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.

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.

How could our lives be progressively informed by a view of the human being we know to be abstract or incomplete or, in the most important respects, not true? Locke’s description of the human individual was less an account of what we really are by nature than a project to free us from our natural and social limitations. It was Locke’s intention to make his view of the human individual true, to reconstruct human life with that liberation in mind. He wanted the abstract human being to become real, to become the basis for the description of human life, even of religion, marriage, and the family. He seems to have been almost as optimistic as our pragmatist Richard Rorty in his belief that human life could be improved slowly but, eventually, quite dramatically—could be made freer, more prosperous, and less cruel—through the right kind of redescription.

Who can deny that with every passing generation Americans understand themselves more and more as individuals—and not as friends, parents, children, creatures, and citizens? Those other understandings do not disappear of course, but they are increasingly compromised by individualism or, as Harvey Mansfield and Carey McWilliams have put it, by “creeping libertarianism.” Justice Kennedy expressed this view clearly in his opinion justifying the striking down of Texas’s antisodomy law: limitations on liberty that one generation finds tolerable the next finds tyrannical. It would have astonished even Jefferson, the most libertarian of the founders, that anyone would regard laws against sodomy as tyrannical. Our sophisticates no longer regard the march of our history as one toward equality but as one toward individual liberty. And the mainstream consensus in our political life—the one joining Clinton Democrats and Schwarzenegger Republicans—is an increasingly comprehensive libertarianism in both our economic and our social or cultural lives.

Based on Kennedy’s argument for autonomy or individual liberty in his sodomy decision, the reasonable assumption is that the Court will soon declare laws prohibiting same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Our framers and political leaders for almost our entire history did not imagine for a moment that such laws were tyrannical. But perhaps we really might regard Kennedy’s activism as the result of unveiling the unintended but real implications of the Lockeanism embedded in our constitutional principles. For us, judicial review has become a mechanism for deducing the consequences of a purely individualistic self-understanding, of “liberty” defined as the viewpoint of the liberated individual. “As the Constitution endures,” Kennedy concludes, “persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.”

The Court, as Carey observes, uses the idea of the “living constitution” to transform our fundamental law in accordance with “a regime quite different from that established by the Constitution.” The Court aims, gradually for the most part, to impose on our way of life a consistency that our founders did not choose and would not have imagined to be good. According to Carey, the Court’s mandate arises from an interpretation of the Declaration of Independence that is both Lockean and “teleological.” That statement of American principle is seen to embody “promises” and “goals” that can be advanced effectively only through judicial review. The Court’s unique task consists in “leading the American people to a greater awareness and realization of the values that gave birth to the nation.” The Court leads us to improve ourselves by advancing in the Lockean project of redescribing ourselves as sovereign individuals with progressive perfection. The Court aims at the theoretical greatness our Constitution and its framers themselves lacked.

. . . .

America’s Divided Soul

There is no denying the strong discontinuity between the personal experience of oneself as a creature and the experience of oneself as a modern or Lockean individual. But there is also no denying that Americans are a singular people because we have been and still are strongly moved by both experiences. Tocqueville noticed that our genius consists in our ability to understand ourselves differently on different days of the week. Most days Americans are largely self-reliant individuals in restless pursuit of happiness. But on Sunday they engage in a “sort of solemn meditation.” That is because “the soul finally comes back into possession of itself and contemplates itself.” At times, especially on Sunday, “the American is torn away from the small passions that agitate his life and the passing interests that fill it, he at once enters into an ideal world in which all is great, pure, eternal.” On Sunday, Americans are at rest because they believe that God provides and so all is well with them as beings that are essentially souls. They believe, contrary to Locke, that their transcendence is not really in their own hands—even as during the week they provide plenty of evidence of their transcendence as middle-class beings, as free beings that work. We see this sort of complex or divided thinking, for example, in the very philosophic Little House on the Prairie books. Pa usually torments the women in his life with his restless desire to be on the move; but on Sunday the little girls don’t even get to play.

The greatness and misery of the divided soul of the American Lockean Protestant might be one reason that American Protestant Christianity has characteristically not been very leisurely or playful. It may be why our Protestants have believed that the Bible is against drinking not only on Sunday but on every other day too. They have believed that moderation is impossible for sinful mortals. That belief may be the result of mixing two unrealistically extreme views—Lockean individualism and Augustinian Calvinism—of human nature or the human condition.

But it is also true that that mixture has done us much good. As a result of our Lockean pursuits, we have achieved unprecedented health, wealth, and freedom. It would be a Lockean exaggeration to believe that our success has not made us happier in some ways. Locke may be as responsible as anyone for the fact that American government and American technology are the envy of the world. People still flock to the nation where free beings can and must work not merely for survival but in pursuit of happiness, and where people always seem to be becoming more and less Christian. And our ability to understand ourselves in different ways at different times has been our way of dealing with the problem of pursuing happiness but never actually enjoying it. Insofar as we pursue happiness, we understand ourselves as individuals defined by calculation, consent, and anxious unease about the future. But we have then been able to use the good things we have acquired as individuals to enjoy happiness as citizens, family members, friends, lovers, and creatures. When we are successful we think that Locke teaches us the truth about ourselves, but when we are happy we understand ourselves in some other way. There is a lot to be said for this plan—although not from the perspective of harmonious self-understanding. However, it seems to be working less and less well.

For example, few people seem to take the distinctiveness of Sunday seriously anymore. Our creeping libertarianism—the fact that the Lockean self-understanding is informing our lives more and more—means that we are less able to be happy, to engage in soulful self-contemplation, or to be in love in the present. Our sophisticates demand that Sunday be treated like every other day of the week; they even believe that the Constitution demands the end of all such faith-based privileging. Yet what we think of as our enlightened secularism or secular humanism is really promiscuous Lockeanism. The biggest intellectual error of our time is too readily to identify a genuinely rational view of human nature with the view of the Lockean individual.

Meanwhile, as Locke and Tocqueville predicted, the unhappy excesses of our secular individualism have generated an impressive Christian response. Religious Americans, especially but not only our evangelicals, are becoming increasingly “whole life” or more assertively countercultural Christians. They do not look for God’s guidance only on Sunday but every day and about all things. The family’s whole life centers on the church, which is the foundation of both human responsibility and human happiness. These evangelicals wholly support our political guarantee of religious liberty. But as much as our libertarians, they use their freedom to work to heal the divided soul Tocqueville describes. As Christians they do not feel alienated in America because they believe most deeply that ours is a Christian nation. Our evangelicals’ most important error is the same as that of our libertarians: both identify enlightened secularism with promiscuous Lockeanism. Thus, both contribute to the quite misleading impression that our culture war plays out between secular humanists and fundamentalists and that it is a war to the death, because no principled compromise is possible.

Neoconservatives often say that the true American conservatives are Lockeans. They defend the regime according to nature against relativists and historicists on the Left and traditionalists on the Right. James W. Ceaser and Daniel DiSalvo have even concluded that the Republicans should no longer call themselves neoconservatives but rather members of the “neo–natural right” party. In my view, the truly conservative response to this one-sided thinking is not merely to affirm Christian or traditional America but to wonder who in America really lives according to nature.

A nation lives contrary to nature, surely, if it is unable to perpetuate itself by bringing a sufficient number of new citizens into the world. The European nations are endangered by their strangely unnatural dearth of births. We Americans are still replacing ourselves in sufficient numbers. But as Phillip Longman explains, our fertility rate is dropping or remaining low among all our ethnic groups. Immigrant groups, it seems, cannot be relied upon to have lots of kids for more than a generation or two. “Fertility rates,” Longman goes on, “correlate strongly with religious conviction. In the United States, fully 47 percent of people who attend church weekly say that their ideal family size is three or more children. By contrast, only 27 percent of those who seldom attend church want that many kids.” If Americans were not more religious than the Europeans, our demographic facts would also be dangerously contrary to nature. “High fertility rates,” Longman continues, “correlate strongly with support for George W. Bush.” Looking back to 2000: “if the Gore states had seceded from the Bush states and formed a new nation, it would have the same fertility rate, and the same rapidly aging population, as France.” Our religious conservatives are the reason we are not fading away like France. That fact is as important for our national security as any. Surely there is some deep connection between our nation’s singular acceptance of its global military responsibilities, our singular acceptance of familial responsibilities, and our singularly strong religious beliefs. Conservatives defend America as a place where the human being in all his or her complex natural distinctiveness can flourish, where we can be free, rational, familial, social, political, and religious beings. Liberals, conservatives believe, too readily view our freedom as freedom from the responsibilities that correspond to our natural purposes. From that standpoint, conservatives defend human nature against the unrealistic, unnatural, and ultimately self-destructive abstractness of the Lockean individual.

We need an understanding of liberty that incorporates what is true and rejects what is false in both libertarianism and evangelical Protestant Christianity. That comprehensive understanding cannot come from Locke: he cannot serve as the referee, because his principles are too closely associated with one of the teams. It cannot even come from the thought of our founders: they had the wisdom of statesmen, but it was based to some extent on theoretical confusion. An appeal to our tradition by itself cannot cure the excesses of our all-too-theoretical time. Murray and Brownson suggest that our founders built better than they knew because they were more influenced by the Thomistic or natural-law tradition than they knew. But that possibility has to be defended theoretically. Our healing American task may be to show that Thomism is the true realism, that it reconciles reason and revelation through a realistic account of the whole human being.

Excerpt from Defending the Republic: Constitutional Morality in a Time of Crisis, Essays in Honor of George W. Carey (ISI Books, 2008).

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