Renewing American Leadership
20 July 2010

In 1765, the then young John Adams wrote a brilliant article called, imposingly, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law.” He argued that the rights of man exist, “undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government – Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws – Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe.”

With the other Founders, Adams believed that high character and God-ordained rights recognized and sustained by the government, combined with the liberty and opportunity that flowed from them, would serve as both the foundation and guideposts of the new country.

This explosion of optimism was grounded in the series of events that produced the American Revolution. But the Revolution was itself grounded not merely in the accidental collision of men, politics and geography. It also had impressively deep ideological roots.

The Founders believed that their rights as British citizens were in the process of being systematically eroded by the imperial government. They also believed that those rights stemmed not from the benign but arbitrary largesse of any human institution but from God. The Founders derived their motivation for revolution in large part from their devotion to these natural rights—the rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as the equality and dignity of man.

There is no underestimating the uniqueness of this event. Historian Edwin Erler notes that “The American Founding represents the first time in human history that a people attempted to constitute itself by dedication to a principle – the principle that ‘all men are created equal’ and its necessary concomitant that all legitimate government must be derived from the ‘consent of the governed’.”

The main burden of the Declaration of Independence is captured in the following epic lines: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”   CONTINUE

Albert Jay Nock, although writing from the vantage point of a libertarian with strong Jeffersonian leanings, was among the very first to identify the ways in which the centralized welfare state would encroach upon conservative values. In inveighing against the New Deal programs – and this as early as 1935 – he emphasized that the growth of “state power” can only come about through a diminishment of “social power” and that in any competition between state power and social power, the former would invariably win because it “can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself.” He remarked upon the prodigious growth of the federal bureaucracy which, through rewards and punishments, was able “to convert every official and every political aspirant in the smaller units into [its] venal and complaisant agent” thereby surrendering “The right and practices of local self-government.” Although Nock can be charged with exaggerating the effects of the New Deal – he strongly intimates that we are fated to end up with a collectivist, regimented state, not unlike those of Nazi Germany or communist Russia -- he was prescient on one critical issue: namely, the character of politics once the shadows of state power lengthen. The issue between the parties will center on who can best control and manage the state. Politicians, for their part, implement policies and dispense with the resources of the state to win votes and perpetuate themselves in office.

Robert Nisbet, who can fairly be described as a modern disciple of Tocqueville, is in many ways the foremost conservative critic of the centralized state. Towards the end of his classic, The Quest for Community, he describes the characteristics of a totalitarian democracy. It is one in which the state is ever expanding its operations, seeking greater and greater control over “social, economic, and cultural life,” “in the name of freedom –freedom from want, insecurity, and minority tyranny.” Employing “the symbols of progress, people, justice, welfare, and devotion to the common man,” the state, through its constantly growing bureaucratic structure, comes to provide the individual’s “basic needs” – “education, recreation, welfare, economic production, distribution, and consumption, health, spiritual and physical.” The social sector, Nisbet points out, shrinks and shrinks until there is “an absolute identity of State and society – nothing outside the State, everything in the State.” Fatally weakened in this process are “the small traditional associations, founded upon kinship, faith, or locality,” whose functions have been taken over by the state. The same fate also overtakes the “Family, local community, church, and the whole network of informal interpersonal relationships,” once integral to “our institutional systems of mutual aid, welfare, education, recreation, and economic production and distribution.” In this process, the individual is uprooted, lacking those relationships that provided security within and an orientation towards the larger society. What is left is the “mass” – basically a collection of atomized individuals, lacking firm roots in society and psychologically adrift – confronting the monistic state. To be sure, Nisbet writes, “the masses” may not be tortured or subject to brutalities by the centralized welfare state but they “are nonetheless relentlessly destroyed as human beings, ground down into mere shells of humanity.”

Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power, a classic work that appeared shortly after World War II, draws an equally alarming picture of the modern centralized state. Indeed, one of Jouvenel’s main points is that the modern democratic centralized state is the most dangerous species of government in this history of mankind, its powers vastly exceeding those of the most absolutists monarch of yore. But what serves to make this condition so perilous is that “Power ... founded on the sovereignty of the people is in better shape than any other to fight and conquer” compared with the “sovereignty” of a “king or aristocracy” that “cannot markedly extend its scope without clashing with the interests of a majority.” He, too, envisions a “totalitarian democracy” arising as the state becomes a “social protectorate,” a “beneficent authority” watching “over every man from cradle to grave, repairing the disasters which befall him,” superintending his “personal development and orienting him towards the most appropriate use of his faculties.” The state thus comes to control “society’s entire resources,” while simultaneously eliminating “makeshifts” –   intermediate institutions and associations, local and sectional interests – that might serve to limit the power of the state.

Jouvenel emphasizes another even more basic concern central to the modern conservative views on limited government. He reminds us that the cohesion of society, that which serves to make a society a society, is “rooted in a common faith, a deep community of feeling.” When, he continues, this community of feeling is shattered, when “Good and evil, justice and injustice” come to be regarded “a matter of opinion,” two consequences follow, neither of which serves the ends of limited government. First, restraints on the law makers is removed; whatever they enact into law has, in a democratic society, the superior claim to be the standard of justice or good. But, second, to the extent that this engenders, as it must, further intense divisiveness, the state “must intervene, widely and continuously, to restore, if it can, the threatened cohesion.”

We may extrapolate from Jouvenel’s observations. Limited government, we may say, depends upon factors far more basic than those which capture the fancy of our modern pundits and constitutional lawyers such as judicial enforcement of the bill of rights. If there is no widespread public understanding of what is required for limited government or, conversely, what endangers it, then its realization is at best problematic. To make these judgments involves judging the character of governmental programs and whether they serve to help or undermine the intermediate institutions of government, the existence and effectiveness of the counterweights to government in the society, and, among other factors, the degree to which there is a “community of feeling” that effectively operates to keep the exercise of power within bounds. Above all, the realization and maintenance of limited government depends upon the character and spirit of the people. The principal concern of conservatives – that is, to the extent that Nock, Nisbet, and Jouvenel, among others, are our guides – is whether the people can see through and resist the allurements and deceptions of the state.

George Carey is a professor of Government at Georgetown University. The full essay can be read here.