Unwritten Constitutionalist
To understand American conservatism, read Orestes Brownson.
In The Conservative Mind,
Russell Kirk identified Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803–76) as a
foundational figure of American conservatism. Brownson emerged from the
poverty and obscurity of backcountry Vermont. With less than a year of
formal education, not only did he become a master of English prose, he
also taught himself Latin, French, Italian, and German. His wide scope
of learning enabled him to critique the latest trends in politics,
philosophy, and theology with a gravity few American contemporaries
could match. A prominent journalist, he was engaged in virtually all of
the major political and religious controversies of his time. Lord Acton
declared Brownson the most intellectually formidable figure he
encountered during his visit to the United States.
Brownson’s voluminous writing,
particularly on political theory, provides a clear and coherent set of
philosophical principles that transcend his own times and have direct
relevance to our predicament. He believed in applying the genius of the
federal Constitution to revitalize America’s political life; restoring
republican self-government while fending off rapacious private interests
intent on plundering the public purse; and rebalancing state authority
and individual liberty under the principle of man’s relational
personhood, as revealed in his multi-dimensional social, familial,
religious and economic life.
For Brownson, there was only one test:
truth, and truth is not negotiable. Right reason, rigorously applied, is
imperious. Brownson insisted that the premises of an argument be
pressed to their logical conclusion. And he combined an impressive
command of formal logic with an extraordinary capacity for literary
expression. That is why his great body of work not only provides a
wealth of insight into our past but can serve as a vital resource for
modern conservatives.
The American conservative project has
always required more than just theoretical individualism and the magic
of the marketplace. Too many conservatives, however, make conservatism
in America a doctrine rather than a practice grounded in the country’s
unique political culture. They have overrelied on sources like
free-market theory, the abstract principles in the Declaration of
Independence, or simply the post-World War II role of the United States
in attempting to maintain global hegemony for democracy.
But the conservative’s task must be to
forge a theory of the American constitutional order that, in the words
of Brownson, “secures at once the authority of the public and the
freedom of the individual—the sovereignty of the people without social
despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy.” And no one defends
the achievements of American constitutionalism in the face of
ideological assault better than Brownson. His biography itself is one of
recovery from political madness.
♦♦♦
Between the 1820s
and 1840s the young Brownson underwent a series of intellectual and
spiritual conversions: from Congregationalism to Unitarianism, then
atheism, while at the same time, he aligned himself philosophically with
the New England Transcendentalists. A man of the left, he pragmatically
enlisted Christological imagery for social and political reform,
channeling his formidable energies into radical movements that called
into question the distinction between labor and capital.
In 1840, Brownson campaigned vigorously
for President Martin Van Buren’s unsuccessful bid for reelection. That
same year he published “The Laboring Classes” in the Boston Quarterly Review.
Brownson predicted a coming class struggle between workers and owners. A
victorious working class, he claimed, would pave the way to a
revolutionary new social order that would eliminate inheritance, special
privileges, and the hateful wage system.
Brownson’s explosive essay uncannily anticipated the arguments Karl Marx would employ eight years later in The Communist Manifesto.
He was, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed, a “Marxist before Marx.” His
extremist ideas on political economy got a hostile reception even as the
Democratic defeat of 1840 administered an electoral education.
President Van Buren’s loss to the Whig candidate, William Henry
Harrison, left Brownson permanently disillusioned with partisan
politics.
Having been “mugged by reality,” he
revolted against the overblown promises of “popular democracy” and the
notion that the voice of the “sovereign people” was the voice of God.
The people had been easily duped, he thought, by the faux populism of
the Whigs. Salvation, Brownson was coming to understand, would not be
found in the leveling condition of democratic equality. Over the next
four years, he argued himself into conservatism in politics and
religion. In rejecting socialism, which he would come to label “social
despotism,” he developed a new appreciation for the idea of limited
government.
Yet at the same time, he refused to
embrace the premises of radical individualism being powerfully expressed
by the sundry radical liberals of his day. In wrestling with the
problems of labor and capital, wealth and poverty, Brownson decided to
reexamine and embrace an older, deeper, and richer intellectual
tradition that justified life and liberty in civil society. He studied
the great Western thinkers, particularly Aristotle and the Christian
philosophy of Augustine and Aquinas, and he found answers in the
classical tradition of natural law.
By 1844, Brownson’s intellectual and
religious transformation was complete. He converted to Roman
Catholicism, the religion of the then-despised and poverty-stricken
Irish immigrant minority. He severed his relationship with the Democratic Review, an influential journal of what was then “liberal” opinion, and started Brownson’s Quarterly Review.
He wrote as an uncompromising Catholic apologist, a stance that, at a
time of intense anti-Catholic sentiment, weakened his popularity and
damaged him professionally.
This change, though, wrought intellectual
rewards. While rejecting the politics of the left-wing French
philosopher Pierre Leroux (1798–1871), Brownson, inspired by
Catholicism, nonetheless embraced Leroux’s principle that all persons
live in communion with God, man, and nature. He transformed this “life
by communion” philosophy into a foundational justification for
constitutional government. Brownson argued that every man is, by nature,
a relational person who exists with others to work, to love, and to
pray. These higher ends of man provide the principles that limit
government.
Now a realist regarding politics,
Brownson was sobered as to its possibilities. He came to see political
life as reflective of a people’s history, as well as their deeper
cultural, philosophical, and theological assumptions about man, society,
and God. True political science, he believed, fully embraces the study
of government as a fact—what is—and as a right, what ought to be.
Brownson’s expansive aim became to
articulate the providential or unwritten constitution of the United
States—which is to say, what the country had been given by way of
religious, cultural, social, legal, and economic inheritances. The
distinctiveness of America’s written Constitution didn’t stand on its
own but memorialized, as it were, society’s unwritten norms and mores.
To elucidate them, Brownson stressed, required deference and humility.
In developing this argument, Brownson
rejected the social contract teaching which held that an unattached mass
of people creates, ex nihilo, government and a body of law on
the basis of self-interest. Something must first determine the people:
before the state there is a common history, culture, language, religion,
and law that form a people into a body, making them capable of pursuing
a common political project. This—the providential constitution—enables
the actual organization of the state. Attempting to replace or discard
the unwritten constitution was “state suicide,” Brownson said.
That each American was a citizen of a state government and
a national government reflected the preexisting political settlement of
the colonies. Constitutional federalism was a unique outgrowth of this.
For Brownson, the constitutional framework of 1787 properly expressed
the dialectical form of national and state political organization in
America. Brownson urged that the national (general) and state
(particular) governments need not be competitors: as he envisioned them,
they would meet, in a complementary way, the natural requirements that
move man from the local community outward to larger spheres of
interaction.
As a fact, government is largely the
product of historical development. This Brownson captures in his concept
of “territorial democracy,” by which he meant the possession of a land
by a historically formed people. The sovereign people of the United
States are the territorial people of the United States, who have
authorized, through the federal Constitution of 1787, a dual system of
government, state and federal. This concept had profound implications
for the expansion of slavery into the territories, secession, and the
justification of the Union cause in the Civil War.
On the premises of the sovereignty of the
territorial people of the United States, Brownson declared the Southern
secessionists in the Civil War to be rebels against legitimate
constitutional authority. There is not one square inch of territory in
the state of California, New York, Texas, or any other state, North or
South, that does not belong to the sovereign people of the United
States, and there is not one square inch of territory in the United
States—except those areas designated as territories subject to the
United States—that does not equally belong to the American people as
citizens of the state in which they reside.
Writing in The American Republic
(1865), his masterwork on political theory, Brownson was crystalline on
the subject of federalism. Through the Philadelphia Convention of 1787,
he said, the sovereign territorial people of the United States designed a
unique division of governmental authority rooted in the distinctions
between the American people’s general and particular interests and
relations. In other words, in American federalism, there is no supremacy
of the states over the general government. Nor is the general
government supreme over the states. “In their respective spheres neither
yields to the other,” Brownson writes in The American Republic.
“In relation to the matters within its jurisdiction, each government is
independent and supreme regard to the other, and subject only to the
convention”—the convention being the federal Constitution.
♦♦♦
There were
dangers to American constitutionalism in consolidation or, at the other
extreme, disintegration. Still another danger was confusion about the
content of religious freedom. Such freedom is no mere concession to
tolerance, he insists. Why? Because religious freedom is grounded in
man’s true end, which is supernatural—a higher end than government in
the natural order. Legitimate republican government recognizes and
supports the citizen who is naturally more than a citizen—he is a
creature who desires to act in ways that manifest his understanding of
God.
The good news is that the religion provisions of the
Constitution’s First Amendment afford the best legal security for
religious freedom in the world because they recognize, as Brownson said,
that “The civil authority is incompetent to discriminate between truth
and error.”
Brownson’s defense of religious liberty is much deeper
than protection of the individual conscience. He defended the freedom of
the church to propose its truth, teach and govern its members, and to
speak freely to the social and political order that it inhabits. Liberty
of conscience, Brownson said, can only be recognized and upheld when
the liberty of the church is included within the broader protections of
religious liberty.
The perennial foe is activist government, whether in the
grip of a particular religious sect or, as today, dominated by an
intolerant ideology that pushes religious institutions from the public
square and violates their autonomy when they act from an ethics that
transcends human concerns.
Another conceptual distinction that Brownson considered essential to constitutionalism was that between res privata, private affairs, and res publica,
public affairs. In a republic, officials dedicate themselves
exclusively to public matters and refrain from intrusion into private or
personal matters. We limit government so that our free choices in
family, religious, and economic decisions are uniquely our own.
Unfortunately, the republican regime can abuse its powers
in an anti-republican manner or at the expense of the public purse.
Brownson in his day scolded Congress for serving as a tool of powerful
railroad interests: “Louis XI was not weaker against Charles the Bold
than is Congress against the Pennsylvania Central Railroad and its
connections, or the Union Pacific, built at the expense of the
government itself. The great feudal lords had souls, railroad
corporations have none.”
Brownson’s defense of civil society was built on the
notion that the human being advances through his relationships with God,
with other human beings, and with nature in the form of property, all
of which bind the human person and shape his existence. American
constitutionalism serves the common good by facilitating what Brownson
called communion of man with man (society), man with property
(economics), and man with God (religious life). This means that what
really inspires our loyalty to the constitutional order is its defense
of the dignity of our relational personhood, not mere self-interest.
Brownson considers the signature elements
of modern political thought—autonomous individualism, self-interest as
an organizing principle of politics, dislocated reason, and
secularism—to be detours from the truth about the human person. In
“Liberalism and Socialism” (1858), he takes on the two chief modern
ideologies, socialism and liberalism. Both, he says, reduce man’s social
and political existence to abstract doctrines of self-sovereignty or
egalitarianism without fully reckoning with the complex requirements
that undergird free and democratic societies.
Insofar as socialism has any truth, he
argues, it has to do with the fact of human solidarity: we are, after
all, equal by the divinely created law of nature. But socialism of
necessity calls for the state to invent new forms of morality and
enforce them against the freedom of the people. Reforms for the working
class should be consistent with solidarity, Brownson believed, but
without overriding each person’s need for family, property, political
society, and religion for his integral development. He saw the madness
in undoing these associations in pursuit of an egalitarian society.
The problem with continental European liberalism, on the
other hand, was its constricted view of the individual and the state as
the only two entities needed in a free and decent regime. The autonomous
individual armed with a bevy of rights before the state, Brownson
warned, was likely to be swallowed by a collectivism made possible by
the elimination of various types of communities that traditionally stood
between the individual and the state. The consequence would be
individuals de-linked from each other, seeking refuge within the
tutelary modern state.
As political scientist Peter Lawler has
noted, this analysis aligns Brownson with Alexis de Tocqueville’s
reflections on the arts of associations that stave off an omnicompetent
state by attaching people to one another in shared pursuits. Brownson
saw a tragic side to modern democracy: its tendency to reduce the person
to an individualism that could not encompass the relational
institutions of freedom. Absent the proper contexts for its exercise,
freedom loses to equality’s siren calls to re-link man through the
ministrations of the modern state.
♦♦♦
Liberty is at the heart of what Orestes Brownson called “the
American Idea.” Brownson appreciated John Locke’s natural-rights
conclusions, but he broke with Locke on the key issue of the origin and
ground of government and political authority. In rejecting the Lockean
social contract, Brownson held instead, with the classical philosophers
and medieval schoolmen, that society and government were equally
natural. Society and government were, that is, equally governed by
natural law—though the concrete social and political order of any given
people was shaped by history and providence.
By insisting on the authority of the
sovereign people, as expressed through the federal Constitution; by
reaffirming the moral authority of the institutions of civil society,
especially religious institutions; and by rejuvenating the
countervailing authority of state and local government to confront
abusive federal power, Americans can forge a united front to protect,
preserve, and extend personal and political liberty. Brownson saw that
task as nothing less than the historical mission of America. As he wrote
in The American Republic:
Its idea is liberty, indeed, but liberty with law, and law with liberty. Yet its mission is not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the state, which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual … The Greek and Roman republics asserted the state to the detriment of the individual freedom; modern republics either do the same, or assert individual freedom to the detriment of the state. The American republic has been instituted by Providence to realize the freedom of each with advantage to the other.
This was true in Brownson’s day, and it’s equally true in our own.
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