My purpose here is to consider the place of John Locke in American political life. I will follow the wisdom of George Carey in explaining why Locke forms the foundation of part of us, but not all of us. Our founders had a complex view of human nature, in which Locke played his part. But we—especially our intellectuals—have become more Lockean over time, coming to believe in effect that our founders lacked our theoretical greatness because their view of liberty was not as expansive or individualistic as ours. We have come to accept too uncritically the view that our nation has progressed historically by embracing principled individualism more consistently over time.

Carey writes as a conservative American, and he distinguishes his conservatism from the progressivism he finds in neoconservatism. This does not mean that he is simply a traditionalist. He is one of the most astute and meticulous defenders of The Federalist Papers, a set of essays that, among other things, defends the innovation that was the American Constitution. He sees that the American solution is strong on institutional remedies for destructive factional strife and is in some ways, in the interest of success, a bit weak on virtue. But that weakness is mitigated by our federalism; the cultivation of virtue, according to our founding thought, was to be left to our states and churches, and the scope—including the moral reach—of our national government was originally quite limited. For Carey, a free and healthy society is constituted by a mixture of tradition and innovation that is determined through prudence; and for the most part he would trust the good judgment of the American people. For him, the political centralization of our time—especially through judicial activism—is above all a crisis in self-government. The people have been seduced into surrendering the power the Constitution had given them to govern themselves.

Carey’s account of the intellectual influences on our founders is shaped by an antitheoretical or at least antireductionist impulse. True enough, the founders were avid readers of John Locke; but they also owed much to Christianity, common law, and a variety of thinkers both ancient and modern. The greatness of our framers, from this view, lies in their lack of theoretical “greatness.” They differed from the French in not having attempted to impose a consistent theoretical vision on their nation. As Tocqueville explained, the Americans were fortunate enough to have acquired democratic institutions without having undergone a revolutionary social upheaval; and our founders had no intention of applying Lockean or individualistic principles to every area of life. So the greatness of America—our ability to reconcile democracy or equality with liberty and to avoid the apathetic withdrawal of individualism that is the prelude to despotism—depends on our fortunate inheritance of aristocratic or relatively traditional institutions. Our political founding did not level such foundations as free, local political institutions, religion, the habit of voluntary association, and the family. Part of our good fortune is that we Americans do not think of these inheritances as aristocratic: we see localism, churches, the nuclear family, private philanthropy, and so forth as not only compatible with but indispensable for the flourishing of democratic life.

Brownson and Murray

Close, at least, to Carey’s view of the founding is the great tradition of American Catholic thought that begins with Orestes Brownson’s The American Republic (1865) and ends with John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths (1960). According to Brownson, our framers were Lockeans in theory; and he criticizes their theory for its unfettered egoism and “political atheism.” Their theory offers no adequate account of the citizen’s loyalty to his country—indeed, no adequate account of human duties or responsibility at all. And so, in theory, our framers held no argument against the Southern states’ assertion of the same “right of secession” that caused the Civil War. They had in fact no argument against the individual’s “right of secession” from all the ties that bind him to other human beings and to God.

Brownson admits that our framers did not think the states possessed a right to secede from the union, but he adds that they gave no compelling theoretical argument against that right. They did not in fact give any compelling argument for the individual’s loyalty or responsibility to anything higher than himself. According to Locke, sovereign individuals are like sovereign states—and so government is a treaty or compact among sovereign individuals. Sovereign states can withdraw from treaties without expecting to be invaded, just as sovereign individuals can withdraw their consent from the ties that bind them when these no longer serve their self-interest. The argument used by the Confederate states to withdraw from the union is based on our framers’ Lockean theory. And the argument is in fact destructive not only of all government but of all social life. Brownson sees clearly what Lockean theory would do to marriage, the family, friendship, and churches, not to mention to nations and citizens.

According to Brownson, Lockean theory produces an abstract being having few of the social qualities that characterize real human beings. That theory cannot do justice to the phenomenon of human loyalty, especially to that of our gratitude to all the sources of our being. As Roger Scruton explains, the priority of multifaceted familial or communal loyalty over individual liberation is the basic conservative insight. Brownson contends that American liberalism—the liberties protected by our written Constitution—depends on the prior existence of our unwritten or providential constitution, of our invincibly conservative tradition. Providence, in this view, is what we’ve been given. As our various debts and inheritances, it is something we can change only by doing destructive violence to our particular identity as a people.

Our framers, Brownson observes, were less theorists than they were statesmen. As statesmen, they built well upon what they were given; they consulted human nature, our history, and our particular circumstances in constructing our political institutions. So they relied less on Lockean theory than on common law, our Christian and classical inheritances in thought and political experience, and the particular democratic genius of the American people. Their practice was better than their theory because of its complex mixture of diverse elements; this mixture, according to Brownson, produced a result better than any of these elements considered alone. Brownson affirms the framers’ conclusion that the American Constitution—both written and providential—was the unprecedented result of undeniable political progress. But he denies that that progress can be explained solely or even mainly in terms of the individualistic theoretical innovations of Locke.