And This Passes forScholarship

The central feature of any modern, prosperous society is its division of labor. While some produce the goods, others perform the vital services which individuals need and/or desire.

Since each person's well-being is to an enormous extent affected by prevailing social and economic conditions, and since in those conditions are, themselves, the product of innumerable political enactments, one of the most valuable services required by a free people, is the clarification of complex social, economic and political issues.

To be really clear, in this context, is to see the deepest connection between first cause and ultimate effect, even when they are separated by long stretches of time.

What makes the search for such clarity possible is the determination to examine human affairs from a long-range perspective, looking for similar social patterns in various times and places and seeing why it is that like causes invariably produce like conditions.

That, ultimately, is the purpose and mission of intellectual activity in the social sciences and the even more basic and generally neglected field of philosophy. But for such labor to pay off, those engaged in such study must pursue their calling with great care.

This selection illustrates what can happen when insufficient care is accorded the basic questions and conceptions that guide our intellectual exertions.

Since the book from which this excerpt is taken is intended for an academic audience, i.e., for learned men and women who deal with issues more basic than those that make their way onto the nightly news, this piece could require a little more of the reader's attention and patience.

For convenience, I have confined the more esoteric issues, of interest primarily to university students and professors, to the essay's endnotes.

Unavoidably, the work of several leading contemporary and classical political thinkers is raised in the body of the text (at least in passing).

But the attentive reader should be able to gloss over these unfamiliar figures without losing the larger point the piece seeks to press.

As we have already seen, much of what passes for politics, these days, is an incessant wrangling over issues that are essentially inessential, hence, inconsequential. Very often, the consequences of this "inconsequentialism" are such as no one had ever intended, expected or desired. The nation is simply left to cope in consternation and, as they say, "move forward." The names and numbers of the bills change, but the results remains the same. In politics, puddles of money turn into pools, but the pools of poverty and ignorance barely drain at all. Our public schools relentlessly fail the young, so also drying up is the pool of candidates prepared to find good jobs, meet life's challenges and climb the slippery ladder of success. Too many children grow up and leave school, still wading in shallow moral, emotional and intellectual waters.

Full to overflowing is the Olympic-size pool of reports that chronicle the chronic failure of so many well-intentioned policy initiatives and anxiously question the wisdom of the course which the nation is taking.

But if it can be said that nearly no educated onlooker is even minimally content with the current state of public affairs, it can also be said that the state of intellectual affairs is not any more cheery. If our elected leaders run from one hot-button topic to the next, as dictated by fluctuating headlines, the latest focus group findings or overnight polling results, our intellectual leadership suffers from a somewhat different attention disorder. Viewing human affairs from a perch situated so high above the hubbub of everyday life, many simply lose sight of the hard ground of daily experience, altogether. So those situated in ivory towers too often produce what the common man or woman on the street thinks they produce: abstract ideas that may sound good in theory, but can never works in practice, i.e., ideas that defy "common sense"

Intellectuals think conceptually, i.e., in very broad, general or abstract terms. That is as it should be, as long as the concepts they deploy can be tied to a concrete world of particulars. And as long as they do not confuse apples for oranges or a herd of orangutang. Consider the practice of any science. Biologists and medical researchers study all the complex processes of "life" - a gigantic concept that subsumes an infinite variety of individual life forms. So the discoveries scientists make in examining any number of the lower species can often be logically and successfully applied to higher species. This permits critical advancements in understanding the causes and cures of disease, as such, and so contributes to the quality of life for us all. Now, in the natural sciences, researchers know better than to confuse plants for household pets. And if I were to bring my Rottweiler, Winston, to see his vet for a digestive problem, I wouldn't expect the good doctor to bone up on the process of photosynthesis in plants or the impact of nutritional deficiencies in frogs. Different levels of life possess different features (e.g., differing needs and differing capacities for satisfying those needs). Critical distinctions need to be clearly grasped, every step of the way.

The intellectual sciences, whose job it is to discover the causes and cures of social and political infirmities and prescribe the nutrients necessary to maintain the health and vitality of this noble republic must also deal in basic ideas. But the ideas must make sense. And they must be intimately linked to the realities under review, the evidence of everyday life provided by our five senses and informed by plain common sense.

So it is not unreasonable if many of today's academic debates center around a very basic, yet elusive concept. The title of two hundred books published last year might just as well have read: Liberalism, Is it Good or Bad? The debate never ends. But how sound are the terms in which it is couched? Relentlessly, thoughtful writers expose the crises and debate the merits of liberalism as a conceptual monolith, all but losing sight of the many tensions that divide various liberal models - or the brute facts that often render those abstract models irrelevant to daily democratic practice. Hence we witness modern scholarship busy reassessing a "liberal ethos" that simultaneously emerges out:

Is it at all plausible or useful to .link under the aegis of "liberalism," the extraordinarily diverse philosophical views and approaches of all those who have contributed to the liberal tradition - including some outstanding socialist writers and statesmen? Is it useful to weigh the moral merit, historical tendencies or "iron laws" of something that has no discernible shape or conceptual boundary? Or do we just load ourselves with too much baggage to carry or intellectually inspect?

Rexford G. Tugwell, one of FDR's most prized brain-trusters, glimpsed the problem in writing about his own New Deal experience: "It was a time of confusion, of trying to attain collectivistic organization under individualistic labels."² What can we expect from a "liberalism" that lives and struggles with such confusion, or worse, contradiction? In English Liberalism and the State, Harold Schultz summed the point up well:

If liberalism meant laissez-faire individualism, how could it also spur state intervention? If it was equated with liberty, as it was, how could it endorse laws limiting freedom of action? No wonder the term almost defines definition and seems to suffer from such a serious case of intellectual incoherence.³

Yet for contemporary scholarship it is all of a piece: it is all "liberalism." And all those engaged in the post-cold-war debate over its meaning and merit must contend with all the jagged ridges that attach to this vexing, elusive conceptual "unit." Today, when liberalism is asked to rise, nearly no one is left seated.

But how large and liberal a roof would jt take to conceptually cover the political proposals of such diverse theorists as Bentham and Burke, Dewey and Dworkin, Gladstone and Green, Hobhouse and Hume, Jefferson and James, Kant and Keynes, Locke and Lowi, Mill and Madison and Rawls and Rorty -just a few of the guests who apparently find shelter under it? What welter of incommensurable, intellectual girders and beams would have to be welded together to support that roof and satisfy those demanding draftsmen? What would the final architecture possibly look like, and how could so wobbly an edifice even stand? These writers differ on an unimaginable range of critical issues. Their premises are as incompatible as are many of their conclusions. If they are merely participants-in liberalism's "internal" debate then it is no wonder that that debate is mired in a contagion of confusion and dissension. Whose liberalism is the "real" liberalism? And just which liberal theory or combination of theories brought us to where we are today?

To raise this last question is to pose a daunting intellectual challenge - the manifest difficulty of reconciling theory and reality. Finding so many troubling disparities between the idyllic theory and daily practice, many conclude that liberal thought is but a thin ideological veneer masking, and legitimizing, a darker, more disturbing reality. Pointing to this undeniable gap, liberalism's least sympathetic critics portray its professed ideals as so many useful "myths" or "legends." Marx famously referred to these as society's ideological "superstructure." He believed that the ruling ideas of any epoch are merely the ideas of the ruling class.⁴ All allusions to liberal equality, all legitimation theories aside, liberal, capitalist democracies are still viewed as states organized by, of and for the capitalist classes. And there is much to be said for this view. Modern pluralists simply expand the ruling classes to include all organized groups, as such - which still renders less equal all those who remain unorganized or exist as mere cogs in someone else's organizational machinery.

But is historical practice a necessary reflection on any (let alone, every) particular liberal theory? Let us take a case in point, just to see the difficulty of too hastily lumping the two together.

Many a history teacher has explained to his or her students that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence nicely sums up the common outlook shared by the leading American patriots at the time of the country's birth. The more careful instructor might go on to discuss the fuller meaning of the towering principles contained in the famous second paragraph of that American Declaration:

But to really explain all that is intended and implied in this pregnant paragraph, the most studious instructor would raise the writings of Jefferson's chief intellectual mentor. This would be John Locke, an English philosopher and radical, 'revolutionary who died in 1704 and never set foot on American soil.⁵ Now, American scholars have been wrangling over the extent of John Locke's influence on the nation's founding for the past half century. At this juncture, a clear consensus would have to concede that, all other ideological influences, notwithstanding, Locke's impact on the late 18^thcentury outlook is beyond dispute, if not decisive.⁶

And there is the rub. America's intellectuals tirelessly point to the ways in which the republic failed to live up to its vaunted principles. There is the early institution of slavery and the treatment of Black Americans decades after the institution was banished.. There are the unsavory attitudes and acts taken against Native American tribes throughout the 19`" century and the "discrimination" practiced against women, gays and other minorities down to this day. Nor have those principles prevented other calamities, such as long bouts of high inflation or spreading joblessness over the course of the past two-hundred years.

But here is the question. Is it either coherent or convincing to reason, as many apparently would, that, since American democracy was founded on a firm liberal and Lockean base, this nation's manifest failure to live up to liberalism's (i.e., Locke's) stated ideals, or its propensity to plunge into periodic panics and crashes, reflects the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of liberalism, generally, and of Locke's liberal vision, specifically? Consider just a few of the derivitive questions that such reasoning begs.

Besides, if Lockean liberalism eventually lost ground to other thinkers' or practitioners' more fashionable operating principles, whose liberalism, which rationalization is really responsible for the revolving pattern of power, plunder, poverty and peril that has accompanied American "liberalism's" remarkable, even exemplary progress?⁷ The gap between liberal theory and historical practice has often been remarkably wide. But what is the significance of this fact? Does it signify historical duplicity on a world-historical scale, a plot to pass off abase and counterfeit "superstructure" in order to justify injustice and pacify a gullible populace? On this view, "liberalism" is to modernity what Marx believed Christian theology was for the high Middle Ages: a powerful opiate.

But will the charge stand up? It certainly makes for a cumbersome conspiracy theory. Since American liberalism has been the inheritance of along succession of national leaders, it apparently implicates everyone from John Adams to Lyndon Johnson, from James Madison to George McGovern, from Patrick Henry to Henry Clay, from Herbert Hoover to Hubert Humphrey, from Roosevelt to Reagan and on and on. Is it reasonable to round up this odd gang of "usual suspects" on a charge of conspiring to promote any one thing, at all? Their practical visions have been as diverse as the theoretical views of our prior line-up of philosophers. Yet, is this not what it means to say that liberalism is this, or that, or anything at all?

Ideally, history should serve as theory's testing ground. But before one can say any particular theory has been tested one ought to be sure that it has ever really been tried. It is both imprudent and unfair to lump together founding ideals and finagling affairs and censure the whole package-deal as hypocritical, bankrupt, impoverished or corrupt. The pertinent and intriguing questions that could occupy the labors of historical scholarship for years to come are these:

These, as I say, are some of the critical questions for historical scholarship, but they are not the ones that shall concern us at present. For now, we shall linger a while longer on the idea of liberalism itself. For, in this writer's view, it has been the basic failure to think carefully enough about the very concept that has hindered our efforts at historical understanding and undercut our capacity to grapple with "liberalism's" triumphant, yet troubling, legacy.

In a strict sense, there really is no such thing as liberalism. Rather, there are a wide variety of liberal theories that begin with the idea of popular sovereignty, then run off in a galaxy of different ideological directions. The many models we commonly group under the head of liberalism (utilitarianism, majoritarianism, pluralism, pragmatism, democratic socialism, Lockean liberalism and capitalism), are really competing understandings of government and society.⁸

In sum, if critiques of liberalism abound, so do varieties of liberalism. And while we relentlessly debate the merits of "democratic liberalism" as a monolithic social construct we too often lose sight of the fundamental tensions and incompatible principles that divide various liberal theories. In fact each theory or model of liberalism contains a certain set of characteristics and may be distinguished from every other theory in large and little ways. Each variant on the liberal theme deserves to be considered in its own right and on the merits.

But let me take that back. It is possible to assess the merits of several theories, at once. All political theories stand on one side or another of a great intellectual divide. One way or another, they must answer to a higher authority, i.e., a "higher law," - if only in the sense of accepting the notion, or not. Will a theory abide the idea that there is a set of uniform, universal precepts:

(2) with which human institutions ought to righteously and rigorously conform?

This, in short, raises the deeper question of foundations. We shall see exactly what foundations are and what role they play in political life a little further on. First, it is worth pausing to mention that, in the circles of academia, one party to this fundamental dispute is enjoying a clear ascendance.

An important consensus is quietly forming among many of today's most prominent liberal political theorists. In what does it consist? In the steady rejection of any universal, ahistorical determinants of political right, i.e., in a self-conscious disavowal of any "timeless ends," around which a liberal democratic order can, must or should be organized. Against the specific principles spelled out in the respective revolutionary manifestos of, say, a Jefferson or even a once-admired Marx, leading intellectuals today pin their hopes, not on universal maxims, good at all times and places, but on the idea of "contingency," on the nitty gritty circumstances that surround us at any peculiar, historical moment. Just about everything, they would agree, is relative. In reality, this represents a theoretical meeting gathered around a well-attended table of historical minds. A brief survey is can be undertaken. And it is a view one hears repeated in common parlance almost daily. It all reflects the skeptical predicament in which we find ourselves. But let us look at the genesis of the development. For it was not always this way.

As we have already noted, the well-read American patriots who declared independence in 1776 and went onto draft the U. S. Constitution some years later shared a commitment to certain natural law tenets. The ideas of Locke and his 18' century disciples exerted a powerful pull on the course of human events in late 18`'' century America. However, by the time the early republic had settled into the so-called "Era of Good Feelings," a new theory of liberalism was busy making its way in the world. Beginning with Jeremy Bentham, Western liberalism mounted a strident revolt against the kind of natural and immutable laws invoked, first, by Locke, and then by the radical French Revolution., Believing that all such absolute "fictions," were so many invitations to tyranny (a state into which the "glorious" French Revolution had certainly sunk), important British utilitarian writers counseled liberal societies to practice a strict ideological tolerance and more flexibly pursue "the greatest good ofthe greatest number." The idea captured the British imagination for decades to come.⁹ But this utilitarian strain would bear even riper fruit on the other side of the Atlantic.

Launching a school ofthought known as pragmatism a century later, William James and John Dewey revitalized the assault on political foundationalism. They advised their readers to give up the pointless pursuit of "universal" truths. The pragmatist ideal was that of a freewheeling deliberative democracy that would allow for the widest range of novel initiatives and daring social experiments. Its proponents believed that, in the name of the "greatest good" or "general welfare," legislators and policy bodies should be left free to bargain, compromise and come to terms. If a piece of legislation or blueprint for bureaucratic action could pass democratic muster, then the question of its "legitimacy" need not arise.¹⁰

Now, while the early Utilitarians and later pragmatists postulated this greatest good in terms of a unifotm common interest, astute observers, from Madison forward, appreciated that modern societies are really divided into groups with differing, often competing, interests and aims. By effecting a democratic balance of these disparate interests and accommodating their several aims via legislative logrolling, coalition-building and other forms of accommodation, a school of pluralist political thought imagined that a next-best situation might emerge: a fluid and flexible balancing of interests, and ofthe power they would exert on all public institutions.¹¹

These approaches remain a powerful presence in our university classrooms. Today, schooled utilitarian writers still debate the intricacies and implications of their theoretical commitment.¹² Spurred by the poetic imagination, literary power and wide learning of Richard Rorty, modern pragmatists studiously labor to revitalize the home-grown ideas of Dewey and James. A robust exchange between "New Light" (or Rortyan), and a more orthodox "Old Light" pragmatism that claims to be true heir of James and Dewey fills the scholarly literature.

Adding a new wrinkle to the academic fold over the past quarter century and marking an interesting episode in liberal speculation, is the work of another learned and enormously influential author. . Having begun his speculative career by rejecting the relativism implicit in the utilitarian formula, John Rawls seems now to have taken up sides with his former foes. For all its theoretical categorizations and claims to universality, Rawls' most recent notion of "justice"ends up as tradition-bound and indeterminate as the theory of utility he once excoriated. Thus, clarifying the doctrine presented in A Theory of Justice, and avoiding the serious objections raised by many a critic of that earlier work, Rawls. now expressly roots his political theory in the institutions and traditions of our culture.¹³

Welcoming the clarification, Richard Rorty concurs with the refreshing viewpoint. He applauds Rawls for this rejection of the classical, "Plato-Kant Canon" which promised (but failed) to ground political "right" in a deeper conception of reality and human nature. For Rorty, Rawls stance is "thoroughly historicist and anti-universalist." Liberalism's preeminent contemporary philosopher "can be as indifferent to philosophical disagreements about the nature of the self as Jefferson was to theological differences about the nature of God."¹⁴

For Rorty, the "father of modern pragmatism," this is a fruitful convergence of theoretical opinion, since, as he sees it, the effort to ground political practice in universal, ahistorical foundations is both impossible (i.e., philosophically futile) and unnecessary (i.e., superfluous for all practical purposes). True enlightenment, Rorty might say, is the acknowledgment that there is no moral or metaphysical necessity, only contingency. For Rorty and many of his critics„ the long frustrating line of philosophical speculations ends in a reaffirmation of pragmatism and a renewed appreciation of Dewey and James.¹⁵

Utilitarianism, pragmatism and an interest-driven pluralism, these are the popular operating systems that sit at the center of scholarly attention today. And they are seated on the anti-foundational end of the liberal spectrum, confident (or at least hopeful) that daily democratic processes will iron out all dangerous social creases and weave a smooth, continuous fabric of tranquility and improvement. As Rorty has urged:

The robust emphasis on nothing more permanent than a fluctuating social tradition and a willingness to peacefully consider and compromise on every competing political claim, a trend that Rorty correctly perceives as pervasive in recent scholarship begs us to consider carefully the direction in which political theory is now headed.¹⁷

Before the "fruitless" quest for deeper, universal political foundations is abandoned, the fateful idea of contingency (i.e., the freewheeling, tradition-centered approach to political philosophy) should be very carefully scrutinized.

Asking to be judged by the consequences they produce and touted as the only practical (as opposed to the foolishly philosophical) approach to policy-making in these complex times, policy results time and again show how embarrassingly impractical that peculiar approach actually is. Pragmatic policies, routinely produce consequences that formed no part of anyone's original plan or purpose and often prove anything but useful. Often, well-intentioned solutions end up exacerbating the very problems they were designed to solve. Could it be that many of the most worrisome problems our leaders confront today issue from the commitment yesterday's leaders made to this enticing liberal formulation? Is it our already well-worn progress along these "liberal" pathways that has produced so many of the unfortunate outcomes and unforseen consequences that continually befuddle the modern policy experts?

What are political foundations and what"functions do they perform? To speak of foundations is simply to speak of principles. Political foundations are most often understood as moral principles that seek to justify or legitimize public acts and institutions. Jefferson's Declaration thus sets out to justify the act of thirteen North American colonies in declaring their sovereign independence from Great Britain and establishing a just basis for political authority. In constructing his defense he ultimately raised and relied upon a higher law doctrine: the principle that by the very nature of things, all men are created equal and possess "certain unalienable rights," which it is government's duty to protect -and not violate. If they are to perform their service, they must be embedded in the basic "constitutional principles" that form a society's jurisprudential foundations. Consequently these principles may rightly serve as the benchmark by which actual social practices and political processes may be judged.

But besides this legitimation function, founding principles also perform an important guidance function. If they are clear and coherent they are able to properly steer the course of public affairs. They form the basic principles around which purposive political activity can be organized and directed. As the principles of navigation direct a mariner to his desired port of call, so political principles will safely steer a ship of state in a steady and true direction - along a path of governance deemed to be worthy, efficacious and just. Lacking such foundational principles, a nation can easily get mired in a muddle of inconsequential questions and find itself swimming in circles or getting in ever deeper over its head.

The two functions served by a theory's foundations, then, legitimation and guidance, give rise to two separate sets of questions. The problem of legitimation presses a theory to explain or justify itself. It relentlessly asks: Why is this so? And how do you know?¹⁸ It is important that a theory avoids falling into co tradiction or presupposing postulates it needs to persuasively demonstrate. - standing, it could be said, with its feet planted firmly in mid-air.

The problem of guidance has a somewhat different focus. It takes a theory's organizing principles as a given (e.g., Locke's "natural rights of life, liberty and property," Bentham's "greatest happiness principle," or Rawls lexically prior first and his two-part second principle of justice), and wants to know whether they are clear and coherent enough to set a firm political course. Will such principles safely and surely take their practitioners from here (basic theory) to there (intended practice)? Or are there theoretical flaws within this or that liberal theory that could invite the kind of practical failures that mark out liberalism's pot-marked progress? Are the theoretical principles so broad and ambiguous that almost any package of legislative acts, judicial interpretations, administrative actions or radical reforms could be adopted in their name? Organizing principles are only as useful as their recommendations are clear and unambiguous. The question of guidance, in short, is the question of practical implementation. Its chief nemesis, very often, is indeterminacy.

Under what terms and conditions will any given set of foundations adequately perform their guidance function? What is necessary for the practical, successful implementation of such principles? These questions are truly deep, truly interesting, and truly philosophical.

Unfortunately, philosophy appears very far removed from the problems of everyday life and walled up in high academic towers - where it is not much respected, anyway.

It is sad that this is so, for the power of philosophy is as potent as any force of nature. In an admiring, yet sharply-critical review of Jeremy Bentham's intellectual contribution published in the London and Westminster Review in August, 1838, John Stuart Mill paid tribute not only to his former mentor, but to the practical power of speculative philosophy, as such:

Mill saw how systems of ideas are transmitted to those who are in a direct position to shape the course of human affairs, "the teachers of our teachers" (not to mention our legislators, judges, journalists, etc.). But the italicized text, in particular, begs an intriguing question, to wit: what kind of "influence" is it that speculative philosophy "must itself obey" and so, by implication, is powerless to thwart? In this context, Mill alludes to the influence of missing, yet relevant considerations, what we could call "deficiencies of omission."

If in his survey of human nature and life [a theorist] has left any element out, then, wheresoever that element exerts any influence, his conclusions will fail, more or less, in their application. If he has left out many elements, and those very important, . . . the applicability of his system to practice in its own proper shape will be of an exceedingly limited range.¹⁹

In short, a speculative system designed for mankind, but which posits a portrait of human nature that is at odds with certain unavoidable facets of human experience would certainly appear to be self-defeating and nugatory. But there are other factors that can hinder the practical implementation of a body of belief. Consider what must follow from the failure to abide by an uncompromising law of identity. A philosophy built upon key logical inconsistencies could not coherently guide the course of human affairs; since it must thereby embody opposing influences, at once.

Most relevant for our purposes, however, is that speculative system which is simply incomplete in the sense that it lacks precision, is ambiguous, or capable of being variously interpreted. We can think of such a system as committing the fallacy of indeterminacy. As such, it furnishes its practitioners insufficient guidance by which to accomplish any specified objective, or is all too vague in spelling out the objectives it would seek. Ultimately, it will prove too imprecise or elastic to furnish sufficient direction to legislators or jurists. A wide range of political arrangements and policies could be established or defended in its name - depending on historical contingencies, unanticipated philosophical influences or the clever manipulation of its basic tenets by forceful and charismatic public figures.²⁰

In the end, it will be not the theorist's broader vision, but the relentless unfolding of logical effects from first philosophical causes that will move history forward or backward. The upshot is that successors to a particular intellectual tradition could employ such incomplete, ill-defined, indeterminate, inconsistent or ambiguous principles to accomplish ends that the originators ofthe system never anticipated or even vehemently opposed. Even more "clueless" are the expert policy analysts who eschew the need for any broader vision or encompassing world view and only care about those ever-loving, ever-elusive results.

This is the condition of American liberalism today. And this is the "hidden hand of philosophy" at work. It is a fascinating process to witness, and it is everywhere to be found. It is an inescapable consequence of the inconsequentialist predicament in which we find ourselves and of the pragmatism we practice. In one arena after another, our ideological leaders are content to deal in details. The hottest contest over the most divisive issue really boils down to an inconsequential skirmish over a few narrow particulars. With much fanfare, our elected leaders reach "great" compromises on minuscule matters. They think they can achieve fundamental reform without asking the fundamental questions. They seek sure-sighted, practical results, yet pursue short-sighted policies. So they blindly stumble over the theoretical suppositions that constantly confound them. And for their trouble, they are invariably pulled down paths they never planned to travel and pushed to achieve results they neither anticipated, intended nor desired. It does signify a certain type of attention disorder, a chronic condition of intellectual neglect grounded in a deeply ins~itutionalized skeptical faith - the certainty that certainty is an impossibility.

But in the annals of American liberalism. that neglect has not been total Drawing inspiration from the deep pool of human experience and applying the lessons of history to their own turbulent times, America's founding generation constructed a nation on a set of political foundations that so far have achieved the results (and blessings) originally intended. The Constitution they crafted has stood the test of time. Its essential and unambiguous operating principles, embodied in the "separation of powers" and "checks and balances, as well as the constitutional protections afforded to free speech, a free press, etc., point to a much more successful way of conducting the people's business. For all the challenges and crises this nation has had to confront, it can be confidently said that the devil tyranny has not made much headway in America. The basic understanding early Americans shared about human nature and especially the seductive temptation posed by power, informed their labors and formed a union more perfect and free than any other on earth.." And that accomplishment should never be minimized or overlooked.²¹

It is only by dealing with reality as it is and has ever been, and learning the lessons it has to teach, that human effort can pursue (or even discover) its legitimate interests, achieve its vital purposes and satisfy citizens' unavoidable needs. I believe it is only the learning of this crucial lesson that can presage a revival of confidence in liberalism's capacity to steadily improve the conditions of life for living and future generations.

Those who ignore the past, Santayana said so many years ago, are forever doomed to repeat it. One need only consider that counsel against a reflection of modern liberalism's checkered record to see that there certainly are permanent and universal truths waiting to be discovered - and applied.

This, then, is the thesis that informs the larger work, Unintended: the Consequences of Liberalism. Future selections on this wehsite, drawn from that hook, will go on to explore specific episodes in American policy history, Throughout, the aim shall he to show why and how an inadequate attention to deeper, foundational questions invariably results in consequences that are as unfortunate as they were unforseen. Lacking the adequate guidance that only a firm and well-considered set of foundational principles can furnish, the most dedicated reformers constantly crossed their own purposes and unwittingly courted calamity.

1. The allusion is to Charles Warren, Congress as Santa Clause or National Donations and the General Welfare Clause of the Constitution (New York: Arno Press, 1978), orig. pub. 1932.

2. Rexford G. Tugwell, "The New Deal: The Progressive Tradition,"Western Political Quarterly, III (September 1950), p. 420.

3. Harold J. Schultz, ed., English Liberalism and the State (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1972), p. viii.

4.. Following Marx, C. B. Macpherson, in The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), famously argued that while the various models of liberal democracy are grounded in a political ethos of liberty and equality, they are invariably shaped by class divisions and, what's worse, designed to subordinate the interests of the"weakest social classes to the narrow advantage of the well-to-do. In fact a whole genre of literature, informed by the Marxist historical teaching, has been geared to "unmasking" the inequality and hypocrisy practiced by a so-called "political economy of capitalism." Since the fall ofthe Soviet Union and discrediting of the communist "ideal," the publishing spigot has, of course, closed somewhat.

5. For Locke's perilous career as a radical and revolutionary in Restoration England in the years leading up to the Glorious Revolution (1688) see esp. Richard Ashcraf, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises ofGovernment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). See Also, Jerome Huyler, Locke in America: The Moral Philosophyh of the Founding Era(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995, 2001) esp. chs. 5 and 6.

6. This is precisely the debate I addressed in Locke in America. My investigation led to a long line of intellectual intermediaries who carried on Locke's work, principally in 18`h century England and in European legal theory ofthe period. Some influential intermediaries would fluidly affix the fundamental elements of Locke's philosophy to other important currents (such as those belonging to the republican science of politics). It was this powerful synthesis of Lockean and republican themes that swiftly washed up on the late 18`" century American shoreline as the Imperial crisis was just appearing on the horizon.

7. The portrayal of a cycle of "power, plunder, poverty and peril" refers to the title and central theme of a work, currently underway. It represents a sequel to Locke in America and portrays a revolving historical pattern marked out by (1) an initial expansion of governmental power in one area or another, (2) the hatching of innumerable schemes designed to take advantage of that expansion for the enrichment of certain well-connected segments of the population, resulting, ultimately in (3) a financial collapse or commercial crisis brought on by those very circumstances, and, so, (4) an even greater demand for expanded political power to avoid future peril. For a good documentary reading on how crisis in America has been the handmaiden to an ever-expanding range of political power, see Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth ofAmerican Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

8. And the historical ideologies we commonly oppose to liberalism frequently conceal some surprisingly liberal features. For example, historians view the ideological conflicts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of an emergent liberalism pitted against a more ancient republicanism. Scholarship commonly associates the former with a tendency for self-pursuit, acquisitiveness or what Macpherson famously called "possessive individualism, and the latter with a civic commitment to the common good, or general welfare. Only it is clear, by now, that all side o these disputes reflected principles that we understand as liberal. It is no wonder that the historical-literature now speaks of a liberal republicanism. In bifurcating the liberal and republican "idioms" or "paradigms" we intellectually split the personalities of historical actors who could effortlessly combine a liberal devotion to liberty, property and even personal acquisitiveness with a commitment to civic participation and even patriotic sacrifice. Then, too, we casually speak of liberalism's "internal" debate and gloss over the most divisive disputesof past ages, e.g.: the minimalist views of a "Cato," a Jefferson, a Madison or a Jackson vs. the expansionist visions assiduously promoted by a Walpole, a Hamilton, a John Quincy Adams or a Henry Clay. But in the 1720's, 1780's and 1790's, and then again in the 1820's and 1830's, the respective parties to this "family" debate were committed ideological foes, battling for the very fate of their societies. The differences that divided them, as they viewed it, were explosive and of the utmost consequence. What did they see that we do not? And what ideological divisions do we conjure up that played no apparent role in the conflicts of their time? Again, see Locke in America, esp. ch. 8.

9. The career of British Utilitarianism is developed in ch. 1 ofUnintended: the Consequences of Liberalism and will be adapted for inclusion on this site sometime in the future. In a nutshell: In Great Britain, a pair of influential thinkers planted a philosophical standard designed to ground the principle of laissez faire liberalism forever. It was obvious to them that a government dedicated to the protection of property, and little else, would most conduce to "the greatest good of the greatest number" But Jeremy Bentham and James Mill lived long enough to see a young harvest ofdemocratic socialism sprout from the natural rights soil they overturned and the "fertile" utilitarian seeds they planted. Providing no firm guidance, beyond the "greatest good" injunction, they did not foresee that three distinct social groups would form three distinct opinions regarding it, and that nothing save the interplay of politics would decide which would win out. For Utilitarianism's passionate renunciation of any natural rights foundation for a liberal, laissez faire order, see Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies: Being an Examination of the Declaration of Rights Issued During the French Revolution (1824), in John Bowring, The Works of Jeremy Bentham(New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), vol. 2, pp. 498-501. It was Bentham's and James Mill's express desire to more firmly ground the substance of Locke's social teaching, i.e., the principles of individualism and limited government in firmer philosophic soil. The principle of "utility," they 'believed, elieved, would fit the bill. For the centrality of acquisitiveness in Bentham's thought, see Allison Dube, The Theme ofAcquisitiveness in Bentham's Political Thought(New York: Garland Publishing, 1991). Nonetheless such later British writers as T. H. Green and Leonard Hobhouse built their far more socialist visions precisely on the wobbly political foundations left by the early Utilitarians. See T. H. Green, The Principles of Political Obligation, Paul Harris and John Morrow, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 and L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980 orig. pub. 1911). John Stuart Mill's career would represent the Archimedean lever bridging the social development. For a very useful commentary on the intellectual foundations of the 19`h century growth of welfare state capacity in Great Britain, see E. K. Bramsted and K. J. Melhuish, eds., Western Liberalism: A history in documents from Locke to Croce (London: Longman, 1978).

10. Subsequent selections on this site will examine in fine detail the rise and widespread influence of the modern pragmatist movement in the recent literature of liberalism. See "Going Around in Cycles: The Lessons of History vs. Rorty's Antifoundational Philosophy" and "No Great Awakening: On the Revival of Pragmatism."

11. Actually, most modern students of interest-group liberalism are not at all sanguine about the way in which politics is practiced. We have already alluded to the important writings of Theodore Lowi, Robert Dahl and others. The list of bibliographical citations of works warning of the dangers inherent in this this fully accepted and "legitimate" political model could, itself, fill a volume.. However, I do not mean to say that the "interest-group" model of liberalism arose with the theoretical analyses of the pluralist writers. To some extent, an ever-growing extent, the dynamic was always present, assuming the form of the daily tug and pull of politics. All manner of interests have been able to steer all manner of special privileges, subsidies and immunities through legislative bodies and when challenged, even the courts. For the origins of the practice in Washington's first Administration, i.e., from 1789 forward, see Locke in America, ch. 10.

12. Gaining wide circulation is the recent work of Robert E. Goodin. See esp. Utilitarianism as a public philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For what remains a good overview of the various strands of utilitarian thought, see J. J. C. Smart & Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For & Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).

13. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993 ). Today, Rawls hopes "the fundamental ideas of justice as fairness are present in the public culture, or at least implicit in the history of its main institutions and the traditions of their interpretation." For, "only if the full explanation and justification of justice as fairness is publicly available can citizens come to understand its principles in accordance with the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation" (p. 78). Rawl's liberalism, therefore, is essentially cultural specific and makes no underlying claims about a universalistic human nature or immutable political right.

14. Richard Rorty, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in Alan Malachowski, ed., Reading Rorty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 283-5.

15. Besides "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," Rorty's antifoundationalism is developed in Contingency, irony, and solidarity(Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1989), "Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein," Political Theory, 15, 5. 1987), "Postmodermst Bourgeois Liberalism," The Journal of Philosophy, 80, 10, 1983) andConsequences ofPragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

17. For the communitarian commitment to tradition, see especially, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). On a reflection of this posture by American pragmatism, see esp. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), p. 26. For a similar affirmation, see Michael Oakeshott, Of Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 78-79.

18. For skeptics, such as Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrho , this signifies the impossibility of ever satisfactorily reaching a foundational bedrock. InAfter Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), MacIntyre presses the essential point of skepticism. Because "there is in our society no established way of deciding between [the premises of moral arguments] that moral argument appears to be necessarily interminable. From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises, but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion" (p. 8). We are therefore left to our "emotivist" devices, a quasi-existentialist commitment that must be made in the absence of any firm, epistemological confidence (let alone certainty).

19. For Mill, this constituted the chief failing of Bentham's social theory. J. S. Mill, "Bentham," in Mary Womock, ed., Utilitarianism and Other Writings(New York: Meridian 1962) pp.78, 93.

20. A brief examination of John Rawl's reworked theory of justice amply illustrates the problem. So sincerely desiring to avoid the trap of relativism he saw implicit in the utilitarian model of liberalism, Rawls now retreats to a tradition-bound position that is every bit as relative, ambiguous and indeterminate. As he himself writes, political liberalism "presupposes that the fundamental ideas of justice as fairness are present in the public culture or at least implicit in the history of its main institutions and the traditions of their interpretation" (1993, 18, 78). Perhaps, but consider the vast range of ambiguities, contradictions, disagreements and heated disputes over the meaning and interpretation of those "institutions" and "traditions." Since such disputes are rarely settled and forever being revisited, this formula actually allows for the widest imaginable latitude of legislative and judicial action. Both the true-blue conservative politics of a Newt Gingrich and the full rainbow-colored spectrum of a Jesse Jackson - and every ideological shade in between - finds adequate shelter in the American political tradition. In short, John Rawls' grand theory begs all of the important questions; it takes us nowhere and everywhere, at once. What is more, Rawls's all-important "difference principle," which lies at the heart of his own conception of "justice as fairness," contends with a great deal of the American democratic tradition.

21. At the heart of the ideological origins of the American founding, there stands a Hobbesist or "Catonic" estimate of mankind's thirst for power and dominance. This feature of the Revolutionary psyche has been exhaustively chronicled in the recent literature on the American Revolution. See Jerome Huyler, Locke in America, pp.208-19. This attitude was still pervasive in Jacksonian America, as shown by Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics ofJacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990).That propensity being what it was, the Patriots knew they would have to resist the first attempt of Great Britain to infringe the rights of Englishmen. They clearly perceived the power of a single principle-shattering precedent. No one better reflected this understanding than the "penman of the Revolution," John Dickinson, in his blistering assault on the Townsend Act.. See Locke in America, p. 233.