This was originally delivered as a speech at the Liberty Political Action Conference in Reno, Nevada on September 15, 2011.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n The phenomenon that has arrested our attention and that is the object of our concerns is something that we call \u201cliberty.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, if our political universe can be said to consist of ideas, then the idea of liberty is the center around which every other revolves.\u00a0 Partisans of every conceivable variety, if they insist upon engaging in our political discourse, simply have no option but to become fluent in the language of liberty.\u00a0 The idiom of liberty has prevailed over all others, not just within the contemporary Western world, but well beyond it.\u00a0 InAmerica, especially, one would no more think to deny the value of liberty than one would think to deny the values of compassion, justice, or any other virtue.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, just because the rhetoric of liberty springs effortlessly from our lips does not mean, necessarily, that we know that of which we speak.\u00a0 It is true, no doubt, that, not unlike any number of other concepts with which we are acquainted, \u201cliberty\u201d is not something that is easy to define.\u00a0 <\/em>And, not unlike any other concept, the challenges of defining liberty, we are confident, do not preclude us from identifying <\/em>it when we see it.\u00a0 Whether this self-assurance is justified, however, is another question.<\/p>\n That there is a plethora of mutually incompatible and, in some instances, contradictory, purposes in the service of which rival partisans have enlisted the language of liberty is as powerful an indicator as any that our concept has fallen on hard times indeed.\u00a0 Perhaps it is inevitable that an abstract term, especially a normative<\/em> abstract term like \u201cliberty,\u201d should acquire for itself a storied history.\u00a0 Given the centrality of place that it managed to secure in the modern imagination, a position toward which it labored for centuries, it is to be expected that anyone and everyone in search of advancing an agenda should invoke the rhetoric of liberty.\u00a0 By way of these efforts, though, the term\u2014compelled, as it was, to sustain multiple, conflicting meanings\u2014has become like the beast to which Plato likened democracy, a beast with a thousand heads, each pulling in a direction separate from all of the others.<\/p>\n So, given the morass within which we find ourselves, we are left wondering: Is there a single satisfactory account of liberty and, if so, what is it?<\/p>\n <\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n Liberty<\/strong> as \u201cNatural Right\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n Historically, most of those singing hosannas to liberty, whether they have been libertarians, conservatives, or leftists of one stripe or another, have identified liberty with something to which every <\/em>human being is said to have a right.\u00a0 <\/em>Liberty, on this account, is a \u201cnatural\u201d or \u201chuman\u201d right. \u00a0Our own Declaration of Independence is as clear and prominent an illustration of this understanding of liberty as any.\u00a0 From the perspective of the Declaration, liberty is an \u201cunalienable,\u201d \u201cself-evident,\u201d right, a divine dispensation of which every <\/em>human being the world over is a beneficiary.\u00a0 That this right to liberty is \u201cself-evident\u201d means that anyone and everyone with just a modicum of rationality can no more think to deny this universal right to liberty than they can think to deny that they have bodies: self-evidence\u2014in this context, at any rate\u2014implies that which is impossible to coherently deny.<\/p>\n The Declaration of Independence has assumed something of a sacred status for many Americans. Because of this, this conception of liberty as a \u201cnatural right\u201d that it embodies has prevailed over all others.\u00a0 To question it is to risk falling into ill repute.\u00a0 But question it we must, for the very same notion of liberty was resoundingly, unabashedly, indeed, aggressively affirmed by another group from the eighteenth century: the French<\/em> Revolutionaries.\u00a0 In fact, the conservatism of which the great apostle of liberty Edmund Burke remains to this day the most eloquent and impassioned of representatives emerged as a distinctive intellectual tradition precisely in response to the French Revolution\u2019s \u201cRights of Man\u201d: Fraternity, Equality, and, yes, Liberty.<\/p>\n In both the American and French revolutions, liberty was held to be a \u201cright\u201d that belonged to all <\/em>human beings just by virtue of their humanity. Contrary to what some argue, that the American revolutionaries, via the Declaration, depicted liberty as a right bestowed by God<\/em> while the French did not is neither here nor there.\u00a0 The point is that this liberty to which all people had a right, like the right itself, owed nothing to the contingencies of place or time. Transcending as it did both history and culture, it was held to be timeless.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n Many a heroic thinker to this day remains committed to this idea of liberty as a \u201cnatural right.\u201d\u00a0 And indeed, it has much to commend it.\u00a0 For one, in identifying liberty with a \u201cprinciple,\u201d an abstract, universal proposition specifying a \u201cself-evident\u201d \u201cright\u201d rooted in human nature itself, this theory of liberty is as comprehensive in scope as it is simple in conception: it encompasses<\/em> everyone and should be easily apprehended<\/em> by everyone. Furthermore, because it ascribes to liberty the character of a \u201cself-evident\u201d right, it satiates that longing for certainty <\/em>that dwells in the breast of every human being while reducing its enemies to fools.\u00a0 And since it construes liberty as a natural <\/em>right, it exposes those who would threaten it not just as fools, but as evil.\u00a0 After all, only an agent of evil, be it a person or a government, would seek to acquire something that is beyond its authority to claim.<\/p>\n Yet for all of its virtues, it would be a mistake to think that this notion of liberty is devoid of problems.<\/p>\n For one, if liberty really is the \u201cself-evident\u201d right that its defenders claim it is, then it should be beyond dispute.\u00a0 But there are substantial numbers of people\u2014including quite respectable thinkers of a more conservative bent\u2014that deny, not just the \u201cself-evidence\u201d attributed to the natural right to liberty, but the claim that there even is <\/em>a natural right to liberty.\u00a0 Moreover, it hasn\u2019t been until relatively recently, as far as history is measured, that the language of \u201cnatural rights\u201d has emerged: prior to the very late middle Ages, there was no talk of \u201cnatural rights\u201d at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n These are crucial considerations for the proponents of this theory of liberty to bear in mind. This so-called right to liberty has for quite some time been at the center of many a dispute; thus it is not self-evident.\u00a0 So, since it is not self-evident, when it is depicted as if <\/em>it were so, its opponents can be forgiven for suspecting that the idiom of a self-evident natural right to liberty is nothing more or less than a rhetorical device deployed in the service of a partisan agenda.\u00a0 They could be forgiven for thinking along with Jeremy Bentham that natural rights are \u201cnonsense on stilts.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Another difficulty with this natural right conception of liberty is that in and of itself it tells us nothing.\u00a0 As we already saw by way of reference to the French Revolution, leftists have been no less inclined than those on the right to invoke the natural or \u201chuman\u201d right to liberty.\u00a0 Put another way, theoretically speaking, the concept of a natural right to liberty is as compatible with communism and socialism as it is compatible with libertarianism and even anarchism.<\/p>\n Finally, by portraying liberty as a universal ideal that subsists in advance of culture, the proponents of this natural right conception of liberty reveal themselves to be as indebted to rationalism <\/em>as are their rivals who insist that liberty is a creation of government.\u00a0 Whatever their differences with one another, all rationalists share in common an irresistible disposition to neglect the voice of tradition <\/em>or culture <\/em>in moral and political matters.\u00a0 Believers in the natural right model of liberty look beyond culture to nature <\/em>in accounting for liberty.\u00a0 Those who regard rights to liberty as utilitarian contrivances of government ignore culture inasmuch as they view liberty as the product of the fully conscious intentions of individuals.\u00a0 Nature and artifice are opposite heads of the same rationalist coin: both stand over and above culture, civilization, and tradition.<\/p>\n The liberty with which we as Americans are enamored is not some timeless, self-evident abstraction to which all peoples in all places have as much of a claim as ourselves.\u00a0 No, it is something much more concrete and particular than that.<\/p>\n <\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n Liberty<\/strong> as Cultural Inheritance<\/strong><\/p>\n The only liberty with which we are acquainted is not a universal principle; rather, it is a particular tradition.\u00a0 In fact, far from denoting a single entity, the term \u201cliberty\u201d serves the same function served by all general terms.\u00a0 Like, say, the word \u201chumanity,\u201d \u201cliberty\u201d is really a short-hand way by which we<\/em> designate a multiplicity of individual things that we recognize as belonging to the same type.\u00a0 In short, literally speaking, there is no liberty; <\/em>there are only liberties. <\/em>However, these liberties, while distinct from one another, are nevertheless mutually supporting components of a culturally specific political-moral tradition or system. <\/em><\/p>\n Although Americans, regardless of ideology, not infrequently speak as if our love for liberty is unique or \u201cexceptional,\u201d this is not the case. Admittedly, Americahas historically had a distinctive <\/em>commitment to liberty. But the notion that America is \u201cexceptional\u201d or unique by virtue of having been the only nation in all of human history to have been founded upon a proposition <\/em>asserting the equal liberty of all human beings implies, among other things, that up until the emergence of America, even the most civilized societies that had ever existed were as unfamiliar with liberty as the most primitive.<\/p>\n In reality, our liberty is not some timeless abstract principle of which anyone can have an immediate and comprehensive grasp.\u00a0 It is a long standing Western tradition that Americans inherited <\/em>directly from England.\u00a0 The American colonists were, after all, the descendants of Englishmen.\u00a0 Eventually, after quite some time, they decided to emancipate themselves from the Mother country because they convicted it of having violated, not their \u201cnatural right\u201d to liberty, but the liberties that they believed were their birthright as Englishmen. <\/em>\u00a0Edmund Burke\u2019s love of liberty was second to none, and Burke was an adamant supporter of the American colonists.\u00a0 Yet in his Address to the British Colonists in North America<\/em>, he reminded them that the \u201cvery liberty, which\u201d they \u201cso justly prize above all things, originated here,\u201d inEngland.\u00a0 The colonists and their antagonists inEngland were \u201ca people of one origin and one character,\u201d of the same \u201cblood,\u201d who \u201cshould be directed to the rational objects of government by joint counsels, and protected in them by a common force.\u201d<\/p>\n Against \u201cthe delusive plausibilities of moral politicians\u201d (431), those \u201cmen of theory\u201d (433), those \u201cnew doctors of the rights of men\u201d (424) who would \u201centangle\u201d society \u201cin the mazes of metaphysic sophistry\u201d (423), Burke articulated a very different vision of liberty.\u00a0 He writes that \u201cfrom Magna Carta to the Declaration of Right,\u201d it had been the custom of the inhabitants of the British world to \u201cassert our liberties as an entailed inheritance <\/em>derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity [.]\u201d\u00a0 This conception of liberty as an \u201centailed inheritance,\u201d Burke is quick to note, \u201cis without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right\u201d (428 emphasis original).<\/p>\n In A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America<\/em>, Burke notes that our \u201ccivil freedom\u2026is not\u2026a thing that lies hid in the depth of abstruse science.\u00a0 It is a blessing and a benefit, not an abstract speculation [.]\u201d\u00a0 He continues: \u201cFar from any resemblance to those propositions in geometry and metaphysics which admit no medium, but must be true or false in all their latitude, social and civil freedom, like all other things in common life, are variously mixed and modified, enjoyed in very different degrees, shaped into an infinite diversity of forms, according to the temper and circumstances of every community\u201d (288).\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Burke never denies that there are <\/em>natural rights.\u00a0 What he denies is that they are relevant to life in civil society, or to the art of governing.\u00a0 \u201cThe extreme <\/em>of liberty (which is its abstract perfection, but its real fault) obtains nowhere, nor ought to obtain anywhere; because extremes, as we all know, in every point which relates either to our duties or satisfactions in life, are destructive both to virtue and enjoyment\u201d (288 emphasis original).\u00a0 Our liberties, because they \u201cvary with times and circumstances\u201d and \u201cadmit of infinite modifications,\u201d are incapable of being \u201csettled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle\u201d (442).\u00a0 When we are discussing politics and government, it is \u201cthe civil social man, and no other\u201d with which we are concerned.\u00a0 That is, man as he exists or allegedly exists in a \u201cstate of nature\u201d is of no relevance.\u00a0 As Burke reminds us, we \u201ccannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and civil state together\u201d (441).\u00a0<\/p>\n The liberty to which we are attached resides within our institutional arrangements. \u00a0The rule of law, a government divided against itself, and the wide dispersion of power and authority that these affect do not \u201cembody\u201d or \u201cexpress\u201d our liberty; they constitute<\/em> it.\u00a0 Of course, these arrangements are not now nor have they ever been without defects.\u00a0 But what this in turn means is that far from possessing the metaphysical perfection of the principle of the natural right to liberty, our liberty is always more or less.\u00a0 It is a tradition<\/em> of liberty with which we are in love, and because every tradition is open ended or incomplete, this tradition to which we owe, not just our love for liberty, but our very identity, forever hints at ever new possibilities of which we can avail ourselves in strengthening that liberty.\u00a0<\/p>\n Although we today tend to reference the Constitution and <\/em>the Declaration of Independence as our founding documents; although we tend to exalt both <\/em>documents as repositories of our liberty, there is a very good reason why it is the Constitution and not the Declaration that is regarded as the supreme law of the land.\u00a0 The Declaration, at least insofar as its most memorable and frequently quoted passage is concerned, gives expression to a universal conception of liberty that, because of its inherent abstractness, is incapable of governing specific conduct.\u00a0 Whether in a court of law or a legislature, invocations of a natural right to liberty are singularly out of place, and if they are made at all, it is not before long that they give way to more particular considerations.\u00a0 The Declaration is silent with respect to how societies\u2014including American society\u2014ought to arrange its institutions.\u00a0 The Constitution, in glaring contrast, not only delineates those arrangements; in a real sense, it is <\/em>identical with them. \u00a0<\/p>\n It really is no exaggeration to say that the Constitution, with its division of numerous powers, each \u201csovereign\u201d in its own demarcated arena\u2014each a \u201ccheck\u201d upon the authority of the others\u2014articulates a fundamentally different kind of politics than that conveyed by the Declaration.\u00a0<\/p>\n With its soaring rhetoric concerning self-evident natural rights to liberty and the rest, the Declaration belongs to what the conservative English philosopher Michael Oakeshott once called \u201cthe politics of faith.\u201d\u00a0 Within this context, \u201cfaith\u201d need not, and almost always does not, <\/em>pertain to religion.\u00a0 Rather, the proponents of this style of politics share in common the conviction that there are timeless, self-subsistent ideals toward the realization of which societies must be forever laboring.\u00a0 To put it bluntly, proponents of this vision believe that it isn\u2019t just permissible but mandatory that governments deploy at least some portion of its citizens\u2019 resources, whether it be their wages, time, or even their very lives, in the service of perfecting<\/em> these ideals on Earth.\u00a0 What Oakeshott calls \u201cthe politics of faith\u201d earlier generations of conservatives, like David Hume, referred to as \u201cthe politics of enthusiasm.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The problem with this style of politics, however, is that it is a standing repudiation of the liberty for which Americans have historically been willing to shed to the last both their own blood as well as that of anyone who would dare attempt to deprive them of it.\u00a0 Even if there really are self-evident moral ideals that anyone and everyone can effortlessly grasp, once governments, whether of their own volition or on the part of the majority of their citizens, proceed to coerce<\/em> other citizens to serve ends that are not of their own choosing, liberty has been denied.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Constitution, on the other hand, signifies what Oakeshott calls \u201cthe politics of skepticism.\u201d\u00a0 Robust metaphysical assertions and grandiose visions of the sort embodied in the Declaration are nowhere present in the Constitution.\u00a0 It resolutely refuses to specify goals or ends for those within its jurisdiction to pursue.\u00a0 Its language is somber, even dry.\u00a0 The Constitution presupposes what all disciples of liberty have always known: dreams of perfection and great concentrations of power are mutually antagonistic.\u00a0 In other words, nothing more or less than great skepticism is called for when attending to the claims of governments to do anything other than enact and enforce only those laws that protect liberties while remaining indifferent to the uses that citizens make of those liberties.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n Though it is understandable that the lovers of liberty should want to elevate their beloved as high as she can go, they would be well served to consider that the higher the altitude, the greater the loss of oxygen.\u00a0 The object of our affections\u2014liberty\u2014is not some abstract, universal ideal.\u00a0 It is a concrete, particular reality.\u00a0 This <\/em>is the point that I have been trying to make.\u00a0 If we love her as much as we claim to love her, then we must hold her close.<\/p>\n Thank you.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This was originally delivered as a speech at the Liberty Political Action Conference in Reno, Nevada on September 15, 2011. \u00a0 Introduction The phenomenon that has arrested our attention and that is the object of our concerns is something that we call \u201cliberty.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, if our political universe can be said to consist of ideas,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n