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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/19/2003 4:21 PM (GMT -6) |   | taken from chapt 3 of "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolutions", power and liberty:A theory of Politics.
The colonists had no doubt about what power was and about its central, dynamic role in any political system. ... The essence of what they meant by power was ..revealed by John Adams as "dominion."
..."Power" to them meant the dominion of some men over others, the human control of human life:ultimately force, compulsion. ...
Commonly, the discussion of power centered on its essential characteristic of aggressiveness:its endlessly propulsive tendency to expand itself beyond legitimate boundaries. ..this central thought explained more of politics, past and present,...than any other single consideration. ...
Power,..., has "an encroaching nature"; "...if at first it meets with no control [it] creepst by degrees and quick subdues the whole."
"Power is "grasping" and "tenacious" in its nature; "what it seizes it will retain." Sometimes power "is like the ocean, not easily admitting limits to be fixed in it." Sometimes it is "like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour." Sometimes it is like "jaws...always opened to devour." It is everywhere in public life, and everywhere it is threatening, pushing, and grasping; and too often in the end it destroys its benign-necessarily benign-victim.
...the natural prey...was liberty, or law, or right.
The public world these writers saw was divided into distinct, contrasting, and innately antagonistic spheres:the sphere of power and the sphere of liberty or right. The one was brutal, ceaselessly active, and heedless; the other was delicate, passive, and sensitive. The one must be resisted, the other defended, and the two must never be confused.
Not that power was in itself-in some metaphysical sense- evil. It was natural in its origins, and necessary. It had legitimate foundations "in compact and mutual consent"-in those covenants among men y which, as a result of restrictions voluntarily accepted by all for the good of all, society emerges from a state of nature and creates government as trustee and custodian of the mass of surrendered individual powers. ... Power in its legitimate form inhered naturally in government, just as liberty, always weak, always defensive, always..."skulking about in corners...hunted and persecuted in all countries by cruel power," inhered naturally in the people.... Liberty was not...the interest and concern of all, governors and governed alik, but only of the governed. The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous. "For as great a blessing as government is, ...,like other blessings, it may become a scourge, a curse, and sever punishment to a people." What made it so..the nature of man-his susceptibility to corruption and his lust for self-aggrandizement.
...Everyone knew that if "weak and ignorant men are entrusted with power..such exaltation will...make them giddy and vain and deprive them of the little understanding they had before." But it was not simply a question of what the weak and ignorant will do. The problem was more systematic than that; it concerned "mankind in general." And the point they hammered home time and time again..was the incapacity of the species, of mankind in general, to withstand the tempations of power. ...
These are instincts that have "in all nations combined the worse passions of the human heart and the worst projects of the human mind in league against the liberties of mankind." Power.."converts a good man in private life to a tyrant in office." It acts on men like drink..and nothing within man is sufficiently strong to guard against the effects of power-certainly not "the united considerations of reason and religion...".
From these central premises..., there followed a series of important conclusions. Since "the supreme power is ever posessed by those who have arms in their hands and are disciplined to the use of them," the absolute danger to liberty lay in making "the civil subordinate to the military,...instead of subjecting the military to the civil powers." Their fear was...of standing armies, a phrase that had distinctive connotations..from the seventeenth century..
There was...no worse state of thraldom than a military power in any government, unchecked and uncontrolled by the civil power" and they had a vivid sense of what such armies were:gangs of restless mercenaries, responsible only to the whims of the rulers who paid them, capable of destroying all right, law and liberty that stood in their way.
This fear of standing armies..went beyond mere logic. Only too evidently was it justified..by history and by the facts of the contemporary world.
The most vivid of these sad cases..was that of Denmark. The destruction of parliamentary liberties in Denmark had..taken place a century before, but that event...was experienced as contemporary by the colonists.
Molesworth's An Account of Denmark (1694) established the general point...that the preservation of liberty rested on the ability of the people to maintain effective checks on the wielders of power, and hence in the last analysis rested on the vigilance and moral stamina of the people. Certain forms of government made particularly heavy demands on the virtue of the people. Everyone knew that democracy-direct rule by all the people-required such spartan, self-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race. Other forms, aristocracies, for example, made less extreme demands; but even in them virtue and sleepless vigilance on the part of at least the ruling class were necessary if privilege was to be kept responsible and the inroads of tyranny perpetually blocked off. It had been the lack of this vigilance that had brought liberty in Denmark to its knees, for there a corrupt nobility, more interested in using its privileges for self-indulgence than for service to the state, had dropped its guard and allowed in a standing army which quickly destroyed the constitution and the liberties protected by it.
The word "constitution" and the concept behind it was of central importance to the colonists' political thought...the colonists..understood by the word "constitution" as the arrangement of governmental institutions, laws and customs together with the principles and goals that animated them. So John Adams wrote that a political constitution is like "the constitution of the human body"; "certain contextures of the nerves, fibres, and muscles, or certain qualities of the blood and juices" some of which "may properly be called stamina vitae, or essentials and fundamentals of the constitution; parts without which life itself cannot be preserved a moment." A constitution of government...is a..combination of powers for...the good of the whole community."
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Distinctive is its emphasis on the animating principles...those "fundamental laws and rules of the constitution, which ought never to be infringed." ...For if the ostensible purpose of all government was the good of the people, the particular goal of the English constitution was...the attainment of liberty. It was for this that it should be blessed, supported and maintained, and transmitted "in full, to posterity."
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What was the secret of this success of the British constitution? It lay in its peculiar capacity to balance and check the basic forces within society. It was common knowledge, that English society consisted of three social orders..each with its own rights and privileges, and each embodying..the principles of a certain form of government:royalty,...monarchy;the nobility...aristocracy; and the commons,..democracy. In best of worlds,...each of these forms was capable of creating the conditions for human happiness; in actuality all of them, if unchecked, tended to degenerate into oppressive types of government-tyranny, oligarchy, or mob rule-by enlarging their own rights at the expense of the others' and hence generating not liberty and happiness for all but misery for most. In England,..these elements of society..entered into government in such a way as to eliminate the dangers inherent in each. They entered simultaneously, so to speak, in a balanced sharing of power. The functions, the powers of government were so distributed among these components of society that no one of them dominated the others. So long as each component remained within its proper sphere and vigilantly checked all efforts of the others to transcend their proper boundaries there would be a stable equilibrium of poised forces each of which, in protecting its own rights against the encroachments of the others, contributed to the preservation of the rights of all.
Such was the theoretical explanation..of the "mixed" constitution of England...But if the theory was evident..the mechanics of its operation were not. It was not clear how the three social orders were related to the functioning branches of government. ...
The difficulty of explaining how..the natural divisions of society expressed themselves in the English government so as to pit power against power for the mutual benefit of all was compounded when the unit involved was seen to be nto the single community of Britain but an empire of communities each with its own separate social groupings and governmental institutions yet each part of a greater society and government as well.
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The very idea of liberty was bound up with the preservation of this balance of forces. For political liberty..was traditionally known to be "a natural power of doing or not doing whatever we have a mind" so long as that doing was "consistent with the rules of virtue and the established laws of the society to which we belong". Liberty..was the capacity to exercise "natural rights" within limits set not by the mere will or desire of men in power but by non-arbitrary law-law enacted by legislatures containing within them the proper balance of forces.
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Conceivin of liberty as the exercise of natural rights whose essences were minimally stated in English law and custom, the colonist saw in the balance of powers of the British constitution "a system of consummate wisdom" that provided an effective "check upon the power to oppress." Yet they were far from optimistic about the future of liberty. They looked ahead with anxiety rather than with confidence, for they knew, from the whole of their received tradition, of the desperate plight of liberty everywhere:"new tyrannies have sprung up, like so many new plagues, within the memory of man, and...[have] engrossed almost the whole earth," rendering "the world a slaughterhouse." Rulers of the East were "almost universally absolute tyrants...even in Europe..where can we find a well constituted government or a well governed people? France "has an arbitrary authority"; Prussia,"an absolute government"; Sweden and Denmark"have sold or betrayed their liberties"; Rome "groans under a medley of civil and ecclesiastical bondage"; Germany "is a hundred-headed hydra"; and Poland a ruin of "extravagant licentiousness and anarchy...the nobility and gentry arbitrary despotic tyrants, and the populace a race of slaves." Only in Britain-and her colonies-had liberty emerged from its trials intact; only in Britain had the battle repeatedly been won. Yet even in Britain the margin of victory had been narrow..and the dangers were known to persist.
At this point, the author describes how the freedom of the Saxons and their landholding system was viewed as ideal prior to the invasion of the Normans, which imposed tyranny and led to the alteration of despotism and anarchy within England until gradually reforms against this were built up and took the form of the Magna Carta, but then the Stuarts precipitated a bloody struggle between the people and the confederacy "of temporal and spiritual tyranny." Then, liberty was reestablished in England with the Glorious Revolution of 1688,...but it had been a close victory which would require the utmost vigilance to maintain. .. At this critical juncture in the history of England and of liberty..that America had been settle. The conjunction had not been accidental. "It was this great struggle that peopled America...a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror, or the infernal confederacy [of temporal and spiritual tyranny] projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America." Just as their Saxon ancestors had left "their native wilds and woods in the north of Europe," the settlers of America had emigrated to create in a new land civil and ecclesiastical governments purer, freer than those they had left behind. The transplantation had been..placed in a soil perfect for its growth. In the colonies, "sought and settled as an asylum for liberty, civil and religious," virtue continued to be fortified by the simplicity of life and the lack of enervating luxury.
The idea that America was a purer and freer England cam largely from local, nonconformist readings of history, reinforced by powerful elements within Enlightenment thought. European illuminati continued to identify America..with..approximating a benign state of nature and to think of the colonies as special preserves of virtue and liberty. They could not help but note the refreshing simplicity of life and the wholesome consequences of the spread of freehold tenure. Nor could they deny the argument..that the colonies demonstrated the effectiveness of militia armies whose members were themselves the beneficiaries of the constitution and hence not likely to wish to destroy it. ..Voltairestated that America was the refinement of all that was good in England, writing in his Lettres philosophiques that Penn and the Quakers had actually brought into existence "that golden age of which men talk so much and which probably has never existed anywhere except in Pennsylvania." ..Promoters of emigration broadcasted the idea that inhabitants of the colonies enjoyed a unique simplicity and rectitude in their social life and a special freedom in their politics.
In summary, there were grand utopic expectations about the future states of the USA, but what would happen would be the result of the degree of vigilance and the strength of purpose the people could exert. For they believed..that "what happened yesterday will come to pass again, and the same causes will produce like effects in all ages," the laws of nature..being "uniform and invariable." The preservation of liberty would continue to be..a bitter struggle with adversity; and by 1763 it was commonly believed that the immediate circumstances of..England..were far from conducive to the continued maintenance of liberty..that a new crisis of liberty might be approaching..that effeminizing luxury and slothful negligence continued to soften the moral fiber of the nation, and that politics festered in corruption. Specifically,..the prime requisite of constitutional liberty, an independent Parliament free from the influence of the crown's prerogative, was being undermined..
How widespread the fear was in America that corruption was ripening in the home country..may be seen..in the general popularity of periodicals like The Craftsman and Cato's letters, which repeatedly excoriated the degeneracy of the age and the viciousness of ministerial corruption, but..some of the most vituperative of the English jeremiads were selected for republication in the colonies.
..The most sustained, intense attack on the corruption of England was James Burgh's Britain's Remembrancer:or, The Danger Not Over...(London, 1746)..Its..denunciation of "our degenerate times and corrupt nation"-a people wallowing in "luxury and irreligion...venality, perjury, faction, opposition to legal authority, idleness, gluttony, drunkenness, lewdness, excessive gaming, robberies, clandestine marriages, breach of matrimonial vows, self-murders...a legion of furies sufficient to rend any state or empire that ever was in the world to pieces."..This pamphlet was reprinted over and over again in the colonies along with others that decried how "vain, luxurious, and selfish EFFEMINACY" were "weakening..the foundations of the our constitution" and several personal witnesses regarding the degenerating state of liberty in England.
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Benjamin Franklin wrote..in 1753:"I pray God long to preserve to Great Britain the English laws, manners, liberties, and religion notwithstanding the complaints so frequent in your public papers of the prevailing corruption and degeneracy of your people. I know you have a great deal of virtue still subsisting among you, and I hope the constitution is not so near a dissolution as some seem to apprehend. I do not think you are generally become such slaves to your vices as to draw down that justice Milton speaks of" in Paradise Lost. The tide.."is never so low but it may rise again." Yet it might not; and should the worse happen,"should this dreaded fatal change happen in my time, how should I, even in the midst of the affliction, rejoice if we [in America] have been able to preserve those invaluable treasures, and can invite the good among you to come and partake of them! O let not Britain seek to oppress us, but like an affectionate parent endeavor to secure freedom to her children; they may be able one day to assist her in defending her own."
So too John Dickinson, in England in the election year 1754 as a student of law..was shocked..by Hogarthian election scenes and by the callous disregard of freedom exhibited in Parliament. Over a million pounds, he wrote his father, had been expended..to manipulate the general election. The starting price for the purchase of votes in one northern borough..was 200 guineas.
"If a man cannot be brought to vote as he is desired, he is made dead drunk and kept in that state, never heard of by his family or friends till all is over and he can do no harm. "
"Bribery is so common that it is thought there is not a borough in England where it is not practiced, and it is certain that many very flourishing ones are ruined, their manufactories decayed, and their trade gone by their dependence on what they get by their votes...It is ridiculous and absurd to pretend to curb the effects of luxury and corruption in one instance..without a general reformation of manners, which everyone sees is absolutely necessary for the welfare of this kingdom. " ..
Further reports from England and the rest of Europe make Paul Krugman's gloom and doom seem optimistics, however, the main point seems to be that it was viewed to be essential that history had proved things may always get worse and that liberty must be preserved and this was the root metaphor that motivated many future member of the USA to declare their independence from England.
dlw
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/19/2003 4:25 PM (GMT -6) | | As I was condensing this reading down, which I intend to assign to one of my classes, it struck me how it still applies in many ways to today.
It has an open view of the quality of the governance of a country, the state of its constitution and, instead of the warfare theodicy, going chasing after demons, it maintains the importance of vigilance in virtue and watchfulness of those in power wrt them abusing their powers...
Haven't our luxuries taken up our lives and prevented us from being more vigilant both in our spiritual lives and in following and participating in our politics, including thinking critically about our political strategy wrt to abortion?
dlw
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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