Progressive writer Frank Goodnow wrote in “The American Conception of Liberty” that man as viewed in Europe as a member of society as secondarily as an individual. The rights an individual possesses comes from the society in which he belongs and not from his Creator. His rights are to be determined by the legislative authority in view of needs of that society. Social expediency is what determines his rights.
Natural rights theory, according to the progressives, was appropriate at that time. Perfectly understandable. The Founders were oppressed by a tyrannical king. Today, gov’t has to be understood by its particular historical context. The problem was the doctrine of natural rights was meant for everybody at all times. That it transcended time and space.
Abe Lincoln praised Thomas Jefferson in a letter he wrote in 1859. The last paragraph Lincoln wrote:
“All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times [my emphasis], and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”
John Dewey said in his “Liberalism and Social Action” (LSS) essay that the italicized part of the letter was the problem. He agreed with Goodnow that the Declaration did not transcend space and time. The doctrine of natural rights is a relic from the past.
Dewey writes the following in LSS:
“The earlier liberals lacked historic sense and interest. For a while this lack had an immediate pragmatic value. It gave liberals a powerful weapon in their fight with reactionaries. For it enabled them to undercut the appeal to origin, precedent and past history by which the opponents of social change gave sacrosanct quality to existing inequities and abuses. But disregard of history took its revenge. It blinded the eyes of liberals to the fact that their own special interpretations of liberty, individuality and intelligence were themselves historically conditioned, and were relevant only to their own time. They put forward their ideas as immutable truths good at all times and places; they had no idea of historic relativity, either in general or in its application to themselves....”
Dewey goes on to explain in the essay that the idea of liberty is not frozen in time. Liberty has a history of evolving meaning. History of liberalism is a progressive history. It’s a narrative of the move to a more primitive to a more mature form of liberty. Progressivism is a vast improvement over early or classical liberalism according to Dewey.
This coupling of historical contingency with the doctrine of progress is shared by most progressives to one degree or another. It shows how German historicism was imported from Europe into America in the 19th century. Almost all progressives at that time were either educated in German political philosophy by studying in Germany or had teachers who were educated in Germany who taught the philosophy. By 1900 the faculty of most universities were populated by those educated in the German model because it was prestigious to get a European Ph. D. at the time. John Hopkins University for example was one university was founded to bring the German model to America. Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey went to John Hopkins.
The American progressives took from the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his disciples this critic of social compact theory and the “organic” notion of the Constitution. Woodrow Wilson wrote of gov’t as a living thing. The notion of the Constitution as a living Constitution is vastly superior, according to the progressives, to the notion of the Constitution as a fixed-mechanistic form of gov’t. In his essay, “What is Progress?” Woodrow Wilson talks about the Founders view of the Constitution:
“….the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory. You have only to read the papers of The Federalist to see that fact written on every page. They speak of the "checks and balances" of the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system,---how by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and the President as a sort of imitation of the solar system.”
Then Wilson explains his organic notion of the Constitution:
“The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way,---the best way of their age,---those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of "the laws of Nature,"---and then by way of afterthought,---"and of Nature's God." And they constructed a government as they would have constructed an orrery,---to display the laws of nature. Politics in their thought was a variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of ‘checks and balances.’
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.”
So according to Wilson, Gov’t has to evolve. It has to adapt to all the changing circumstances that are out there. Liberty is no longer threatened in the way like it was in the Founding era. Take a look at all the new economic and social ills out there and it seems to call out for a new gov’t remedy. For an adaptive gov’t. So, the progressives took this idea of progress and translated it into a call for an sharp increase in the scope of gov’t power.
Theodore Roosevelt saw almost no limits in the power of the national gov’t especially when he was in charge of the national gov’t. In the “New Nationalism” speech he calls for the State to take an active role in effecting economic justice, redistributing property, and superintending the use of private property. He said new circumstances have necessitated a new view of gov’t.
We have to reexamine this idea of property rights. Those rights should no longer serve as principle boundary that the State is prohibited from crossing. In Woodrow Wilson’s “Socialism and Democracy” essay he defines socialism:
“'State socialism' is willing to act through state authority as it is at present organized. It proposes that all idea of a limitation of public authority by individual rights be put out of view, and that the State consider itself bound to stop only at what is unwise or futile in its universal superintendence alike of individual and of public interests. The thesis of the state socialist is, that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the State may not cross at will…”
Then he goes on to say that democracy and socialism are essentially the same principle:
“For it is very clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme [my emphasis] over men as individuals. Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.”
According the progressives, we ought to have faith in the majority. This rights-based Republicanism of the Founders is not democratic and isn’t going to work for our circumstances today. It limits the people to implement their collective will.
Progress for the progressives is about moving on from the limited principles of the Founding. It’s about opening up the power of the gov’t. It’s about faith in the people to use gov’t in a way that won’t be threat to the liberty of their fellow citizens.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment