American Political Thought. Ken Kersch

from time immemorial got to tell them what to do, a new group of political theories began with what, under conditions of dissension and disagreement concerning first principles, they assumed would be the least controversial starting point promising the broadest common ground. They proposed that each individual person (answering to his own understanding of God’s commands) got to tell himself what to do (the “his” here is deliberate: gender played a major role in structuring the public realm). Modern political theorists asked next, “Under what conditions would this person delegate the authority to tell himself what to do to someone other than himself?” The answer was: “Under conditions in which that person could help them get something that they needed or wanted but could not otherwise get if sovereignty were held only to reside in their lowly selves – all equals in the state of nature – and no higher.” In Leviathan (1651), the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature as a condition in which

      there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

      Hobbes posited the state of nature, bereft of common political authority, as a hellscape. His countryman John Locke’s subsequent understanding of the state of nature (Second Treatise on Civil Government, 1689) was somewhat more benign, but still undesirable. It was a condition in which the protection of highly valued natural rights to “life, liberty, and property” vouchsafed to all by nature was perpetually uncertain. Under such conditions, these modern political theorists proposed, men would agree to a “social contract” by which they would cede either all power, save that of self-defense (Hobbes), or all powers which did not transgress upon their core natural rights (Locke), to a sovereign who would stand, by their own hypothesized grant of political authority, above them. The sovereign would then have the good and rightful authority to tell them what to do, since the sovereign’s power was a power they themselves, acting in the posited state of nature as sovereign individuals of their own free will, would have logically conferred upon – delegated to – the sovereign to advance their own best individual and common interests. These modern ideas of the origins of political authority underwrote the rise of a distinctive species of modern nation-state. And they were enlisted by the American Revolutionaries as the basis for their Declaration of Independence (1776), and, under the theory of “popular sovereignty” – “We the People” – for the Constitution of the United States (1787/1789).

As such, many have argued that, from its inception in the “Age of Revolutions” (English, 1689; French, 1789), American political thought represents an apotheosis of the new genus of “modern” political thinking. In part by dint of its fictional and imaginatively willed origins in the settlement of an (ostensibly) unpopulated blank-slate wilderness, with none of the on-the-ground monarchical and ecclesiastical baggage of palimpsest England and France, the United States was heralded by many – not least the proud Americans themselves – as the first “new” nation, founded upon modern principles on the origins of legitimate political authority, free from the encrusted hierarchies and traditions of Old World assumptions and understandings. Indeed, John Locke himself was looking across the ocean to this altogether new departure: “In the beginning,” he wrote of the hypothesized state of nature in his Second Treatise, “all the world was America.”

      While there is certainly something to this, the reality is considerably more complicated. For one thing, of course, the settlers who came to North America were hardly stripped clean of their prior understandings of political and other forms of authority – of their faiths, folkways, traditions, and hierarchical assumptions. All – including a belief in the rightfulness of monarchy – were imported, to greater and lesser degrees, into the North American settlement. To complicate matters further, the polity – or polities, since British North America was initially organized as a contiguous arrangement of separate self-governing colonies – was far from static or impermeable. From the beginning, new immigrants and new ideas were introduced into the polity, either from the outside, or as cultivated from within. These layered over and interacted with the peoples and the political thought already there. As such, “New World” or not, the US polity was its own palimpsest. The result was a lively political culture, and distinctive tradition of American political thought, grounded, dynamic, and perpetually becoming.

The Traditional Framing: Lockean Liberalism, Civic Republicanism, and the Liberal–Republican Debate

       Frameworks of American Political Thought

      1 (Lockean) liberalism (“The Hartz Thesis”)– Other liberalisms:J. David Greenstone’s liberal bipolarity Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear Rawlsian liberalism

      2 (Civic) republicanism

      3 Ascriptive Americanism

      Lockean Liberalism

Some of the first phrases to fall from the lips of contemporary scholars seeking a core essence of American political thought (if they are so inclined) – whether to praise, condemn, or simply describe it – are “Lockean liberalism,” “liberal individualism,” “individual liberty,” and “individual freedom.” The belief in “American exceptionalism” – the idea that the United States as a polity is unique, and sui generis – has been closely (if not solely) associated with an understanding that the United States is quintessentially, and to a peerless degree, a Lockean liberal nation. By this, these scholars mean that the American people have defined themselves as a nation defined not, as other nations have been, by race or ethnicity, its people (volk), spirit (geist), or its primordial traditions, but rather by a pervading commitment to a set of political-philosophical ideas and ideals associated with Lockean liberalism or liberal individualism – by its foundational commitment to the political liberty of free and equal individuals.

      The most prominent contemporary articulation of this view is known as the “Hartz thesis,” advanced by the Harvard political scientist Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). The Hartz thesis holds that the key to understanding how Americans think about political authority is that, as modern liberals, they collectively subscribe to the belief that all claims to political authority ultimately derive from the will of sovereign individuals. Acting of their own free will, in their own self-interest, these individuals chose to unite with others, via a social contract, to create a government to protect their foundational natural rights to “life, liberty, and property.”¹ Hartz argued – critically, rather than in celebration – that, for the length of its history, American politics, and, indeed, the political imagination of Americans, has been fundamentally shaped and bounded by a consensus commitment to Lockean liberal premises and principles.

Liberal political thought as a genus is defined by a set of themes and touchstones. First, liberalism takes the individual as the foundational unit of analysis. It considers political questions initially from the standpoint of the individual, as opposed to, say, communal bodies or groups, like a tribe, family, or demos (the people, considered as a self-governing unity, and whole) – although, to be sure, each of these can be reimagined in accord with liberal premises. Second, liberalism posits that the chief purpose of government is to protect the rights of individuals. In line with liberalism’s a priori individualism, those rights are considered pre-political: they exist in nature, prior to the establishment of political society, by virtue of simply being human. Third, liberalism promises individual freedom, guaranteed equally to all individuals, under a legitimately authorized government limited by constitutional constraints and the rule of law (an understanding that political philosophers call “negative freedom”).² Fourth, by necessary implication from its commitment to limited government under the rule of law, liberalism enacts a separation between the public and private spheres, and distinguishes the proper realms of state and civil