Conservatives Need To Find A Way Out Of Their Locke-Box

During the past week there was a bit of a discussion going on in the comments, the general idea of which was whether conservatives need to come up with a new tag. The truth behind this concern is that, once you find yourself in the position of having to explain what you mean by your chosen tag—in politics, in religion, whatever—you’ve almost certainly lost the fight. In America there’s a very strong tendency to regard the past—which conservatives value—as not all that relevant. It’s part of that whole Novus Ordo Seclorum thing, meaning that the tendency of the American spirit is to regard reinventing ourselves ain’t no biggie. New Deal, New Frontier, Great Society, and so forth. We’ve been suckers for that nonsense ever since the Progressive era, and that’s how we wind up with knuckleheads like Anthony “Sweet Mystery of Life” Kennedy on the SCOTUS. It’s not that conservative is necessarily bad, but it sounds just a bit stodgy to most Americans.

Still, coming up with just the right tag isn’t easy, and especially when you’re trying to convey reverence for the wisdom of our fathers as part of who we are. I have nothing to offer as far as a tag goes, but there’s a bit of discussion—an ongoing one—currently with regard to who our Founding Fathers, who certainly had a high regard for the wisdom of the past, really were. A very strong tendency, fostered by the liberaltarianism movement, is to identify the American Founding with the thought of John Locke. There is increasing pushback against that idea, including on the part of people like Patrick Deneen. Michael Anton is another of the type who is sympathetic to Deneen’s approach, but is dubious about its practical appeal to the public.

Quite recently Steven Hayward, in a very brief post, took note of this ongoing discussion:

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: ARE WE TRAPPED IN A LOCKE-BOX?

With some of the leading National Conservative intellectuals—especially Yoram Hazony—casting shade on the imputed Lockeanism of the American Founding, it is worth recurring to just one of Willmoore Kendall’s fertile provocations about this point from more than 50 years ago:

“The emphasis of Locke’s political theory is, ultimately, egalitarian, since if the consent of all is necessary for the ‘compact,’ then each man’s consent is as ‘good’ as any other man’s; so that if you marry Locke you are ultimately without grounds for resisting current egalitarian trends—which is exactly where most of our Conservative intellectuals have ended up.”

The thought behind what Kendall says here is that egalitarianism leads to a practical indifferentism. Hey, this is America—everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The historical context for Locke is the wars of religion and the subsequent “enlightenment”. The motivation for thinkers like Locke was to find a substitute for religion as the tie that binds a society together—since religion was blamed for the disastrous wars that ensued following the Protestant Revolt. That Lockean agenda is captured in the title of the first of two articles on the subject by Robert Curry:

The Locke-Box

For Locke, it is property all the way down. But property is not the be-all and end-all for the founders.

Curry starts by referring to Hayward’s question, and then referring us to an earlier article that he (Curry) wrote—and his reference to “vocabulary” recalls how we got here:

Un-Lockeing the American Idea

We need to rediscover the vocabulary of the founders if we are to make a success of a new vocabulary for a new Right.

Let’s start with The Locke-Box. Yes, says Curry, many conservatives are trapped in a Locke-Box, but there’s a “simple” way out: Pay attention to the vocabulary of the Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers were very clear, he says, about where they stood with regard to Locke:

[T]he founders were declaring to the world they had broken out of the Locke-box. In our time, there is a steady stream of books and articles by conservatives trying to stuff them back in.

The key that makes this so simple is the word “unalienable”—i.e., not alienable. Alienable is a technical legal term:

It is a word with an unusually precise definition, one that is unchanged from the founders’ day until our own. Here is how it is defined in my dictionary: “adj. Law. Capable of being transferred to the ownership of another” (emphasis mine). That is the complete definition in my dictionary.

“Alienable,” in other words, is a term used in reference to our right to the property that belongs to us, not our abstract “right to property” but to actual property. Our right to our property is an alienable right because we can transfer it. It is because our right to our property is alienable that we can sell, exchange, and bequeath it.

Not entirely clear yet? Curry makes it clear by contrasting Locke’s own words with Jefferson’s famous words in the Declaration of Independence:

Those who are trapped in the Locke-box make much of the fact that the Declaration borrowed “life and liberty” from Locke—but in fact, Jefferson deftly used “life and liberty” to declare that the founders were un-Lockeans. Putting Locke’s “life and liberty” list and the Declaration’s “life and liberty” list side-by-side will make this clear:

“Man . . . hath by nature a power . . . to preserve his property—that is, his life, liberty and estate.” 

“Men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, . . . among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Locke declared that our rights to life and to liberty are property. The Declaration declared that our rights to life and to liberty are among our unalienable rights. And to declare that those rights are unalienable is to declare that they are not property, making it perfectly clear that the founders were declaring they had left Locke’s thinking behind. 

The point here is that Locke sought to evade the religious thought of the past. His idea for the New Order of the World was an explicit appeal to “power”, a concept which in this context is quite Hobbesian in tone. By very strong contrast, Jefferson appeals to religion—the concept that “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are not property over which we exercise power but are rights derived from our God-given human nature that nobody—including ourselves—can give away, or alienate.

The consequences are important. For Locke, the whole purpose of government is rooted in the inability of any individual to have enough “power” to protect his “property” against all comers. Jefferson’s concept of “rights” is rooted in the idea that we are united in receiving these common rights from one Creator. Jefferson’s thought is fundamentally religious, while Locke’s is explicitly advanced as an alternative to religion.

Not sure about that? Locke views even God as a property owner—we are his possessions:

For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker—all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order, and about His business—they are His property.

How different, says Curry, from Christ’s doctrine of the fundamental identity of God: a loving father (this concept of God as father, btw, is especially explicit in the Gospel of John).

And so Curry ends the first of his two articles:

For Locke, it is property all the way down. The idea of property explains our relation to the creator, to society, to government, and to our rights. But property is not the be-all and end-all for the founders. They made that perfectly clear every time they wrote or spoke about our unalienable rights.

Curry (in Un-Lockeing the American Idea) quotes a contemporary conservative who chooses to leave God out of all this, and the implications of Locke’s thought become very clear. If God is left out, where do our rights come from?

Civil rights are rights created and bestowed upon us by the state, and as such, are quite ‘alienable.’

The state giveth and the state taketh away. If you don’t like it, your resort is to power. But there’s no morality involved. And that is the logical end of liberaltarianism. At best it’s the contract theory of government—a radical individualism that leaves no room for human solidarity rooted in a God-given nature.

But, you ask, where did the Founding Fathers get these ideas? Wasn’t Lockeanism everywhere in the intellectual air? Curry explains:

The Locke-Box, Part 2

To declare that those rights are unalienable is to declare that they are not property.

The Founding Fathers got their concept of unalienable rights from the thought of Francis Hutcheson, a moral philosopher whose active life came shortly before the American Founding. Hutcheson distinguished between alienable property rights and unalienable rights associated with human nature as created by God. The link to Wikipedia, in the final section (Influence in Colonial America), discusses Hutcheson’s profound influence on the our Founding, beginning:

Norman Fiering, a specialist in the intellectual history of colonial New England, has described Francis Hutcheson as "probably the most influential and respected moral philosopher in America in the eighteenth century".

Here is Curry’s discussion of that influence:

Francis Hutcheson, in his 1755 treatise A System of Moral Philosophy, presented that breakthrough to the world: “Our rights are either alienable or unalienable . . . our right to our goods and labours is naturally alienable.”

The distinction between alienable rights and unalienable rights is only one element of Hutcheson’s discovery of a profound new way of thinking about humankind. The idea of unalienable rights was a direct consequence of that new way of thinking. That idea and that way of thinking arrived just in time to provide the American founders with the intellectual tools they needed to conduct the American experiment.

The new way of thinking Hutcheson set in motion is known today as common-sense realism. It was the philosophical system that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton learned at William and Mary, at Princeton, and at the college now called Columbia. In fact, all the young Americans who had attended college in America and who rode off to fight the British had been educated in the thinking of Hutcheson and his followers.

Hutcheson’s influence on the founders was profound. There is no need to try to stuff the founders in a Hutcheson-Box. The fit between the thinking of the founders and the thinking of Hutcheson is perfect. Hutcheson even drew for the founders the direct connection between unalienable rights and their passion for limited government: “Unalienable rights are essential limitations in all governments.”

Hutcheson is here making a philosophical point, not making a claim about any government then existing. He showed that unalienable rights entailed limited government philosophically, though no government then existing recognized unalienable rights. It was left to the founders to create the government that did.

I’m not nearly as persuaded of the profundity of Hutcheson’s philosophy as Curry is, suffering as it did from the weaknesses of all types of thought that flowed from Nominalism. However, I agree that his heart was in the Right place. Perhaps this will suggest a way to reframe or retag “conservatism”. If not, I’m content to remain a conservative.