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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Liberalism, and in particular American liberalism, has now achieved the purposes which it set for itself. It has freed men by eliminating the political as dominant in their lives, and by relegating it to the level of supplementary social action. All that is called for now by liberalism's original prescriptions is the maintenance of that freedom. The ancient categories of analysis and action which liberalism worked out, the concept of the struggle of oppressed middle class or downtrodden worker are no longer applicable in the West, and especially not in America. The satisfaction of the social needs of man, as liberalism understood them, is now the reserve of quiet bureaucracies in labor union and corporation headquarters, of clerks and lobbyists, and of lawyers pleading before administrative agencies in Washington, all going about their business largely ignored by those who through dues and contributions provide them livelihood. The political world has been closed off from the ordinary citizen and, in a word, the ills of Western man and, all the more so, of Americans can no longer be translated into political terms.
1 Those whose boyhoods were passed in the twenties will recall their youthful reaction to the sound of fenders crunching in a corner car collision, and the exuberant dash to the scene on the certainty of being a ring-side spectator at the inevitable fisticuffs between the drivers of the two cars. The more rational institution of automobile insurance has produced a more civilized, less traumatic, and considerably less colorful exchange of identities and names of insurance companies.
2 The freedom Eric Fromm describes is not of course the Christian freedom I refer to in this essay, but nonetheless the psychological disorientation in our society is brilliantly depicted by him. Escape from Freedom (New York, 1941)Google Scholar.
3 Leviathan, Ch. 29.
4 Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. IV.
5 Leviathan, Ch. 13.
6 Ibid., Ch. 29.
7 Ibid., Ch. 30.
8 Ibid., Ch. 18.
9 Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. I.
10 Leviathan, Ch. 16.
11 Essential to the operation of this system is the existence of a feeling among those interested that if a particular decision is taken with which they are not completely sympathetic, nonetheless the difference is not a crucial one.
12 Federalist, LI.
13 While classical liberal theory follows the principle of quod omnes tangit (see the description of the translation of this private law doctrine of Roman law into the political process in Gaines Post, “A Roman Legal Theory of Consent, Quod Omnes Tangit in Medieval Representation,” in Wisconsin Law Review, January 1950, pp. 66–78), it also follows the principle that the decisions reached in the political process need be only statements of the “sense of the meeting.” Locke observed that the “variety of opinions and contrariety of interests” would make real unanimity impossible. Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. VIII. The majority acts for the whole but in so doing it certainly expresses a sentiment that is essentially of the whole.
14 The governing of a very small town, as in parts of New England where the town meeting is still the center of the decision-making process, is one point at which it is possible to speak of the activity of the whole man, undifferentiated and self-represented, in politics. This kind of government can be personal, rather than abstract, government. This of course does not in itself make it better government or worse than the abstract government of larger entities. New England small town government affords an opportunity for personal expression, for the ideal kind of human activity toward which constitutional theory tries to drive us. But we are still good and bad human beings, and to be able to express ourselves is to bring into play all those complicated human forces and to effect all the intricate human designs with their selfish and charitable intentions and their disordered and ordered effects which are usual in human action. It is, true, the one place where it is possible for the unorganized and indeed the unevoked interest to have a share in the shaping of the community. But this is just another way of saying what it is. Though such government might be something like that which some of the ancients thought ideal — small, and the like nonetheless—given the changes which have taken place in the idea of the proper relationship between the individual and the political process since the classical period, especially with the development of the constitutional idea of the profession of politics, I think much confusion would be avoided if such personal government could be thought of as non-political. The Progressives’ desire to transform political institutions from the community to the national level by introducing persons into the process has its post-War expression in such things as the “neighborhood” movement in large metropolitan areas. To the extent that such movements ignore the distinction between the manipulation of abstractions which is politics and the interaction of persons in small groups which is not politics, they are as unrealistic now as their antecedents were two generations ago.
15 Of course, though the task of the leader in any institution is to simplify, to translate the visionary into the routine, the unprecedented into the common-place, the culmination of the efforts of genius and vision into the tools of ordinary minds or into the simple social instruments usable by an ordinary bureaucrat, Congressman, or lawyer, nonetheless a society is better for individuals and for persons if there are geniuses and saints in positions of leadership, just as it is better for having geniuses and saints simply walking among us. John Stuart Mill perceived that Bentham's dictate about the equality of the views of human beings in the political and moral order was not correct, that there are degrees of quality and that some men are in fact pigs. His projected solutions, such as proportional representation and the extra vote for university graduates, were, I think, ill-conceived both in terms of modern liberal premises about the proper nature of the political institutions in a society and in terms of the great Christian and liberal ends of politics: to make the social arena, and not the political, the central one for human interaction, to encourage men to act upon each other directly and not indirectly through the manipulation of abstractions.
16 Works of Love, tr. by Swenson, David F. and Swenson, Lillian Marvin, with introduction by Steere, Douglas V. (Princeton, 1946), pp. 71–72Google Scholar.
17 “To what end is the whole government of civil life if not to assure the exterior peace of contemplation.” Maritain, Jacques, Art and Scholasticism (New York, 1930), p. 80Google Scholar.
18 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. 3, Ch. 37. See Adler, Mortimer J. and Farrell, Walter, “The Theory of Democracy” in The Thomist, 01 1942, p. 146Google Scholar.
19 I recognize that one can very well raise the question of how the public interest is to be represented in all this system I am sketching; of how, to put it another way, that “public philosophy” that Walter Lippmann has so superbly discussed is to be reintroduced as a measure of our social decisions. It would be possible again to resort to constitutional and institutional tinkering, as General DeGaulle has done, in an effort to save a place for the representation of the public interest. But like J. S. Mill's analogous efforts in the nineteenth century I suggest that these too are doomed to failure. The principle of “one man, one vote” has made each one of us the center of the political process by allowing us to choose irrationally as well as rationally, as a total act of our social selves, those who will run the governmental mechanism; by this personal act we infuse the political process with our values. There is no going back from this principle of ultimate popular determination of our political climate. Whether our values are in harmony with the moral law, whether it is possible for those we choose to act in terms of a public interest rather than simply as reflexive responders to pressure group force will depend, first, on whether those endowed with the political talent or who assume political responsibility will have the imagination to open up the political profession to men who are skillful in influencing the judgments of the citizen and whose values are those of the public philosophy, and, second, on whether by personal action the defenders and advocates of the moral law, the representatives, so to speak, of a “disinterested interest group,” will have been able to help men turn their thoughts from themselves to the good of others and, indirectly, to the good of the community.
20 See his “Where Do We Go From Here?” in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, August 4, 1957, pp. 7ff.
21 Roelofs, H. Mark, The Tension of Citizenship (New York, 1957), p. 176Google Scholar.
22 (New York, 1956), p. 11
23 Garrigou-Lagrange, R., The Three Ways of the Spiritual Life (London, 1938), p. 244Google Scholar.
24 lbid., derived from Summa Theologica, II–II, Q.184, a.2 ad.3.