Unmasking the Administrative State
Page 12
The American Founders were not oblivious to the fact that there would be immigrants from particular regimes who could not be easily assimilated. As a result, prudence would require the necessity of extending residency requirements for such immigrants. When the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Act, they extended the number of years necessary for naturalization to fourteen (as opposed to two in the old act). They were concerned that the increase of immigrants from Europe, many of whom had fled the French Revolution and were thought to have the kind of habits of character that could be modified by association with free citizens, would require a longer period of naturalization. Of course, those prudential arguments could not be separated from the political problems of the time, and therefore they can be sound or unsound in terms of policy. However, no policy based on prudence, which is concerned with means, should have the effect of undermining the end or principle of the regime.
Citizenship in a free society could encompass many differences based on religious, ethnic, or racial grounds. It would be necessary, of course, that those who established the compact consent to the fact that all of those differences can be accommodated on the ground of equality. But immigration policy could not be indifferent to the moral character of its prospective citizens. Therefore, prudence would dictate that those immigrants would be best suited who were most capable of grasping and appreciating the principles of equality and liberty. It would be those who were self-reliant and most interested in self-government who would be encouraged to become citizens. Most importantly, there could be no expectation that government should extend privileges to any group or deny the rights of any individual. Immigration could in no way undermine the principles of the social compact, which provided the foundations of citizenship for those who had established it.
In 1819, John Quincy Adams illustrated the importance of this fundamental necessity. He gave the following reply to a German immigrant who wondered why America had not adopted measures to encourage immigrants from Europe by extending favors on their behalf. Adams noted that Americans were not “in any manner insensible to the great benefits” of immigration,
but there is one principle which pervades all the institutions of this country, and which must always operate as an obstacle to the granting of favors to new comers. This is a land, not of privileges, but of equal rights. Privileges are granted by European sovereigns to particular classes of individuals, for purposes of general policy; but the general impression here is that privileges granted to one denomination of people, can very seldom be discriminated from erosions of the rights of others. But hence it is that no government in the world possesses so few means of bestowing favors, as the governments of the United States. If the powers, however, of the government to do good are restricted, those of doing harm are still more limited.14
Immigration policies, understood in light of the social compact, could offer no more than freedom and opportunity to prospective citizens. A government or society that offered incentives and privileges to newcomers could do so only at the expense of the equal rights of all citizens.
The American Founders established a new ground of citizenship compatible with an understanding that equality and freedom was subordinate to the moral law. That view required the protection of the freedom of the mind and conscience, which meant the free exercise of religion. Thus the Founders for the first time solved the problem of political obligation in a democratic manner. This had become possible because of the rediscovery of the doctrine of natural right. The social compact, based on the principle of equality, would give rise to a free society. A free society would in turn require the necessity of distinguishing the sacred and secular, the political and social, and the public and private sphere.
The new Progressive political thought, on the other hand, denied natural right and the social compact. Through the idea of the state, Progressivism hoped to establish a new conception of government and citizenship, one that would empower government to reorder the economy and society with the purpose of resolving the tension between the individual and society, or between freedom and necessity. With the establishment of the modern administrative state, the role of government could not be understood to be the protection of the individual natural rights of citizens. Consequently, the social compact would become meaningless.
History, Science, and Race
The ideas of natural right and the social compact had animated the early American understanding of citizenship and immigration. With the acceptance of historicist—or Progressive—thought in the period after the Civil War, the foundation and meaning of citizenship was fundamentally altered. That transformation had a profound effect on the problem of immigration as well. The political meaning of equality had rested upon an understanding of man as a rational and moral being. As long as nature provided the standard by which to judge political right, freedom and equality were understood to be subordinate to the moral law. In the modern state, a new understanding of freedom would become the foundation of morality and citizenship.
Rousseau’s denial of the view that rationality constituted the distinction between man and the animals led him to conclude that man has no nature, only a capacity for self-perfection.15 He argued, “Therefore it is not so much understanding which constitutes the distinction of man among the animals as it is his being a free agent.… It is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul is shown.”16 After Rousseau, freedom would no longer be understood in terms of the nature of man, nor could it be subordinate to the moral law. Rather, freedom, or will, would become the foundation of morality. The political problem was then one of creating a general, or moral, will.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of consciousness of freedom and the idea of perfectibility in the minds of the Progressive intellectuals. Thus Herbert Croly, one of the most important Progressive intellectuals of the early twentieth century, insisted that “democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility.”17 Croly measured the progress of man in terms of his willingness to serve his fellow man. “If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man shall serve his fellow-men, the organization of democracy should be gradually adapted to that assumption.”18 Nonetheless, Croly was well aware that
the majority of men cannot be made disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any expenditure of subsidized words, or even by grave and manifest public need. They can be made permanently unselfish only by being helped to become disinterested in their individual purposes … In the complete democracy a man must in some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to his own individual fulfillment. Not until his personal action is dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between private and public interests.19
The bureaucracy, by creating the occupations to be established within the administrative state, would become the means of reconciling private and public interests, or the particular and general will.
It was the German theorists, primarily Kant and Hegel, who established the ground of humanity—and subsequently citizenship in the state—upon the new understanding of freedom and the cultivation of moral will. Because man was now understood to have made himself human through his own efforts, or in the course of his history, it was no longer possible to understand nature and reason as the fundamental attributes of man’s humanity. Rather, it is the capacity for, and consciousness of, freedom that distinguished man among the animals. The process by which man had made himself human through the use of his freedom, or will, was a result of his ability to adapt and transform his environment in the course of history.
Subsequently, the tangible ingredients by which to identify the evolution of social and economic man would come to be understood through the concepts of race, class, or variations of those categories—concrete factors such as geography, climate, and language. These things taken together with art and civil religion would, after the influence of Hegel, come to be und
erstood as culture. In looking at the historical differences in the progress of the evolution of man, it was not long before it was thought possible to measure the superiority of different peoples and classes or groups. In undermining the natural right foundation of individual citizenship, moral will, based on the new understanding of freedom, was legitimized within the concept of the state.
One important American Progressive, Mary Parker Follett, in The New State, written early in the twentieth century, outlined the new Progressive understanding of freedom and rights. She noted,
Democracy has meant to many “natural” rights, “liberty” and “equality.” The acceptance of the group principle defines for us in truer fashion those watchwords of the past. If my true self is the group-self, then my only rights are those which membership in a group gives me. The old idea of natural rights postulated the particularist individual; we know now that no such person exists. The group and the individual come into existence simultaneously: with this group-man appear group-rights. Thus man can have no rights apart from society or independent of society or against society. Particularist rights are ruled out as everything particularist is ruled out.… The truth of the whole matter is that our only concern with “rights” is not to protect them but to create them. Our efforts are to be bent not upon guarding the rights which Heaven has showered upon us, but in creating all the rights we shall ever have.20
In Follett’s view, those rights had to be understood in terms of the group and not the individual. Thus she noted,
As an understanding of the group process abolishes “individual rights,” so it gives us a true definition of liberty. We have seen that the free man is he who actualizes the will of the whole. I have no liberty except as an essential member of a group.… But liberty is not measured by the number of restraints we do not have, but by the number of spontaneous activities we do have.… We see that to obey the group which we have helped to make and of which we are an integral part is to be free because we are then obeying ourself. Ideally the state is such a group, actually it is not, but it depends upon us to make it more and more so. The state must be no external authority which restrains and regulates me, but it must be myself acting as the state in every smallest detail of life. Expression, not restraint, is always the motive of the ideal state.21
The Progressive understanding of freedom and citizenship necessitated the rejection of the notion of individual private rights because individuals would become free as citizens only when they exercised their will on behalf of the group, or ultimately participated as members of the ethical state, understood as the embodiment of the organic will of a people. John Dewey had expressed much of this same view a generation before Mary Parker Follett. In an early essay, “The Ethics of Democracy,” published in 1888, Dewey observed:
The essence of the “Social Contract” theory is not the idea of the formulation of a contract; it is the idea that men are mere individuals, without any social relations until they form a contract.… Society, as a real whole, is the normal order, and the mass as an aggregate of isolated units is the fiction. If this be the case, and if democracy be a form of society, it not only does have, but must have, a common will; for it is this unity of will which makes it an organism. A State represents men so far as they have become organically related to one another, or are possessed of unity of purpose and interest.… But human society represents a more perfect organism. The whole lives truly in every member, and there is no longer the appearance of physical aggregation, or continuity. The organism manifests itself as what it truly is, an ideal or spiritual life, a unity of will. If, then, society and the individual are really organic to each other, then the individual is society concentrated.… In conception, at least, democracy approaches most nearly the ideal of all social organization; that in which the individual and society are organic to each other.… The organism must have its spiritual organs; having a common will, it must express it.22
Mary Parker Follett had contended that “as the collective idea and the collective will, right and purpose, are born within the all-sufficing social process, so here too the individual finds the wellspring of his life.”23 The individual will and collective purpose is reconciled within the social process of the group, which taken as a whole becomes the moral will within the modern state. Therefore, the group process and social—or organized—intelligence becomes institutionalized in the regulatory apparatus of the administrative state. Thus, the state, because it encompasses an organic social and ethical whole, produces within itself the technical or rational means—the bureaucracy—which can enable it to establish policies for carrying out the will of the people. With the establishment of the scientific method, Charles Merriam observed, “Politics as the art of the traditional advances to politics as the science of constructive intelligent social control.”24 Thus, the modern state would require centralized control of the political, social, and economic sphere. Subsequently, the Progressives would argue that the unity of the citizenry would necessitate a commonality of race or common blood.25
Equality and Citizenship
Modern science and philosophy of History had not only transformed the meaning of freedom, but the understanding of equality and citizenship as well. The categories of race and class had become central to the elucidation of man as an historical being. Interestingly, the most important battleground in the Progressives’ attempts to undermine the natural right foundation of the social compact came to revolve around the interpretation of the meaning of the American Civil War. The Progressives hoped to replace the old view of the social compact with the new Hegelian understanding of the modern state. During the Civil War, Lincoln had defended America as a regime of civil and religious liberty. In his view, the social compact had established the political conditions of equality and liberty. Slavery was incompatible with both equality and liberty when understood in light of nature and philosophic reason.
The Civil War, as Abraham Lincoln always insisted, was about the issue of slavery and was fought over the principle of equality. With the victory of the Union armies, it seemed likely that Lincoln’s understanding of the meaning of equality would prevail. In that case, equality would have remained the indispensable ground of national citizenship. But such was not to be the case. The Progressive intellectuals, and the new social science disciplines then being developed in the new research universities, denied the natural right foundation of the regime. They also rejected the social compact and the abstract principle of equality itself. Charles Merriam, a celebrated political theorist of the time, explained the reason for the rejection. He noted, “the influence of the German school is most obvious in relation to the contract theory of the origin of the state and the idea of the function of the state. The theory that the state originates in an agreement between men was assailed by the German thinkers and the historical, organic, evolutionary idea substituted for it.”26 Merriam was well aware that
considering the question as one of principle, it is evident that much depends on one’s political theory. If we believe that government has no jurisdiction over men unless they have consented to it, and that every man is entitled to equal civil and political rights, regardless of his fitness for them, then it follows that to deprive any man of the suffrage for any cause, or any people of self-government for any cause, is a departure from democratic principles.… If, on the other hand, it is believed that liberty and rights are necessarily conditioned upon political capacity, and that the consent of the governed is a principle which, in the present state of affairs, cannot be perfectly realized, then the situation is altered.27
Nor was Merriam alone in his defense of Southern principles. Herbert Croly, the great Progressive reformer, agreed with Merriam and the slave owners. The slaveholders were correct in their view, Croly insisted, because “negroes were a race possessed of moral and intellectual qualities inferior to those of white men.”28 In the view of the Progressive intellectuals, man is an historical being, and History, not nature, had determined what it means t
o be a human being. The struggle among the races in history determined the race that deserved to be on top. The superiority of the white race and the inferiority of the black race is the scientific proof of the inequality of men. This proof had become evident as a result of the evolutionary theory of human development. Furthermore, they insisted that, if individual rights cannot be derived from the principle of equality, the source of legitimacy, or right, is derived from the state and its laws, not nature.
Abraham Lincoln was admired, and even revered, by many of the Progressive intellectuals. But it was not because he had anchored the moral authority of the regime in the principle of equality. That view would have made it impossible to defend political inequality on any ground whatsoever. Moreover, the Progressives denied what Lincoln affirmed: that the foundation of the social compact rested upon an understanding of natural right. The Progressive intellectual and political movements, whether animated by social Darwinism, socialism, anarchism, or communism, were united in rejecting the natural rights foundation of the social compact. Rather, they came to embrace the modern idea of the state. Charles Merriam was typical of the Progressive intellectuals. He noted, “The present tendency, then, is to disregard the once dominant ideas of natural rights and the social contract.… The origin of the state is regarded, not as the result of a deliberate agreement among men, but as the result of historical development, instinctive rather than conscious; and rights are considered to have their source not in nature, but in law.”29