2.1 The Invention of Modern Liberalism and Conservatism

John Locke

Part 1 of 5

The liberal river begins with the principles that inspired the Great American Experiment with democracy and limited government. As the framers put pen to paper economic self-interest compromised the Constitutional promise of individual rights and freedom. Still, across two centuries the country moved closer to fulfilling its promise. What mid-seventeenth century writings inspired the principle behind that promise? 

The Invention of Modern Politics

Liberalism (1660s) and conservatism (1790s) are English social inventions. After the fall of the Roman Empire the Holy Roman Empire replaced the belief that nature granted individual rights with the Divine Right of Kings. The king, God’s representative on Earth, held absolute authority. The guiding doctrine, the “Great Chain of Being”, held that God assigned each person a station at birth. Nobility ruled and serfs were servile by God’s design. To try to change your station challenged God.

Centuries of religious and political wars discredited middle ages governments. Colonialism, slavery, and global trade created merchants, traders, and colonists with wealth matching and surpassing that of nobles. The newly rich wanted rights and privileges equal to nobility’s, challenging the Great Chain of Being. The drive for greater rights found justifications in ancient Greece and Rome, which were so contradictory that writers could defend whatever they wished. Aristotle supported democracy with an educated public and the innate inferiority of different peoples. Socrates thought democracy the second worst form of government, favoring rule by a cadre of philosophers. Rome traded Republican democracy for Imperial dictatorship. The past offered pretensions: Greece and Rome were token democracies with elections controlled by elites, few eligible voters, and lots of slaves.

What, then, defined legitimate government? Sir Robert Filmer defended the Divine Right of Kings. Thomas Hobbes defended a social contract granting the monarch absolute authority. John Locke defended individual rights and the limited authority of government.

Sir Robert Filmer Patriarcha: or the Natural Power of Kings (written 1620, published 1680) argued that the divine right to rule extended through the sons of Noah. Just as God’s creation, man, could not make a claim against God, no subject of the King could make a claim against the King. Filmer cherrypicked Bible verses to argue that women were inferior, and that men held absolute authority over their wives and children. As a Catholic loyalist, he was fined and imprisoned by the Parliamentarians during the English Civil war.

Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651) argued that without an all powerful authority to enforce laws, civilization would be impossible. People, not God, enthroned the monarch with the expectation that the resulting stability would promote their collective wellbeing. Whether the monarch was just or corrupt was fate. His most famous passage explained life without an absolute monarch.

“In such condition, there’s is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, not 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, and brutish, and short.”     Leviathan Chapter XIII

Removing God’s authority angered Catholics and Anglicans. Hobbes was forced to flee to Europe.

John Locke Two Treatises on Government (written 1660, circulated privately, published 1689) refuted Filmer Bible verse by verse. He shared Hobbes belief that government was a social contract created by the people. He differed by arguing that the social contract was to preserve people’s well being and the government held limited power.

“The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another’s life, health, liberty or possessions; for all men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not another’s pleasure. And being furnished with like facilities, sharing all in one community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours. Every one as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station willfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he as much as he can to preserve the rest of mankind, and not, unless it be to do justice to an offender, take away or impair the life, or what tends to preservation of the life, liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.”   Two Treatises Chapter II §6

Hobbes’ key points:

1.  God created/owned every person and no one could damage His property. You could not kill, harm, enslave another, nor commit suicide or sell yourself into slavery.

2.  Women were duty bound to their husbands but held full rights.

3.  Every person had an equal right to share God’s bounty.

4.  You were entitled to no more of that bounty than you could use and could not hoard it so that others suffered.

5.  You owned the product of your labor: the fruit you picked (property), but not the tree in the forrest.

6.  Having no individual right to harm or restrict another person, people could not  collectively grant government an authority to restrict others that they individually lacked. That is the founding principle of limited government.

Next:

Conservatism was invented to discredit liberalism, so what opportunities that liberalism offered was the counter-Enlightenment trying to eliminate?