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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
They might. It’s a little early to know, but it wouldn’t shock me. If SSM divorces don’t reach opposite couple rates it will probably be because SSM is a predominantly “Belmont” phenomenon while opposite sex is well established in “Fishtown” as well. But yea, too early to say.
How do you think the “crafting of a new social consensus” works if not by being the dominate voice arguing against the perceived wisdom and no one is pushing back? Decisions like gay marriage, abortion, no fault divorce, and drug legalization don’t materialize out of no where. They may have jumped the gun at the Federal level on some of those issues, but the culture was largely moving that way before any decisions were made. No one was providing arguments in the opposite direction because conservatives thought they were still the majority and just needed to get out the vote more effectively. Just have to elect the right judges. The landscape shifted underneath them and didn’t realize they already gave up ground. The Left used it’s position as the largest influencer in the culture to sway people (and sometimes bully them) into moving in their direction. Everyone else just went about their business thinking nothing would change.
How else does one “re-order” the public square if persuasion is off the table and society no longer sees the Church as an institution to be taken seriously in regard to moral instruction?
Taking action infers an outcome. Ahmari dances around how he envisions fixing the problem without giving any concrete proposals.
Government intervention is not the answer to every social ill but possibly for some undefined percentage of them? And we’ll throw in some free markets around the edges since it will only have an indirect effect. What if society doesn’t agree with the prescription for that social ill?
How is society going to revere the authority of that tradition if we aren’t willing to persuade them of its correctness? The Lockean village decided to get rid of the previous traditions in favor of ones that better suit them. There are no shortcuts to solving this problem. Elections can be lost and court cases can be overturned.
Sounds about right to me, except it probably wouldn’t be done by percentages.
Then maybe it doesn’t work.
The Left doesn’t argue. It doesn’t have any good arguments (therefore the demonization and scapegoating of conservatives as Nazis, white supremacists, blah, blah, blah…). It indoctrinates. Big difference.
I agree the Right has been “going about its business” as if politics is a nice hobby for some, but pretty far down the priority list for most of us. I believe the Right has life rightly ordered in this way (God, family, community, country…) and the Left makes politics the meaning of life. But, when the way we live is under threat, as it is from the Left, it’s about time the Right gets engaged!
I believe this is what Ahmari is arguing for — more political activism from the Right — not more government intervention.
And, uh, the…marital act? You don’t need a marriage to be a good parent. You could look it up.
Grafting a desire for good outcomes onto a gov’t to oversee its implementation is a recipe for disaster. See the 20th century, and 100 million dead under Communism.
I don’t want permission from the state to pursue my life, liberty, and happiness. Neither should you.
I only dance disco, bro.
Also, I have zero idea of what AnCap is. Is that like a shuffleboard fanclub?
The Founders are on my side, too – so sorry to say, in terms of individual liberty. And why should I care what company you think you find yourself in, or what camps you put others into?
Hey. The Founders were slave owners. Are you in the slave-owning camp, too?
Anarcho-capitalists, I believe.
Plus if marriage is only something that can or should be pursued by those who wish to procreate, what happens to those of us over 55 who choose to get married?
BEST. Look it up.
Not good enough, not do-able, BEST.
And all those kids raised in single parent households, statistics disagree with you
Who’s saying people past procreation age shouldn’t marry? We want standards to be the least intrusive possible for obtaining a marriage license. No one is suggesting fertility tests or anything like it. The standard for marriage should be: two; opposite sex; minimum age; consent; and limited consanguinity. That’s it.
Opposite sex couples who have procreative potential take on the risks of parenting and providing the next generation. Family formation and stability are crucial to a healthy society. There has to be a means of dealing with failed unions when children are involved. This is all common sense and, up until recently, customary practice.
What homosexual couples do in their private lives is of minimal interest to society. That’s not the case with procreative couples. The distinction matters.
It’s like the Ricochet edition of Godwin’s law – as a Ricochet discussion grows longer, the odds of somebody bashing same sex marriage approaches 1.
I’ll betcha nobody claimed you did.
Oh so innocent. The longer a discussion on culture goes, the odds of somebody smugly declaring so-cons losers approaches 1. (Valiuth, McVey, and you all have tendency to go there).
Did I use the word “loser?”
You mean when owning land as property became that, which misses all the other manifestations of private property. And this completely misses the point that it already existed by the fact that the sovereign king had ownership of said land in total. Even then enclosure and the partitioning of common land was widespread by the 15th century in England so the idea of communal villages was dying long before 1688.
No one was arguing they were. If they had attained actual communism there would be no need to work because there would be no scarcity.
Locke had to escape London because he was considered a political dissident by the Crown and it’s aristocratic supporters. The whigs after all were the liberals of his time. They were predominantly mercantile interests that wanted enfranchisement for non conformist Christians and to restrict the Kings powers, whereas the Torries were land owners that wanted to maintain the older regime. He was only able to come back when William III deposed James and the Whigs took power.
Also, London at the time, which was where Locke was employed during his life, would have had a population of half a million. So it would have hardly been anything akin to the villages or small towns you mention in other parts of England. That is a considerably different frame of reference.
I find it intriguing, to the say the least, that your commentary failed to highlight such important facts.
Who’s “bashing” same sex marriage? I’m simply pointing out that intrinsically sterile same-sex unions do not carry the same social weight as coupling which naturally produces children. It seems you agree with me, since the impact of same sex “marriage” seems to be so minuscule on children, unlike no-fault divorce (although, I would argue, individually, maybe we should be concerned for motherless or fatherless children as a society, whether they’re being raised in single-parent or same-sex households).
But, we’ve torn down the minimum standards for marriage to affirm some sort of positive “right” to marriage, and I don’t expect the complementary sex barrier to be the last one to go. This fits neatly into the Left’s atomization of society in order to ultimately wield more power. The mediating institutions must go if the Left is ever going to immanentize the eschaton. Family is the last bulwark and it’s been under attack for decades.
“Regulating” marriage isn’t the real issue. The government merely needs to recognize the marriages that are taking place. That’s just government meeting the needs of the vast majority of the people, and responding to how families are structured.
The only marriage-related thing government needs to do a better job of regulating is divorce. In other words, put an end to no-fault.
And traditionalists don’t need to establish that same-sex relationships harm anyone, to return marriage laws to the status quo ante. That was always the wrong question, because it was not a matter of homosexual behavior being in any way restricted by the government. Lawrence v Texas established that same-sex couples had the same rights as other non-married couples. That was all they needed. The same-sex marriage debate was never a fight for the rights of homosexuals. Rather, it was a debate about whether our government would go along with the counter-factual claim that marriage could exclude one of the two sexes, and then begin to treat same-sex relationships like opposite-sex relationships. “It doesn’t harm anyone” is not a reason for government to start recognizing an already-legal behavior.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It is right there. All of those things are about preserving the Republic for the future. What on Earth do you think Posterity means, anyway?
But hey, if you think that personal liberty is so important that no man may make any demand whatsoever on another citizin then you go live in that world.
My empire will roll over your discordant collection of angry men telling everyone else to get off their lawns.
Ha! My empire of angry men telling everyone else to get off their lawns will roll over your empire!
If Libertarain states are so damn good, where are they?
History is full of states which protect their existence.
Libertarians are so individualistic, their states would collapse in a single generation. Look at their conferences. They are a collection of freaks. Individuals who cannot come together to win, anything.
THey cannot even win when their are more statest types defending them. What hope do they have against a real military when they refuse to even form one?
Any political group who seriously thinks you can privatize police and it won’t lead to disaster is one that is not serious about the realities of the world.
That would never hap…Oh, wait.
You really think your angry men will roll over Bryan’s empire? He swings a mean vaccination needle. :-)
(I’m leaving now.)