An interesting little debate has flared up in the Claremont Review of Books and continued online between a group of academics who make the case that the Founding laid the seeds of liberal disorder and what might be considered America’s turn to libertinism (think the sexual revolution, abortion on demand, gay “rights” and so-called gay “marriage”, the push for transgender “rights”, etc.) The other group of academics, led by Robert Reilly, argue that the Founders built better than they knew and that the Constitution draws on natural law ideas perfectly compatible with traditional and conservative policies – the question for America was whether its leaders and citizens would be wise enough to implement such ideas. This blog post explores this debate.
The first salvo in this interesting intellectual fight came from Reilly in the Claremont Review of Books, and he did a nice job of summarizing the battle lines:
Do her principles doom America to moral and cultural decline? The question is hardly new. More than two decades ago, Professor John A. Guegan, participating in a conference reflecting on Jesuit priest John Courtney Murray’s book We Hold These Truths (1960), condemned the American Founding for “the philosophical errors that are embedded in the American civil religion.” The task for Christians, he said, should be to destroy the “erroneous philosophy of man and society which underlies the American Proposition and the currently reigning gnosis of pragmatism and positivism which grew out of that philosophy.” In other words, the American Founding was a poison pill with a time-release formula. We are its victims.This view has been gaining strength among Christians. Witness the recent New York Times bestseller The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher, who assumes that the American “purpose of government is to liberate the autonomous individual.” What this means, as he states elsewhere, is that “[t]he summum bonum of our American civil religion is maximizing the opportunities for individuals to express and satisfy their desires—a belief that orthodox Christianity by nature opposes.” A broad range of Christians has endorsed The Benedict Option, from the Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput, to such notable figures in the Southern Baptist Convention as Russell Moore.
There is, in other words, a growing faith-based critique of the founding, based on premises accepted almost offhandedly by many of its followers, including Dreher. We would do well to examine these premises by looking at the critique’s leading theoreticians. Two thinkers frequently referred to by Dreher as authorities are Patrick Deneen, an associate professor of constitutional studies at the University of Notre Dame, who previously taught for many years at Georgetown, and Michael Hanby, a scholar at the Vatican’s Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. Both are major contributors to First Things magazine and prominent members of the conservative Catholic cadre that holds to the poison-pill thesis. Deneen thinks the founding is based upon a lie about humanity, a false anthropology. Hanby believes that the founding is based on an error about the nature of reality, a false metaphysics. Their arguments, considered together, provide the central elements of the poison-pill case, which is why writers like Dreher invoke them sympathetically.
O.K., so we have Deneen and Hamby on one side (and their intellectual heirs) and Reilly and his intellectual heirs. Interestingly, it should be noted that on both sides the principals are mostly Catholics, so this seems to be an intramural intellectual battle, but relevant of course, to anyone interested in the history of ideas and the American republic. Reilly makes the counter-claim that the Founders ideals were and are congruent with Catholic natural law traditions and following John Courtney Murray, he believes that the Founders
thought…the life of man in society under government is founded on truths, on a certain body of objective truth, universal in its import, accessible to the reason of man, definable, defensible. If this assertion is denied, the American Proposition is, I think, eviscerated at one stroke. This is exactly the assertion that Deneen and Hanby do deny, with the consequences Murray predicted. He would find this development ironic. Murray had expected that if the growing forces of voluntarism (meaning law as will rather than reason) further imperiled the founding, the “guardianship of the original American consensus, based on the Western heritage, would have passed to the Catholic community, within which the heritage was elaborated long before America was.” By this, he meant that the natural law tradition within the Catholic Church, going back to the Middle Ages, was strong enough to resist modern corrosives, and a return to it might be possible, led by American Catholic intellectuals steeped in that tradition.
Reilly is writing this review so obviously his viewpoint is the one that is presented as correct; however, I think he makes a compelling case and having read at least Professor Deneen’s response (and some of his original essays) I would agree that we must look for the cause of modernity’s evils somewhere else other than the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Reilly’s review spends quite a bit of time on explicating some of Deneen’s writings on Madison (much hinges on quotes from Federalist No. 10) but to my mind, it is when Reilly turns to Hanby and begins to summarize Hanby's overall argument in conjunction with Deneen that he does an excellent job of winning over the reader’s allegiance.
Reilly makes a persuasive case that the Founder’s political metaphysics was one that was for the most part sympathetic to natural law teleology and therefore should have been the basis of a government that helped the American people govern themselves in light of the common good. Reilly quotes from Adams, Jefferson, Madison and other Founders showing that they all drew their inspiration from varied natural law political philosophers (with Locke being the wild card) but seemed to agree on the danger of a Hobbean worldview:
The key to understanding Hanby’s accusation that the founding separated freedom from truth is to grasp that the “conflation of nature and art” means the removal of formal and final causality from metaphysics—leaving only material and efficient causality. Rightly, he understands this as the ontological foundation of modern thought—the metaphysical premise for accepting as real only those things man can change through the instrument of modern science. If the entire view of reality is collapsed to fit within its limited scope, then there will be perpetual revolution of one kind or another because nothing in nature could direct anything to its end or telos. Therefore, the modern enterprise is necessarily unlimited, its goals decided by will rather than reason.That view, however, has no connection with what the founders said or did. They based their claim to freedom upon the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths, which they considered transcendent. Does Hanby show that they were kidding themselves? Like Deneen, he doesn’t think he needs to. He rests his case almost solely on the evidence of Locke’s influence on the Declaration. Hanby contends that 17th- and 18th-century philosophy was materialistic, mechanistic, and voluntarist, and so therefore was the founding. This influence negates anything that the founders themselves said about the meaning of the words they used. The “Declaration’s specification of those rights, its treatment of the end of government, and its justification for dissolving political bonds with England are all recognizably Lockean,” according to Hanby, “irrespective of the founders’ private predilections about the nature of liberty, virtue, and self-governance” (emphasis added).
For Hanby, the founders’ “predilections” do not matter because the underlying metaphysics had changed—which, in turn, changed the meaning of everything. For this reason he goes on about the metaphysics of modernity, and not the founders. It didn’t really matter what they said, since their world was imbued by the new metaphysics whether or not they realized or admitted that fact.
For their critique to stand, however, Hanby and Deneen would have to prove that the founders held a non- or anti-teleological view of nature along the lines of Machiavelli or Hobbes. But then why did the founders execrate Machiavelli and Hobbes? If the American Founding was inspired by Hobbesian ontology, why did it not look like it? The denial of formal and final causality defines Hobbes’s thought and his unlimited Leviathan. If they shared in a similar metaphysical rejection, why did the founders not replicate a Leviathan state? Their government was limited precisely because they did not dismiss either formal or final causality, which they acknowledged in “the laws of nature.”
Deneen claims that the Constitution perversely aims at “liberating humanity from the constraints of nature.” Why would the founders seek to subvert the constraints of the very “laws of nature” on which their endeavor depends? They wouldn’t, and didn’t. The contradiction is only in Deneen. He cannot possibly square his claim with John Adams’s statement: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”
But, as we have seen, the founders were simply cogs in the wheels of the new ontology. Deneen and Hanby remove from them what Pascal called “the dignity of causality.” Otherwise, they could have seen the disaster coming. Smuggle historicism and relativism back into the founding, and then wonder why the founders did not see this “tragic flaw.”
The notion of a new ontology controlling and transforming everything, however, has more than a touch of historical determinism about it, which is how Hanby can assert that the founders did not adequately understand “the nature of their own deed.” Therefore, they must be understood better than they understood themselves. We now know where Deneen’s “invisible architecture of the regime” came from and who put it there: not the founders, but the forces of History.
Ironically, the progressive Left dismisses the founders on the same grounds, as products of History. The Left is just as happy as Hanby to say that the founders did not know what they were doing, which is why they “built worse than they intended.” The difference is that the Left embraces the new ontology, while Hanby rejects it. The Left has its hands full as a result, while Hanby’s are empty.
Hanby ends up as much a product of History as he claims the founders were. As Dennis Teti has put it, “Hanby cannot both believe that freedom and truth are united, and believe that what the founders said they were doing is irrelevant because they are cogs in the machinery of the new ontology.” The signers of the Declaration appealed to the “Supreme Judge of the world” for the rectitude of their intentions, not to History. Hanby and Deneen, in effect, appeal to History to undermine the founders’ rectitude. Their argument rests on the determinism they condemn.
Against Hanby’s and Deneen’s thesis is the fact that nothing like the Declaration and American Constitution could have issued from the irresistible 18th-century worldview they depict. They make what the founders said, sacrificed, and did, unintelligible. The founders would not recognize or comprehend the choice that Deneen and Hanby see them as having made: to found a regime on moral relativism and radical individual autonomy. The founders repeatedly described these concepts as repugnant.
Deneen’s response to this is that the Founders could have done a better job of using the government to promote public virtue vis a vis our constitutional system and instead, by focusing on the protection of individual rights, they failed to adequately do justice to the Christian (and older, classical Greek) ideal of promoting the common good:
Reilly takes me to task for suggesting that a long and winding connection between Madison’s call for government to protect different attainments in property with contemporary calls for government to protect a variety of other forms of “identity” and individual belief is unjustified, but we should not be surprised that a political order that comes into existence to protect private differences should result in positive calls for government to protect and preserve “diversity,” expressed as “identity.” Indeed, inasmuch as for Locke the first form of property is ownership of our own selves, protection of expression of selfhood is a predictable form of how our “diversity in faculties” is likely to find expression. And, as his 1792 essay on property makes clear, Madison’s understanding of property as exclusive possessions of individuals, which includes not only external wealth but also opinions and belief, is extensively the same as the Lockean view.Reilly claims that Locke and Madison—in distinction from Hobbes and Machiavelli—are part of a continuous tradition that reaches back to ancient and Christian philosophy. However, one would be hard-pressed to find a justification of res publica from pre-modern thinkers that rests on the claim that protection of private differences is the “first object” of republican government. The classical tradition—expressed, for instance, in the writings of Aristotle or Aquinas—encouraged public-spiritedness, self-rule, concern for the common good, and cultivation of virtue as the essential elements of a polity or republic. While classical thinkers also recognized differences (and the potential for factions) as a major challenge, they commended the harmonization of differences and cultivation of virtue rather than promoting pursuit of private differences as the best avenue of avoiding political division. Indeed, the ancient Greeks reserved the word idiotes to those mainly concerned with private things. Classical thinkers encouraged the formation of small-scale regimes over large ones as more likely to promote participation in a shared common good. Aristotle argued for a limit to acquisition, believing that excess was as dangerous to civic and personal virtue as deficiency.
In calling for a large and extended republic, a relatively small political class whose ambition would promote national greatness, and a citizenry with a main focus on private pursuits, both Madison and Hamilton were cognizant that they were building a nation based on a new science of politics, as Hamilton readily acknowledges in Federalist 1 and 9.
Later in two more essays for the Public Discourse, Reilly essentially expounds on his previous summary, detailing the ways in which the Founders believed in the importance of morality to politics and crafted the Declaration and Constitution so that citizens animated with public virtue and Christian morals could enact wise legislation to govern their lives – and at the same time protect them against those who would tyrannize them for corrupt reasons. For Reilly, the common good will be advanced and promoted by Christian citizens who will enact legislation via the Constitution – but if those citizens lack basic decency and Christian virtue, then we will find ourselves in our present predicament (remember Adam’s famous quote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”)
As conservative or traditional Christians should we want, with Deneen, more support for an activist government that promotes a public morality? I guess it depends on what that support entails; after all it wasn’t so long ago that it was considered common sense (and uncontroversial) that we had laws that made it difficult to get a divorce or have a child out of wedlock, or obtain contraceptive devices, or obtain an abortion, or proclaim your status as a sodomite! All of these laws were legal and supported by the American constitutional system – what changed seems to be the American people. On the other hand, does Deneen pine for a public, state-support church? It is hard to say, but looking back at the great American Catholic thinker Orestes Brownson, there is ample support in Catholic natural law thinking for the separation of church and state and the American First Amendment:
Brownson, though, did not merely restate America’s defense of religious freedom to the editors of La Civiltá Cattolica, but also stressed that American constitutionalism is really the form of government that most approximates a Christian anthropology and provides an example of how modern republics can realize the Christian idea of the integral development of the human person. On this point, Brownson observed that the First Amendment’s religion clauses were a specific limitation on the state’s power reminding it that it stood under a higher order of law. The right of citizens to situate themselves before God was anterior to political society, thus the supremacy of the spiritual order fundamentally limited the federal government. A core aspect, then, of freedom is grounded in personal communion with God.Brownson stated forthrightly in “Civil and Religious Freedom” that “the spirit of Christ is the spirit of Liberty,” that God everywhere governs the moral world by moral power and not divine coercion. The Church’s teachings must be proposed not imposed, and be received and responded to by voluntary assent. But what was true for the Church was even truer for the state. The operations of government are entirely incompetent to prescribe any spiritual truths to the heart of man. The state’s province is in the temporal acts of governance and here it reigned supreme. The Church, however, Brownson argued, retained the authority to declare the natural law to any state that acted unjustly in its duties, but, Brownson seemed to stress, this is more of an exhortatory action by the Church.
Accompanying Brownson’s defense of religious liberty throughout the essay is the notion of corporate worship as the fundamental way we participate in religion. And this demands not merely freedom of conscience for merely private religious beliefs, but the full freedom of the Church as the entity whereby our thoughts and beliefs achieve their full expression in concert with others. Brownson recognized that reducing religious liberty to merely private conscience is to reduce greatly any vital public significance that it might have. The Church must not face sanction from the government in any of its efforts to teach or form its members, and citizens should be free to follow their faith as taught by churches. This freedom, Brownson continued, the Church demanded “not on the ground that she is the Church of God, but on the ground that she is our church, our religion, our conscience, and we are men and citizens.”[4]
So life hasn’t turned out in ways that traditional Christian conservatives would have liked – but is that the fault of our Constitution? Where has a political regime done a better job of holding the line against the corrosive acid of modern life? The Saudi Monarchy? The Islamic theocratic government in Iran? How about the traditional but constitutional monarchy in Thailand? In other words, you would have to point to a repressive society inimical to Christian values if you want better social indicators (things like abortion being illegal or no so-called “gay marriage”) or you could point to a society where modernity is pushing in slowly but surely -- it seems like traditional morality and public virtue cannot figure out how to stem the tide of creeping libertinism. Looking at the diversity of political systems that have been unable to withstand this tide, it seems almost bizarre to pin the blame in America on the Founding, which instead seems to be the source of much public good and many heroic deeds that can be attributed to the American government and way of life.
Comments (43)
Thanks for this summary, Jeff; especially for bringing in Orestes Brownson to assist the clarification. Your question at the end about what regimes have held the line against modernity is a provocative one, but to me the key lacuna in the Deneen/Hanby argument is how we actually get from the Declaration and the Constitution to transgenderism. It's a huge leap that needs to be demonstrated, not implied, much less smuggled in.
Posted by Paul J Cella | October 30, 2017 12:17 PM
Thanks for the summary, Jeff, and for the perspective!
I wonder if anyone in the exchange has talked about the issue of federal-state subsidiarity. At the time of the founding, the states were completely free even to have an established state church. Not that I recommend this, but it was considered allowed by the Constitution, and I believe that the Founders wanted it left that way. Certainly states were completely free to have vice laws, "blue" laws, recognition of God and even of Christianity in the ceremony of their legislatures, and so forth. If Deneen really believes that this was a *weakness* of the founding and that our country would have somehow been more resistant to modernist rot if all of this had been *standardized* at the level of the federal constitution, he is clearly wrong. It was the variation of state law that allowed resistance to many evils for so long, and it was only after the activist Supreme Court began, contrary to the Constitution and in defiance of its meaning, to federalize these matters that more conservative state laws were overthrown.
Deneen would have a better argument if he went with some paleoconservatives and argued that the "fatal flaw" entered with the 14th amendment. To be sure, paleocons take all of that much too far and tie it in with their neo-confederate and sometimes pro-slavery ideas. But it isn't entirely false to say that the 14th amendment was a dangerous tool of centralization inasmuch as it a) was part of the Constitution itself, b) permitted and even encouraged the federal government to have far greater control over state laws and even state enforcement of the laws and c) was not as clear as it could have been concerning which subjects did and did not fall under its purview.
Moreover: How would Deneen and his ilk explain the extreme liberalism of a state like Quebec on social issues? Or the decadence of Italy? Both of these were confessional states. Both had a strong, built-in idea of religion as a counterweight to individual whims. Both are, if anything, crazier than the U.S. Quebec has gone from promoting Catholicism centuries ago to, now, forcing all schools to promote the "LGBT" perspective.
Similarly, institutions of higher learning such as Yale were founded on extremely pious religious principles and now are extremely liberal.
The problem with someone like Deneen is a common disease of the historian of ideas--the obsession with finding an Original Sin in the founding of something that explains its later downfall. I realize that finding such an original, fatal flaw gives a feeling of intellectual satisfaction, but it is completely misguided history ideas to insist that there always must be such a thing and to go digging in order to find or manufacture one.
The only universal Original Sin is just...Original Sin. That is to say, mankind is fallen and can pervert anything, no matter how well-founded. Very often, that is the end of the story. But pundits and historians of ideas would find themselves out of a job (figuratively or literally) and bereft of their raison d'etre if they admitted, even to themselves, how often that is the case.
Posted by Lydia | October 30, 2017 2:39 PM
Yes, that's true. It also struck me that what Jeff was showing us in Hanby's thinking
is actually Hegelian, rather than Lockean. The "historical imperative" nonsense comes out of Hegel's twisted mind, (twisted in no small measure in trying to understand the world through Kant, which can only be done in a twisted mind).
Posted by Tony | October 30, 2017 11:19 PM
"how we actually get from the Declaration and the Constitution to transgenderism. It's a huge leap that needs to be demonstrated, not implied, much less smuggled in."
A good place to start is Hanby's 2015 First Things essay "The Civic Project of American Christianity."
~~The notion of a new ontology controlling and transforming everything, however, has more than a touch of historical determinism about it, which is how Hanby can assert that the founders did not adequately understand “the nature of their own deed.”~~
Not necessarily. If ideas have consequences, it's no leap to believe that big ideas can have big consequences.
How is it any different from asserting that Luther, Calvin, et al. did not adequately understand what would be the negative fruits of the Reformation?
"it is completely misguided history ideas to insist that there always must be such a thing and to go digging in order to find or manufacture one."
No need to go digging here. Take your "choice will devour itself" principle and apply it somewhere other than sex. Autonomy let loose cannot be expected to behave and remain compartmentalized. See Kalb's The Tyranny of Liberalism and more recently Legutko's The Demon in Democracy.
Posted by Nice Marmot | October 31, 2017 7:20 AM
Thanks for all the encouragement and comments so far...it is good to be back after a long absence!
Lydia, I think you raise an important point with respect to our federal system -- it strikes me that if we really want to think hard about how to fix some of our problems the key lies in restoring federalism and restoring real power to the States. Let Texas (and Mississippi and Alabama, etc.) be Texas and we would see abortion outlawed, sodomy illegal, marriage protected by law, etc. We'd also see progressive madness in places like New York, California and probably my home state of Illinois but that is the price we pay for a federal system and allowing the States to control their own destiny.
Nice,
This provides less of an answer than you think:
Again, if you mean to indict all modern political systems that introduced democratic governments and forms of constitutional republicanism, I suppose this might be a place to start. But it certainly cannot be a specific knock against the Founders or the American Constitution -- as we keep pointing out the evils of modernity can be found throughout the West (and in places like South America, Asia, heck, even the Middle-East is not immune) and in often a more virulent form than we find in America. So "autonomy let loose" seems to be a very modern phenomenon closely allied with people's desire to throw off the constraints of religion -- which tends to have very little to do with the form of political system they live under.
Posted by Jeffrey S. | October 31, 2017 8:12 AM
Jeffrey, what you say is correct, but I think that it must be taken into consideration that the United States was the first nation that consciously attempted the creation of a secular democratic republic. Isn't that the nature of the "American experiment"?
Likewise, we have been the chief exporter of the ideas and ideals of the same, good and bad.
This is not to blame the U.S. for the experiment, but it does seem to preclude the idea that, if there is a worm in the heart of secular democracy per se, we are somehow immune to it.
In other words, the worm is there not because of what the Founders built, but in spite of it.
Posted by Nice Marmot | October 31, 2017 8:41 AM
a) I don't think they viewed it, nor was it, "secular" in anything like the sense that that term is currently used, *even at the federal level*. Consider all kinds of federal-level invocations and recognitions of God. At the federal level, one might say that it was theistic as opposed to confessionally Christian, but not secular.
b) It was not even merely theistic at the state level, which was where most of the action took place on...pretty much everything. If you *like* or *desire* a more explicitly confessional state (which I think is not such a good idea, but that's not the point here), the U.S. was not trying to found something where people didn't have that, though they had no desire to put that in place at the federal level, any more than they were putting in place the prohibition thereof at the federal level.
Posted by Lydia | October 31, 2017 8:58 AM
I meant secular in the sense of not being explicitly religious: not relying on, supportive of, or attached to any specific religion.
Posted by Nice Marmot | October 31, 2017 9:18 AM
Nice, suppose that we grant for the sake of the argument that from Locke's philosophy, unrestrained license (the "full fruits" of his notion of "liberty") follows. It still would remain to be established that what the Founders were doing was "establishing a Lockean system". There is a lot of reason to dispute that conclusion. While Locke certainly influenced a lot of people including some of the Founders, so did other thinkers. Lots, actually. Insofar as they were engaged in practical politics and not writing a scholarly treatise as such, there is no reason they could not borrow from this, that, and the other political theorist what they liked in his works. And as there were many men engaged in the process and not just one, "what they were doing" is multi-hued in one sense, though averaged out to a consensus in another, so it is very difficult to be definitive about it except where what they arrived at has only one possible explanation. And that hardly ever obtains.
As I showed in my post on whether conservatism is a subset of liberalism, there was a certain commonality of interests between the traditional religious and social conservers (especially, of the natural law tradition) of the 1600s and 1700s, and the new liberals, in rejecting absolute monarchy. That they both believed in individual rights did not mean that traditional conservers were really liberals. Nor does it mean that setting up a government that respected certain individual rights was "a liberal project" as such.
The Constitution (as originally written), especially, is not such a vehicle. As much as there were individual rights written into it (in the Amendments, that is), these primarily preserved the ability of the States to act as real governments with real sovereignty within their own spheres. Perhaps one of the most intrusive constraints it placed on the States was that the federal order would require that they have a republican form of government (so that none of them might become a monarchy, for example).
Nor can the mere fact of the new order being (a) based on a written Constitution (rather than those unwritten ones based solely on custom), or (b) (partially) democratic, constitute reasons to call the founding a liberal project. Both of these are, for example, possible within the framework of the kind of good governmental order (i.e. "mixed") set out by Aquinas in On Kingship:
And in the Summa Theologica:
And while God can establish such an order directly, one can hardly suppose that men could do so without at least some parts of such a complex order being established in a written form, for as complexity increases, disagreements between men multiplies many-fold, unless it be reduced by some explicit means - e.g. written law.
Posted by Tony | October 31, 2017 9:30 AM
Nice, I suppose that on recent decades this is the "received wisdom", especially in judicial circles. But I doubt that the Founders would have been quite so ready to agree with that. The federal order left the States free to be confessional. Almost all of the states were in fact explicitly confessional. The few that were not were largely Protestant in ethos and entirely Christian in population (there were less than 0.1% Jews, and almost certainly fewer still of any other religion).
I think that the Founders would have been astounded at legal forms (such as we have now) that refuse to be "supportive of" - explicitly - the Christian religion. And also that an adequate legal theory behind the laws should be devoid of Christian understanding of God's place in human affairs.
Would it not be more accurate to say that the Founders established a Christian government, that was explicitly non-denominational?
Posted by Tony | October 31, 2017 9:39 AM
Tony, I certainly agree that there influences on the founding other than Locke. But if the idea of radical human autonomy is inherently corrosive, the other more positive influences would only serve as short- or long-term hindrances to that corrosion, not as perpetually impregnable defenses.
If, as Jeff says, we see it manifest its corrosive tendencies even in "religious" nations, why would we think that a sort of vaguely Burkean conservatism, say, or a civic non-confessional Protestantism would be able to withstand it?
Posted by Nice Marmot | October 31, 2017 9:59 AM
And, again, you are ignoring the importance of subsidiarity in such matters. Are you really of the opinion that things would have been better, that virtue and freedom would have lasted longer in the U.S., if the U.S. federal government had been explicitly confessionally Christian, and therefore attached to some specific variety of Christianity (perhaps Catholicism) in 1789, as opposed to leaving that issue for variation at the state level?
Because if you think that, I say that a) you have no good evidence for the thesis, b) you don't understand the huge degree of centralization that would have entailed and its many spin-off evils, and therefore the wisdom of the founders in doing no such thing, c) history is not on the side of the thesis, inductively.
You seem to think that merely refraining from establishing a confessional state at the federal level involves this ginormous set of substantive ideas about the vast importance of radical individual autonomy or some such. I say that's an immense over-reading of the non-centralized structure of our Republic (not to mention a failure to value the wisdom of that restraint) at its outset.
Posted by Lydia | October 31, 2017 8:04 PM
I'm all for subsidiarity. I just do not see how esconcing radical human autonomy into law at the highest level encourages, let alone guarantees, it at lower levels. Subsidiarity cannot be imposed from above or poured in from the top; liberalism in all its forms would seem to preclude that.
"You seem to think that merely refraining from establishing a confessional state at the federal level involves this ginormous set of substantive ideas about the vast importance of radical individual autonomy or some such."
I said nothing about a confessional state. Frankly, my personal opinion on that is still out, so it's not a subject I tend to comment much upon one way or the other.
"that's an immense over-reading of the non-centralized structure of our Republic (not to mention a failure to value the wisdom of that restraint) at its outset."
I do not see why this has to be a radical either/or. Again I'll ask, how is the question at hand any different than the one that can be asked about the Reformers? Is it not possible that they got many of the smaller questions right while getting a major one, perhaps the major one, wrong?
Posted by Nice Marmot | November 1, 2017 8:14 AM
Please specify in detail the ensconcing of radical human autonomy into law at the highest level in the U.S. Constitution of 1789. I think you will be hard-pressed to document any such thing. The accusation is just a neoreactionary meme.
Posted by Lydia | November 1, 2017 9:07 AM
You know as well as I do that it's not the sort of thing that can be specified in detail in a combox. If it were, Reilly and Deneen wouldn't need a lengthy back-and-forth.
I'm not even trying to "prove" it; I'm asking why it must be dismissed outright, to wit:
"The accusation is just a neoreactionary meme."
Posted by Nice Marmot | November 1, 2017 9:41 AM
By the way, D.C. Schindler has just published a major book on this subject, and Deneen's comes out in January, published by Yale no less. Not bad for a neoreactionary meme.
Posted by Nice Marmot | November 1, 2017 10:42 AM
But, I mean, I've read the original Constitution. There's nothing in there to that effect at all. It's pretty much just nuts and bolts of how to set up this republic in which most of the powers are retained by the states. You aren't going to find an endorsement of radical individual autonomy in boring things like the grant to Congress of the power to coin money or regulate Interstate commerce.
I've spent hours arguing this kind of thing over a period of years with reactionary friends, and they never could find anything either. It was all vague history of ideas talk about Locke, psychoanalysis of the Founders, and a general yearning for a utopian Catholic state, much like Deneen & co. And more recently I spent time reading the more bitter variety of neoreactionary talk-talk, and there was nothing convincing there, either. I'm "dismissing it outright" now because I already put in my time investigating it, and evidentially speaking there's no there there. The burden of proof is on them, you know. They're the ones with the substantive causal thesis. Let them support it if they can.
I'm afraid you aren't willing to come down to brass tacks. When I suggest, "Okay, are you saying the 1789 Constitution embodied radical individualism? If so, where?" you back off and act like it's an unreasonable request. If I ask, "Are you saying that the problem lay in the failure to establish a confessional Catholic state at the federal level at the outset?" you disclaim that as well. Yet you'll keep on talking about "esconcing radical human autonomy into law at the highest level" as if this is a meaningful, plausibly accurate criticism of the American founding, without being willing to give it any clear cash value or argue for it.
Ain't nobody got time for that.
Posted by Lydia | November 1, 2017 1:52 PM
Oh, please. Like nobody *ever* wrote whole, long books in the humanities, including the history of ideas, even published by major presses, based on dubious and poorly argued ideas. *That* kind of credentialist argument should cut precisely zero ice.
Posted by Lydia | November 1, 2017 1:56 PM
Still waiting to hear how this claim is any different from that regarding the Reformation....waiting....waiting....waiting.
Posted by Nice Marmot | November 1, 2017 3:13 PM
It appears to me that both sides of this argument have elements of truth because there was a tension in the American founding, which is best summed up in the Declaration of Independence. The justification for rebellion - "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..." - layed the ground work for radical autonomy. Christianity held liberalism in check, but as that became less influential liberalism spread like a virus infecting everything. This isn't so much the fault of the founders, but the fault of Man.
Posted by Urban II | November 1, 2017 3:31 PM
So an argument from analogy is all ya got? What precisely *is* the claim about the Reformation, and why would a Protestant accept it?
Posted by Lydia | November 1, 2017 3:31 PM
Working backwards...
Urban II,
I think the tension can be found within the Declaration itself -- after all, if the document claims as you say that governments derive their "just powers from the consent of the governed" that simply begs the question about what are just powers? To that question we go to the Declarations famous preamble: "that all men are...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." So we have a Constitution that does its best to balance the conflicting claims upon a citizen and his government -- a majority of people cannot arbitrarily decided to vote that all red-heads should be executed because they don't like red-heads. This would be a nice example of an unjust power -- our first ten amendments could be construed as an imperfect effort to protect minorities from unjust majority power.
Lydia and Nice,
Building off of what I said to Urban II, I think Deneen's main argument concerning the Founders and Constitution boils down to what he says in his response to Reilly here:
Is this a good argument? For the reasons I claim in my OP, I don't think so -- mainly because as I said and Lydia echoed my argument, the States (and even the Federal government to a lesser extent) were free to implement all sort of ethical and moral laws that promoted the common good (a quick Google search confirms that there were State laws governing the Sabbath, church property, blasphemy, oath taking, and marriage.) Somehow all these Christian lawmakers didn't get the memo that they were to ignore the common good.
Posted by Jeffrey S. | November 1, 2017 4:41 PM
There's also the fact (sorry) that Deneen's suspicion of "protecting different attainments in property" is way overblown. It's actually not a bad thing to let people keep what they've earned rather than either allowing it to be stolen from them by outright robbery or forcibly distributing it by the state. This, I suspect, is where a major part of our disagreement with Deneen and also with NM lies. Both of them think there's something inherently wrong with strong protection of private property rights, that it doesn't show enough care for the poor, or that it's radically individualistic, or some such.
The great irony there is that the countries in this world where the poor suffer the most are those where there is not strong protection of private property, security of contract, etc., to give stability to the economy and thus allow human ingenuity to lead to human flourishing within a safe environment where people can keep what they earn.
What this argument may really be is a proxy for the old argument between those who think that the security of property and the free exchange of goods and services have a lot to be said for them and those who think these political ideals are inherently suspect, wrong, and lead to all kinds of evil.
Posted by Lydia | November 1, 2017 5:41 PM
We can also just repudiate this claim outright. In America in 1776 through 1789, there was already existing the several state governments which existed for the basic reasons that polities everywhere have always existed. The government that came into being in 1789 came into existence in order to unite the several states (partially, not fully, because they retained their sovereignty in part), to protect the whole, and to referee disputes between them. There is, frankly, almost nothing in the formation of the US federal govt that would even bear on the "protect private differences" except a few of the limitations on Congressional power in Section 9 of Article 1, and limitations from the Amendments. The proposition that the Amendments were such as to make the very governmental order "came into existence in order to protect private differences" is just bizarre, not least because they were an after thought to the Convention, not its main focus, but also because one can hardly make out a case that the 4th (against unreasonable search and siezure) or 5th (against being held for a crime without indictment of a grand jury) without sounding like an idiot.
Posted by Tony | November 1, 2017 7:19 PM
Good point, Tony. That's one reason why people's feet need to be held to the fire on pointing to precisely what in the actual founding documents of the country bears on this point. They really shouldn't be allowed to get away with vague talk about the secret purposes of the founders or their Lockean inclinations or what-not.
In contrast, when a modern liberal tries to enshrine radical personal autonomy in law in some area, he is not shy about it, nor is it hard to find the fingerprints of his ideology in the law itself. He induces the Supreme Court to declare that abortion is a fundamental right. He induces legislators or the people (in a referendum) to make it legal to kill oneself with the help of a doctor. He argues strenuously against, and usually succeeds in blocking, parental consent provisions in abortion law. He gets legislators to pass laws saying that minors (!) can obtain contraception without the knowledge or consent of their parents. And so forth. We don't have to go around holding up modern laws and court diktats to a flame so that the lemon juice code in the document, which can be seen only by the eyes of faith, will reveal the radical autonomy provisions hidden therein.
Posted by Lydia | November 1, 2017 8:15 PM
Jeffrey S,
I agree that the tension is found within the Declaration itself and I would add that it not only raises the question of what are just powers, but it raises a fundamental question of the nature of authority itself - does political authority come from the Creator or the "consent of the governed"? Christian tradition holds that:
There is a deep tension between the historical Christian understanding that all authority derives from God and those "who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed" and the Declaration's claim that authority is derived from the consent of the governed. Furthermore, there is little justification for outright rebellion against your own political authority (i.e King of Great Britain) because of perceived unjust taxation.
Posted by Urban II | November 2, 2017 3:54 AM
"So an argument from analogy is all ya got?"
All that the argument from analogy does is demonstrate that the "poison pill" or "worm at the heart" idea cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. I don't expect a Protestant to buy it, but it should at least give your Catholic cohorts a moment of pause.
"What this argument may really be is a proxy for the old argument between those who think that the security of property and the free exchange of goods and services have a lot to be said for them and those who think these political ideals are inherently suspect, wrong, and lead to all kinds of evil."
In a limited sense you are correct, but you've not only overblown it, you've got it bass-ackwards to boot. If anything the "goods vs. the Good" argument is a proxy of the autonomy argument, not the other way around. This whole thing reminds me of the arguments with Maximos back in the day: you don't seem to understand Deneen any more than you understood Max when he was here.
"Both of them think there's something inherently wrong with strong protection of private property rights, that it doesn't show enough care for the poor, or that it's radically individualistic, or some such."
Can't speak for Deneen, but as one who leans trad con/agrarian, I have a very strong commitment to private property rights. However, like Weaver, Kirk, Scruton, etc., I do believe that property rights can be manifested and defended in such a way as to both hurt the poor and to foster radical individualism, and that this is precisely what occurs when avarice is recast as self-interest. For a very timely demonstration of this, see Jonathan Taplin's recent book Move Fast and Break Things.
Posted by Nice Marmot | November 2, 2017 9:07 AM
This, by the way, is why we shouldn't be surprised when the elites and the corporations go along with the latest lunacy of the sexual revolutionaries. St. John linked greed, lust, and pride, but too many "conservatives" find it expedient to put them asunder.
Posted by Nice Marmot | November 2, 2017 9:14 AM
Which you will be hard-pressed to find anywhere in the founding documents of our country. Golly, anyone would think that the original Bill of Rights was an op-ed piece at the _Federalist_ extolling radical, unqualified libertarianism.
Posted by Lydia | November 2, 2017 10:37 AM
"Which you will be hard-pressed to find anywhere in the founding documents of our country."
It's a given, baked into the then-contemporary understanding of the Commercial Republic. The business of America is business, remember? Silent Cal didn't just dream that up.
Posted by Nice Marmot | November 2, 2017 2:57 PM
Perhaps not, but it came out 130 years after the Founding. That's enough time to at least doubt that it expresses an original tenet of the Founding. Surely the men who pledged their lives and fortunes (and honor) might be at least potentially considered to imagine the business of America something slightly more significant than "business".
Posted by Tony | November 3, 2017 5:29 PM
That's really lame, NM. It's more or less saying that you can just see what's in their minds, and it has something-something to do with greedy consumerism and commercialism. Because you can Just Tell. Because you're just sure that's what "America" stands for. Lame stuff.
Posted by Lydia | November 3, 2017 8:24 PM
By that standard of evidence, I might as well spin out the following similarly deep stereotypes, with their predictions:
--Germany is damned from its inception because the Teutonic spirit is all about harsh control, which is inimical to the human spirit.
--Italy has a worm in the bud because it's all about wine, women, and song, and you can never make a virtuous country that way.
--France is definitely doomed, because life is more than sex, and sex is all that Frenchmen think about.
--Catholicism will fail because it has always been about controlling people's minds and burning people at the stake and stuff, and that always backfires in the end (pun intended).
You get the picture.
Posted by Lydia | November 3, 2017 8:28 PM
~~~Perhaps not, but it came out 130 years after the Founding. That's enough time to at least doubt that it expresses an original tenet of the Founding. Surely the men who pledged their lives and fortunes (and honor) might be at least potentially considered to imagine the business of America something slightly more significant than "business".~~~
Certainly. But that doesn't mean their thought was immune to the unintended consequences of errors they may have accepted uncritically, not out of malice but out of ignorance.
"it has something-something to do with greedy consumerism and commercialism."
Newsflash: the love child born at the junction of Wall St. and K St. ain't pretty. You can keep denying the existence of consumerism and materialism, but all the denial in the world won't make that ugly bastard any prettier. And it'll just keep on doing what it does best -- destroying the very things Christians value most. Choice will devour itself, indeed.
Posted by Nice Marmot | November 4, 2017 1:22 PM
Sigh, which is related to the founding somehow, because someone said so and it's got something to do with America.
Posted by Lydia | November 4, 2017 3:25 PM
Double sigh. For an academic you have a surprisingly close-minded approach to ideas that may make waves in your ideological ocean.
Posted by Nice Marmot | November 5, 2017 9:52 AM
Can you see that you are running along a circular track here: the founding did in fact lead to the Commercial Republic, so anything present in the time of the founding that could lead to Commercial Republic was in fact an infection that must have infected their thinking and thus was an "original fault" of the founding.
On that basis, every human endeavor is wrong.
Can it not be that original sin, followed by entirely ordinary personal sins of later men, damage and bring down what is originally good? Can it not be that the Jesuit Order, instead of being a pernicious, evil enterprise from the very beginning, merely had the difficult working conditions of using humans, damaged as they all are? Can it not be that the Solomon, rather than being evil and bent on destroying Israel from his first days as king through bent designs, became evil through giving in to evil influences LATER in his kingship?
I would suggest you consider this line of thinking: a "state", that is, a polity, is a natural entity in that man is made for social being, and social living requires organizing principles in order for harmony to result. This may mean that "the state" is, always, much more than what is set forth in any written constitution and set of rules. It is the society itself, as organized. Much of the society consists in relationships and customs that cannot be reduced to a set of rules. The rules do not determine the society and its particular nature, they reflect it. The underlying nature of a polity is somewhat of a given, insofar as it must comport with human nature and the basic need for a formal society.
But a "super-polity" made up of many already existing whole states is something else. In a certain sense, there is nothing inherently "natural" about it, it is necessarily an artifice of man's invention - however sensible it is at the same time. If each of the member states is itself a sort of whole society, then in a certain sense by voluntarily forming a super-polity they take on what is beyond the "nature" of social organization as such. If so, then the artifice (the agreements which make determinate in specific form a particular super-polity) ARE the "nature" of the super-polity. The larger political reality takes it very meaning from the form of the agreements which are hammered out between the polities who enter into it. That is, the essence of the federal reality (at first instance) just is what is made determinate in the agreements.
I will grant that even this requires that the parties already share a common set of meanings for the expressions used, they have to already agree on the concepts that constitute the underpinnings for the agreement - or they would not really be agreeing to the SAME constructed formal arrangement. And that shared, common understanding (which, in the case of America, was based on somewhat of shared political and cultural background, would also be implicitly part of the essence of the federal order.
But in order to hold that THAT reality entailed, as such, the defective notions of unrestrained liberty, of greedy commercialism, requires that it was also rooted within those pre-existing polities as well, because they are not IN the actual agreements: not just that these deforming forces were IN those polities, but that they belonged to them as deformative fundamental elements. But those polities were (like most states) organically grown structures of piecemeal organizational and social elements, some of which formed before Lockeanism was much of a philosophical force, and in which Lockeanism was at odds with many competing strains of political thought - including absolute monarchy. It would be incredibly difficult to establish conclusively that the notions of unrestrained liberty and greedy commercialism were so rooted in the states as to be fundamental elements thereof.
And even if they were, it would not necessarily lead to the conclusion that those states were SO defective in nature as to constitute "evil beings" for which the only possible answer would be to discard them and start afresh. Rome in the time of Jesus and St. Paul was built on slave labor, and on imperialism. But St. Paul still taught that they owed loyalty to Rome:
Somehow, in 300 years, Rome was converted over so that it was able to become a political order in which Christianity could thrive and become partners with the state - i.e. Christendom. Without overthrowing it's "nature" as an imperial super-polity.
I don't hold out much hope of America turning away from its self-caused illness any time soon - at least not without some calamity like civil war, for example. But with God all things are possible. It could become a fully Christian society, without ceasing to be America.
Posted by Tony | November 5, 2017 1:10 PM
"It would be incredibly difficult to establish conclusively that the notions of unrestrained liberty and greedy commercialism were so rooted in the states as to be fundamental elements thereof."
By the time of the founding avarice had long been recast as self-interest, and a Lockean understanding of freedom was common currency among the "Enlightened." You are correct in saying that the process towards these changes had begun long before, but it is not necessary that they would have had to be in full bloom, so to speak, in order to become fundamental elements of the state.
Recall that Dostoevsky has Shigalyev say, "Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism." At any given time the playing out of this principle is going to vary according to time and place. If the Lockean understanding of human freedom and the recasting of avarice as self-interest are in fact errors, and major ones at that, they will necessarily work themselves out negatively in history, however. If we are trying to figure out where we are and how we got here societally, it seems to me very wrongheaded to ignore this avenue of inquiry simply because it goes against our ideological commitments or makes us uncomfortable.
If there are some inherent philosophical problems with the American founding, wouldn't it make sense to identify them and move forward from there in our attempts to restore some measure of sanity to the culture? After all, no one is saying, "Let's scrap the whole thing and start from scratch," except the far outliers on both sides.
Posted by NM | November 7, 2017 9:54 AM
We're talking different languages here. "Fundamental elements of the state" are not things that you can put on and take off like a coat. For a state that is an organically grown thing, like France, or (even better) like England, which took several hundred years to become "England", you don't make a new-fangled invention like Lockeanism a "fundamental element" in a mere 150 years. And avarice had been around a lot longer than Lockeanism. (Besides, I keep seeing that it was Adam Smith that invented the idea of recasting avarice as self-interest, not Locke.) I just don't see it as a valid historical claim that each of the states, or all of the states collectively, had been formed with "avarice re-cast as self-interest" as fundamental elements of their polities. Yes, they had avaricious men. No, that was not a core political organizing principle.
Posted by Tony | November 7, 2017 8:28 PM
It does not have to be a "core political organizing principle" in order to have an effect. It was simply there -- taken for granted and all but uncritically accepted. Remember what Flannery O'Connor said about "nihilism" being everywhere -- in the air we breathe? She was not implying that a person had to be a conscious nihilist of some sort to be in thrall to it or affected by it.
In a similar way the government itself did not need to be formed consciously with these ideas of autonomy in mind if the men themselves had already been "formed" with these notions as part and parcel of their intellectual make-up. As you well know "free thought" was by no means void of content.
Posted by NM | November 8, 2017 9:40 AM
NM,
It's a given, baked into the then-contemporary understanding of the Commercial Republic.
While I grant that a Commercial Republic was at least partially a founding principle, it seems vital to understand how they interpreted that phrase for their own mostly agrarian economy. I am confident the Founding Fathers would literally have been horrified at the idea of an imperial world power where multinational corporations hold massive sway over government. They had just fought off the British Empire and vandalized one of its main corporate arms, the East India Company.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-accountability-history-corporations-us/
As for individual autonomy, that seems to be more a function of modern technology than any political or philosophical fault with the founding. Hanby's essay approaches that subject in a limited way but doesn't explicitly connect the dots.
Posted by Step2 | November 8, 2017 4:35 PM
Step, I agree with you about the founders and MNC's. Then again, I'd say that there would be a lot of things about today's America they'd be appalled by.
Re: autonomy, although I'm not as familiar with Hanby (I've read only two or three essays), Deneen, D.C. Schindler, Christopher Shannon, and William Cavanaugh, among others, have been writing on this subject for quite a few years now. I expect that the two big books I mentioned above, Schindler's new one and Deneen's in January, will go some ways in connecting the dots.
Posted by NM | November 9, 2017 9:09 AM
Some Presbyterians in the Pennsylvania and the Carolinas in the 1780s predicted that the constitutional settlement would ultimately lead to America's demise. Most of these Presbyterians knew that short of remarkable Divine intervention, that the Solemn League and Covenant was not going to be enacted. But these Presbyterians were upset that in the settlement after the Revolution the Constitution did not acknowledge that Christ was King, and that it did not say that the Ten Commandments were foundational to the laws of our nation. In retrospect they were right.
Posted by Thomas Yeutter | November 11, 2017 10:52 AM