The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Both powers are held as a matter of right, or jus. Both are temporarily transferred as a matter of convenience (to a prince or head of state in the community’s case, to the laws of the state in the individual’s case), to make it easier to protect and defend that power’s original holders, the people and the individuals who make up “the people.” In fact, by the 1500s some were concluding that perhaps there was even more overlap. Perhaps it was in order to protect those same natural rights that individuals banded together in the first place.

  At this point, Aristotle could provide no more help. He had never bothered to ask why men set up city-states or governments. The fact that it was their nature to do so, as political animals (zoon politikon), did the trick. But Aquinas and his followers could help, and did.

  In a pristine “state of nature,” they decided, man was totally free but totally unsafe. He was prey not only to the elements and wild animals, but to his fellow man, for whom freedom was license to act not as zoon politikon, but as homo lupus. In Thomas Hobbes’s famous formulation, life ends up being “nasty, brutish, and short.”

  To correct this, right reason dictates a solution. To avoid killing one another off, men make an agreement. They trade in their natural rights in exchange for civil rights, which are now recognized and protected by the community and those who wield authority in its name.

  For example, the jurist Hugo Grotius (one of Locke’s predecessors in this way of thinking) said this exchange involves a trade-off. What I lose from the point of total freedom, I gain by way of security and predictability.29 Under the new arrangement, I won’t be able to help myself to your pile of grain whenever I feel hungry, or your bank account. But I know you won’t help yourself to mine, either; because if you do, the civil authority will punish you for it.

  Steeped in the Latin of Roman law, Europe’s jurists branded this agreement the pactum societatis. In their minds, it marked the birth of legitimate government. A couple of centuries later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave it a more famous name: the social contract. It’s not based on a signed piece of paper or original physical act. Like the axis of Galileo’s rotating earth, the social contract is imaginary, but it is still there, exerting its influence and power. Like any contract, it imposes obligations both on me and on my rulers. I am bound to obey the laws of the society in which I choose to dwell. The lawgivers, including a prince or king, are bound to respect my civil rights—or else.

  Or else what? By 1600, that was the question every crowned head and magistrate felt entitled to ask. In a profound sense, it was the political question for Europe for the next two hundred years.

  The problem was that many natural law theorists made breaking the contract too easy. It wasn’t necessary for the ruler to threaten people’s lives or seize their property; just being of the wrong religion, or not sufficiently committed to the right one, was enough. A generation of Catholic political writers, including Aquinas’s followers, used the social contract to threaten Protestant rulers with overthrow and assassination. Protestants responded by arguing the same about Catholic kings.30

  Two French kings in a row died from an assassin’s dagger, while James I of England suffered a near miss in the Gunpowder Plot. His son Charles I did end up paying the ultimate price for supposedly breaking his covenant with his subjects; but as Englishmen learned, what was supposed to be a formula for liberty ended up being a formula for a decade of chaos and dictatorship.

  No wonder many preferred the Louis XIV solution, to accept divinely ordained absolute rulership and be done with it. Others, like Locke’s older contemporary Thomas Hobbes, decided that social contract theory needed drastic modification. In his grand theory of the state published in 1651, titled Leviathan, Hobbes insisted that the transfer of a people’s self-sovereignty to a monarch and king did indeed take place but it was a onetime transaction. Once it was complete, there was no going back, ever. “For the Sovereign [must be] absolute … or else there is no Sovereignty at all.”31

  Hobbes’s citizens realize that they must give up their natural liberty in order to protect them from themselves. They are like the alcoholic who hands the key to his liquor cabinet to a friend and says, “No matter what I say, don’t give me back the key.” He knows that unless someone stops him, he is a danger to himself and others.

  Hobbes knew that some rights theorists, like the Calvinist Scot George Buchanan and the Spanish Dominican Juan Molina, still insisted that the alcoholic should get his key whenever he wants it—even at the price of civil war. Hobbes puts the blame squarely on Aristotle, who he said led men to connect liberty with democracy and goaded them into “loving tumults” and disorder, believing those were the way to secure liberty when they did just the opposite. Instead, Hobbes argued, nothing was safe unless we obey the sovereign; and “the Liberty of the subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the Sovereign hath permitted.…”32

  Locke saw this line of argument as a complete perversion of the idea of natural rights. People aren’t alcoholics; by and large, they are the same sober and hardworking people as Aristotle’s householders in the Politics, who want to be left alone to live their lives. Instead, Locke insisted that the debate over natural rights return to its original framework of natural law. “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.”33 Was it possible that God would devise such a system of natural laws and put man in the middle of them in order to create a nation of slaves? Locke said no.

  John Locke was a doctor, not a lawyer. He was less interested in the legal aspect of the social contract than in its moral face. Locke saw at once that God must have constructed the framework of natural law for the same purpose that He devised Newton’s universe: to set men free.

  Therefore, that natural liberty was not something we surrender at all. Putting our trust in a beneficent God is one thing; trusting our liberty to a human ruler is quite another. Instead, we keep our liberty close and forever. It’s ours to use even in civil society; and protection of that liberty is the final end of civil society.

  This includes liberty of our person and our lives and those things that are extensions of ourselves, like our family and property. “Though the earth and inferior Creatures be common to all men,” Locke wrote in his Second Treatise, “the labor that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my Property in them [which] no one has a Right to but [myself].” In fact, nowhere are we closer to God than when we create property from our own handiwork, just as man is the handiwork of his Lord God.34

  Locke’s natural liberty includes liberty of thought, since reason is another of God’s gifts, including our thoughts about religion. This made Locke the first great advocate of religious toleration and author of three Letters Concerning Toleration, the second of which he sent to Newton for comment and approval.35 Liberty included an equality before the law, since all men are equal before God; and it included a generosity of spirit and independence of mind that Aristotle had recognized as the hallmark of the virtuous man and which Locke saw would prevent a state of normal liberty from degenerating into a “state of license”—in other words, a perpetual riot.

  All these liberties or rights are protected, not hindered, by the original social contract. Proper government is not a restraint on our natural liberty, as Hobbes and others thought. It is a net increase, since it provides a framework of security in which we can enjoy our civil liberties in ways not possible in the state of nature. It “is the one great reason of men putting themselves into Society, and quitting the State of Nature.”36

  With it, however, come certain duties. One is the duty to use our reason as God’s gift; another is to protect our liberty and the liberty of others. The most important, however, is the duty of the sovereign to respect that liberty: and when he doesn’t, when “he that in a State of Society would take away the Freedom that belongs to those of that Society,” and
pretends to be our master rather than our servant, then it is he, not us, who is the real rebel against society.37

  Locke’s conclusion was startling, not to say world shattering. A monarch like Louis XIV, or any of his would-be imitators, in effect is at war with his subjects.§ When that happens, Locke asserted, then lawful government is at an end. We are all thrown back into the original state of nature. “Where the government is dissolved,” Locke explained, “the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative” body to act in their name.38 The social contract starts over from scratch. Government by popular consent is not just a good idea, as it was for Aristotle and Ockham. For Locke, it is an inescapable law of nature. It is what separates a society of free men from a society of slaves.

  To others like his late friend Algernon Sidney, that “legislative body” representing the people was England’s Parliament, and always had been.39 To Locke, it really didn’t matter. The issue was not historical precedent, but natural right. The real power was power invested in the people, now and forever. It could not be taken away by any earthly man or institution, including Parliament itself.

  This was a truly radical idea. It was too radical for an England weary of a century of tumults and intrigues. In 1688, the English replaced their monarch James II and brought another, James’s daughter Mary and her husband, William, from Holland. Locke returned to England with them in the royal yacht, but not in triumph. The arguments Parliament chose to justify its removal of one king and replacing him with another implicitly rejected Locke’s populist appeal and substituted the more conservative historical one of his dead friend Sidney.40

  John Locke, former fugitive and would-be revolutionary, died in 1704. His last work was a series of paraphrases of the sayings of Saint Paul, which he sent to his friend Isaac Newton. No man had labored more to reconcile the God of the New Testament with the laws of nature expounded by Aristotle and Aquinas. “He that shall collect all the moral rules of the philosophers,” he once wrote, “and compare them with those contained in the New Testament, will find them to come short of the morality delivered by our Savior, and taught by his apostles; a college made up, for the most part, of ignorant but inspired fishermen.”41 Yet for other reasons no one’s influence would be more important in the secular age to follow: Locke’s belief that a government of the people, by the people, and even as for the people is a matter of natural law and right would take root across the Atlantic in the fertile soil of the New World.

  * * *

  * Descartes completely rejected the idea that animals had mental states or consciousness like those of humans, including feeling love or suffering pain. He has been the bête noire of animal rights activists ever since.

  † Venice, which managed to maintain its republican system of government uninterrupted through the centuries, was the exception, but the exception that seemed to prove the rule. Everyone agreed its case was unique, the product of its closed oligarchic politics and unusual social stability, which no other European state could emulate.

  ‡ Whether a plot to kidnap Charles II was actually hatched at Rye House has been debated and redebated by historians ever since.

  § Something Louis’s wet nurses might have agreed with.

  Twenty-one

  ARISTOTLE IN A PERIWIG: THE CULTURE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

  Commerce [is] the eternal link between men.

  —Voltaire

  It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest.

  —Adam Smith

  The eighteenth century is famously the age of wigs and salons, of wits and philosophes, of experimental science and the first turning of the wheels of the Industrial Revolution—and the transatlantic slave trade. In England, the era dubbed itself the Augustan Age. On the other side of Europe, Immanuel Kant coined another term: the Age of Enlightenment.

  They might just as well have called it the Age of Locke. No thinker since Socrates dominated the minds of his immediate successors as John Locke did. His ideas were the flammable fuel of the Enlightenment, and sent it soaring to new intellectual heights. But this was not Locke the political theorist: his Two Treatises of Government were less read than used to be thought.1 The Locke who inspired the eighteenth century was the philosopher who wired Aristotle’s most important insight, that all knowledge comes through experience, into the modern Western mind.

  Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, written in 1690 after the Glorious Revolution, decisively moved the Enlightenment in Aristotle’s direction.* This was Aristotle the father of empirical science, the advocate of rational argument reinforced by the evidence of the senses. It was Aristotle shorn of substances, essences, categories, and final causes and selectively edited.2 Apart from three or four texts—and only certain key passages of those—the rest of his work was left to gather dust.

  However, those texts were enough. Virtually every eighteenth-century artistic endeavor from poetry to music and painting was governed by rules drawn from Aristotle’s Poetics and Book II of the Rhetoric (Locke’s personal favorite).† Politics and moral thinking—and the Enlightenment was the century of great moral debates—were also dominated by the problem of how to reconcile the social virtues described in Aristotle’s Ethics with the political processes set forth in his Politics. The result was Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, not to mention the American Constitution.

  Impressive for a philosopher who had been dead more than two thousand years and who had nearly been consigned to history’s dustbin during the Reformation. All the same, John Locke said that the place to start the study of how men behave was Aristotle.3 With a handful of exceptions, the Enlightenment followed his advice.

  On the other hand, it entertained no illusions about Aristotle’s limitations. A century and a half of humanist scholarship had given Europeans a far better understanding of both Plato and Aristotle in historical context than was possible for someone like Erasmus. The eighteenth-century mind had thoroughly probed the political economy of the ancient Greek polis. It understood as Machiavelli never could why the ancient world failed to sustain its ideals of citizenship.

  It also realized how much ancient Rome had owed to Greece in terms of thought and culture. Enlightenment historians like Edward Gibbon and philosophers like David Hume understood how Christianity had evolved as the fusion of Judaism and Neoplatonism; how much Christian Neoplatonism and Plotinus’s pagan version overlapped; and how ancient Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics offered philosophical insights as powerful and relevant as the Big Three: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

  Finally, the Enlightenment understood the enormous historical and cultural distance that separated it from the “ancients”—thanks in part to the rise of Christianity. The big loser in all this, however, was not Aristotle but Plato. His Republic—later so much admired by the Romantics—was the one work of political philosophy the Enlightenment most despised. Adam Smith’s teacher Francis Hutcheson pronounced its theory of politics unworkable; Smith’s friend David Hume referred to the book’s “illusory and visionary rantings.” On the other side of the Atlantic, John Adams said there were only two things he ever learned from reading Plato, and one of them was that sneezing will cure hiccups.4

  Thomas Jefferson was even more excoriating. He once confessed in a letter to Adams that he had been rereading the Republic. “I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?” Jefferson had to conclude that Plato had always been a fraud, “a dealer in mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind,” which had been allowed to inject “an impenetrable darkness” into Western culture. “O Plato!” Voltaire exclaimed. “You have done more harm than you know.”5

  Why did the Enlightenment dislike Plato so much? Because his worldview directly contradicted the view of reality and human nature the Enlightenment derived from John Locke, and ult
imately from Aristotle.‡

  That view was, first, that man is an individual, an individual born with a natural sociability (an updated version of Aristotle’s zoon politikon) but also a desire to protect his own natural rights and his own self-interest. “It is love of self,” Voltaire would write, “that encourages love of others.” That self-interest was derived from nature, “which warns us to respect [the self-interest] of others.”6 This was one reason the Enlightenment, like Aristotle, so strongly opposed the Republic’s formula for communism. The abolition of private property was not only contrary to natural right, it would also ensure that the bonds that connected men to each other would be founded not on mutual respect and friendship, but on envy or even hate. “Nothing can be conceived more destructive of human happiness, more infallibly contrived to transform men and women into Brutes, Yahoos, or Daemons,” John Adams wrote, than community of property.7

  Second, the key to happiness is understanding how the real world works. This idea stood in contrast to Plato-inspired utopian dreams, including John Calvin’s Geneva (a favorite target in the Enlightenment). Our highest ideals are not reflections of some transcendent reality, Enlightenment thinkers argued, or some higher truth. They are just that, ideals: insubstantial playthings of the mind that can deceive as often as they can inspire. This is what led Jefferson to dismiss the “dreams of Plato” and dub Plato’s ideal of a Philosopher Ruler “whimsical” and “puerile.”

  Third, the only way to understand that world is through observation and analysis of our experience, not inward self-reflection. In the words of the Scottish thinker Thomas Reid, “Settled truth can be attained by observation.” Reid’s disciple John Witherspoon, who deeply influenced the American Founding Fathers, explained that we know things “by tracing facts upwards rather than reasoning downwards.”8 Indeed, “how can we reason” at all, the poet Alexander Pope asked in his An Essay on Man, “except from what we know,” meaning from our five senses? Indeed, the formal name of Thomas Reid’s philosophy, Common Sense Realism, sums up the Aristotelian stamp on the age.