Nathan Schlueter argues for the presence of natural law in America's founding documents,

Natural Law Liberalism Beyond Romanticism

by Nathan Schlueter

To reject the presence of natural law in documents of the Founding era

 is to embrace both cynicism and romanticism.

Nathan Schlueter argues for the presence of natural law in America's founding documents, not as any one "version" of natural law theory, 

but instead as what C.S. Lewis called "the Tao"

--the basic orientation of human reason to discovering basic goods.

Arguments on the nature of liberalism and America seem to go in cycles, and this recurrence suggests something of the seriousness and complexity of the issues involved. In the 1980s it was George Weigel versus David Schindler. In the 1990s it was Harry Jaffa versus Harvey Mansfield. In the 2000s Robert Kraynak redirected the dispute with his Christian Faith and Modern Democracy. And in our own decade Patrick Deneen has revived the argument with eloquence and energy.

In his most recent Public Discourse piece, Deneen accuses me of "wishful thinking" for arguing that the natural law is a constituent part of America's founding principles. Without citing any evidence, he claims that "the founders said many things that directly contradicted the natural law." And he writes that "claims about whether or not the founders knew and used the natural law tradition are hard to refute, since they are philosophical versions of the dog that didn't quite bark." Against this, he asserts that "the founder's explicit statements, not their inchoate non-statements, clearly reflect [modern] liberalism's assumptions."

These are remarkable claims, for the truth is exactly the opposite. Is Deneen seriously questioning the prominent role that natural law played in the founding era? I quoted the "explicit" appeal to natural law in the Declaration of Independence. I might also have quoted a vast number of sermons, speeches, and writings of the founding era. Consider, for example, the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, the world's first and oldest written constitution, and the pattern for the other constitutions of the revolutionary period.

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Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com