In celebration of
Independence Day here in the United States, we decided to take a look at where
the Founding Fathers got some of their ideas.
While the specific notions of democracy that inspired American liberal
democracy go back to ancient Greece and Rome, their more immediate source of inspiration
was the reaction against the “divine right” theory of Sir Robert Filmer (cir.
1588-1653), chief theologian of James VI/I (1566-1625) of Scotland/England.
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| Sir Robert Filmer |
According to
Filmer, only a government having a king appointed or sanctioned by God is
legitimate. This is because the king is
directly descended from Adam, who in Filmer’s interpretation of the Bible was
given dominion over the entire Earth to the exclusion of all others.
In Filmer’s
theory, only the king has rights, because only the king is sovereign. All other people are limited to such rights
as the king chooses to grant them.
Rights may be revoked at the king’s pleasure, although (being directly
inspired by God and ruling in His Name), he will not do so unjustly.
Filmer’s Divine
Right theory did not go unchallenged, especially by the Catholic Church in the
person of Roberto Francesco Romolo Cardinal
Bellarmino, S.J. (1542-1621), Saint Robert Cardinal Bellarmine. A champion of human dignity and thus a
personalist (although he made a critical mistake, below), Bellarmine maintained
that God created every human being with natural rights, and thus with political
sovereignty. As Filmer summarized the
“vulgar opinion” of his chief opponent in the opening passage of Patriarcha,
Mankind is naturally endowed and
born with freedom from all subjection, and at liberty to choose what form of
government it please, and that the power which any one man hath over others was
at first bestowed according to the discretion of the multitude.
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| Robert Cardinal Bellarmine |
In countering
Filmer, Bellarmine influenced political thought and thus the concept of the
sovereignty of the human person instead of an élite or a Divine Right
monarch. He wrote extensively on the legitimacy,
source, transmission, and application of the civil power, that is, of political
sovereignty, especially in De Laicis and De Summo Pontifice.
Bellarmine
declared that because the sovereign power resides in actual people, government
only receives its power as a grant from human persons. In addition, distinguishing between political
and social, he argued that the legitimacy of political power is demonstrated by
the fact that it is necessary, man being social. Civil
government would thus be legitimate even if the Fall of Man had never
occurred. As he explained,
For even if servile subjection
began after the sin of Adam, nevertheless there would have been political
government even while man was in the state of innocence. And this is proved, firstly, because even
then man would have been by nature a political and social animal, and hence
would have had need of a ruler.
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| Algernon Sidney |
Algernon Sidney
(1623-1683) and John Locke (1632-1704) also took up the gage against Filmer in Discourses
Concerning Government (1698) and Two Treatises on Government (1690),
respectively. Both Sidney and Locke were
used by the Founding Fathers of the United States, with some essential
corrections from a personalist standpoint.
Of these
corrections, the most significant was the question whether man is by nature a
political animal, or whether his natural state is outside society. In this both Sidney and Locke differed from
Bellarmine, who held by the opinion of Aristotle and Aquinas. That is, man is by nature a political animal,
subsisting naturally in a consciously structured social environment.
Still, the
American Founding Fathers managed to take the best of Sidney, Locke, and
Bellarmine, and synthesize it into a theory of liberal democracy uniquely
American. Credit for this can probably
be given to George Mason of Gunston Hall (1725-1792), sometimes called “the
forgotten Founding Father.” Most of the
Founding Fathers got Bellarmine’s thought secondhand through Locke and
Sidney. Mason, however, may have read
Bellarmine directly, imbibing a better understanding of natural law based on
the Intellect, and thus developing a consistent theory of personalism.
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| George Mason of Gunston Hall |
This is evident
in how Mason, a slave owner, attempted to undermine the legal justification for
slavery when he drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776.
When the Virginia
Convention met in the spring of 1776, they adopted a resolution to draft a
declaration of fundamental natural rights. As Mason was the most experienced legal writer
in Virginia, he drew up the draft. Following his usual practice, he included a
provision that implicitly destroyed the legal justification of chattel slavery
by including all men without qualification:
That all men are by nature
equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they
cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the
enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing
property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
If all men are naturally members of
society, regardless of circumstances, it logically follows that this applies to
slaves. The clear implication is that
slaves have the natural right to be free.
Unfortunately,
the conservative (“aristocratic”) delegates to the Virginia Convention were
ready for Mason. They immediately
challenged the language, accusing Mason (with justification) of wanting to
abolish slavery.
Mason was forced
to agree to amend the language, or be faced with the possibility of losing
Virginia’s support for the Revolution. As
historian Robert Rutland noted,
As finally approved, the first
sentence read “That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and
have certain inherent rights, of which, when
they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or
divest their posterity; . . .” The italicized phrase, with its implicit
proposition that slaves are not members of society, placated the opposition.
Possibly warned
by Mason’s experience, Thomas Jefferson was able to retain the basis of natural
law and inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence adopted a month
later. This, however, was only at the
cost of surrendering a passage condemning slavery and leaving out mention of
private property as a natural right.
Still, a Bill of
Rights was added to the 1789 Constitution that included recognition of private
property in the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. More to the point, the personalist
orientation of the document is stated in the Preamble: “We, the People,” with
the clear implication that the State only gets what rights it has from actual
human beings who are, ipso facto, persons with inalienable rights.
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