade to other villages for whatever couldn’t be produced locally. These villages were largely self-sufficient, at least locally, but they were also mainly steady-state organizations. The social and economic roles played by everyone in the village kept a delicate balance. If anyone didn’t pull their weight, the entire village would starve. The legal regime -in which no one owned land, but rather had the use of the land provided they produced the required allotment of goods and services for the village, encouraged this. Contrary to the common story, these villages did not have many problems with their commons, because everyone’s use of the commons was closely watched by everyone else. No one would overgraze their livestock, or try to cheat another family out of their time with the animals -because if anyone did that, it would throw off the balance, and everyone would starve. (The transition to private property happens during this period, and is largely driven by technological changes that makes farming much more efficient -which caused a lot of other villages to close down, which were then bought by lords like the Pembrokes to build their great estates. Some of the villagers were taken into service by the lords, some went to the cities, and others became basically brigands -who, when the Civil War came, were drafted into both Royalist and Parliamentary armies.)
Because these villages were so delicate, there was a great deal of social coercion used to make sure everyone did their part. Councils of elders could fire shepherds and other specialists if they failed to do their jobs. The indigent were required to be taken care of by their nearest family members, on the threat of the family being expelled from the village. These communities also built up long traditions, their own holidays, and other special quirks which kept everyone working and prevented the village from starving. One of the more interesting passages was about the food allocations everyone got for feast days -food allocations that depend on everyone having already done their part to gather the food into the village first.
This is the reality Locke was writing about when he describes how the commonwealth comes together. By 1688, the method of coordinating village production is currency, not conditions, but the villages are still highly dependent on everyone left doing their part. It also makes some of his more bizarre requirements make a lot more sense. For example, I have long wondered why it was that Locke allows people to leave the commonwealth only on the condition that they cannot take their property with them. But, when you realize that the (predominantly) real property is part of a complicated production chain, the loss of which would kill the village, it makes much more sense why Locke would require people leave their property behind when they exit. He simply scales the idea up to the size of England.
The amazing thing to me, contra the radical individualist reading, is just how much of this system Locke leaves in place. He is perfectly happy to allow every village and community to organize its affairs however it would like, and only when the self-sustaining political units are ready and able to come together does he allow for the creation of larger nations. Even then, though, the larger nation is only allowed so long as it doesn’t interfere in the operations of the constituent villages -all of them have to agree to band together. This echoes the actual justifications for the Civil War. Beyond the religious arguments, the King’s economic policies were making a disaster of the commonwealth -with villages dying all over, and their parliamentary representatives unable to get the King to do anything about it. Pembroke -despite being an aristocrat with a long history of service directly to the Crown -sided with Parliament precisely because of the damage Charles I was doing to Wiltshire.
All of this, Locke is willing to leave in place.
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It is true that much of Locke’s theories of government are built on procedural rules. However, Locke wrote against a background of very powerful local and regional political bodies that -while following procedural rules -governed in very specific, coercive, and intrusive ways. These local bodies could tell you what to eat, where to worship, and how to work. The way the decisions should be made matters, but Locke continues to allow this level of government intrusion, only allowing people to leave if they don’t like it, because without these decisions being made and obeyed, the whole networked economy of the village crashes, and everyone dies.
With later technological developments, even more liberality with the rules of the community becomes possible. Generally speaking, the American economy is not so fragile as the 17th-century English economy was. But this does point to the key insight Ahmari was making: Lockian Liberalism -of the type the US was founded on -assumes a civic culture and view of how everyone should live their life. It allows society to enforce that way of life in order to preserve the continued existence of the commonwealth.
The procedural rules, the “neutral public square idea” are not in Locke or Adam Smith. They are later additions -probably at earliest Jeremy Bentham in the early 19th century, if not 20th-century innovations of Rawls and Nozick.
There are those who say that Locke leads inexorably to Bentham, but I don’t see it. I don’t think Ahmari does either.
We can be perfectly true to the ideals of Locke and still support a great deal of socio-political decisionmaking by governments.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
I think the United States as originally organized matches this model. Before the bill of rights was incorporated against the states, each state could – for example – establish its own religion; some did. Each state as Lockean village seems like a plausible way to conceptualize what was going on. To paraphrase what you wrote earlier:
“He is perfectly happy to allow every [state] to organize its affairs however it would like, and only when the [states] are ready and able to come together does he allow for the creation of the [United States]. Even then, though, the [United States] is only allowed so long as it doesn’t interfere in the operations of the constituent [states] -all of them have to agree to band together.”
Preferably at the lowest possible level for each decision.
The other half of this is understanding just how small England, Ireland, and Scotland are. England is roughly the size of Alabama. Wales is about the size of Massachusetts. Ireland is smaller than Indiana. Scotland is about the size of South Carolina. Put all of the British Isles together, and you have land area about the size of New Mexico.
Another factor is that population density was not nearly as high back then. The current estimated population of the UK is 67 Million. Figure it was at most one-quarter of that, perhaps 16 million (Actually a late Eighteenth Century figure.). While more densely populated than today’s New Mexico, it was still not ridiculously crowded. Between the Sweat, the plague (1666), and war, the population probably fell overall in the Seventeenth Century, although I don’t have figures to hand. So, what they were was a big village composed of many little villages, some towns, and a handful of cities.
If one studies the marriages in the nobility or even just the landed gentry, one sees just how small the country really was.
Even a hypothetical village that adopted the true “neutral public square idea” will probably find itself undermined in the long run. Kevin Williamson has talked about “militant democracy” on one podcast, which basically means a free country that polices illiberal groups that would undermine it. His example was German suppression of Neo-Nazi expressions. This contrasts with United States, where anyone can basically advocate for anything even if those things are antithetical to the principles the country was founded on. Kevin Williamson was in favor of the way the United States handles things. I would label myself conservatarianish and come down on Williamson’s side, but I have come to realize that allowing a completely neutral public square probably will eventually result in a critical mass of illiberal viewpoints overwhelming and destroying that very public square.
The irony is that both Ahmari and French want the same result for the most part: a virtuous, christian village. Ahmari wants to use force while French believes we can persuade people to be virtuous through debate and by setting a good example; they are both wrong.
Thanks for an excellent and informative article Sabrdance.
Is this description really complete? Wasn’t this a manor system like much of the rest of Europe, in which village farmers had some sort of inheritable tenure, but owed rent and various dues and work obligations to the landowner, i.e. the lord, who did hold the land as private property of a sort?
I am chagrined to say that I don’t already know the answer to my question. But in order to better understand my family history, I’ve been trying to learn how it worked in Germany and Poland and would be surprised to learn that the system in England would have been so different at this particular time — before the modernization of agriculture that you wrote of.
I’m currently reading Germans, Poles and Jews: the Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914 (1980) by William W. Hagen and have read a good deal of his book, Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500-1840 (2002). I’ve also read a number of other books that deal with the topic less directly.
In earlier times, and here I’m going to say off the top of my head, starting in the 13th century plus or minus, Polish nobles/landowners often induced German peasants to come and settle on their estates and set up a version of the commonwealth that you describe. There were at least 1700 of these German settlements in Poland, which tended to be different from the Polish ones in that the landowners granted them greater rights of self-government. The villagers could adjudicate some of their own disputes without taking them before the lord, they could decide among themselves how to apportion the annual rents that were due (and usually the total burden was slightly less than in the traditional arrangement) and could apportion lands among themselves more according to their own rules. The lords/landowners negotiated these agreements separately with each community, so they were all different, but they tended to have these features. Traditional Polish villages in Poland or German peasant villages in Germany did not have quite the same level of self-government. And the traditional villagers had more of the onerous requirements for work days owed to the lords. Peasants hated those, because all their best days of the growing season went to working on the lord’s own fields or hauling his stuff to market, which meant they couldn’t make optimum use of their own time and fields. Getting rid of those was always at the top of the list of any reforms they tried to obtain.
Under each type of arrangement, there were common fields that worked much as you describe.
What kept the landlords from reneging on their arrangements? Well, in part it was the fact that these German villages tended to be productive and make more money for the landlords. But whatever village system was in place, disputes could in some cases be appealed to the king, although the rights of appeal were not always very strong, e.g. in the case of German villagers in Prussia. But whether or not it was handled through direct appeal, the king sometimes used any problems the peasants were having with their landlords as a pretext to step in, protect the peasant rights and keep the lordly class under control.
One thing I don’t understand is why a Polish village in Poland couldn’t look at the deal their German neighbors had and negotiate a similar deal for themselves, in exchange for farming in the German style that tended to make more money for everyone concerned. There must have been some strong cultural factors that made it difficult to change their ways, but I don’t know what those factors would have been. Hagen just barely hints at them in one place that I hope I’ve bookmarked.
I do think knowledge of these systems would provide support for your overall conclusions, though I imagine Locke had in mind the system in his own back yard, so to speak.
A fascinating read, thank you for your summation.
Given your view I can see what you mean, and by extension what Ahmari means. However I would like to point out that if Lockian ideas do allow for quite intrusive government social ordering, then our Progressive friends can be rightly called true Lockian Liberals. It seems to me that the benefit of the small English “Common Wealth” was its natural homogeneity which breeds a natural consensus which by the natural human group dynamics creates conformist social pressure even in the absence of official and direct coercion. Who wants to disappoint their friends and neighbors, much less their parents and spouses? But how does one build political consensus beyond the level of Township. How does one build consensus in a religiously diverse country, in an ethnically diverse country? American in many ways stumbled into it vast levels of diversity (geographic, ethnic, religious, racial, etc) and our solution to that has been to build off of Lockian principles giving us the modern Liberal Consensus. It is not something imposed upon us, it has developed gradually over the decades of our Nations existence. It seems quite Burkian to me.
The branch of Conservatism that now finds itself chaffing at the displacement of its social ideals, should take note how it happened. It was by argument and the slow crafting of a new social consensus. This was allowed by our Classical Liberal political order that created room for (even if at times hated and marginalized) people to push their views of the common good and right social order. If the old ideals have been lost it is because those who hold them failed to engage in the culture properly, they saw their social consensus as unassailable and for too long simple appeals to authority served as sufficient argument. But their authority was eroded away by argument and advocacy. The good news is that as long as the open system is maintained a concerted effort over the course of decades can see the public consensus change.
There are no quick solutions, because there was never one thing changed everything that can be undone. You have to go an try to build it back brick by brick.
I don’t think that’s why their authority was lost. Changes in technology led to changes in social arrangements which in turn eroded the authority of those leaders of the old arrangements, to name just one factor.
Yes and no. Was it a feudal manor system? Mostly. Was it like the rest of Europe? Depends on what parts. It could be more or less similar. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? No, not very similar. The Holy Roman Empire? Generally not very similar. For instance, both of these areas had serfdom. Even incorporating the Free County of Burgundy (Franche Comté) into France had been difficult because of the serfdom issue.
The English-Scottish system had it’s roots in Anglo-Saxon culture and the Commonlaw system, which was very different from Salic Law (the legal system of the Salian, or German, Franks). Britain was also not influenced in the same way by Roman Law, which was the basis of continental legal systems which later led to the Napoleonic Code.
So, was it a feudal system after the Norman Conquest? Sort of, but with a substrate of the old Anglo-Saxon freedoms for free men. The peasantry were free. There was no serfdom. There was no legal slavery. (Also true of France.) Thus, it was similar, but not the same. The fundamentals were different, and as the Stuart monarchs claimed Divine Right of Kings to do anything they pleased, the free English (and Scots) claimed the rights of the free men and of their Parliament.
Thank you. This goes along with my own ideas about the purpose of government and the state. The whole point is to organize people and resources so everyone is here tomorrow. It is an alliance for the future.
That is why I think the state has business being involved in marriage. Marriage is about raising the next generation so we can be here tomorrow. Therefore, it is everyone’s best interest that enough people get married and have kids, and they are supported in that.
In the modern world, we forget how little privacy and independence people had in the old days. They lived on top of each other and everyone was in everyone’s business all the time. There might be one person in town who let their freak flag fly, but they were on the outskirts at best, and driven out at worst. Society can only tolerate so many. We are rich enough to tolerate many these days, but no matter how rich, we have to have people willing to do the lifting to keep society running.
The English system was steady state and entirely heritable. There weren’t contracts, really, more like a system of feudal oaths. But the oaths were different than what you’d find on the continent. The rents, obligations, and benefits of being part of the village were spelled out hundreds of years prior, and in 1600 they were still following them.
That would be a question of “when,” wouldn’t it?
I just found an old review of this book on the decline of serfdom in medieval England but haven’t ordered the book, in part because the cover looks so familiar to me. I may already have it on my bookshelves. Or more likely I have another book or two in the same series, with a similarly designed cover.
The systems in Prussia and the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth (which I usually just abbreviated to “Poland”) that I’m describing were not really serfdom, either, although the practical or legal freedom of the peasants to pick up and move elsewhere certainly varied from place to place and time to time.
I found another old article that I’m now reading:
Hatcher, J. (1981). English Serfdom and Villeinage: Towards a Reassessment. Past & Present, (90), 3-39.
I kind of like this quote a short ways into the article: “As we shall see, the forces generated by status did not always go hand in hand with the forces generated by economic and demographic change. Indeed they often pulled in opposite directions.”
In other words, it’s not enough to understand the legal status of the peasants. Their situations in life also depended on their actual economic advantages and disadvantages. Or in still other words, we need to study the social histories as well as the political philosophies that were being argued in the courts.
I would maintain that such is the basis for a very Burkean conservative outlook.
I don’t object to their advocating their positions, but Locke does lay out the limits of how politics can be done. The nationalizing of policy, and the use of the courts was out of bounds. Worse, though, was the refusal of our own people to resist those moves. It should not have taken 50 years to even have a shot at overturning Roe.
Facts not in evidence. The big shifts were brought about by court decisions, and public opinion followed. Many of our counter-arguments were pre-emptively dismissed as religious, and therefore illegitimate in public discourse. A view then enforced by the same usurptious courts. I am aware that our system is more Mill than Locke. I am arguing here that the problems of liberalism are in Mill – and therefore there is no need to jettison Lockean liberalism entirely.
I think fewer and fewer people really believe in a “neutral public square.” I used to. I used to believe, even as a religious conservative, that government could simply be a neutral arbiter, upholding the rights of even very different cultural or religious groups, and ideally, each group would have perfect freedom to follow their own course.
But that’s naive. We must accept that the whole idea of a government that respects the rights of free individuals is an outgrowth of culture. Some cultural groups aren’t going to fit under the overlay of even a very limited, neutral arbiter sort of governance. Every religious group will not be equally happy.
I don’t think so. Government should recognize actual marriages (the opposite-sex kind), simply because they’re a common and vital social arrangement. It makes sense for government to recognize the familial bonds formed thereby. So-called marriages between the same sex (or between a man and a goldfish) are a merely private concern, and the government need not involve itself.
But, changing circumstance allow for new arguments to gain purchase. Had no one questioned the authority it would at least have gone on as a hollow shell by sheer inertia. I admit this is all a chicken and egg problem to a certain extent.
I think people have been on top of making sure there are future generations for as long as the species has been around. Reproduction is a biological imperative. At no point in human history can you really ever find people not reproducing. I think the very fact that people will self organize and self select mates pretty much argues against a need for government action on the topic. People will reproduce with or without government aid or assistance. It seem what you would need government organization for is to get people to do what isn’t natural to them but beneficial to the whole group. Like banding in large organized structures for mutual defense, or deferring retaliatory vengeance for an organized system of justice.
There’s a lot more to reproduction that making new babies and keeping them alive so they, too, can make more babies.
Yes and no. Marriages – even childless ones – have many aspects of a business partnership: they have certain common rights to property (even in non-community property states), they manage income and expenses together, etc. State law provides default rules for governing the partnership and what happens if it terminates; for the most part, these default rules can be avoided by a written agreement between the partners. Similarly, state law provides for default rules regarding property owned during the marriage and what happens if the marriage ends; some – but not all – of these can be avoided by agreement (the pre- or post – nuptial agreement). The fact both the partnership and the marriage are private concerns isn’t exactly the issue here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Historical_population
I think the problem we are seeing is that a lived political system and a theoretical one are two different things. Even generally good theories (like Locke) are bent to the facts of reality. They will have inconsistencies of action and results. Roe v. Wade was a singular event but even it did not come out of nowhere, things built up to it. I think the ultimate problem is that we can never know the proper balance of interest and public consensus. Even if we can claim to know what is the true “public good” knowing the way to achieve it is another matter. Without perfect knowledge the answer to all these questions can only be discovered empirically through the various political processes (human history and institutions are ultimately a process of trial and error). Things will always move in jumps, fits, and starts. Going back and forth.
I think what can be said of the liberal political order that America is the prime example of is that our political system has allowed us to engage in this process of social tinkering and dynamics in a far safer and consistent manner than any other civilization to date. We get about as many things right as we get wrong, but the dynamism of the systems is what has allowed for over 200 years of general growth and improvement in the human condition. Other more rigid systems certainly provide stability, but they are as likely to entrench deep flaws as to protect noble virtues. And in many cases they do not change but rather collapse.
Matelotage.
This is great, @sabrdance. Thank you.
I’m wondering if we can get a summary judgment on whether Ahmari was arguing for Big Encompassing Government or conservative political activism. I believe it was the latter, but I’m willing to be corrected with evidence. Has anyone asked him?
Solid state?
Population increased greatly in the 16th Century in England, throwing off the balance in many places across England. (After the post-plague decline, another major change which had a signification impact on village life. But again, not a solid and constant state. There was a great deal of change and adaptation).
And then there was the confiscation and sale of Church lands under Henry VIII. John Winthrop’s Grandfather purchased Groton Manor when Henry VIII took it from the Catholic Church and sold it.
Then there was the enclosure movement, which the main post alludes to. Many Lords switched to wool production from food production, which reduced the need for having quite so many tenants on their lands.
One way the American colonies differed from England, incidentally, was the degree to which freehold tenure of land (full ownership) as opposed to limited quasi-feudal tenure was the norm.
I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean.
Exactly. As Dave Ramsey likes to say “those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.”
By the way, there’s nothing wrong with some change in the social consensus. Depends on the change. I do not want to see a consensus in favor of Sharia law emerge, but I am not troubled by the change that lead to women entering the workforce in large numbers. That’s really Ahmari’s boggle. It’s not change per se. It’s change he disapproves of. Suffice it to say I don’t think I entirely share his view of what the social consensus should look like (though I’m sure we agree on many parts of it).
I think the point was that most of the land was not actually owned in common. It was owned by the lords and use was doled out according to feudal principles, no? The OP makes it sound like an idyllic Rousseauan state of nature with a bunch of noble savages running around producing from each according to his ability and consuming each according to his needs. I think that’s an ahistorical impression to leave.
You’re just wrong here. It wouldn’t be accurate to say courts only follow public opinion, but it’s equally nonsense to say public opinion just follows the courts. They grope in tandem in the same direction with the courts rarely wanting too get far ahead of public opinion.
And the argument that a religious view, unsupported by other facts or reason, should not be persuasive to a non-religious person is itself an argument. Call it “pre-emptive dismissal” if you like, but it is reasoned and persuasive to many. In a pluralistic society, appeals to a holy book or a holy man are just appeals to authority, and to a non-believer, they are appeals to invalid authorities.
Locke said that.
People are still having babies in Japan, and more government tinkering hasn’t gotten people to make more of them. Again, to me it seems people will have the number of babies they want to have, and unless you exert physical coercion against them in a manner of China’s Single Child Policy or maybe some sort of Eugenics Program from the 30’s nothing much will make them have more or less babies. So even if you think government should meddle it doesn’t seem to be effective at it? So why waste resources doing a job poorly?