Murray echoes Brownson by noting that our framers were “building better than they knew.” It was providential that they were more indebted to the Christian natural-law tradition than they knew. They thought they were liberated Lockeans but in fact they did not really grasp the nerve of Locke’s thought, which returns all human relationships to questions of power. The absence of an appeal beyond the sovereign power of the state was the theory of the French Revolution; on its basis, those revolutionaries attempted to transform all human reality. Religion, for example, was to become merely civil religion, and any human claims to be free from or transcend political sovereignty in the direction of God and the good were dismissed as illusions.

The French, Murray acknowledges, were better—or at least more consistent—theorists than the Americans. They brought political modernity closer to its logical conclusion, which he holds to have turned out to be twentieth- century totalitarianism. But the Americans, because of their inadequately acknowledged debt to pre-Lockean thought, separated state and society or state and church in a way that recognized and effectually protected the freedom of the church. Murray admits that our leading framers, particularly Madison, tended to be rather anti-ecclesiastical for Lockean or individualistic reasons. But they still acknowledged that human beings are free from political duties because they are free by nature to discover their duties to their Creator. For their part, political leaders are incompetent to direct or control any religious institutions that would come into existence in response to those duties. Our framers, finally, agreed with St. Thomas Aquinas that we are inclined by nature to know the truth about God as social beings, not as isolated individuals relying only on our idiosyncratic consciences. Murray finds our framers’ inheritance of this basically Christian understanding of the limits of government and the purposes of human life to be most providential. The idea of freedom of religion—in order to sustain itself over time—has to be understood as freedom for religion, for acknowledging the responsibilities of beings that exist most fundamentally not as sovereign individuals but under a transpolitical, providential, and judgmental God.

Brownson and Murray agree that our framers understood themselves primarily as Lockeans but also that their work was less guided by the individualist’s thought than they believed. Brownson pays them the compliment of having been theoretically radical as thinkers but prudently conservative as statesmen. Murray sees them as sort of Thomistic Lockeans; their understanding of Locke’s modern thought was more compromised by traditional debts than they knew. They built so well because they averted their eyes from the voluntaristic and nihilistic depths of modern thought. Their providential—or we might just say lucky—theoretical confusion or in-betweenness, their lack of theoretical greatness, is the cause of our nation’s practical greatness.

Carey reaches more or less the same conclusion: The Federalist Papers are rarely praised for “metaphysical insights or theoretical coherence,” and “those concerned with the ‘deeper’ questions concerning the origins and purposes of the state, the limits of law, the meaning of justice, and the like, find even the major works of the American tradition wanting.” Theoretical types who study our founding, Carey adds, often fill its theoretical “void” with Locke, but they always do it at the expense of simplifying the complex and contradictory currents of thought that really informed our founding statesmen. For example, Louis Hartz’s “single-theory explanation of the American political tradition” as “a tradition that embraces as its ‘civil theology’ the principle tenets of Lockean liberalism—rationalism, secularism, and individualism” uses the philosopher’s theory to dismiss as unreal genuine historical continuities, contradictions, and ambivalences. The truth, Carey contends, is that the most “confusing” accounts of the founding era are the ones that are “also probably more faithful to reality.” That means that our founders were almost completely unaffected by the French “radical enlightenment” and that they lacked the zeal for “ideological” consistency that fueled the French pursuit of a “radical reordering of society.”

Because our founding cannot be reduced to a single theory, Brownson and Murray conclude that our affirmation of the work of our framers today cannot be merely or even mostly traditional. We cannot appeal to their theoretical wisdom because their theory lacked coherence, and we cannot appeal uncritically to their word as that of “our Fathers” because they themselves based their authority more in reason than in tradition. They dismissed as unworthy of a free people anything beyond a secondary reliance on what Federalist 49 calls “the veneration which time bestows on everything.” We must come to terms with the truth or falsity of Lockean theoretical claims precisely because we live in such untraditional times. The American tradition is too attenuated and too confusing for us to avoid being in some sense theoretical men and women. When we affirm the political wisdom of our founders against theoretical individualism we must have some realistic or true view of human nature in mind.

The Strangeness of Our Theoretical World

Brownson and Murray add that the sense in which we live in a theoretical time is strange. Nobody—or almost nobody—believes that Locke teaches the truth any more. Since Rousseau, nobody really has believed that human beings might exist freely and independently in some state of nature or that government, the family, and all social life are merely products of rational, self-interested consent. As Murray explains, the partial truth of Darwinianism is the recovery of the Aristotelian insight that we are by nature gregarious, social animals and that our extreme efforts to replace the natural world with one consciously constructed for individuals makes us more miserable than anything else. Commonsensically, nobody who thinks that sociobiology is true could also think the Lockean idea of the autonomous individual is true. But our world is filled with sophisticated libertarian sociobiologists, Darwinian feminists, and so forth. We are more theoretical in orientation—or less political or statesmanlike—than our leading framers, but this does not mean that our thought is deeper or less confused.

The reason our libertarians quite incoherently claim to be sociobiologists as well is because they refuse to acknowledge, or at least to reflect on, the fact that human sex or eros is quite different from chimp sex. They refuse to accept the evidence that our eros or love is one of the basic points of human distinctiveness, because then they would have to admit that we are more than individuals. Our erotic longings—our longings for completion—point us beyond ourselves toward other humans, the truth, and God. But the individual, as individual, claims to be complete in himself (or itself). And so he (or it) connects to others in terms only of self-interest, not of instincts or longings that would cause him to forget his interests, to forget how free or autonomous he thinks he is. The libertarian sociobiologist actually exaggerates our difference from the gregarious chimps. But the strongest argument for libertarianism is that we are not able to take the advice of the sociologists and become more content with being animals, abandoning our self-centered rebellion against nature. The reasons for the incoherence of libertarian sociobiology actually show us that neither libertarianism nor sociobiology, neither Locke nor Darwin, could possibly teach the whole truth about being human.

Brownson and Murray both observe that the history of America is marked by a gradual but real infusion of seemingly true Lockean principles or self-understandings into all areas of human life. The tendency of conservatives today, including George Carey on occasion, is to blame turn-of-the-century progressive reforms for betraying our Constitution with an alien injection of German historical thought. And a few conservatives, including George Carey on occasion, blame Abraham Lincoln for “derailing” the rather atheoretical sobriety of our framers by redefining our nation in terms of a permanent reform toward egalitarian perfection. In these two views, our Fathers’ devotion to natural rights or natural law was changed into a rather gnostic effort to transform the world according to an imaginative vision. But Murray and Brownson see this change as having been less radical: the Lockean theory that informed our framers has had the uncanny power to liberate itself from its various non-Lockean constraints. Our framers, we can see in retrospect, may have been naïve in believing that the full practical impact of Lockean theory could be contained over time just as it had been contained in their own complex—if not theoretically “great”—thought. They thought, in effect, that they had put Locke in a Locke box. But in no respect had they contained effectively the right of secession.