Cicero, the greatest of Roman republicans said it was our duties (not our rights) that defined us

The Essence of Freedom

By Bradley J. Birzer

Our rights as Americans can never be separated from our duties. But we must also ask, what is our liberty for?

We live in an age of determinism, especially when it comes to academics and academia. There’s little choice, it seems, and everything is driven by some autonomous and often abstract forces, progressively (often) and inalterably. In the late 19^th century, it was biology (Darwin), economics (Marx), or sexual urges (Freud); in the first half of the twentieth century, it became ideology (socialism, communism, and capitalism); and, in the late twentieth century, it became race, class, and gender and, more recently, the environment.

While I would never deny that biology, economics, sexual urges, race, class, or gender or the environment do not influence us, I would rather argue that each does shape us and, at times, delimits us, but we are also free, moral agents. I would also argue that life is messy. Sometimes, we are rational and sometimes we are passionate. Sometimes, we are calculating and sometimes we are spontaneous. In short, I would say that we are—especially as individuals—incredibly complicated.

For nearly 3,000 years, we have asked and debated: what is the human person? What is the relationship of man to man; and what is God? Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Jefferson were all concerned with these questions.

What liberty allows, therefore, is moral agency; it is the willingness to take responsibility for one’s choices, for good and for ill. We must consider ourselves, importantly, morally capable and morally culpable.

Our rights, though can never be separated from our duties. But, we must also ask, what is our liberty for?

In his 1790/1791 lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, founding father James Wilson (one of the few to sign the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and was also radically anti-slavery) asserted—with no taint of shyness—“Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind.”

The government best suited (but the most difficult to maintain) was a republic, a form that embodied and balanced the best of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The republic means “the common good,” “the good thing,” “the public thing.” It reflected the natural law as well as the order of the soul.

Like most of the Founders, Wilson thought the right to property was the highest right—but, by property, he didn’t mean stuff. He meant self.

“Character may be considered as a species of property; but, of all, the nearest, the dearest, and the most interest. . . . By the exertion of the same talents and virtues, property and character both are often acquired: by vice and indolence, both are often lost or destroyed. The love of reputation and the fear of dishonour are, by the all-gracious Author of our existence, implanted in our breasts, for purposes the most beneficent and wise.”

Expressing a typical Revolutionary-era sentiment, Wilson continued. “As a man is justified in defending, so he is justified in retaking, his property, or his peculiar relations, when from him they are unjustly taken and detained.”

In attendance at these lectures was our first president, George Washington, who said, in his first inaugural:

I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my Country can inspire: since there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity: Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained: And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.

It’s worth repeating: there are no rights without duties. Cicero, the greatest of Roman republicans said it was our duties (not our rights) that defined us. Still, in the words of George Washington, there was a caution or two. Just what makes a people worthy of liberty and of republicanism? Can they sustain the balance of rights and duties; can they follow the eternal rules of right and order?

Most of the Founders were trepidatious about our prospects as a republic. One of the least remembered—but at the time, most interesting of the Founders—was Mercy Otis Warren, author of a three-volume history of the American Revolution, published in 1805.

Though the name of liberty delights the ear, and tickles the fond pride of man, it is a jewel much oftener the play-thing of his imagination, than a possession of real stability: it may be acquired to-day in all the triumph of independent feelings, but perhaps to-morrow the world may be convinced, that mankind know not how to make a proper use of the prize, generally bartered in a short time, as a useless bauble, to the first officious master that will take the burden from the mind, by laying another on the shoulders of ten-fold weight.

And,

If this should ever become the deplorable situation of the United States, let some unborn historian in a far distant day, detail the lapse, and hold up the contrast between a simple, virtuous, and free people, and a degenerate, servile race of beings, corrupted by wealth, effeminated by luxury, impoverished by licentiousness, and become the automatons of intoxicated ambition.

Here, Mercy Otis Warren sounds very much like Livy in his lamentation for the end of the Roman Republic:

To the following considerations, I wish every one seriously and earnestly to attend; by what kind of men, and by what sort of conduct, in peace and war, the empire has been both acquired and extended: then, as discipline gradually declined, let him follow in his thoughts the structure of ancient morals, at first, as it were, leaning aside, then sinking farther and farther, then beginning to fall precipitate, until he arrives at the present times, when our vices have attained to such a height of enormity, that we can no longer endure either the burden of them, or the sharpness of the necessary remedies.

Cicero, already mentioned, compared the republic to a painting.

Thus, before our own time, the customs of our ancestors produced excellent men, and eminent men preserved our ancient customs and the institutions of their forefathers. But, though the republic, when it came to us, was like a beautiful painting, whose colours, however, were already fading with age, our own time not only has neglected to freshen it by renewing the original colours, but has not even taken the trouble to preserve its configuration and, so to speak, its general outlines. For what is now left of the ‘ancient customs’ on which he said ‘the commonwealth of Rome’ was ‘founded firm.’? They have been, as we see, so completely buried in oblivion that they are not only no longer practiced, but are already unknown. And what shall I say of the men? For the loss of our customs is due to our lack of men, and for this great evil we must not only give an account, but must even defend ourselves in every way possible, as if we were accused of capital crime. For it through our own faults, not by any accident, that we retain only the form of the commonwealth, but have long since lost its substance.

These are words from roughly 50 B.C., but there’s no reason why one couldn’t state them in A.D. 2021.

The most important advocate of the American Revolution (and fiercest opponent of the French Revolution) was the grand Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke. He, too, wrestled with rights and duties, with liberties and obligations.

Taking it for granted that I do not write to the disciples of the Parisian philosophy, I may assume, that the awful author of our being is the author of our place in the order of existence; and that having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactick, not according to our will, but according to his, he has, in and by that disposition, virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us. We have obligations to mankind at large, which are not in consequence of any special voluntary pact. *They arise from the relation of man to man, and the relation of man to God, which relations are not matters of choice. On the contrary, the force of all the pacts which we enter into with any particular person or number of persons amongst mankind, depends upon those prior obligations. In some cases the subordinate relations are voluntary, in others they are necessary—but the duties are all compulsive. . . .Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. . . . If the social ties and ligaments, spun out of those physical relations which are the elements of the commonwealth, in most cases begin, and always continue, independently of our will, so without any stipulation, on our part, are we bound by that relation called our country, which comprehends (as it has been well said) “all the charities of all.” 39 Nor are we left without powerful instincts to make this duty as dear and grateful to us, as it is awful and coercive. Our country is not a thing of mere physical locality. It consists, in a great measure, in the antient order into which we are born. We may have the same geographical situation, but another country; as we may have the same country in another soil. The place that determines our duty to our country is a social, civil relation.

While the American Revolution was one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the world, it did, rightly, have a context. And to do it and our Founders justice, it is just and right to consider it within the larger framework of Western civilization. The Founders, as a whole, were liberally-educated men, attending college at age 14, after proving fluency in Greek and Latin.

Editor’s Note: This is part one of a presentation that Dr. Birzer gave at Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota, on October 21, 2021. The second essay may be found here. It was the inaugural lecture of the Forum on History and Ethics series. He would especially like to thank President Griffiths, Provost Hanson, Dean Kenley, Professors Justin Blessinger and Jody Bottum, and Jon Lauck.]

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