Wednesday, December 13, 2017

James Stoner on Thomas West's New Book

See here. A taste:
West’s failure to distinguish political philosophy from political theory makes it too easy for him to dismiss competing interpretations of the Founders’ work and its vulnerabilities. We who teach in the field often elide the terms when we describe what we do to our colleagues in political science, on the one hand, and to those in the departments of philosophy on the other. But in speaking of the political theory of the Founding, West dodges the question of its relation to the account of natural rights and natural law in political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

He uses Locke from time to time to clarify and elaborate the Founders’ theory, as I say, but he backs away from him whenever the Founders did not agree with his conclusions. This prompts one to wonder, did the Founders pull back from logical implications they did not want to face, or did they find Locke’s theory philosophically inadequate?

West can only refute the amalgam theory—the view that the Founders drew on philosophically distinct and therefore philosophically incompatible political philosophies or fundamental traditions—if he can show that the Founders dismissed Locke for theoretical reasons, not just to avoid facing the practical consequences his principles demanded (for example, permitting divorce). The argument of Leo Strauss in the first place, and his successors such as Harvey Mansfield and Thomas Pangle, is that there are aspects of Locke’s political philosophy, not least its deep indebtedness to Hobbes’ philosophy, that lead eventually but inexorably to the materialist individualism and anomie of our current predicament—in other words, toward a crisis of liberalism—and that insofar as the Founders invited Locke into their homes and made his theoretical framework their own, they risked undermining their handiwork.

In short, if the Founding is Lockean, it is no amalgam, but it is unstable, carrying with it untoward Lockean consequences. If it is only partially Lockean, it might avoid the bad consequences, but would do so by being less pure (by being amalgamated). To be less abstract: The weakening of the family, enormous economic inequality, and maybe even eventual recourse to executive predominance arguably follow from Lockean political philosophy even if none of this is what the Founders had in mind.
See also this comment which links to how West has responded to a similar criticism. A taste, quoting West:
“In regard to the decline of our current world… our world is the way it is not because of the Founding, but something else that happened in the last two hundred and some years… if you look at the history of western countries in the 1960s, all of them went through the exact same metamorphosis, almost at the same moment. And so, countries for example like Germany and Britain, that have long had establishment of religion, official churches and all the things that the Americans didn’t do all had that exact same thing. There was immediate institution of no-fault divorce throughout the world in the 1970s in almost every country, immediate institution of barriers on employers in terms of their freedom of contract with their employees. There was a complete collapse of sexual mores throughout the Western world all at once, whether it was New Zealand, Australia, Germany, England America.

This is not due to the Founding Fathers, I can assure you of that… Nietzsche’s diagnosis of what’s wrong with us- that’s where you need to go to understand our current situation. It’s a psychological malady that is a profound indication of a deep dissatisfaction in the Western soul now that it has gotten rid of God, now that it has gotten rid of nature, and reason- it has gotten rid of all meaning in human life. It has put us exactly in the situation.. Tocqueville worried about, where we’re living in the present moment. That’s where we are, and that is not something that the Founding Fathers can be blamed for, and I also agree to some degree that is something the Founding Fathers can’t help us solve, that’s something we’re going to have to solve ourselves.”
I think it's absolutely true that this was an international phenomenon that affected Western culture in general, not just America in particular. Certain folks might operate with blinders and assume since America isn't Europe, let's look for particular American villains to blame -- Alfred Kinsey, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Abbie Hoffman, etc. -- and ignore Europe. The Straussians by the way don't do this and for good reason. They understand the ideas came from continental Europe and migrated their way to America.

I like their analysis much more than that of those who fulminate against "cultural Marxism." But at least they too understand that the "Frankfurt school" whom they blame for cultural Marxism are Europeans whose thought (as well as some of their people) came to America.

I don't think however, what's quoted above from West adequately answers the claim he tries to refute. Here's why: America was founded as a liberal democracy, arguably the first modern one. Lockean ideas began in Great Britain; but GB still was no modern liberal democracy if for no other reason than they still had a throne (monarchy) and altar (state established church), things liberal democracy were meant to if not abolish, defang.

By the 1960s all of the nations in Western Europe were, like America and France, liberal democracies. Indeed, America and France influenced them in becoming such. So yes, these nations are Lockean, because they followed America and France. Yes, many of those nations, like Great Britain still had both monarchies and state established churches as they do to this day. But they are "defanged"; they are titular. As liberal democracies, they have to be.

But before these nations became liberal democracies, those institutions were not titular. There is only one area where Western state established churches and monarchies still have power, and that's that they have money. And money is power.

9 comments:

Tom Van Dyke said...


In short, if the Founding is Lockean, it is no amalgam, but it is unstable, carrying with it untoward Lockean consequences. If it is only partially Lockean, it might avoid the bad consequences, but would do so by being less pure (by being amalgamated). To be less abstract: The weakening of the family, enormous economic inequality, and maybe even eventual recourse to executive predominance arguably follow from Lockean political philosophy even if none of this is what the Founders had in mind.


It is unlikely this Lockeanism is what the Founders had in mind, that they understood him as today's scholars of philosophy do. An "accidental Thomism" is the better theory, IMO.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/01/better-than-they-knew-a-response-to-patrick-deneen

Probably the most nuanced or balanced judgment on the significance of our Declaration comes from R. L. Bruckberger in Images of America . Bruckberger, another of our friendly French critics, took what Tocqueville said about our Puritans about as seriously as anyone, and maybe surpassed Tocqueville in seeing more clearly the connection between the Puritans and the Calvinist believers who helped to shape our founding documents. “The greatest luck of all for the Declaration,” Bruckberger explains, “was precisely the divergence and the compromise between the Puritan tradition and what Jefferson wrote.” A “strictly Puritan” Declaration, of course, “would probably not have managed to avoid an aftertaste of theocracy and religious fanaticism.” But if it had “been written from the standpoint of the . . . philosophy of that day, it would have been a-religious, if not actually offensive to Christians.”

The Declaration as a whole, Bruckberger concludes, might even be viewed “as a more profound accomplishment,” one of “the great masterpieces of art, in which luck is strangely fused with genius.” The combination of American Lockeanism and American Puritanism/Calvinism produced something like an accidental American Thomism. It’s that fact that led the American Catholic John Courtney Murray in We Hold These Truths to praise our political fathers for building better than they knew, although even Murray didn’t acknowledge properly the Puritan contribution to what our political fathers built.

Jonathan Rowe said...

FTR, I'm sympathetic to the natural rights argument; but I also have long believed after the most notable scholars in the amalgam theory. There were disparate strands of ideological thought that did in fact contradict one another.

But as Whigs America's Founders understood and presented that ideology as harmonized.

Tom Van Dyke said...

What Jefferson meant by "the American mind."

Also why I reject the "we cannot speak of 'The Founders' because they were so diverse" meme. That's the moderns trying to overturn the chessboard so they can insert their own ideology into the Founding documents, or obviate them altogether.

Jonathan Rowe said...

Well let's figure out what they believed and talk about where they differed.

Differences between Whig and Tory; Tories lost. Differences between Federalist and Anti-Federalist lost. AFs lost, but were somewhat placated with a Bill of Rights. Differences between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. When it became a partisan issue, the DRs supported the French Revolution, the Federalists didn't, etc.

Tom Van Dyke said...

Well, the point would be that they saw the issues the same, only disagreed on which way to go. Eventually one side won, and that is The Founding, those are the Founding principles.

I'm fond of pointing out he battles that Madison lost. No one Founder gets the last word--the consensus did.

Also obviating the "Key" Founder paradigm. In the end, neither Jefferson nor Madison spoke for the consensus; the Founding documents did. This is where Scalia and "original meaning" are the only reasonable method of Constitutional interpretation. Even Madison agreed. :-)


“As a guide in expounding and applying the provisions of the Constitution, the debates and incidental decisions of the Convention can have no authoritative character. However desirable it be that they should be preserved as a gratification to the laudable curiosity felt by every people to trace the origin and progress of their political Institutions, & as a source perhaps of some lights on the Science of Govt. the legitimate meaning of the Instrument must be derived from the text itself; or if a key is to be sought elsewhere, it must be not in the opinions or intentions of the Body which planned & proposed the Constitution, but in the sense attached to it by the people in their respective State Conventions where it recd. all the authority which it possesses.”--Madison

Jonathan Rowe said...

I do wonder how much of whose vision "prevails" ends up because of post-Founding developments.

Nullification by the states -- something Jefferson (and Madison?) believe in -- didn't prevail.

But what on Jefferson's view that the Alien and Sedition Acts are unconstitutional vs. J. Adams?

Likewise Madison on property is "liberalism." It was inconsistent with the "republican" view re agrarian laws that saw a place for limiting wealth and redistribution.

Tom Van Dyke said...

I doubt Jefferson and Madison actually believed that "agrarian" BS. For one thing, Jefferson was a loust farmer and made almost all his profits on his little nail factory and from breeding slaves.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/

As for the Alien and Sedition Acts, I think it's generally agreed at least the latter would not have withstood constitutional challenge. It was permitted to expire in 1801 and Jefferson amnestied those convicted under it.

Jonathan Rowe said...

No Madison argued against the principle of agrarian laws. Jefferson may have flirted with interest in it, and in fact may have come around to Madison's classically liberal position by way of Madison's influence on him.

I'm pretty sure Thomas Paine was strongly for them. But it was the "republicans" who influenced the Founding like Harrington who were for it. And it's something that Eric Nelson makes central to the thesis of his book. He's pinning support for agrarian redistribution on those who argue the Ancient Hebrews had a "republic."

Jonathan Rowe said...

"As for the Alien and Sedition Acts, I think it's generally agreed at least the latter would not have withstood constitutional challenge. It was permitted to expire in 1801 and Jefferson amnestied those convicted under it."

Yeah, Jefferson thought they were unconstitutional. Whether it was "generally agreed" ... ?