Remembering who and what we are

On Remembering Who We Are: A Political Credo

by M.E. Bradford


Beware lest any man tempt you through philosophy and vain deceit. —Colossians 2:8

Quae est enim istorum oratio tam exquisita, quae sit anteponenda bene constitutae civiti publico jure et moribus? (“For what speech of theirs is excellent enough to be preferred to a state well provided with law and custom?”) —Cicero’s De Re Publica, I.3

Despite the fact that they were men of prudence who recognized the limits placed upon their disposition to inventiveness by an America already in place and by the dynamic of the American experience prior to 1787, there is strong evidence that at least some of the Fathers of this Republic aspired to play the role of lawgiver and founder when they gathered in Philadelphia to draft a constitution for the United States. This ambition was, in their discourse, associated with its classical prototypes: Solon and Cleisthenes of Athens, and Lycurgus of Sparta. According to the ancient authorities, these worthies, without the aid of the gods, operating from the authority of their own character, reason, and judgment, made over their respective communities more or less from the ground up and gave to them new constitutions. Fortunately, the United States of America was not “invented” in imitation of these august examples. The impulse to earn the immortal fame of the statesman by devising and implementing paradigms insofar as it possessed James Madison, James Wilson, and Alexander Hamilton was thoroughly restrained: in some instances by the local and ancestral pieties of less “ambitious” Framers, such as Rutledge and Sherman; in others by their own anticipation of the likelihood of total failure for the entire enterprise should too many of the states be offended by what they had made. On several occasions, individual delegates made it clear that the Convention was not at liberty to draft the finest constitution that the best of men might enjoy, and quoted Solon himself, as he appears in Montesquieu, on the advisability of giving the people no “better” than what they would endure. They did not quote this passage derived from Plutarch’s biography of the Athenian hero out of embarrassment or regret. Rather, they invoked the authority of the most famous classical lawgiver to distinguish his role from their own.[1] Solon had been a cautious lawgiver. They would be even more cautious than he. Politics, they were saying, even in the preparation of a fundamental law for a federal union of states that already exist, is not an exercise in dialectics. The statesman is not the same thing as the philosopher. And when the roles are confused, there is likely to be trouble. The statesman’s world is closer to that of the rhetorician, who rarely argues from definition and never speaks in character without first determining the boundaries that must shape and confine his discourse if it is to be of profit to men living in space and time; and also closer to the world of the man of law who always begins his work by “examining the cases.” To elaborate upon these distinctions with reference to contemporary American political thought which may be identified as either conservative or libertarian is my self-imposed task on this occasion. Returning to the original model for an American politics as I have come to understand it, I am here to insist that efforts to institute the best regime that we can imagine or to lever away at our inherited polity because it falls short of the measure established in some a priori political principle (harmony or tranquility, justice, equality, efficiency, liberty) are likely to result in an arrangement far less agreeable than the customary and inherited pattern of imperfection. And to make the corollary assertion that by working from the non-negotiable”given” of our political identity in our efforts at self-improvement, the “genius” of our particular tradition, we have more expectation of transcending mere prudence and performing service in which our descendants may take pride. My teaching is against the authority of the philosopher qua doctrinaire; in praise of the inhibition and limitation which come from remembering who and what we are, politically speaking.

Though like most scholars, I am somewhat uncomfortable with speaking in my own person, I describe what follows as a political credo. The conventional protective screen of expository intent will not in these circumstances answer to my purposes. As adversary, I postulate the outer reaches and the familiar rigid applications of theories of natural law and natural rights as they press upon the fabric of our present political situation as a people. Yet I do not attempt to draw lines of demarcation between my own reflections and the thoughts of other men concerning “the good city” because I might erect a “house of words” superior and more tempting to the envious fancy of the contemporary electorate than are their finest conjurations. Indeed, I have little interest in that line of inquiry. Instead, as is my habit, I proceed from felt provocation and anxiety and am present to plead a case. Doubting the future prospects of a cherished but fragile social and political order in which I claim a portion by inheritance, I am outraged by the harm done to it by several decades of tinkering conducted on the authority of some theory of natural rights. From such a background, I am more and more frequently moved to ask the political questions. Following Cicero’s Scipio Africanus in the De RePublica (who is for the political philosophers the progenitor of the general position which I am defending), I speak as a rhetor, a legalist, and a republican (small “r”)—though (as I have made obvious elsewhere) more in the tradition of 19th century American Democrats than that of the party of Hamilton, Rufus King, William Seward, and Mr. Lincoln. I refuse to take seriously as proper to the discussion of political practice speculation on the rights of man apart from their embodiment in a specific polity. Or to think of founders and their paradigms apart from such modern illustrations of the breed as Hitler, Mao, and Lenin. But the open parochialism of this testimony does not betoken a lack of conscious affinity between my view of the American Republic and certain other regimes whose histories specify the kind of politics which I am here to recommend to your favor.

Aristotle

Aristotle, observes Robert Nisbet, in commenting on thePolitics, “did not have an ideal of government so much as he had an ideal of the relation between government and thesocial order. What was important was, not whether government was monarchy, oligarchy, or democracy, but whether the family, private property, legitimate associations and social classes were able to maintain themselves free of incessant political invasion or domination irrespective of what form of government existed.” In the same chapter, speaking of Edmund Burke’s passion for liberty, he observes that for the great traditionalist “there are no rights…that are not grounded in the social order.”[2] English liberties, says Burke, are “an estate especially belonging to the people of this Kingdom without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right.”[3] Three European republics not planned by any local closet philosopher, not established to protect anything beyond prescriptive historic rights, and not at all threatening in their posture toward the social order which they were organized to protect are Iceland, Venice, and the United Netherlands. I will say a word concerning each as it sheds light on the characteristic virtues of earlier American politics before the time of overemphasis on natural rights.

Ancient narratives report (and archeology confirms) that the age of first Viking settlement in Iceland ran from A.D. 870-930. Prior to that time, there had been a few visitors, and a small group of Irish hermits had resided on that great island of fire and ice. But it was the Norwegians who finally possessed the legendary Thule as a place of their own where Harold Fair-Hair (Harfagri), King of Norway, and his descendants, who were subjecting the semi-independent communities of the various Viking chieftains to a more vigorous overlordship, could be escaped and old free ways preserved. Naturally, given the fierce independence and heroic code of these archaistic immigrant chieftains, lack of law and scrupulous watchfulness against all infringements on one’s personal rights or those of one’s kinsmen produced in the “Settlement Age” too much violence, too many disputes over authority and territory. Therefore, by general agreement a national assembly or Althing was called for June of 930, where Ulflgotr the Emissary, who had been dispatched to Norway to study the ancient law of his people, proposed a version of that code suited to Icelandic circumstances for general adoption by the thirty-six gothar (chieftains) and their thingmenn (freemen). It was agreed at that time that future sessions of the Althing (modeled on the old Norwegian tribal assemblies) would be held each subsequent midsummer, that their parliament would have legal and legislative authority over the four local Things, and that a chosen law-speaker should preside over these proceedings and, during a term of three years, recite from the great Law-Rock of Thingvellir all of the law to the people as preserved in his memory. Lex est Rex was the motto of these people: “with law shall the land be built up, and with lawlessness laid waste” wrote one of their many poets. Yet an essential feature of their law was its relation to memory: memory as preserved genealogically by Ari the Learned in his Landnámabök, of the first 400 families and their descendants, defined the Icelandic identity; a memory of all the freeholders, living in voluntary submission to self-imposed regulations, not a memory of kings, emperors, or philosophers.[4]

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