Reconsidering American Liberalism

The Troubled Odyssey Of The Liberal Idea

James Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429977404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Forty years ago Louis Hartz surveyed American political thought in his classic The Liberal Tradition in America. He concluded that American politics was based on a broad liberal consensus made possible by a unique American historical experience, a thesis that seemed to minimize the role of political conflict.Today, with conflict on the rise and with much of liberalism in disarray, James P. Young revisits these questions to reevaluate Hartz's interpretation of American politics. Young's treatment of key movements in our history, especially Puritanism and republicanism's early contribution to the Revolution and the Constitution, demonstrates in the spirit of Dewey and others that the liberal tradition is richer and more complex than Hartz and most contemporary theorists have allowed.The breadth of Young's account is unrivaled. Reconsidering American Liberalism gives voice not just to Locke, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Lincoln, and Dewey but also to Rawls, Shklar, Kateb, Wolin, and Walzer. In addition to broad discussions of all the major figures in over 300 years of political thought?with Lincoln looming particularly large?Young touches upon modern feminism and conservatism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, rights-based liberalism, and social democracy. Out of these contemporary materials Young synthesizes a new position, a smarter and tougher liberalism not just forged from historical materials but reshaped in the rough and tumble of contemporary thought and politics.This exceptionally timely study is both a powerful survey of the whole of U.S. political thought and a trenchant critique of contemporary political debates. At a time of acrimony and confusion in our national politics, Young enables us to see that salvaging a viable future depends upon our understanding how we have reached this point.Never without his own opinions, Young is scrupulously fair to the widest range of thinkers and marvelously clear in getting to the heart of their ideas. Although his book is a substantial contribution to political theory and the history of ideas, it is always accessible and lively enough for the informed general reader. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of U.S. political thought or, indeed, about the future of the country itself.

1
The Ambiguous Legacy of Puritanism

IT IS EXTRAORDINARILY DIFFICULT for secularized, twentieth-century Americans to understand the Puritan inheritance. They see the Puritans through a haze of competing mythologies. On the one hand there is the famous remark of H. L. Mencken to the effect that Puritanism was the nagging fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy, and on the other there is the pietistic hagiography to which all are subjected each year at Thanksgiving. Each, of course, is a gross caricature, and neither begins to come close to capturing the intellectual sophistication of Puritan theology and political theory. The difficulty is that the Puritans seem to have inhabited another, long-gone world.

This last point is especially important in discussing the Hartz thesis. One implication of that theory is that since liberalism is an essentially modern ideology, it follows that from the very beginning the United States has been a quintessentially modern nation. But Puritanism was a complex mix of the modern and the premodern, so that Hartz's thesis, although still very powerful, is oversimplified. A brief exploration of Puritan theological and political ideas illustrates the problem.

Puritan Doctrine

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of the fact that the most dynamic settlements in the American colonies were populated by dissenting Protestants. Of course, the earliest colonial beachhead was at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. But from an intellectual and cultural point of view, the northern colonies, founded by accident by settlers aiming for Virginia, were much more important. The first wave came in 1620 with the sailing of the Mayflower and the establishment of Plymouth by the Pilgrims. However, the creation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by the Puritans in 1630 was to have even more important repercussions. Though also, like their predecessors, in revolt against the authority of the Church of England, the Puritans were more worldly and more intellectually sophisticated than their brethren in Plymouth. For various reasons, they rapidly dispersed throughout much of New England. And, of course, they spread a body of doctrine.

In somewhat formal, schematic terms, Puritanism can be defined as "theocratic, congregational-presbyterian, Calvinistic, protestant, medieval Christianity."¹ Medieval Christianity implies the dominance of religion and an Augustinian belief in two worlds—the City of God and the City of Man. The City of Man is corrupt, but it can be saved by faith and faith alone. The dominance of religion implies a theocratic state, but a state influenced by the Protestant revolt against the hierarchy of the medieval Catholic church in the interest of a purification intended to restore the once pristine condition of the faith. But if Protestantism represents an attempt to "purify and conserve" traditional Christianity, then Calvinism is something more, an effort, as Ralph Barton Perry put it, to "save protestantism both from its enemies and from itself."² Protestantism contains within itself profound disintegrative tendencies, and John Calvin proposed a set of rules, ranging far beyond theology, to bring order to this potential chaos. The Calvinists were militants, the "shock troops" of Protestantism, as Perry called them. Having formed a mass movement, they have been called the prototype of the modern revolutionary party.³ Congregationalism and Presbyterianism represent alternatives not only to the papacy but also to the Episcopalian hierarchy of the Anglican church, which was the principal target of Puritan discontent. It is not important to distinguish here between those two forms of Protestant church government; it is sufficient to note that for both, the authority of the church stems from the community of the church membership. This need not necessarily imply a democratic form of church organization, since the clergy may still be vested with a great deal of power. However, both Presbyterian and Congregationalist forms insist on the principle that authorities are chosen by and responsible to believers, who are equal at least before God, even if not in their social relations.⁴

This is a complex body of ideas that must be further explored, but enough has been said to suggest that Puritanism presents a difficult historical problem for the Hartz thesis, since, while having clear roots in an earlier time, it equally clearly looks forward to some of the most significant aspects of modernity. It is this paradox that may account for the wide range of responses to the ideas and institutions of Puritanism.

Perry Millers remarks suggest the interpretive range. In the 1930s, he pointed out, it was common, as a reaction to the pietistic writers who insisted on making the Puritans into prophets of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to stress that they were not at all liberal and to underline the "authoritarian, the totalitarian elements in a complex and sophisticated philosophy." Later, a contrary disposition took hold, and it became more usual to "dwell upon the inherent individualism, the respect for private conscience, the implications of revolution, nurtured by Puritan doctrine." Neither interpretation, Miller hastened to add, constituted more than a "partial apprehension of the reality."⁵

To see Puritanism more clearly, it is necessary to penetrate the clouds of myth that tend to obscure the subject. First, and perhaps most contrary to the historical pieties, the Puritans were not advocates of religious toleration but, rather, "professed enemies of it."⁶ Their purpose was to worship as they pleased and not to allow others in their community to worship as they pleased. Nor were the Puritans concerned in any modern sense with the separation of church and state: Their government was a theocracy. To use that term is somewhat controversial, since the civil magistrates were not ministers. However, the Puritans themselves used the concept of theocracy to suggest the coming together of the sacred and the secular. There was thus a "harmony between minister and magistrate in church and state affairs." Moreover, Perry Miller wrote, at that time "very few men would even have grasped the idea that church and state could be distinct. For the Puritan mind it was not possible to segregate a man's spiritual from his communal life."⁷

Society was conceived as an organic whole, in which government was to play an active part. There was no Jeffersonian liberal ideal of the minimal state. The Hobbesian conception of liberty as the absence of external restraints is at the center of the liberal tradition, but it was simply not in evidence among the Puritans. Rather, as John Winthrop put it, there was "liberty to that only which is good, just and honest."⁸ This is much closer to the idea of positive liberty, the concept that we are truly free only when we obey our true will, a will that is always for the good, even though we may not recognize it, than it is to any liberal version of the theory of liberty. From here it is only a step to the famous formula of Rousseau that held, in words that to a liberal mind seem supremely paradoxical at best, that we might legitimately be "forced to be free."⁹

The Puritans had a very strong community bound together by a powerful sense of religious fellowship.¹⁰ Individuals were expected to subordinate their personal interests to the common good. Again Winthrop was to the point: "The care of the public must oversway all private respects . . . for it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public."¹¹ There was thus an almost civic republican sense of what we today would call the primacy of the public interest—a primacy that is quite at variance with the liberal stress on the pursuit of self-interest.

Puritanism, Michael Walzer tells us, was a "revolution of the saints,"¹² and it is perhaps not too much to add that the governmental result was a dictatorship of the saints. Nonetheless it was "a dictatorship, not of a single tyrant, or of an economic class, or of a political faction, but of the holy and regene-rate."¹³ Still, active participation in the governance of the community was restricted to members of the church, and nonmembers were expected to hold their silence. Even for the "saved," it was not an egalitarian society in the usual sense of the word. "In all times," Winthrop preached, "some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection."¹⁴ Nor was there any question that the magistrates were to be obeyed: "Liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to that authority." As a result, men should "quietly and cheerfully" submit to those in office.¹⁵ That they should do so was simply to give due recognition to the fallen state of man, for which government was a just punishment.

Obviously these are not the typical principles of a modern liberal democratic society. Yet they are part of the foundation of American political culture. But Puritanism is more complex in its implications than those ideas alone suggest. Whatever the predilections of the Puritan divines, their theories, in a superb illustration of the law of unintended consequences, often contributed to some of the basic ideas and practices of liberal democracy.

Some Consequences of Puritanism

First, it is important to stress that the "dictatorship" of the saints was not absolute. Puritanism took over the position of the parliamentary side in the English Civil War that held that even government had to be subordinated to a law more fundamental than its own statutes.¹⁶ In New England, of course, the source of such law was the Bible, but the idea itself was capable of surviving into a more secular age and contributed to the development of constitutionalism. In addition, the idea of a fundamental law was closely related to the idea of a social contract. And after all, there are few documents with greater symbolic resonance in all of American history than the Mayflower Compact, concluded at the very outset of the Puritan experiment. It was a founding document outlining the high ideals that were presumably to guide and indeed structure society. Although the Puritans did not think of the theory of social contract in the same formal terms as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke had, it is not hard to imagine that the Puritan mentality was susceptible to the use of these formal doctrines in a later, more secular period.

Second, in spite of the strong communitarian impulse of the Puritans, there was also, at the same time, a genuinely individualistic, voluntarist side to both theory and practice. Because of the Calvinist emphasis on a determinist theology of predestination, that other side of Calvinism is often overlooked. Nevertheless, Protestantism in general involves a stripping away of the intermediaries between the individual and God. Individual "saints" entered into the church voluntarily in pursuit of their calling, and at the end of time they still had to face God alone.¹⁷ This individualistic voluntarism naturally enough carried over into politics. Citizens were indeed expected to submit to authority, but submission was also to be a matter of willed choice, just as in the case of the church.¹⁸ The similarity of this voluntarism to the underpinnings of liberal contract theory, to the idea that the authority of the state rests on individual consent, is apparent.

Third, for the citizens, in spite of lack of commitment to any modern form of egalitarianism, there was an expectation of a high degree of political participation. As George Armstrong Kelly wrote: "One can recognize in early Massachusetts and Connecticut the sprouting germs of republican civic cooperation. Citizenship and mutual help were strict duties in these communi ties."¹⁹ Even in the face of the pervasiveness and power of the religious creed, it is still possible to argue that "the clergy had less control over politics than anywhere in Europe."²⁰

Fourth, and very much more controversial, there is the much debated question of the relation of Protestantism to the origins of capitalism. By all odds, the most powerful statement of the connection between the two was in Max Weber's great study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. No such large-scale historical generalization is ever likely to be established beyond doubt. However, Weber's theory, especially when applied to the United States, is wonderfully suggestive.

It is vitally important to remember that Weber was at pains to distinguish the three central concepts: modern Western capitalism, the Protestant ethic, and the spirit of capitalism.²¹ Weber's lifelong project was to explain the historical uniqueness of the modern, rationalized, bureaucratized Western world. To this end he focused on the unique Western form of capitalist economic organization. The capitalist adventurer, avid for material gain, has always existed, said Weber. What was unique was "the rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labour."²² It was this rational, systematized organization of labor and the origin of the peculiarly Western middle class that, in Weber's view, needed to be explained. The spirit of capitalism is something quite different from this form of organization. It is an ethos, a way of looking at the world in which the key feature is the disciplined pursuit of the summum bonum, a pursuit of more and more money, combined with the sort of asceticism that often goes with highly disciplined behavior.²³ Of great interest to this inquiry is the fact that Weber used extended examples from the works of Benjamin Franklin to illustrate the spirit of capitalism at work.²⁴ Time is money, A penny saved is a penny earned, and other familiar axioms of Poor Richard pass in review before us.

The Protestant ethic is still another thing and must not be confused with the spirit of capitalism. It is rooted in the central Calvinist tenet of predestination, which holds that the fate of each person in the afterlife is already determined at birth, that no effort he or she can make will alter that fate, and that there is no way to know in advance what is to happen in the life to come. In Weber's view, the "extreme inhumanity" of this doctrine must have led to "a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness" for the individual believer.²⁵ Inevitably the question arose in his mind as to whether he was one of the saved, and his natural instinct was to search for external signs of salvation. In this view the true saint presumably would lead a life designed to serve the glory of God. A life of asceticism and hard work might be such a sign. "Thus," Weber wrote, "the Calvinist, as it is sometimes put, himself creates his own salvation, or, as would be more correct, the conviction of it."²⁶ As Edmund Morgan has summed up, "Although Weber seems to have believed, erroneously, that Calvinists thought consistent good behavior a sufficient proof of salvation, and although he exaggerated the degree of self-denial that was demanded, he was certainly correct in perceiving that a Calvinist had powerful motives to behave consistently as though he were saved, if only to persuade himself that he was."²⁷

Weber's great and controversial move was to link this disciplined, ascetic way of life to the spirit of capitalism. The point is not that Puritans explicitly set out to become capitalists or, still less, to grow rich. It is rather that the Puritan e...