by John Marini
The philosophy of History, therefore, established a new ground by which to determine the common good. That new understanding provided the foundation upon which citizenship would depend—the creation of a rational, or organic, will. By the end of the nineteenth century, the two tangible forces most descriptive of economy and society, class and race, had gained ascendancy over every other category of knowledge providing the ideological foundation for the understanding and exercise of will. Both forces would be discredited in the twentieth century, but long before race theory was discredited politically by Hitler and the Nazis, it had gained intellectual respectability in the natural and social sciences. Indeed, race theory had become so pervasive during the first part of twentieth century that Hannah Arendt, writing during World War II, noted,
Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets History as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept any presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.4
Although the notion of racial superiority was repudiated in the aftermath of World War II, the understanding of History, which made racial theory credible, retained its authority. Perhaps in the twenty-first century it still holds sway. As Arendt surmised before the middle of the last century, any objective understanding of the historical past or present outside of the categories of race and class has had little resonance among intellectuals or the mass public. There is little doubt that class, understood in an historicist manner, however discredited by the political demise of Communism, is still the most useful way in which to evaluate economics and politics in the disciplines of the social sciences. Race has been thoroughly discredited in politics and theory. It has, however, attained a new status as a moral phenomenon, primarily as a symbol of exploitation that would become the ground of group solidarity.
In its origins, race was an important element in the philosophic understanding of History; but it was not the decisive element. While the very real historical events of the twentieth century discredited the political theory of racial superiority, the difficulty of separating the category of race from History has remained. Even when the natural and social sciences began to doubt the authority of race as an explanation for legitimizing political power, it remained a fundamental category in the understanding of identity and citizenship. In his attempt to make sense of that term, race, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry Adams noted in The Education of Henry Adams, “History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the clue, history was a nursery tale.”5
The great tragedies spawned by the Nazi and Communist parties, although defeated as political movements, did not result in a rejection of the ideological ground that engendered them. By the end of the twentieth century, it was clear that mass and elite opinion had not gone beyond the categories of race and class. Despite the fact that political rhetoric in America had proclaimed equality as the fundamental goal, the theoretical ground of the principle of equality had been undermined by the philosophy of History. It has never been restored. Consequently, the leading intellectual movements of our time provide seemingly endless variations on the historical categories of race and class. The postmodern movements—political, social, or cultural—which have looked to establish identity in the categories of race, sexual orientation, or gender, are themselves offshoots of the evolution of historical consciousness.
Despite the civil rights movements of the last half century, ostensibly based on the principle of equality, nearly every political and administrative solution to the problem of equal rights has required an unequal treatment of individual citizens. In practice, therefore, the public policies of the administrative state have not been based upon any understanding of the social compact. The principle of equality, understood in terms of the natural rights of individuals, could no longer serve as the foundation of citizenship. Rather, the new notion of citizenship presupposed the necessity of subordinating individual rights to the fundamental requirements of the administrative state. Consequently, the notion of citizenship as a tangible or meaningful thing has resonance only within the framework of the historical categories of race, class, or culture. Thus, it is not surprising that within the policymaking apparatus of the administrative state, group rights provide the best—perhaps the only—way to establish identity as a member of the state.
As a result, it has become nearly impossible in the administrative state to execute public policies in any way other than the unequal treatment of individual citizens. The undermining of the principle of equality, and the regime of civil and religious liberty after the Civil War, transformed the meaning of citizenship. It was inevitable that this transformed meaning would have a profound effect upon the problem of immigration. Consequently, it was not merely the influx of aliens that could change a nation; ideas have transformed the meaning of citizenship for the native born as well. Moreover, immigrants, too, are shaped by the regime which accepts them. They typically adapt to whatever they perceive as the expectations and aspirations of that regime. Not surprisingly, the expectations and aspirations of citizenship in a regime of civil and religious liberty (for natives and immigrants alike) are far different from those expectations that have been created within the administrative, or welfare, state. It is necessary, therefore, to elucidate the relationship between the idea of regime and the notion of citizenship as it developed in America.
The American Founders established a foundation of citizenship unlike any that the world had ever seen. It was not based on religion, nationality, race, or any previous category of citizenship. It was based on the acceptance of an idea, the natural equality of all men. Although nearly all immigrants would come from countries shaped by those previous categories of citizenship, none of them could be fundamental as the foundation of American citizenship. Therefore, immigration policy would have to be decided on a prudential basis, which would allow exclusion on numerous practical grounds. The understanding of equality as the foundation of citizenship is necessary but not sufficient in itself. It is also essential to take into account the problem of the character of prospective citizens, or their capacity for self-government. This, too, poses a practical problem in a regime in which there is no historical antecedent.
It is not altogether apparent what kind of regime—or categories of citizenship, religion, nationality, color—has established the proper kind of character to merit inclusion in a regime in which equality and liberty constitutes the basis of citizenship. At the time of the American Founding, religious belief was thought to be fundamental in determining the capacity for citizenship. It was necessary, therefore, to understand equality as a principle in order to see that it was possible, within a social compact, to have different religious beliefs and yet be fellow citizens. What are the differences among human beings that can be reconciled within the social compact, and what are those that cannot be reconciled? An understanding of human nature is helpful, but most differences of citizenship—like those of the regimes that produced them—are conventional.
However, no matter what the answer to the question of the differences of character, the American regime had to establish whatever prudential considerations were thought necessary in terms of restricting immigration to those who could best be assimilated into the social compact. Still, no older category of citizenship, even though it might have established the character of decent
citizens in previous regimes, could serve as the exclusive ground of citizenship, especially if it undermined the principles of the social compact. Yet, in the period after the Civil War, that is precisely what happened. Progressive intellectuals, animated by a new understanding of History that resulted in a rejection of natural right, denied that the idea of equality could establish the foundation of citizenship in the modern state. Armed with the authority of science, they came to believe that capacity for citizenship was dependent upon race, class, or subsequently, culture.
The twentieth century has made it clear that the problems of immigration and citizenship have become almost impossible to understand on prudential or practical grounds. Thus, any considerations of means or moral capacity—the things necessary for understanding character—are no longer thought to be relevant to the discussion of citizenship. The category of race, established as the ground of morality in the state because it is the embodiment of the will of a people, had become an end in itself. Thus the notion of race had replaced the principle of equality as the ground of the meaning of citizenship. As a result, every prudential argument is quickly condemned as racist by the intellectuals and increasingly the politicians and public as well. It has not been easy to reestablish the idea of equality as the foundation of the regime. Consequently, even those principled pieces of legislation, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have not been interpreted on the basis of an understanding of the principle of equality but in terms of the historical categories of race or class. It is important, therefore, to understand the meaning of citizenship in a regime of civil and religious liberty before it becomes possible to see how and why it differs from the notion of citizenship in the administrative state.
Citizenship in a Regime of Civil and Religious Liberty
American statesmen from Washington to Lincoln understood America as a regime of civil and religious liberty.6 The uniqueness of America, they thought, was to be seen in the manner in which it was able to reconcile politics and religion, civil and religious liberty, or freedom and morality.7 They understood man and citizenship—and man’s capacity for self-rule and the desire for freedom—in the light of human nature.
In most European nations a common morality and religion, or faith, was the ground of citizenship. However, after the Protestant Reformation, religion itself was a source of division among Christians.8 Religion could no longer serve as the authority for political life and citizenship. A common religion, in which individuals shared a common faith, had established a means for determining the moral basis of self-government. But religious differences among the various Protestant and Catholic sects had only provided the occasion for bloody warfare.
Although the religious doctrines of certain Christian sects appeared to be compatible with freedom and self-government, others seemed to foster a dependency that perpetuated despotic rule. The European nations shared a common religion, but Christianity itself had not established the conditions for a common citizenship. “For when pressed into political service,” Charles Kesler has observed,
Christianity—a religion centered around belief in Christ rather than obedience to a revealed code of laws (e.g., Torah or shari’a)—had the distressing if somewhat paradoxical tendency both to deflate civil laws’ significance and to inflate their pretensions. That is, the pursuit of true Christianity tempted some believers to desert the earthly for the heavenly city, but tempted others to commandeer temporal laws in order to enforce the faith. The one tendency sapped the foundations of citizenship; the other turned citizenship into fanaticism.9
The solution to the problem of citizenship, therefore, required a solution to the problem of religion. Kesler suggests that
by building government on the basis of natural rights and the social contract, the American Founders showed how, for the first time since the days of the Holy Roman Empire, men could be good citizens of the City of God and good citizens of their earthly city without injury or insult to either.… The key to the solution was the insistence that questions of revealed truth be excluded from determination by the political sovereign or by political majorities. Indeed, majority rule and minority rights could be made consistent only on this basis. Under modern conditions, limited government thus becomes essential to the rule of law.10
The structure of republican government and its democratic processes are made possible only upon recognition of the fact that moral authority does not emanate from government or from majorities. It was the new understanding of natural right, and the political doctrine of equality, that had established a foundation for individual rights. The social compact, therefore, provided the theoretical and moral basis for majority rule. At the same time, it was necessary to limit the power of a numerical majority to the protection of the rights of each on behalf of the rights of all. It was for this reason that it was possible for George Washington to celebrate the fact that America had extended the rights of citizenship to Jews, probably for the first time in the modern history of a Western nation. In his letter to the Hebrew congregation in Newport, in 1790, Washington stated the reason why this was so:
The citizens of the United States of America have the right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were by the indulgence of one class of citizens that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.11
The great achievement of the American Founders was to establish a solution to the problem of political obligation that had eluded Western man since the collapse of the Roman Empire. As Kesler has observed,
Civil liberty meant finding a new ground for law and citizenship that would protect decent politics from arbitrary claims of divine right. Religious liberty meant separating church membership from citizenship in order to protect the conscientious pursuit of true religion from civil or ecclesiastical tyranny. Civil liberty and religious liberty have the same root, a theoretical or philosophical insight: the doctrine of natural rights.12
In practice, that philosophic doctrine required the separation of church and state, which made it necessary to separate politics or government from civil society, thereby distinguishing the public and private sphere. It was this doctrine that established the ground of modern constitutionalism. The view of America as a regime of civil and religious liberty lasted only so long as the tradition of natural right remained viable.
The American Founding, through toleration of religion, showed that it was no longer necessary to share a common faith as a fundamental requirement of citizenship. Furthermore, the ground of citizenship would no longer rest upon color or a common blood. The acceptance of the principles of the American Founding made it necessary to establish the foundation of equal citizenship on the natural rights of man. As Abraham Lincoln noted prior to the Civil War, immigrants who had come to America, although unrelated to the Founders by blood, found that they had something in common that was more important than ties of blood. Lincoln observed that
if they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they have none, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration—and so they are.13
What was to become indispensable as the ground of citizenship, therefore, was recognition of an abstract truth—that all men are cre
ated equal.
The new understanding of citizenship, which had important ramifications for the problem of immigration, required an almost philosophic defense of the principle of equality. Furthermore, knowledge of the meaning of equality is only the necessary, but not the sufficient, condition for establishing the social compact. It is also important that prospective citizens have the capacity for self-government, or the right kind of character—one compatible with the exercise of freedom and its defense—in order to perpetuate the regime. But in such a regime, there is no tangible factor, in terms of religion, race, or nationality, by which to determine the basis of citizenship. Practically speaking, immigration into America would, of necessity, be understood in a prudential manner. But the question arises: What determines the proper kind of character for a regime in which equality and liberty constitute the foundation of the compact? Religion, nationality, race, or the kind of regime—despotic or not—are all things that will be taken into consideration.
Interestingly, the Immigration Act of 1790 is often cited as support for the view that the American Founders understood immigration and citizenship in terms of race. That act was an attempt to facilitate the quick naturalization—in only two years—of immigrants. European whites, of course, would be those best equipped to become citizens so quickly. The act, then, was based on excluding those—particularly Indians and blacks—who were, or had been, slaves. It was not color or race but civilization that was the standard for their judgment. The former slaves and savages were not sufficiently civilized to have developed the kind of education, manners, and especially the deliberative capacity necessary to participate in the social compact. The problem of immigration was understood in a prudential way that was compatible with an understanding of nature and reason. The idea that race—as a biological category, understood through history and science—could be more fundamental in terms of understanding man’s humanity than reflection upon human nature or reason was not intelligible to the Founders. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that such an historicist understanding of man would become legitimized in the science of biology. The Founders did not understand man, or race, in terms of history, science, or biology. Rather, they understood man in terms of nature and the cultivation of reason—or lack thereof.