Rousseau is called the father of romanticism for a reason. The romantic eye sees the modern world as alien and alienating, amputating the soul and at war with nature. “The system is rigged”—as so many people say today—is, in its most intense forms, a romantic battle cry.
Indeed, radicalism in all its forms is fundamentally romantic whether it comes from the right or the left. The ambition to “tear it all down” should be seen first as a psychological response to the status quo. Different ideologies color that ambition in different ways, but the substance beneath is not ideological but instinctual. Lenin, Hitler, and all of their petty imitators begin with the assumption that the current edifice of civilization is corrupt and must be torn down. Radicalism is romanticism taken to its extreme. Get rid of it all and start over!
Another way to look at Rousseau, however, is that he was the father of the modern idea of alienation. People no doubt felt alienated prior to the Enlightenment, but, like so many other passions and ideas, such feelings were seen through the prism of religion. One solved feelings of alienation (never mind undeserved status) by getting right with God.
But the Enlightenment had dethroned God and made man the measure of man. And it was Rousseau who first argued for getting right with yourself, because you, your conscience, your inner lantern of truth, lit the path in this world. He believed there was, or had been, an authentic, real noble savage deep down inside every one of us and that civilization had corrupted it by making us care more about status, wealth, respect, fame, and other artificial concerns.
In pre-Enlightenment society, according to Rousseau, the Church was a kind of corrupt guild, using its power for its own benefit and not for the needs of the faithful or the citizens in general. He said the new princes of the Enlightenment were no better than the princes and priests they had dethroned. The same ambitious intellectuals casting themselves as freethinkers and philosophers, Rousseau wrote, “would have been for the very same reason nothing more than a fanatic” of the Church in an earlier era.45
Rousseau was prescient about the role intellectuals would play in modern societies and how ideologues—not just intellectuals, but also artists, educators, and every other profession that works with ideas and concepts—have replaced priests as the definers of meaning. For Rousseau, the so-called Age of Reason was simply a new age of oppression by another name. The Enlightenment theories of democracy and limited government as developed by Locke, Montesquieu, and the Founders were, to him, no better than what they sought to replace.
Here we can see why I think Rousseau’s personal character informs his philosophy. The Scottish writer James Boswell recounted a conversation he had with Rousseau. “Sir, I have no liking for the world,” Rousseau told him. “I live here in a world of fantasies and I cannot tolerate the world as it is….Mankind disgusts me. And my housekeeper tells me that I am in far better humors on a day when I have been alone than on those I have been in company.”46
This dual indictment of the Enlightenment and the old system of absolutism might sound a bit like anarchism or libertarianism: The system is rigged, the rulers are in it for themselves, don’t trust the Man. But Rousseau’s solution wasn’t to reject statist coercion and manipulation. It was to employ them for ostensibly purer ends.
For Rousseau, man and society alike were disordered, unnatural, broken—alienated. Individuals were out of harmony with their nature, and that meant society was too. The only way to fix people was to create a new society empowered to fill the holes in our souls. Salvation was a collective endeavor. Mankind could not go back to being a solitary noble savage; mankind must find new meaning in the group, governed by the “general will,” a kind of collective consciousness that outranked the individual conscience.
This was a brilliant intellectual updating of the tribal instinct. Every citizen in Rousseau’s ideal society would have meaning through the group and only through the group. The group itself would be the object of a new religious faith that defined one’s purpose in relation to service to the whole. Tellingly, Rousseau looked to the militarized state of Sparta for a new model of social organization in which social planners would apply the ancient Roman and Greek concept of a civil religion to a modern society. This civil religion would emotionally bind the citizen to the general will and the community.
Rousseau’s civil religion is a thoroughly totalitarian affair. If you refuse to subscribe to the dogmas of the new civil religion, you should be banished. He who publicly accepts the law of the general will and then violates it, “let him be punished with death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.”47 Rousseau explains: “Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken. The two forms are inseparable. It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either claim or torment them.”48 To this end, public “censors” and other magistrates would mold and define public opinion and identify “unbelievers” in need of extermination. The state, in other words, had complete authority to improve men’s souls for the greater good. Thus Rousseau sought to eliminate the original division of labor that Christianity had introduced into the West through Saint Augustine. He wanted a new theocracy that closed the space between the religious and the secular. This idea amounts to what the great sociologist Robert Nisbet called, with perhaps only modest exaggeration, “the most powerful state to be found anywhere in political philosophy.”49
Nationalism served as the framework for this new imagined community. The most obvious illustration of Rousseau’s ideas at work can be found in the horrors of the Reign of Terror at the end of the French Revolution, in which the Committee of Public Safety became a real-world example of Rousseau’s boards of censors, sentencing unbelievers to death in the name of the great new French nation they were building. The Revolutionaries believed they were creating a nation from scratch in Year Zero. Rousseau’s social contract was hailed as ‘‘the beacon of legislators.’’50
Maximilien Robespierre, the chief architect of the Jacobin Reign of Terror, and thus the first modern totalitarian mass murderer, reportedly read Rousseau every day like a daily devotional.51 Robespierre used Rousseau’s ideas to justify his authority in a higher ideal. ‘‘For us, we are not of any party, we serve no faction, you know it, brothers and friends, our will is the General Will,’’ he proclaimed in a 1792 address to leaders of the various French départements.52
Even after the Thermidorian Reaction, when Robespierre was killed in a coup by a faction appalled by his excesses, the French Revolutionaries did not abandon Rousseau. They believed that Robespierre had betrayed the true spirit of Rousseau. In 1794 the revolutionary government called for Rousseau’s remains to be exhumed and brought to Paris to be reinterred at the Panthéon. A copy of the Social Contract was carried on a velvet cushion while a twelve-horse carriage pulled a statue of Rousseau.53
The stories Rousseau and Locke told, as well as the stories we tell of Rousseau and Locke, represent the two main currents in Western civilization and, increasingly, in modernity itself. It is a fight between the idea that our escape from the past has been a glorious improvement over mankind’s natural state and the idea that the world we have created is corrupting because it is artificial. One side says that external moral codes and representative government are a liberating blessing. The other says that the truth is found not outside of ourselves in the form of universal rules and tolerance for others but in our own feelings and the meaning we get from belonging to a group.
Locke and Rousseau may stand as useful markers between the left and the right, but the divide is more fundamental than that, for it runs straight through the human heart. There are people of the left who are more Lockean than they realize, and there are people of the right who are far more Rousseauian than they would care to admit. Locke represents the idea that we can conquer not just nature but human nature. Rous
seau is a stand-in for the notion that such conquest is oppressive. This tension is not permanently resolvable because the Lockean world is an imposition on human nature, and human nature doesn’t change. Each of us starts our journey as an ignoble savage. Nobility must be taught—and earned. It is not inherited.
* The term “cabal” has special meaning here. Normally, the king selected a single “favorite” counselor to advise and manage his rule. The so-called Cabal ministry, instead, was made up of five privy counselors whose names (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley-Cooper, and Lauderdale) spelled out the acronym “CABAL.”
6
THE AMERICAN MIRACLE
They Put It in Writing
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness….”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON ET AL., THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
The Founding Fathers were wrong.
It is not self-evident that man is endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights. Colloquially, “self-evident” simply means obvious. Something that is self-evident, according to the dictionary, is something that does not require demonstration. The existence of gravity is self-evident and that is a very easy thing to prove. It is obvious that fire burns, and if you need a demonstration, I can provide one on request.
Meanwhile, how does one demonstrate that we are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights? People have been trying to demonstrate that our Creator exists for thousands of years. If that cannot be done to everyone’s satisfaction, it seems a daunting task to prove He created unalienable rights. The simple fact is that the existence of natural rights, like the existence of God Himself, requires a leap of faith. Meanwhile, the vast history of mankind provides one endlessly dreary demonstration after another that people can be alienated from their rights quite easily, starting with their right to life.
The first and most glorious achievement of the American founding was to assert in writing—not argue for, claim, or suggest—that all men are created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. It’s a bit of a strained analogy, but in the context of the Miracle, one can think of the English people as the Jews. The Jews introduced a moral monotheistic framework into the world. But in ancient times, it only applied to Jews. Christianity took those precepts and universalized them. Similarly, the English introduced an understanding of rights and liberty into the world—and made it work. But initially it only applied to the English. America universalized these English ideas.
It is a common response to such claims to point out that the Founders didn’t mean it. They were hypocrites who denied the rights of slaves, women, and, to a lesser but still significant extent, the propertyless. But this is an exercise in looking through the wrong end of the telescope, which robs the heroism of every soul who made the world a better place. We judge the strides we make in the present by the extent of our improvement over the past. But we have an annoying tendency to judge the past by the standards of the present. “The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history, starting with the simplest of them, the anachronism. It is the fallacy into which we slip when we are giving the judgments that seem most assuredly self-evident,” Herbert Butterfield observed. “And it is the essence of what we mean by the word ‘unhistorical.’ ”1
The Founders advanced the “wheel of history” as none had before. They started a revolutionary new chapter in the story of humanity by broadening the principles laid out by Locke and the English people generally. Consider the evolution of the Declaration of Independence.
Some ninety years before Jefferson put pen to paper, the Glorious Revolution had cemented the English commitment to ancient English rights. That revolution had a huge impact on the politics and popular attitudes in the American colonies. Just as the threat of absolutism in the mother country had been thwarted, it was curtailed in the New World as well, allowing for representative institutions to develop organically.2 That English notions of rights and liberties would intensify only makes sense, given that the yoke of the crown felt tighter, or at least more unjust, across the Atlantic. As the case for independence grew in the hearts and minds of the colonists, the argument inevitably shifted from the rights and liberties of Englishmen to the rights and liberties of men generally. Events, in other words, forced the Americans to shed allegiance not only to the English crown but also to the idea of English particularism.
A good illustration of this evolutionary process is the expression “A man’s home is his castle.” The original saying was “An Englishman’s home is his castle,” and it was more than just a slogan for husbands trying to get out of doing chores. The idea that even the king himself could not enter a man’s home without an invitation is precisely one of those ancient English rights and liberties. It was a common understanding centuries before the Glorious Revolution. Sir Edward Coke wrote the cultural custom into the common law 1628: “For a man’s house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium [and each man’s home is his safest refuge].” In 1763, William Pitt clarified the meaning of “castle”: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail—its roof may shake—the wind may blow through it—the storm may enter—the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter.”
Now, in practice, this did not mean that the home was an inviolable sanctuary in which one could break the law or escape from its reach. What it meant was that the state needed a good reason to enter a home. And the state needed to make its case to a judge, who would issue a writ or later a warrant. This, in short, is where the Fourth Amendment right “of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” comes from. What began as English custom over time became an inalienable right.3
The Declaration of Independence follows a similar pattern. It is chockablock with echoes of Locke, from the “life, liberty and happiness” line to the talk of unalienable rights. But the Declaration is less indebted to Locke than it is to the American people, who, at the time, had only recently stopped thinking of themselves as Englishmen. Years later Jefferson would write that, “neither aiming at originality or principles or sentiments, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American Mind.”4 Proof of this can be found in the fact that the Declaration was not quite as original a document as we’ve come to be taught. Pauline Maier found that there were in fact some ninety Declarations of Independence written up by various groups, from county conventions to New York mechanics’ guilds and Massachusetts town halls. Jefferson wasn’t inventing anything in the Declaration. Rather, a brilliant writer on deadline, he contented himself with eloquently summarizing what was little more than American conventional wisdom.5
As Gordon S. Wood has observed, when the Declaration was issued, the important part was the conclusion: the break with England. Only later did the beginning “all men are created equal” take on philosophical and metaphysical significance. “Certainly no one initially saw the Declaration as a classic statement of political principles,” Wood writes. “Only in the 1790s, with the emergence of the bitter partisan politics between the Federalists and the Jefferson-led Republicans, did the Declaration begin to be celebrated as a great founding document.”6 And that celebration evolved into sacredness.
“Let us revere the Declaration of Independence,” Abraham Lincoln insisted.7 “Let us readopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices and policy which harmonize with it.”8 That is what he did in the Gettysburg Address when he proclaimed, “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”9 Lin
coln essentially rewrote the meaning of the Founding and consecrated it with the blood of Americans. It didn’t matter that Southerners had a plausible argument that they understood the Declaration better. What mattered was the new meaning breathed into it. The Founders may well have believed in the Lockean notion of natural rights, but it is not news that they didn’t apply it consistently. They risked their lives and sacred honor for more worldly reasons. But Lincoln sifted a golden idea from the currents of our story and molded it into an icon. That idea of human equality took deeper root in American life because of it. A century later, Martin Luther King Jr. did the same thing once again. In 1963, in his “I Have a Dream Speech,” he said:
In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”10
Both Lincoln and King were appealing to the story—the best story—we tell about ourselves. That our story begins with Americans falling short of the ideals embedded in the Founding is not an indictment of the ideals; it is testament to the nobility of America’s story arc. Without even considering the material prosperity that the American miracle created not just for its own citizens but for billions of people around the world, if America had done nothing else but this, it would be a glorious leap forward for humanity.