Social Justice and Liberal Democracy

A popular meme floating around social media shows actor Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  The problem was bad enough with a single word in a work of fiction.  It gets much worse when it is many words in real life.

Do We Need a Theocracy?

We’ve been looking into the roots of socialism, and how socialism and social justice became confused.  One of the things that struck us that we had never noticed before was the insistence of the early socialists that, one, what became known as socialism was originally not intended as an alternative to capitalism, but to Christianity, especially the most organized and hierarchical form of Christianity, Catholicism.

A Language Lesson

No, this isn’t a “real” language lesson, a sort of “Latin pro populo” (“Latin for everybody”) that you can use as a handy phrase book when ordering dinner at the Vatican.  It’s just that we got into a discussion about singing in Latin the other day, and one of the participants in the conversation happened to mention that singing “Church Latin” is much easier than singing “Germanic Latin.”  That started us off on our “Latin Pronunciation Lecture,” which — bear with us — does have a bearing on the Just Third Way.  Of course, everything does, but it might not be obvious at first glance.

Karl Marx, the Great Reductionist

A short time ago we got a request to comment on Karl Marx as “the second economic reductionist.”  In the context of the discussion this referred to the socialist movement which, to make a very long story short and oversimplify greatly, began in the early nineteenth century with Henri de Saint-Simon’s declaration in his posthumous book, Le Nouveau Christianisme (1825) that what would in a few years be known as “socialism” was “the New Christianity.”

The Quest for Utopia

We’re having trouble keeping up with what various commentators are proposing as their respective solutions to the pandemic, racism, the economy, the politicians, the academics, the guy next door, and can you believe the price of [fill in the blank] these days?  Case in point: a few weeks ago (or was it months? it’s getting hard to tell . . .), an article appeared in Catholic World Report, a webzine, “America’s Utopian City Wreckers.”

An Eternal Question

One of the things we’ve noticed about people who call themselves capitalists or socialists is that far too often those who advocate or defend a system seem to have trouble defining it consistently, and sometimes at all.  It calls to mind what Alexis de Tocqueville said about socialism during the 1848 Revolution in France:

Was the State Made for Man, or Man for the State?

In the previous posting on this subject, we addressed the question whether the United States was founded as a “Christian nation,” and came up with the non-answer that it depends on what you mean by “Christian nation.”  We decided — that’s us, not you — that, yes, you could use that term if you didn’t mind saying something misleading, but it would be better to say that the United States was founded as a country that — with certain rather key exceptions — embodied respect for the dignity of the individual human person.

What Do You Mean By “Christian Nation”?

A couple of weeks ago an article appeared in The Christian Post on how America was departing from the values of the Founding Fathers of the United States.  The idea was that the principles espoused by the Founders were essentially Christian, and that therefore the United States is properly a “Christian nation.”

How to Read a Social Encyclical

Contrary to popular opinion, Rerum Novarum was not the first social encyclical, nor did Catholic social teaching as such begin with Pope Leo XIII.  The social doctrine of the Catholic Church, of course, is as old as the Church itself.  It was not until the early nineteenth century, however, that social teachings were treated as a specialized area of study.

The Academic Fantasy

Every now and then students, especially college students, complain that their education and the academic environment isn’t anything like the “real world” it’s presumably training them to enter.  That’s true.  In one sense, academia isn’t supposed to be a reflection of the real world, but of real life, a place in which one prepares to assume the great task of becoming more fully human.

State Sovereignty . . . Or Sovereignty of the People?

As the Preamble to the Constitution clearly states, “We, the People” are the source of all rights and powers that we have delegated to the government so that it may carry out its proper function.  This is in strict accordance with the political philosophy of Saint Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, with which most of the Founding Fathers were familiar through John Locke and Algernon Sidney, although George Mason of Gunston Hall may have read Bellarmine directly.

Orestes Brownson and Socialism, IV: Progressivism

The great struggle that Orestes Brownson saw for possession of the soul of the United States had its origin before the American Civil War. His concern for individual and social rights — as opposed to individual or social rights — make Brownson, to a great extent, a "proto-progressive." The progressive movement in American politics, an effort to return to the original founding principles of the American Republic, "officially" began in the late 19th century and reached its zenith under Theodore Roosevelt early in the 20th. The movement, however (weak as it seemed at times), had never been silenced, even by the growing conflict between capitalism and socialism that characterized the latter half of the nineteenth century in America.

Briefly, if somewhat inaccurately, described as a political movement in opposition to conservatism, progressivism was actually an effort to return America to its constitutional and philosophical roots. Progressivism was in contrast to both individualism/capitalism ("conservatism") and collectivism/socialism ("liberalism").

The period following the Civil War saw the rapid passing of the way of life described in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. This is best summarized as having embodied the three principles of economic justice — participation, distribution and harmony — in the "four pillars of an economically just society," covered in the previous posting.

Still, the period before the Civil War was anything but halcyon, due principally to the abomination of chattel slavery. William Crosskey posited that the "power grab" by the Supreme Court that resulted in the decision in Scott v. Sandford in 1857 (the Dred Scott case), was the culmination of a decades-long effort to defend slavery. To accomplish this, the theory of "states rights" had been invented, and judicial review expanded far beyond what the Founders had ever intended.

Economically, Scott v. Sandford was a triumph of southern agrarian capitalism over northern industrial, commercial and financial capitalism. This undermined the natural law basis of the Constitution, and fostered the belief that socialism was the only alternative — viable or otherwise — to capitalism. It can be said that the southern agrarian capitalists found their position justified by the economic arguments best presented in David Christy's Cotton is King (1855). At the same time, the emotional presentation in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) inspired the northern "socialist" humanitarians in their abolitionist crusade.

As we have already noted, the war itself was — in economic terms — a struggle between two forms of capitalism, a system depending on a twisting of the natural law. In a supremely ironic circumstance, the northern capitalists took as their justification socialist abolitionist arguments, while the southern capitalists (somewhat more consistently) twisted the natural law right of private property to justify theirs. In more fundamental terms, the war raised the question whether the country would be locked into a seemingly permanent struggle between individualism and collectivism, or whether it would return to what the Founders originally intended, purified of the taint of slavery.

With the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, it appeared as though the Founders' natural law orientation had won. The Homestead Act seemed to put the seal on the triumph of "Catholic" political philosophy and respect for the dignity of the human person by opening up near-universal access to the means of acquiring and possessing capital, at least in land.

Brownson, however, foresaw problems. There was, of course, the usual anti-Catholicism. This, however (especially in light of the courage shown by Catholic soldiers on both sides during the war), seemed to be fading. A greater concern, at least according to Brownson, was the growing power of northern capitalism, and the incentive it gave to socialism to oppose the abuses.

From a constitutional perspective, the greatest danger to the United States appeared in 1873 after Brownson published The American Republic. This was a number of lawsuits grouped together as "the Slaughterhouse Cases."

The story is complex, and we need not get into the details here. We only want to note that, according to William Crosskey's analysis, in the ruling in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the United States Supreme Court took the opportunity to nullify the 14th Amendment, which had been passed largely to overturn Scott v. Sandford. Despite the fact that the majority opinion seemed to favor "states rights," Crosskey noted that the opinion was so vaguely worded as to be completely meaningless. It could be — and was — used to make the 14th Amendment mean anything the Court wished, depending on the specific political goal sought.

Up through the 1940s, the precedent set by the Slaughterhouse Cases was used to justify the erosion of private property, especially in corporate equity. It formed the basis of the New Deal, and laid the groundwork for the rapid acceptance and spread of Keynesian economics.

The effort to counter the movement away from the natural law and return to the original intent of the Founders came to be known as "progressivism." While usually characterized as a late 19th and early 20th century movement, we can hypothesize that Brownson was, in a sense, a founder of the movement, and his magnum opus, The American Republic, as its manifesto of a sort.

The latter half of the 19th century was characterized by the struggle that Brownson seems to have anticipated. The more powerful northern capitalism grew, the stronger the socialist resistance became in response. Populism, especially in the west and the south, initially offered an alternative to socialism. The east, with its growing population of propertyless workers, tended more toward socialism.

As the "free land" available under the Homestead Act ran out, however, and the opportunities for small ownership disappeared, populism became increasingly socialist in tone. Ultimately, there was little to distinguish populism from socialism. This left the great mass of people propertyless and thus helpless before the growing power of both the government, and the industrial, commercial and financial power centers of the private sector.

A true understanding of the constitutional basis of the United States was rapidly fading. This had proceeded so far that, when Pope Leo XIII issued the "encyclical" Rerum Novarum ("On Labor and Capital") in 1891, capitalists took it as a defense of their position, while socialists insisted it really supported theirs. The thought that the encyclical is neither individualist nor collectivist, but political in the Aristotelian sense, rarely intruded into discussions then or now.

As a result, by 1900 the country was in serious danger. As described by Herbert Knox Smith, Commissioner of Corporations under Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and a key man in the "trust busting" effort,

"In 1900 the surface of American life was, as it were, hardening, was growing less plastic. Dangerous division lines were opening from the pressures beneath, splitting the unity of the nation. The great trust movement was in full force, sweeping into a few hands special industrial privileges, the control of natural resources, and decisive advantages in transportation. Individual opportunity and the open highways of commerce were narrowing. Great corporations were considering themselves above the law, with the cynical but increasing concurrence of the public. A sinister atmosphere was gathering, menacing to American initiative and American ideals.

"These recognized inequalities, with the twisted standards which they implied, were moving strongly toward national disunity — that profound disunity which in a democratic people must result from confessed differences in privilege and opportunity." (Herbert Knox Smith, "The Great Progressive," introduction to Social Justice and Popular Rule, by Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926, xi.)

The failure of populism as an effective counter to capitalism left what amounted to a power vacuum among reform-minded citizens. This set the stage for a potential convulsion that could tear apart the nation as surely as slavery had forty years before. By what could only be described as a series of unforeseen circumstances (again, much too lengthy to relate here), however, Theodore Roosevelt was picked as William McKinley's vice president. The idea was both to bring into the Republican fold the reforming, progressive elements of the Republican Party and the more conservative Democrats who rejected William Jennings Bryan's "silver socialism," and to get the reforming Roosevelt shunted aside into a dead end office where he could do little to annoy the reactionary elements in the party.

The tragedy of McKinley's assassination in 1901 catapulted Roosevelt into the presidency at exactly the right time for the reform movement to gain a champion untainted with populism, socialism, or (especially) capitalist greed and corruption. McKinley, while honest, had been expected to carry out business as usual, which was why the party bosses had tried to make certain of his election. The country had only recently pulled itself out of the Great Depression of 1893-1898, apparently validating the refusal of the federal government to inflate the currency or intervene in any other way. (It was actually the combination of bumper crops in the U.S. and crop failures in Europe that brought the country out of the first Great Depression, just as World War II, not FDR's "New Deal" that brought the country out of the second Great Depression.) Only five years before the Supreme Court had ruled that the new income tax, as a direct tax levied without apportionment among the states on the basis of population, was unconstitutional, a decision that outraged the populists and socialists. The Republican Party was seen as catering to the demands of the rich, leaving the poor and downtrodden out in the cold. The road seemed clear for the ever-increasing concentration of ownership and control of industry, commerce and finance in fewer and fewer hands. "Don't rock the boat" might well have been the national slogan to replace "In God we trust."

Roosevelt, however, was a man consumed with reforming zeal — and the intelligence, energy and even the sense of humor needed to carry it through. Today's historians like to point out that Roosevelt's actual legislative accomplishments to carry out reforms were relatively few compared with those of Taft. The authorities tend to forget, however, that without Roosevelt to lead the way, there would have been little or no reforming legislation at all. Pioneers build few cities, but few cities are built without the pioneers to pave the way. As Herbert Knox Smith related, "In 1901, Colonel Roosevelt, with his seer's insight into Americans and American conditions, became President. He saw the danger, and with increasing clearness he framed the issues, speaking directly to the people." (Ibid., xi-xii.)

Throughout his first administration Roosevelt moved the Republican Party toward progressivism, emphasizing "trust busting," increased government oversight to stem the abuses of laissez faire capitalism, and a "square deal" for the average man. In these and other areas Roosevelt, while not a Catholic, seemed more in tune with Pope Leo XIII's view of the American political system expressed in the 1899 "Apostolic Letter" to Cardinal Gibbons, head of the American Church, Testem Benevolentiæ Nostræ ("Concerning New Opinions, Virtue, Nature and Grace, with Regard to Americanism"), than many Catholics. The high regard that Leo XIII exhibited for American civilization and the pope's recognition of its weaknesses was a virtual restatement of Brownson's position set forth in The American Republic.

(The Apostolic Letter is frequently misunderstood, even today, as a condemnation of the American political system. On the contrary, the letter is a virtual endorsement of the American system as a model for civil society. The dangers against which Leo XIII warned Cardinal Gibbons were those associated with applying American civil democratic principles to religious society, particularly in the determination of theological doctrines.)

Of particular note are the efforts of Judge Peter S. Grosscup in advancing progressive ideas in the area of widespread capital ownership, an absolute necessity in a program to secure a "square deal" — respect and support for essential human dignity. One of Roosevelt's "trust busters," Grosscup authored a series of articles in the early 20th century on the necessity of countering the rapid decay of small ownership of farms and businesses with small ownership of the large corporations — something in which G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc later concurred.

The problem with the proposals of Grosscup as well as Chesterton and Belloc was that all of them assumed the necessity of access to existing accumulations of savings to finance acquisition of existing or new capital. This locked them into what Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler would later call the slavery of past savings. The effect was to restrict capital ownership either to a private wealthy elite to maintain the natural right of private property, or to the State through the abolition of private property to try and guarantee results instead of opportunity, usually through re-defining what "property" means.

Abolishing private property through re-definition (what John Maynard Keynes called "re-editing the dictionary") was made substantially easier in the United States as a result of the decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases. The vague decision (deliberately so, according to William Crosskey) made the status of "person" dependent on whatever a court might decide. The decision was also used to change the meaning of "property," as well as life and liberty (all inalienable rights of "persons"), making them subject to judicial whim or political expedience.

Past savings as the only source of financing for new capital for the non-rich was the shoal on which populism had been wrecked, turning it into just another form of socialism. It would now sink progressivism.

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The Wall Street Model of Education

We recently received a series of e-mails between two brothers, Mike and Dan, discussing the state of education today. There are a number of allusions and references that we left in that might confuse the casual reader, but there's enough information to get the point — you don't need any more. We thought it might make a good posting for today.

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I worry about the application of Wall Street models to education, although I have always been highly impressed with KIPP ("Knowledge Is Power Program") as an organization. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has mandated performance goals that I suspect are unattainable. I think the minimal goals have led to an inflation of testing data tied to yesterday's skills, and a false sense that schools are continually improving.

Personally, I feel that schools and school personnel have far too much incentive to "game" the numbers. I would not be in the least surprised if we were to see a bubble in education scores, just like we saw a bubble in financial markets. I seriously doubt that NCLB has taken much of a bite in the 30% national dropout rate. This is not because measurements and accountability are bad things, but because the wrong things are being measured. As the computing aphorism has it, garbage in, garbage out.

This is not a rant — or, at least, not much of one. It's just an explanation of how complex teaching even a single subject such as reading is. As my reading professor frequently repeated, "reading is rocket science." Most elementary teachers teach a minimum of 4 subjects. During the fall, I'll read the latest research on best practices in teaching math. Very exciting!

The scientifically validated practice of providing opportunities for students to respond 8 times per minute is to get students responding to new information immediately. If students aren't responding systematically, they aren't learning.

There are many different ways and levels of responses. Your brain is far more powerful than you give yourself credit for. Think of all the responses per second you make while riding a motorcycle at 80 miles per hour on the Beltway! Learners like Olivia, who are being raised in a language rich environment, have a tremendous advantage when they enter school over children of poverty. Their brains have had exponentially greater opportunities to respond than the brains of many of the children I have worked with in Title I Schools.

At six, Olivia can fluently read a label that says, "Smoked Spanish Paprika," has tasted how the spice changes the flavor of the melted cheese, knows the difference in the aroma between that and regular paprika, and is responding in complete sentences in daily conversations with lyrical fluency and phrasing.

I'm sure you are aware of the rat studies where the brains of rats raised in engaging environments have been compared to those of rats raised in impoverished environments. How the learning environment is structured matters developmentally. If we want to take a bite out of the 30 percent national dropout rate, we need to find ways to make learning environments systematically more engaging for all learners. In too many examples, what No Child Left Behind has left behind is sterile learning environments in which nobody is being uplifted, because everybody is "teaching to the test," i.e., telling students what they need to pass a test, not to learn. There are far better ways to handle the accountability issue than the current setup.

I totally agree with your argument that self-improvement is critical. I decided to enter a master's program so that I can become dual-licensed. I knew that I needed to become better at differentiating instruction, assessing progress, and become a more effective collaborator. In my experience, however, teachers learn best in collaboration with knowledgeable and supportive teams. I would never have been able to launch a Kindergarten class in a Title I School last fall without collaboration with a 17-year veteran who introduced me to the Reading and Math Specialists. I already knew that Rambos don't last long in the classroom, not even in Kindergarten. Thus, I gratefully accepted the guidance of Veteran teachers, which helped me manage a steep learning curve. Trying to go it alone simply hasn't worked for me.

We need to get past the fallacy that Super Star teachers and Super Star, i.e., highly paid administrators, are responsible for student success. Why do you think the young lady, who was obviously an asset to the field of education, ultimately left the field of education? Obviously, the promise of cash was not sufficient incentive to soldier on within a toxic working environment. The prevailing mindset in the field of education, based on the same failed Wall Street model that led to the S&L crisis, is fundamentally flawed. A teacher who relies on self-improvement alone won't make much of an impact. There is simply too much ground to cover in too little time to try to go it alone.

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The Political Animal, Part XVIII

In the previous posting in this series we concluded that the American and French Revolutions differed in at least one important area. That is, the American colonists went into rebellion to protect and defend what they saw as violations on the part of the British Crown of their natural rights as Englishman. In France, the citizens revolted in part in response to the growth of new views of the State and the promulgation of new rights that were not necessarily consistent with the natural moral law, but with "the will of the people."

The American revolutionaries used reason to discern the natural moral law and based their rights on that. The French revolutionaries based their assertion of new rights on "pure reason," without first basing reason itself on a sound foundation, even going to the unreasonable length of enshrining "Reason" as a goddess of the new State-established and maintained religion. The essential difference in orientation is clearly evident when we examine the principles of political science used in forming the United States of America.

When the Virginia Convention met in the spring of 1776, they adopted a resolution to draft a declaration of fundamental natural rights that they believed King George III and his parliament were violating. As George Mason of Gunston Hall in Northern Virginia (near Alexandria) had a reputation as the most experienced legal writer in Virginia, he was the obvious choice to draw up the draft for the discussion and approval of the other delegates. As was his habit, he included a provision that destroyed the legal justification of chattel slavery, even though he was himself a slave owner:

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.

As drafted, the Declaration states that all men have inherent (i.e., natural) rights, of which neither they nor their posterity can be deprived, regardless of the justification. All men have the right to live, to be free, and to acquire and possess private property: John Locke's famous triad of fundamental human rights of life, liberty, and property — but with a difference.

That difference is the fact that Mason (in common with Bellarmine, whom Mason appears to have studied) simply ignored "state of nature" theory and declared that all men have rights by nature, not as a result of entering into a social contract and agreeing to enter into society. Man is political by nature; he does not agree to enter society. He is already a member of society by nature unless he removes himself by the commission of a crime.

That man is naturally a member of society is not, however, a doctrine found anywhere in Locke or Sidney. They were firm adherents of the "state of nature" theory, virtually their sole point of agreement with Hobbes. That man is naturally a member of society, however, is found throughout Bellarmine's writings, notably in De Laicis.

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 — absent conviction of a crime for which the slave is actually and personally guilty — have the right to be free. If this sentence in the Virginia declaration passed unchallenged, the implication was that slave owners were themselves engaged in doing the very thing for which they were condemning George III and his parliament.

Even so, Mason might have gotten away with it . . . had he not had the reputation of making similar insertions in virtually every possible document at every opportunity. By having previously tipped his hand through his laudable habit of standing up to condemn an institution he despised, he made it impossible to slip it in where it would have done the most good. The "reluctant statesman" and even more reluctant slave owner outsmarted himself.

Being familiar with Mason's "tricks," the conservative ("aristocratic") delegates to the Virginia Convention were ready for him. As Robert Rutland describes the events surrounding the discussions leading up to the ratification of the Virginia Declaration,

After each delegate studied the proposals, the general debate opened on a sour note. Thomas Ludwell Lee [Mason's aide on the drafting committee] lamented in his nightly letter-writing sessions that "a certain set of aristocrats" had thrown up a line of defense in an effort to keep control of the Convention in conservative hands. Led by Robert Carter Nicholas, the old guard "kept us at bay on the first line" of the draft, Lee reported. Nicholas challenged the statement that all men are created equally free and independent. In a slaveholding society, the argument ran, all men were obviously not born free and equal. To pretend otherwise, the conservatives suggested, was to invite civil war on their own estates. (Robert A. Rutland, George Mason: Reluctant Statesman. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1961, 51-53)

Consistent with liberal political philosophy, the conservative members amended Mason's language. Raising the issue of slavery in the very first line of their Declaration could derail the entire Convention. As Florette Henri reports,

Those opening words of Mason tore the convention apart.

"'All men are born equally free and independent' — pray, what does that mean?" demanded the conservative Robert Carter Nicholas. "Does it include my slaves?"

Nicholas' supporters joined the outcry. Were slaves to be set free? They would not accept such a declaration. With one hand it guaranteed Virginians the right to hold property, and with the other it snatched that property away — slave property. What sort of radical document was this? Was it intended to abolish slavery?

Of course, Mason secretly hoped it might. (Florette Henri, George Mason of Virginia. New York: Crowell-Collier Press, 1971, 93.)

Mason was forced to let it pass. As Rutland reports,

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. (Rutland, op. cit., 54)

While important, however, the focus on slavery and the natural right to be free overshadowed another natural right, "the means of acquiring and possessing property." Unfortunately, property was inextricably tied in with the slavery issue. The institution of black chattel slavery in the United States consisted of owning human beings as private property. To assert a natural right to be free for all men, and then equivocate by keeping some in bondage without the justification that they were criminals was a question not too many people had either the inclination or the ability to deal with. The issue at hand was political freedom for the American colonists, not natural freedom for people held in slavery.

When you added in the fact that a slave owner believed that his or her economic survival was tied to slavery just as much as to his or her ownership of large tracts of land, discussing slavery and private property at the same time made for an extremely volatile mix. If you asserted that private property in human beings — slavery — was illegitimate, it was a short leap to maintaining that all private property in anything was equally illegitimate.

The important issue here, however, is that Mason laid the groundwork for reconciling the collectivist and individualist positions. He somehow managed to insert the fact that the human person is both individual and social — political — into the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Even though it did not survive unedited, the fact that the idea was there is important — and that it made its way into the underlying political philosophy of the new country via Mason's influence through Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence. How Mason tied private property, slavery, and man as a political animal into a consistent whole will be examined in the next posting in this series.

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The Political Animal, Part XVI

In the previous posting in this series we decided (in common with John Locke and Algernon Sidney), for the sake of the argument and to get around the difficulties posed by Cardinal Bellarmine's insertion of the collective between God and man, and between man and the State, to assume the existence of a "state of nature." This would remove, at least in part, the presumed necessity of the existence of rights that God grants to something that is not a natural person. As Locke explains in his Second Treatise on Government,

Wherever, therefore, any number of men so unite into one society, as to quit every one his executive power of the law of nature, and to resign it to the public, there, and there only, is a political, or civil society. And this is done wherever any number of men, in the state of nature, enter into society to make one people one body politic, under one supreme government, or else when any one joins himself to, and incorporates with, any government already made. For hereby he authorizes the society, or, which is all one, the legislative thereof, to make laws for him, as the public good of the society shall require, to the execution whereof his own assistance (as to his own decrees) is due. And this puts men out of a state of nature into that of a commonwealth. . . (Second Treatise on Government, § 89)

Where the ruler or group charged with the rule is carrying out its mandate to conform to the natural moral law and promote the common good, the consent of the governed, after the initial establishment, is assumed to have been given automatically. No single individuals or groups, acting on their own authority, can decide that the current government is illegitimate, and work for its overthrow or go into rebellion. This would be merely to participate in criminal acts, contrary to the common good.

When, however, the government is engaged in egregious violation of the natural moral law, or is acting directly contrary to the common good in an obvious and material fashion, there may then be just cause to revoke the grant of political sovereignty made to the present government, and vest it in another group or form of government. As Aquinas states, "If any society of people have the right of choosing a king for itself, it is not unjust if he be deposed by the same, or if his power be curbed, when by a royal tyranny he abuses his power." (De Regimine Principum ("On the Rule of Princes"), Book I, Chapter vi) This was echoed by John Locke in the 19th chapter of his Second Treatise on Civil Government, "There is therefore secondly another way whereby governments are dissolved, and that is when the legislative or the prince, either of them, act contrary to their trust." As Locke continued,

First, the legislative acts against the trust reposed in them when they endeavour to invade the property of the subject, and to make themselves or any part of the community masters or arbitrary disposers of the lives, liberties, or fortunes of the people. . . .What I have said here concerning the legislative in general, holds true also concerning the supreme executor, who having a double trust put in him, both to have a part in the legislative and the supreme execution of the law, acts against both when he goes about to set up his own arbitrary will as the law of the society. He acts also contrary to his trust when he either employs the force, treasure, and offices of the society, to corrupt the representatives, and gain them to his purposes; or openly pre-engages the electors, and prescribes to their choice such whom he has by solicitations, threats, promises, or otherwise won to his designs, and employs them to bring in such, who have promised beforehand what to vote and what to enact. (Second Treatise on Government, §§ 221-222)

Anyone familiar with the Declaration of Independence of the United States, as well as the Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted nearly a month earlier, will recognize the basis and justification of the English colonies in America joining together and repudiating the governance of the King of Great Britain by revoking the grant of sovereignty:

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government. . . .Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.

(See also the Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776, "When government fails to confer common benefit, a majority of the people have a right to change it." Also Bellarmine, De Laicis, Ch. VI, "For legitimate reason [the people] can change the government to an aristocracy or a democracy or vice versa. . . . It depends upon the consent of men to place over themselves a king, consul, or magistrate.")

What are the conditions that justify a change in government? First, oppression must be habitual, tyrannical, and intolerable. Second, other remedies must have failed, legal and peaceful means must have been ineffective. Third, there must be reasonable probability of success. As Aquinas says, "If indeed a tyranny is not excessive, it is better to bear it for a time, than, by acting against the tyrant, to be involved in many perils, which are worse than tyranny. For it may happen that they who rise against a tyrant do not prevail against him; and so the tyrant, being incensed, rages the more violently." (De Regimine Principum, Book I., Ch. vi) Fourth, and finally, the revolt ought to be approved by the majority and by the best men of the land.

Although the work of Bellarmine, Locke, and Sidney in some measure discredited divine right theory, it left two problems in place. One, Bellarmine, due to his insertion of the collective, inadvertently gave ultimate power to the State — although that was clearly not his intention. The State, as Father Heinrich Pesch, S.J., was to note later, is presumed to be the mediate, that is, the indirect cause of individual welfare. This is chiefly through the State's care of the general welfare. In extraordinary cases, however, and on a temporary basis, the State is justified taking over direct care of individual welfare.

In the nature of things, however, the State inevitably moves to take over control of as much of everything as possible by becoming the immediate cause of individual welfare. To paraphrase the old saying, give the State an inch, and it will take a mile. All rights, even life, liberty, and property, become interpreted as "prudential matter," to be exercised or even granted solely at the discretion of the State. As far as the bottom line goes, this was not an improvement over basing the natural moral law on the Will — and falls into the "law is will" category by default.

Two, if we go the other way and base our understanding of sovereignty on the "state of nature" argument, we secure recognition of humanity's individual inalienable natural (that is, absolute) rights . . . but we tend to lose sight of the fact that no right is or can be absolute in its exercise. The nature of the human person and of society itself demands that the exercise of all rights be defined in a way that not only respects the human dignity of the individual right holder, but of all others in society, as well as the common good itself. Unfortunately, when we base our argument on the assumption of a state of nature, we tend to define possession of natural rights correctly as absolute, but also (and incorrectly) include the exercise of rights as absolute as well.

Thus, by claiming that all rights come from the State, the collectivist puts the State in the place of God. By claiming absolute exercise of rights, the individualist usurps the place of God.

The situation was not, however, hopeless — only confused. We will start to look at how these problems were resolved in the next posting in this series.

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The Political Animal, Part XIII

In the previous posting in this series we looked at an understanding of money and credit based on an approach to the natural moral law derived from the Intellect rather than the Will. We saw that this understanding of
money was summarized by the late 18th, early 19th century political economist Jean-Baptiste Say. This "Say's Law of Markets" can briefly be stated as "production equals income." Thus, in the aggregate, "supply generates its own demand, and demand its own supply."

Unfortunately, there is another understanding of money and credit, one that has become accepted as economic orthodoxy, despite the fact that it contradicts both common sense and sound philosophy, to say nothing of the natural moral law. Nor was Say unaware that there were economists and others (notably Malthus) who disagreed with his analysis. As Say explained,

I am aware that this proposition has a paradoxical appearance, which creates prejudices against it; I know that common prejudices are more likely to support the opinions of those who maintain that there is too much produce, because every body is engaged in creating it: that instead of constantly producing, we ought to increase unproductive consumption, and devour our old capitals instead of accumulating new ones. This doctrine has indeed appearances on its side: it may be supported by arguments; and may interpret facts in its favour. But, Sir, when Copernicus and Galileo first taught that the sun (although it was daily seen to rise in the east, ascend majestically to the meridian, and decline at evening in the west) never moved from its station, they also had to contend with universal prejudice, the opinion of antiquity, the evidence of the senses: ought they to have renounced the demonstrations resulting from sound philosophy? I should wrong you, were I to doubt of your answer. (Jean-Baptiste Say, Letters to Mr. Malthus on Several Subjects of Political Economy and on the Cause of the Stagnation of Commerce. London: Sherwood, Neely & Jones, 1821, 3.)

The crux of the issue, and the basis for the misunderstanding between Say and Malthus, is that each used a different definition (and thus understanding) of "money." As we might expect, these different definitions of a concept as fundamental as money have been evocative of much confusion about the science of political economy, particularly where it overlaps into the moral philosophy, which necessarily provides the foundation of all the social sciences.

To Say, "money" is anything that can be used in settlement of a debt. As previously noted, this includes anything and everything that people use as a medium of exchange, regardless whether a third party has put some kind of stamp of approval on it. This is, essentially, the basic principle of the "British Banking School." As long as something can be used in settlement of a debt in a free exchange, it counts as "money," regardless who issued it, or even what it is.

To Malthus and those who take the position at odds with that of the Banking School, "money" is limited to that which is recognized by the State as the official medium of exchange. To be legitimate, it must have the sanction of the State. No transaction is legitimate unless it is carried out by means of whatever the State has authorized to be used as money. This is the basic principle of the British Currency School. It assumes a State so powerful that, like a god, it can presumably command changes in the natural law itself by claiming the right to define not just the exercise of rights, but the substance of rights, the very essence of reality. Perhaps John Maynard Keynes, the architect of modern economics, described it best in his Treatise on Money:

It is a peculiar characteristic of money contracts that it is the State or Community not only which enforces delivery, but also which decides what it is that must be delivered as a lawful or customary discharge of a contract which has been concluded in terms of the money-of-account. The State, therefore, comes in first of all as the authority of law which enforces the payment of the thing which corresponds to the name or description in the contract. But it comes in doubly when, in addition, it claims the right to determine and declare what thing corresponds to the name, and to vary its declaration from time to time — when, that is to say, it claims the right to re-edit the dictionary. This right is claimed by all modern States and has been so claimed for some four thousand years at least. It is when this stage in the evolution of Money has been reached that Knapp's Chartalism — the doctrine that money is peculiarly a creation of the State — is fully realized. (John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, Volume I: The Pure Theory of Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930, 4.)

According to Keynes, then, the State is effectively God — for nothing other than a Supreme Being has or could have the power to redefine the substantial nature of a thing and thereby transubstantiate one thing into another. Keynes claims for the State as something ordinary the extraordinary ability to change reality itself: "the right to re-edit the dictionary"! We can only pause in wonder, even awe, at the ready and unquestioning acceptance of such a claim and statement in the realm of political science on the part of the State, when, e.g., Christian bodies that maintain a belief in the "Real Presence" have been subject to abuse and ridicule for claiming that, as an extraordinary favor and purely a matter of faith (although considered no less real for all that), the bread and wine presented at the altar is transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ by God acting through the minister.

According to Keynes, then, "money" does not consist of anything that can be used in settlement of a debt, but is a purchase order issued by the State, or by a State-sanctioned individual or organization. Just as Hobbes claimed in Leviathan, the State is presumed to be the ultimate owner of everything. Nothing else can be used as the medium of exchange; by no other means can contracts be entered into or fulfilled; freedom of association is abolished, and even the substantial nature of reality has been altered.

Keynes's explanation, however, while superficially plausible once you accept the idea of divine right or an all-powerful State (and, in fact, reflects what many people today firmly and sincerely believe), is completely wrong. It is a declaration of pure legal and moral positivism, the sort of thinking that the noted German jurist Heinrich Rommen declared leads ultimately to nihilism, and to which he traced the rise of Nazism. Contrary to the statement that absolutism has been "claimed by all modern States and . . . so claimed for some four thousand years at least," Keynes's belief and faith in absolute State power is (as we have seen already in this blog series) actually of relatively recent appearance on the political stage — and is not, in any event, "claimed by all modern States." Contrary to Keynes's declaration, the United States of America explicitly vests sovereignty not in the State, but in the people.

This is nothing more than the Medieval argument as to whether God's Intellect (Nature/Reason) has the primacy, or whether God's — or the State's — revealed Will is supreme. We can easily see, then, that Keynes's concept of "money" is directly contrary to the Thomist understanding of the natural moral law. It assumes as a given that "law is will" (lex voluntas) instead of "law is reason" (lex ratio). (Rommen, op. cit., 36) In Keynes's and the Currency School's positivist orientation, money, like law, is whatever the State says it is. This is claimed to be so, regardless of the underlying principle, whether it be actual value represented, or the dictates of justice as discerned by reason, respectively. As Rommen explains,

Natural law is the consequence of the doctrines of the priority of the intellect over the will (law is reason) in both God and man, of the knowability of the essences of things and their essential order, their metaphysical being and the ordered hierarchy of values. Positivism, on the other hand, is the consequence of the doctrine of the primacy of the will with respect to the intellect in both theology and human psychology. Besides, voluntas here means more than mere will: it denotes passion, irrational appetite, and so on. Positivism signifies the renouncing of all efforts to know the essences of things (nominalism), the repudiation of the metaphysics of hierarchized being and value. Accordingly it is also found in the same conceptual pattern in the things of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even though it is concealed under different names. (Ibid.)

The idea that money is anything that can be used in settlement of a debt is consistent with the understanding of the natural law based on reason (lex ratio), while the belief that money is and can only be what the State declares to be money is an application of pure moral positivism, indeed, even tyranny — as Keynes admits.

Modern political absolutism, such as Keynes erroneously declared has been around for "some four thousand years," is rooted in the theories of "divine right" that followed hard on the heels of the Reformation, as John Neville Figgis noted, and the growth of the idea that the natural moral law is based not on the Intellect, but on the Will, that is, personal opinion and (ultimately) the belief that "might makes right." As we saw, it reached its highest (or, depending on your point of view, its lowest) development in Stuart England with the totalitarian political philosophies of Sir Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes. Far from being unchallenged and pervasive for thousands of years as Keynes claimed, State absolutism was countered by political philosophies at least as far back as Aristotle in The Nichomachean Ethics, The Politics and The Athenian Constitution, and Aquinas in De Regimine Principum.

Not that any refutation of the modern mania for legal and moral positivism and State absolutism has made any difference in the modern world, absolutely convinced that the State is the sole means of effecting changes in the common good, even in reality itself. Aristotle's idea persists that the individual is helpless in the face of existing social structures or conditions. Only a divinely instituted State or one that exists on its own authority (so modern political scientists and economists assume) has the power to act on the common good, and that only indirectly.

The implications of the claim that the State alone has the power to define what can be used as money and by whom are thus, to put it mildly, breathtaking. This has led to the situation so ably described by Pope Pius XI in his landmark encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, "On the Restructuring of the Social Order," issued in 1931. As Pius XI observed,

In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure.

This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money. Hence they regulate the flow, so to speak, of the life-blood whereby the entire economic system lives, and have so firmly in their grasp the soul, as it were, of economic life that no one can breathe against their will. (§§ 105-106)

Although Keynes's view of money and the role of the State is admittedly the prevailing view in the modern world, it did not (despite Keynes's claim that it had developed out of the accepted theory of State absolutism for "four thousand years") go unchallenged. Aquinas opposed the theory after it made its first appearance in the 12th century. In the 16th century, when the belief that the natural moral law is based on the Will rather than the Intellect gained new momentum from the Reformation, the argument in support of the Intellect was strengthened, notably through the work of Cardinal Bellarmine.

We will start to look at the work of Cardinal Bellarmine in the next posting in this series.

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The Political Animal, Part XII

As we learned in the previous posting in this series, the belief that the natural moral law is based not on the Intellect, but on the Will is one of those "small errors" in the beginning that leads to great errors in the end. The particular great error on which we will focus in this particular posting is the idea that the State is or can be sovereign in and of itself, or by direct grant of Heaven, without reference to the individual sovereignty of the human person under God.

The idea that the State is somehow sovereign in and of itself or has been granted some kind of sovereignty directly by God leads inevitably to the belief that all rights come not directly from God to natural persons as part of nature itself, but from the State or the collective to individuals as a revocable grant. The individual is perceived as utterly helpless in any social situation, unless he or she is directly assisted by the State, which assistance always takes the form of direct control over the life, liberty, property, and acquisition and development of virtue of each citizen. Every individual becomes a "mere creature of the State," existing as a person only at the sufferance and permission of the State, which thereby becomes all-powerful.

Nowhere is this more immediately evident than in the institutions of money and credit, the life's blood, so to speak, of the body politic. As the 19th century economist Charles Morrison explained,

Confidence and credit are only moral elements in society; they may be said to be, to a great extent, mere matters of opinion; yet their importance in the production and distribution of wealth is so great, that the whole machinery of material production is kept at work, disordered, or paralyzed, according as these principles act in a healthy manner, irregularly, or not at all. They are to our industrial community what the nervous system is to the body, a slight and sensitive substance in itself, but the indispensable cause of all the life and motion of the system. A great nation may possess in abundance all the means of producing wealth, — population, intelligence, capital, natural and artificial instruments of production; and yet, if credit and confidence should be from any cause destroyed, all these resources seem to have lost their virtue, and general distress prevails. Let confidence and credit be restored, and the whole system is immediately set in motion again, and in a very short time general prosperity returns. (Charles Morrison, An Essay on the Relations Between Labour and Capital. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854, 200.)

Money and credit, as the economist Irving Fisher explained in The Purchasing Power of Money (1911), are based on private property. Credit, simply put, is delivering something of value to another conditional upon the future return of something of equal value. Extending credit creates a debt. Money is whatever is used to return value to a creditor; it consists of anything that is or can be used in settlement of a debt.

Money is thus always something that conveys a property right. This obviously implies that whoever or whatever issues or creates the money has a property right to convey; that he, she, or it "owns" whatever backs the money, or has a legal claim on the thing of value sufficient to derive and issue claims against the thing of value. Issuing money backed by something that the issuer does not own or to which he or she does not have a legal claim is theft; the issuer is making promises for someone else to keep, or is committing theft in some other fashion.

By understanding money and credit as the medium of exchange — that is, anything that can be used in settlement of a debt — anyone can participate in the economic process and engage in exchange simply by establishing his or her "credit" in the community. That is, someone demonstrates to the satisfaction of all parties to any transaction in which the one seeking to establish credit participates that he or she will make good on his or her promise to deliver value on demand or at some agreed-upon future date or on the occurrence of some event. The ability to enter into a contract is an inherent aspect of individual human sovereignty, coming under freedom of association (liberty), and is based on private property. Every person is (or should be) free to enter into a contract (free association) to deliver value immediately or in the future (private property).

Part of this explanation might confuse some people. They may wonder how or why the power to deliver value immediately or in the future comes under "private property." This confusion is easily cleared up once we understand that "property" does not refer to the thing that is owned, but to the inalienable (absolute) right to be an owner that every human being has, and to the socially determined bundle of rights that define how an owner may use what he or she owns. "Property," as the late lawyer-economist Louis O. Kelso pointed out, in everyday speech connotes "control." Thus, the power to deliver something of value immediately or in the future signifies the owner's exercise of control in the form of the right of disposal over what he or she owns — private property.

Thus, anyone who wishes to participate in the economy must have the means to do so. This in turn means that everyone who wishes to participate in the economy must have ownership of something, whether labor or capital (preferably both), and that ownership must be exclusive, that is, the owner must have the right to exclude others from the use and enjoyment of that which he or she owns. (There are circumstances that justify limiting or even confiscating a portion of what someone owns for the common good, but only to the extent that 1) it is absolutely necessary and no other recourse is possible — and the owner is justly compensated in some fashion — and 2) the owner's right to be an owner is in no way limited or abolished.) Only in this way can the process of money creation be carried out legitimately, for unless we have something of value to back our promises, we cannot make good promises, and the economy will not function, just as Charles Morrison pointed out. As Jean-Baptiste Say explains,

Since the time of Adam Smith, political economists have agreed that we do not in reality buy the objects we consume, with the money or circulating coin which we pay for them. We must in the first place have bought this money itself by the sale of productions of our own. To the proprietor of the mines whence this money is obtained, it is a production with which he purchases such commodities as he may have occasion for: to all those into whose hands this money afterwards passes, it is only the price of the productions which they have themselves created by means of their lands, capital, or industry. In selling these, they exchange first their productions for money; and they afterwards exchange this money for objects of consumption. It is then in strict reality with their productions that they make their purchases; it is impossible for them to buy any articles whatever to a greater amount than that which they have produced either by themselves, or by means of their capitals and lands. (Jean-Baptiste Say, Letters to Mr. Malthus on Several Subjects of Political Economy and on the Cause of the Stagnation of Commerce. London: Sherwood, Neely & Jones, 1821, 2.)

The "job" of money is thus to facilitate participation in the economic process. If people need this thing called "money," they either produce a good or service to exchange for the goods and services produced by others, join with others to create the money by means of a contract backed by the promise to repay the money in the future, or borrow existing money on the strength of their promise to produce a good or service in the future to repay the loan. Obviously, common sense tells us that if we borrow money, we should only do so if what we spend the money on produces something that we can use to repay the loan. We are otherwise diminishing our future ability to meet our consumption needs out of our own resources — in effect, robbing not only Peter, but ourselves to pay Paul.

If we reflect on Say's explanation of the role of this thing we call "money," we come to a number of conclusions, the most important of which is that anyone can create money simply by having "good credit" and by exercising his or her right of free association to enter into contracts with others. The actual thing or things that two parties to a transaction agree to exchange between themselves is irrelevant to anybody who is not a party to the transaction. It can — and has been — such things as stamped lumps of gold, silver, and bronze, cattle, tobacco, playing cards, wooden tokens, promissory notes, even elephants or human skulls. All that is necessary is that someone either have a good or service that he or she has produced, or be reasonably certain that a good or service can be produced in the future so that it is available for delivery when the "money" is redeemed, thereby making good on the promise. As Say further explained to Malthus,

From these premises I had drawn a conclusion which appeared to me evident, but which seems to have startled you. I had said, "As each of us can only purchase the productions of others with his own productions — as the value we can buy is equal to the value we can produce, the more men can produce, the more they will purchase." Thence follows the other conclusion, which you refuse to admit: "that if certain goods remain unsold, it is because other goods are not produced; and that it is production alone which opens markets to produce." (Ibid., 3.)

This is "Say's Law of Markets." To summarize as briefly as possible, production equals income, and supply generates its own demand, and demand its own supply — in aggregate, of course.

Unfortunately, while this understanding of money is both logical and derived directly from the common sense precepts of the natural moral law based on the Intellect, it is neither widely understood nor accepted today. Instead, the world has been saddled with an understanding of money based on an approach derived from positivism, an almost pure moral relativism, that is, the Will, rather than the Intellect. We will look at this "unnatural" understanding of money and credit in the next posting in this series.

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The Political Animal, Part XI

In the previous posting in this series, we found that many people base their understanding of the role of the State and the place of man within the common good on a theory of human society peculiar to themselves. Almost inevitably these theories are irreconcilable with the traditional Aristotelian and Thomist understanding of the natural moral law based not on Will, but on the Intellect, that is, on reason alone.

Within the framework that bases the natural law on the Will, "right" and "wrong," as Heinrich Rommen pointed out, become matters of opinion. Morality becomes "situational," based on the personal faith of the individual with little or no reference to reason or common sense. Reason itself becomes something to ridicule, if not rejected outright. Faith alone justifies all of our acts and beliefs, just as William of Occam concluded. As Rommen explains the results of this kind of thinking,

For Occam the natural moral law is positive law, divine will. An action is not good because of its suitableness to the essential nature of man, wherein God's archetypal idea of man is represented according to being and oughtness, but because God so wills. God's will could also have willed and decreed the precise opposite, which would then possess the same binding force as that which is now valid — which, indeed, has validity only as long as God's absolute will so determines. Law is will, pure will without any foundation in reality, without foundation in the essential nature of things. Thus, too, sin no longer contains any intrinsic element of immorality, or what is unjust, any inner element of injustice; it is an external offense against the will of God.

As a result, Occam, who sees only individual phenomena, not universals, the concepts of essences, can likewise admit no teleological orientation toward God is inherent in all creation and especially in man; or at least he cannot grant that it can be known. The unity of being, truth, and goodness does not exist for him. Moral goodness consists in mere external agreement with God's absolute will, which, subject only to His arbitrary decree, can always change. . . . Hence there exists no unchangeable lex naturalis, no natural law that inwardly governs the positive law. Positive law and natural law, which indeed is also positive law, stand likewise in no inner relation to each other. The identity of this thought structure with The Prince of Machiavelli, with the Leviathan of Hobbes, and with the theory of will of modern positivism (the will of the absolute sovereign is law, because no higher norm stands above him) is here quite obvious. (Rommen, op. cit., 52-53)

Obviously, opinions based on faith are invalid outside of whatever group accepts those specific concepts or shares that particular interpretation of some document of faith or of revelation, or has or obtains the power to force others into compliance with what they assert must be the divine Will. (Hence the accusation so frequently heard these days that attempting to assert any absolute standard of the good is "forcing your morality on others.") Basing the ideas of right and wrong on opinion necessarily results in the creation of an elite "inner circle" that alone is privy to the full truth that the great mass of humanity simply lacks the capacity to understand.

Thus, within this framework, it becomes the duty (or, more correctly, the delusion) of the elite to force the masses to comply with its personal interpretation as to what constitutes the good. Naturally, the means by which compliance is forced on the rest of humanity is the State, which has a monopoly on the instruments of coercion. Implicitly rejecting the natural equality of all humanity — that is, that every human being by the mere fact of being human has an analogously complete capacity to acquire and develop virtue — the human race is divided into two groups. These two groups are 1) a necessarily small group of rulers — masters — and 2) the much larger group of ruled: natural slaves. Since this arrangement is presumably based on God's Will, the rulers have their positions by divine right, while the ruled are under a holy obligation to obey the rulers on peril of their immortal souls . . . to say nothing of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, which must in all cases be sacrificed if the elite in control of the State so demand or command.

These assumptions are at the root of such productions as Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, or, The Natural Power of Kings (1680) and, of course, Thomas Hobbes's virtual manual for totalitarian government, Leviathan, or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651). Within this framework, individuals have no inherent, that is, natural rights. All rights are a grant from the ruler, and are thus the result of prudential judgment on the part of the State as to what rights can be permitted, and how they are to be exercised.

This extends even to the natural rights of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness (the acquisition and development of virtue), and, especially, private property. Some modern commentators, claiming to be "authentic" interpreters of, e.g., the social teachings of the Catholic Church (based on the natural moral law, in common with all the major religions), have taken it on themselves to redefine the institution of private property as being "a right, but not an absolute right." This is a meaningless statement once we understand the difference between possessing a right, and exercising a right. Nevertheless, the idea that all rights come from the State is pervasive today, and is based on a presumption of totalitarian State power in one form or another. As Hobbes asserts,

A Fifth doctrine, that tendeth to the Dissolution of a Common-wealth, is, That every private man has an absolute Propriety in his Goods; such, as excludeth the Right of the Soveraign. Every man has indeed a Propriety that excludes the Right of every other Subject: And he has it onely from the Soveraign Power; without the protection whereof, every other man should have equall Right to the same. But if the Right of the Soveraign also be excluded, he cannot performe the office they have put him into, which is, to defend them both from forraign enemies, and from the injuries of one another; and consequently there is no longer a Common-wealth.

And if the Propriety of Subjects, exclude not the Right of the Soveraign Representative to their Goods; much lesse to their offices of Judicature, or Execution, in which they Represent the Soveraign himselfe. (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, II.29)

Note the subtlety of the change from the traditional understanding of the natural law. As far as Aristotle and Aquinas were concerned, every human being is a natural person, and thus necessarily has those natural rights that define something as a "person." How those natural rights are to be exercised, however, is a matter of prudence, subject however always to the proviso that the exercise of natural rights must never be defined in any way that effectively negates the right itself. Aristotle and Aquinas disagreed as to whether all human beings have the full — analogously complete — capacity to acquire and develop virtue, and thus the full spectrum of natural rights, but the fact of natural, that is, absolute, rights is not a matter of dispute.

That is, all human beings necessarily and absolutely have such natural rights as life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness (the acquisition and development of virtue). They could not otherwise be defined as human beings. It is essential to the understanding of humanity as political animals that we realize each of us has the full spectrum of natural rights, and we have possession of these rights absolutely — or, again, we could not be defined as "human."

No one, however, has or could possibly have the absolute exercise of any right, even a natural right. This is impossible in any event, given humanity's social nature. No right can be exercised except within the confines of the common good, which in turn precludes the exercise of any right in any way that harms the right holder, other persons, or the common good. You cannot legitimately violate anyone's rights by the proper exercise of your own rights. As John Locke pointed out, you are not even "allowed" to violate your own rights, e.g., by voluntarily selling yourself into slavery or committing suicide. That would imply that your presumably inalienable rights to life and liberty are, in fact, alienable. If you can alienate your own rights, even with your own full and free consent, what is to stop others from alienating your rights without your consent once the precedent of alienation has been established?

Ultimately, the claim that a ruler holds his or her position by some kind of divine right, that is, either by a direct grant of authority from God or some other Power, or believes it to be self-generated or unaccountable, is a claim to divine status. Thus, by claiming that ordinary people do not have absolute possession of their natural rights — in effect, that natural rights are not, in fact, rights at all, but "prudential matter" — the State (or the ruler who claims to personify the State, especially by his or her own authority) usurps the place of God.

Understood in this way, basing the natural law on the Will rather than the Intellect is clearly contrary to reason — and, possibly, one of the reasons why Aquinas declared that the law is discernible by reason alone. Basing the natural law on the Will is one of those seemingly "small errors" in the beginning that lead to big errors in the end, as both Aristotle and Aquinas pointed out. Nowhere is this more evident than in how we relate to the institutions of the social order, those props intended and presumably designed to assist each individual in the task of acquiring and developing virtue, and thereby becoming more fully human. That is what we will begin to examine in the next posting in this series.

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The Political Animal, Part X

In 1896 (the same year in which he entered the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield), the Anglican monk John Neville Figgis (1868-1919) published The Divine Right of Kings, a study of the political philosophy that reached the height of its development after — and as a result of — the Reformation.

From the Catholic point of view, the Mirfield Community (which still exists) is a relic of the somewhat artificial effort initiated during the "Oxford Movement" to revive the role that the monasteries had in the daily life of the people prior to what is euphemistically described as "the break with Rome." It is an application of "branch theory," a complicated issue that has no real significance for our argument, however important it might otherwise be. Whatever might be your personal opinion of such efforts as the Community of the Resurrection, it attracted some of the leading intellectual lights of the Anglican Church. The novelist Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914) spent time there before his conversion to Catholicism and ordination as a Catholic priest.

Figgis's scholarly labors took a different direction. While apparently convinced to the end of his days of the falsity, etc., of the claims of "the Church of Rome" to a spiritual supremacy in Christendom, in all honesty he openly admitted, in common with William Cobbett a century earlier, that essential concepts such as the natural equality of all men, democracy, and governing with the consent of the governed had all been developments and teachings of the "Church of Rome" to which (for expedience, if nothing else) we will refer in the customary fashion as "the Catholic Church." (Some authorities consider the term "Roman" Catholic to be a concession to "branch theory," that is, to the belief that there are three "branches" of the Universal — Catholic — Church: Orthodox, Roman, and Anglican. The autocephalous Orthodox churches and the churches in union with the pope do not accept branch theory.)

Figgis concluded that divine right theory is a purely Protestant invention, and directly contrary to the great philosophical and political tradition of the West. While he utterly rejected the claims of the Catholic Church relating to the supremacy of the pope, Figgis felt himself forced to admit that, as far as political theory went, the Catholic Church was in the right, and it was, and had always been, a champion of political democracy as being the theory most consistent with the dignity of the human person.

Paradoxically, however, many people today, even (or especially) devout Catholics, seem unalterably convinced that a divine right monarchy is the only legitimate "Catholic" form of government, the only form given direct sanction by God Himself, and the only form approved by the Vatican and the papacy. How this came to be is the result of a series of historical accidents, as well as the triumph (temporary, we hope) of the party that since the sixteenth century has sought to base the natural moral law on God's revealed Will (explicit commands of God found in documents we base on faith), rather than on His Intellect (divine Nature reflected in that of every human being and discerned by reason alone). It's a complicated story, but we'll try to condense it as best we can.

It begins, as we might expect, with the rediscovery of Aristotelian philosophy in the 12th century — something to which we will keep returning in order to understand what is going on in the modern world. As Dr. Heinrich Rommen explained in his book, The Natural Law,

With Duns Scotus (d. cir. 1308), and with the principle of the primacy of the will over the intellect so much emphasized by him, there began inside moral philosophy a train of thought which in later centuries would recur in secularized form in the domain of legal philosophy. The principle that law is will would be referred in legal positivism, as well as in the theory of will in jurisprudence, to the earthly lawmaker (self-obligation).

For Duns Scotus morality depends on the will of God. A thing is good not because it corresponds to the nature of God or, analogically, to the nature of man, but because God so wills. Hence the lex naturalis could be other than it is even materially or as to content, because it has no intrinsic connection with God's essence, which is self-conscious in His intellect. For Scotus, therefore, the laws of the second table of the Decalogue were no longer unalterable. The crux of theology, namely, the problem of the apparent dispensations from the natural law mentioned in the Old Testament and thus seemingly granted by God (the command to sacrifice Isaac, Raphael's apparent lie, Osee's alleged adultery, the polygamy of the patriarchs, and so on), was now readily solved. Yet St. Thomas, too, had been able to solve such cases. Now, however, an evolution set in which, in the doctrine of William of Occam (d. cir. 1349) on the natural moral law, would lead to pure moral positivism, indeed to nihilism. (Heinrich Rommen, The Natural Law. Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1998, 51-52.)

Rommen was a student of the great Father Heinrich Pesch, S.J., Ph.D., who (in common with so many thinkers of equal or even greater caliber) has suffered much at the hands of later commentators and disciples who twist the otherwise clear teachings of their "master" to fit their preconceived theories and ideas. The distortions forced on the distributism of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc come forcibly to mind, especially those that change the substantial nature of natural rights to liberty — freedom of association — private property, and pursuit of happiness — the acquisition and development of virtue.

As a member of the renowned Königswinterkreis discussion group that included such luminaries as Father Oswald von Nell Breuning, Gustav Gundlach, and Franz Müller, Rommen was probably more "in touch" with Father Pesch's teachings than many of Father Pesch's latter-day aficionados. A number of these "wannabe" authorities seek to validate their personal opinions at the expense of common sense and sound philosophy by using Father Pesch's name as a deodorant for theories directly at odds with Father Pesch's Thomist orientation and that adhere more closely to an understanding of the natural moral law based on the Will rather than the Intellect.

This Occamist "triumph of the Will" received its greatest impetus after the success of the Reformation and when the Protestant groups finally saw themselves as completely separate bodies from Rome, instead of themselves being the sole representatives of the true Church established by Christ. This was supported by the aberrations in philosophy that began cropping up. As that genial commentator of the early 20th century, G. K. Chesterton, commented,

Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality; to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox: a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind. (G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas, "The Dumb Ox." New York: Image Books, 1956, 145-146.)

Coincidence (as they say)? I think not — although with far more justification than is usual with conspiracy theory fanatics. We will start to look at why this is so in the next posting in this series.

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The Political Animal, Part IX

In the previous posting in this series we saw that Aristotle and Aquinas both agreed and disagreed on their respective understandings of legal justice and how people participate in the common good. According to Aristotle, no one has direct access to the common good by means of an act of a virtue. According to Aquinas, no individual has direct access to the common good by means of an act of a virtue . . . but that the common good is directly accessible. How is this possible?

Unfortunately, Aquinas did not explain how the common good is both not directly accessible by any act, and directly accessible . . . but not by any individual act. (Remember this, for it is an important point: no individual as an individual can have direct access to the common good.) To this we need to add the general principle of philosophy that no one other than a person can carry out an act of a virtue. Further, no one can act directly on something that does not allow a particular act — and a general virtue is, by definition, a virtue that does not have a particular act.

The solution to the first of Aquinas's apparent self-contradictions becomes evident once we think about it. If you have something you call legal justice that you define as a general virtue with the common good as its indirect object, and then claim that legal justice alone looks directly to the common good, it is clear that you are using the same term for two different things. Obviously, then, Aquinas was telling us that there is a general virtue called legal justice that has the common good as its indirect object . . . and that there is a particular virtue, that he also confusingly called legal justice, that has the common good as its direct object. Logically, there are thus (according to Aquinas) two distinct types of legal justice, one general, and one particular.

General legal justice is just what Aristotle said it is: a general virtue without a directed (particular) act that has the common good as its indirect object. Particular legal justice, however, has the common good as its directed object — "legal justice alone looks directly to the common good" . . . and there Aquinas left us hanging. It necessarily follows from the fact that a virtue is a particular virtue that it has a directed act . . . but all we can tell from what Aquinas said following his declaration about particular legal justice is, although particular legal justice has a directed object, individuals as individuals cannot carry out a directed act of legal justice! (Again, this is a critical point to keep in mind: individuals as individuals cannot carry out directed acts of legal justice.)

The "act" of legal justice, whether general or particular, apparently remains the vague, indirect effect that Aristotle described. That is, the effect that individuals acquiring and developing the classic virtues has on the general welfare, not any particular, directed effect on the complex network of institutions that make up the concrete manifestation of the common good and give particular form to the social order.

For the next eight centuries or so philosophers and political scientists got around this difficulty by — ignoring it. Treatises on justice examined legal justice exclusively as a general virtue (and not very deeply, at that, as Ferree notes), and left it at that. The only way to affect the common good is, they concluded, indirectly, and then only by means of acts of other virtues that somehow improved the general welfare of the community. In the meantime, however, a theory was reemerging in Europe regarding the origin and transmission of political power — sovereignty.

For centuries the west had more or less based its politics on Roman theory. According to the Romans, the social order is divided into three discrete societies, domestic (the family), religious (the temple), and civil (the State). Sovereignty is a slightly different concept, or at least has different applications, in each of the three societies.

In the family, the Romans believed the gods vested all power in domestic matters in the head of the family, the pater familias. No one, not even the head of State or the chief priest, could interfere with the power of life and death that the pater familias exercised over the members of his familia. In theory, anyway. In practice, it wasn't too uncommon for a pater familias to be prosecuted for violating a family member's civil or even religious rights, such as poisoning your wife or introducing the worship of unauthorized gods into the family. Even a slave had the quasi-right to sue for his freedom if he thought he could prove he had been unjustly enslaved — and winning such a case was not as rare as we might think.

Religious society was similar. The gods vested the priest with the power to administer religious matters. With so many gods, however, and the fact that the Romans were always bringing in new ones as new nations joined the Empire, it was anybody's free choice which god or gods you worshipped, or even whether you worshipped at all. Again, that was the theory. In practice, many civil institutions required participation by religious authorities or religious sanction, including the games.

Foreign affairs, for example, were construed as relations between peoples under the protection of different gods, so diplomats at the highest level had to be priests. Also, the person of a diplomat or envoy was considered sacred, so harming a diplomat offended the god or gods involved. A witness could not give testimony in a court of law without calling a god — usually Apollo — to stand surety, and to punish the witness in the next life if the testimony was perjured. When the reigning Caesar was considered divine or at least semi-divine, soldiers burned incense to the emperor's "genius," symbolized by his bust, as a test of loyalty. Early Christians were considered dangerous atheists and traitors to the State for refusing to participate in these practices.

In civil society, however, the Romans believed all power resides in the people. The State receives its power as a grant from the people who make up the State. The Romans don't appear to have gone much further than that, but the principle is clear. The State only exists by the consent of the governed, and the selection of ruler is ultimately the people's choice — in theory. "Emperor" (Imperator) was not a civil office, but a military honor signifying "one worthy to command Romans in battle." The heads of State (there were always two) were officially the Consuls, in theory elected every year. How well this worked in practice, and how consistently it was applied is a different issue.

The bottom line in all this is that during the Middle Ages, any ruler, regardless of the specific form of government, was believed to rule ultimately only with the consent of those whom he or she ruled, albeit with the sanction of God, sometimes confusingly referred to as ruling by "divine right." With the intellectual revolution that resulted from the rediscovery of Aristotle in the 12th century and in response to the changing political situation, however, new theories began to evolve or be revived as philosophers and political scientists began to examine the matter in greater detail. That is what we will start to look at in the next posting in this series.

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