by John Marini
The challenge posed by Rousseau’s theory was to determine whether or not it was possible “to seek the standard of human action in the historical process.” As Strauss observed, “this solution presupposed that the historical process or its results are unambiguously preferable to the state of nature or that that process is ‘meaningful.’” Strauss contended that
Rousseau could not accept that presupposition. He realized that to the extent to which the historical process is accidental, it cannot supply man with a standard, and that, if that process has a hidden purpose, its purposefulness cannot be recognized except if there are trans-historical standards. The historical process cannot be recognized as progressive without previous knowledge of the end or purpose of the process. To be meaningful, the historical process must culminate in perfect knowledge of the public right; man cannot be, or have become, the seeing master of his fate if he does not have such knowledge. It is, then, not knowledge of the historical process but knowledge of the true public right which supplies man with the true standard.20
Tocqueville remained within the horizon of Rousseau, in his rejection of the view that the historical process is rational and therefore meaningful. Thus, he could not accept the Hegelian claim that it is possible to unite “true knowledge of public right” with perfect knowledge of the end or purpose of the historical process.21 As a result, he refused to believe that the rational or bureaucratic state could be anything other than a new kind of despotism.
Nonetheless, his analysis of the subsequent progress of equality of conditions and its effect upon democracy was so prescient and accurate because it derived from a theoretical understanding of man in which the primacy of History had replaced nature. In that respect, he acquiesced in the view that will had replaced reason as the distinctive characteristic of man.22 Therefore, the process of centralization, or rationalization and bureaucratization, was almost an historical inevitability for Tocqueville. As a result, he could find no rational defense of the principle of equality in nature itself, as did the American Founders. Consequently, Tocqueville could not provide a theoretical or intellectual defense of constitutionalism, or limited government. Such a defense would have required a recovery of the philosophic ground of natural right, which was not forthcoming until the twentieth century.23 It was Leo Strauss who made the defense of constitutional government possible once again by distinguishing, in a meaningful way, the theoretical and practical differences in the understanding of natural right and history.
In 1953, in Natural Right and History, Strauss noted that “the problem of natural right is today a matter of recollection rather than of actual knowledge. We are therefore in need of historical studies in order to familiarize ourselves with the whole complexity of the issue. We have for some time become students of what is called ‘the history of ideas.’”24 Harvey Mansfield and his many students have contributed to a renewed understanding of the problem of natural right by their historical studies, which have illuminated the history of ideas. Nonetheless, Tocqueville’s warning concerning the dangers of centralized administration have taken on a new meaning with the possibility of the coming into being of a universal homogeneous state. In the absence of a meaningful defense of natural right and a decent constitutionalism, there seems no reason to doubt that Tocqueville’s diagnosis of the problem of democracy, understood historically, is an accurate depiction of the advent of a universal tyranny. Tocqueville’s analysis of the despotic character of centralized administration is therefore more relevant than ever before. But the important question remains: Is it possible to defend the principles of equality and liberty, understood in a manner compatible with constitutional government, without meaningful knowledge of natural right?
11
Roosevelt’s or Reagan’s America? A Time for Choosing
ON JANUARY 11, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent the text of his Annual Message to Congress.1 Under normal conditions, he would have delivered the message in person that evening at the Capitol. But he was recovering from the flu, and his doctor advised him not to leave the White House. So he delivered it as a fireside chat to the American people. It has been called the greatest speech of the century by Cass Sunstein, a prominent liberal law professor at the University of Chicago.2 It is an important speech because it is probably the most far-reaching attempt by an American president to legitimize the administrative or welfare state, based on the idea that government must guarantee social and economic security for all.
Thirty-seven years later, in his first inaugural on January 20, 1981, President Ronald Reagan would deny that government could provide such a broad guarantee of security in a manner consistent with the protection of American liberty.3 Indeed, he would insist that bureaucratic government had become a danger to the survival of our freedom. In looking at the differences between the views of Roosevelt and Reagan, we can discern the distinction between a constitutional regime—in which the power of government is limited so as to enable the people to rule—and an administrative state, which presupposes the rule of a bureaucratic or intellectual elite.
FDR’s New Bill of Rights
When Roosevelt spoke to the nation that January night, he was looking beyond the end of World War II. In recent years, he said,
Americans have joined with like-minded people in order to defend ourselves in a world that has been gravely threatened with gangster rule. But I do not think that any of us Americans can be content with mere survival. Sacrifices that we and our Allies are making impose upon us all a sacred obligation to see to it that out of this war we and our children will gain something better than mere survival.
And what was this “sacred obligation?” Roosevelt continued:
The one supreme objective for the future, which we discussed for each nation individually, and for all the United Nations, can be summed up in one word: Security. And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security—in a family of Nations.
Government has a sacred duty, in other words, to provide security as a fundamental human right. Roosevelt was well aware that this was a departure from the traditional understanding of the role of American government:
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty. As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all.
Among these new rights, Roosevelt said, are
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the Nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education.
The Constitution had established a limited government that presupposed an autonomous civil society and a free economy. But such freedom had led inevitably to social inequality, which in Roosevel
t’s view had made Americans insecure in a way that was unacceptable. He had lost faith in the older constitutional principle of limited government. Rather, he thought that the protection of political rights—or of social and economic liberty, exercised by individuals unregulated by government—had made it impossible to establish a foundation for social justice (i.e., what he called “equality in the pursuit of happiness”), He assumed that a fundamental tension exists between equality and liberty that can only be resolved by a powerful, even unlimited, administrative or welfare state.
Rejecting the Founders
The American Founders, by contrast, thought that equality and liberty were perfectly compatible—indeed, that they were opposite sides of the same coin. The principle of natural equality had been set forth in the Declaration of Independence, which clearly spelled out the way in which all human beings are the same: They are equally endowed with natural and inalienable rights. But along with this similarity, the Founders knew that differences are sown into human nature: some people are smarter, some are stronger, some are more beautiful, some are musically inclined while others have a predilection for business. Political equality, which requires the protection of individual rights, produces social inequality (or unequal achievement) precisely because of these unequal natural faculties. The preservation of freedom, in the Founders’ view, requires a defense of private property, understood in terms of the protection of the individual citizen’s rights of conscience, opinion, self-interest, and labor. They thought that a constitutional order, by separating church and state, government and civil society, and the public and private sphere, makes it possible to reconcile equality and liberty in a reasonable way that is compatible with the nature of man. Thus the Constitution limits the power of government to the protection of natural rights.
Roosevelt and his fellow Progressives rejected the idea of natural differences between men, insisting that those differences arise only out of social and economic inequality. As a result, they redefined the idea of freedom, divorcing it from the idea of individual rights and identifying it instead with the idea of security. It was in the cause of this new understanding of freedom that America’s constitutional form of limited government was gradually replaced—beginning with the New Deal and culminating in the late 1960s and 1970s—by an administrative or welfare state. Roosevelt had made it clear, even before he was elected president, that government had a new and different role to play in American life than that assigned to it by the Constitution. In an October 1932 radio address, he stated: “I have further described the spirit of my program as a ‘new deal,’ which is plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of Government toward economic life.”4 In his view, selfish behavior on the part of individuals and corporations must give way to rational social action informed by a benevolent government and the organized intelligence of the bureaucracy. Consequently, the role of government was no longer the protection of the natural or political rights of individuals. The old constitutional distinction between government and society—or between the public and private spheres—as the ground of liberalism and a bulwark against political tyranny had created, in Roosevelt’s view, economic tyranny. To solve this, government itself would become a tool of benevolence working on behalf of the people.
This redefinition of the role of government carried with it a new understanding of the role of the American people. In Roosevelt’s Commonwealth Club address of 1932, he said:
The Declaration of Independence discusses the problem of government in terms of a contract.… Under such a contract, rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights. The task of statesmanship has always been the re-definition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order. New conditions impose new requirements upon Government and those who conduct Government.5
But this idea of a compact between government and the people is contrary to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Indeed, what links the Declaration and the Constitution is the idea of the people as autonomous and sovereign, and government as the people’s creation and servant. Jefferson, in the Declaration, clearly presented the relationship in this way: “to secure these [inalienable] rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Similarly, the Constitution begins by institutionalizing the authority of the people: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
In Roosevelt’s reinterpretation, on the other hand, government determines the conditions of social compact, thereby diminishing not only the authority of the Constitution but undermining the effective sovereignty of the people.
Reagan’s Attempt to Turn the Tide
Ronald Reagan addressed this problem of sovereignty at some length in his first inaugural, in which he observed famously: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” He was speaking specifically of the deep economic ills that plagued the nation at the time of his election. But he was also speaking about the growing power of a bureaucratic and intellectual elite. This elite, he argued, was undermining the capacity of the people to control what had become, in effect, an unelected government. Thus it was undermining self-government itself.
The perceived failure of the US economy during the Great Depression had provided the occasion for expanding the role of the federal government in administering the private sector. Reagan insisted in 1981 that government had proved itself incapable of solving the problems of the economy or of society. As for the relationship between the people and the government, Reagan did not view it, as Roosevelt had, in terms of the people consenting to the government on the condition that government grant them certain rights. Rather, he insisted:
We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.
In Reagan’s view it was the individual, not government, who was to be credited with producing the things of greatest value in America:
If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth.
And it was the lack of trust in the people which posed the greatest danger to freedom:
[W]e’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?
Reagan had been long convinced that the continued growth of the bureaucratic state could lead to the loss of freedom. In his famous 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” delivered on behalf of Barry Goldwater, he had said:
[I]t doesn’t require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? Such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile
, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.6
Reagan made it clear that centralized control of the economy and society by the federal government could not be accomplished without undermining individual rights and establishing coercive and despotic control.
“[T]he full power of centralized government” was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don’t control things. A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.
Over the next fifteen years, Reagan succeeded in mobilizing a powerful sentiment against the excesses of big government. In doing so, he revived the debate over the importance of limited government for the preservation of a free society. And his theme would remain constant throughout his presidency. In his final State of the Union message, Reagan proclaimed, “the most exciting revolution ever known to humankind began with three simple words: ‘We the People,’ the revolutionary notion that the people grant government its rights, and not the other way around.” And in his Farewell Address to the nation, he said: “Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: ‘We the People.’” He never wavered in his insistence that modern government had become a problem, primarily because it sought to replace the people as central to the American constitutional order.