For more than a century, what’s called ‘liberalism’ in the United States consists of an overlay of ‘German’ or historicist ideas on a natural-rights constitutionalism. Contemporary American liberalism is a theoretical and rhetorical justification of the regime of commercial republicanism, with a substantial, Bismarck-style ‘welfare state’ added. In theory usually and in practice almost always, this liberalism combines two elements. First, there is a respect for such core principles as the equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—which, in the original formulation, are held to be principles held to be universally valid, independent of political or social conventions. Second, there is a congruent set of political and social conventions (“inventions of prudence”), designed to secure the enjoyment of those principles in practice. These conventional agreements typically include the rule of law, culminating in a written constitution; a political economy regulated but not dictated by the national government; and a federal government characterized by the separation and balance of powers. American liberalism esteems self-government—government by consent understood as reasoned assent. The institutions this liberalism favors recognizes the sovereignty of the people, not the sovereignty of government.
More pertinently for present purposes, American liberalism asserts in its fundamental law certain civil rights intended to parallel and secure natural rights. The civil rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, ranging from freedom of religion to federalism, give practicable legal form to universally valid but perpetually vulnerable natural rights.
American liberalism has been complicated if not rendered incoherent by an overlay of ‘German’ thought. The Hegelian concept of a ‘recognition’-driven historical dialectic—whether based upon class, race, or some other ‘identity’—exists in tension with natural right. German idealism goes beyond the prudential securing of natural rights, conceiving of political ideas as objects of achievement and construction. This constructivism lends itself to social activities defined as movements and to an ‘activist’ and bureaucratic government. In politics ‘from below’ and politics ‘from above,’ self-determination replaces self-government, very often replacing such moral and civic virtues as prudence and moderation with individual and group self-assertion. Utilitarianism, pragmatism, ‘class analysis’ forms of socialism, and nationalism number among these auto-determinist ideologies. All of them have influenced contemporary liberalism in complex ways.
This later form of liberalism may sharpen the tensions between ruler and ruled. American bureaucracy or ‘corporate liberalism’ has an ambivalent effect on citizens and liberal institutions. Statism or quasi-statism in a liberal setting very often secures rights but does so at the expense of the vigorous citizen participation genuine self-government requires. Statism threatens to make popular sovereignty very attenuated in practice, as acknowledged by many prominent historians and social scientists, including Daniel Rodgers, Robert H. Wiebe, David Plotke, Stephen Skowronek, and Samuel Huntington. Hegelianized liberalism runs up against the Hobbesian paradox: really to secure equality, do we not need one ruler—or perhaps a well-trained few—to make the rest of us civilly and economically equal, and to keep us that way? If so, how secure are we against that one, or those few rulers? Can the Crolyean promise be kept? Can (faux-)Hamiltonian/ ‘monarchist’/neo-Hegelian means really secure ‘Jeffersonian’/popular/democratic/’Whiggish’ ends? And how will such ends transform commercial republicanism, if rights are reconceived as founded upon ‘History’ instead of nature?
Martin Luther King
King avails himself of many of he principles and practices of American liberalism. However, his thought changes its emphasis during the course of his career, in part responding to changing circumstances. In the 1950s he spoke and acted as if he expected his movement to bring the South to racial justice ‘Whiggishly,’ by bringing local citizens to solve local problems. By the early 1960s, he turned to the federal government and the nation at large (through skilled use of the news media) in order to force reforms upon white Southerners. (In this, he recapitulates the movement of American politics generally from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.) By the end of the decade, King sounded much more like a radical than a liberal, although it is fair to say that he never sounds illiberal, dictatorial.
Several of King’s major initiatives in the South had a distinctly liberal, even Whiggish, flavor. He demanded voting rights for blacks in order to get rid of the need for statist protection (TOH 198). After winning those rights, he spearheaded a voter registration drive (Garrow, 303). The Southern Christian Leadership Conference-sponsored citizenship schools (Garrow, 309) featured not only the political equivalent of ‘assertiveness training’ but self-criticism by blacks of habits unconducive to freedom (STF 173); self-criticism, insofar as it isn’t the phony, ultimately statist sort practiced in Maoist China, goes well beyond ‘German’ autodeterminism to the original idea of self-government. King engaged in forthright partisanship in defense of civil rights (TOH 303) and in coalition-building with other interest groups (e.g., “If the Negro Wins, Labor Wins,” TOH). His critique of the Vietnam War as a statist act of violence (TOH 233) belongs to the Whig tradition, as inflected by King’s own combination of Christian and Gandhian pacifism.
King repeatedly cites the Declaration of Independence (although he mistakenly supposed that Jefferson mean ‘all white men are created equal’ (WDWGFH 77). Not to be judged by the color one’s skin but by the content of one’s character is of course an excellent restatement of the core Jeffersonian thought. Against race prejudice, King cites Jefferson (and, behind Jefferson, Algernon Sidney) in declaring eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man: This means that prejudice interferes not only with the self-government of blacks but that of whites, as well (STL 11; TMOM 35).
In his much-neglected “An Appeal to the President of the United States for National Rededication to the Principles of the Emancipation Proclamation and for an Executive Order Prohibiting Segregation in the United States of America” (May 17, 1962), King cites the American liberal principle of equality before the law, connecting the current civil rights struggle to the principles of the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration, now to be more fully brought into practice—”a democratic heritage so painfully won” (MLKT 294). “Enforced segregation is but a new form of slavery—an enslavement of the human spirit and dignity rather than of the body”(MLKT 296). By the mid-1960s, however, King’s understanding of the Constitution is decidedly not Jeffersonian but Crolyean; he advocates use of the supreme law of the land and due process clauses to break state laws on segregation. In this document also holds up the example of Woodrow Wilson—a Crolyesque move, to be sure—as an example of presidential leadership (MLKT. 311-312).
This notwithstanding, King does not directly endorse ‘German’ liberalism in principle. Famously, in the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” King presents an old-fashioned American liberal account of the distinction between conventional and natural law. Conventional law is unjust if “not rooted in eternal law and natural law” (WWCW 82). Nonviolent resistance against an unjust conventional al asserts the Thomistic and Lockean right to revolution; King may very well have known that some writers link Whiggism to Thomism. Also in the Letter, King cities the liberal principle of toleration: “Unity has never meant uniformity. If it had, it would not have been possible for such dedicated democrats as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, a radical such as Thomas Paine and an autocrat such as Alexander Hamilton to lead a unified American Revolution”(WWCW 133). that is, in his most famous call for a kind of revolutionary and civil war on behalf of American liberal principles, King eschews political sectarianism and vanguardism, and ignores the historicism or ‘progressivism’ of ‘German’ liberalism.
It is in the means King advocates for fighting this war that he adds something new—although not necessarily something contradictory to—the American political repertoire. Nonviolent coercion is “a weapon unique in history”; “a sword that heals” (WWCW 26). This is in part the theme of Christian warfare—bringing not peace but the sword (STF 32, 67). But he adapts it for specific political purposes as well as spiritual ones. Nonviolent coercion requires a tough mind and a tender heart—the wisdom of serpents and the innocence of doves (STL 1). It is a politically savvy expression of agapic love, the love of redemptive goodwill that is neither erotic nor philiac/affectionate. The significance of nonviolent coercion in America is twofold. It is a means of asserting the right to revolution without the anachronistic means of an armed militia movement, or the self-destructive means of rioting, ‘urban guerrilla’ action, and so on. It is also, perhaps more importantly, potentially a way of solving the core problem of rights-based government, a problem no ethnic group has as much reason to see clearly as African-Americans. How to reconcile the protection of rights with the need for consent” If ‘consent’ means reasonable assent, there is no problem, in theory. But what if the majority of the people are unreasonable, prejudiced? Or what if they are reasonable, but do not assent to the protection of minority rights because they reasonably calculate that such assent might tear the society apart? This problem has been with us since the Founding. Nonviolent coercion depends upon mass support but not majority support. A program of nonviolent coercion can be well designed to swing majority support in its direction. Can nonviolent coercion be the practicable ‘missing link’ between secure enjoyment of rights and the need for majority consent?
King’s political Christianity is decisively influenced by the thought of Gandhi. Although much ink has been expended in showing the influence of Christianity (specifically, Quakerism) on Gandhi’s thought, such exercises are ethnocentric; Gandhi has had far more influence on Christianity than Christianity had on Gandhi. King’s theme of “soul force” overpowering physical force, thanks to “the ultimate morality of the universe” which, in the end, rewards righteous action (TOH 257), comes right out of Gandhian Hinduism.
This is where things get interesting. The theme of the progressive ‘ensoulment’ of the world is of course not only a Gandhian theme but a theme of German philosophy, of idealism, as mentioned above. The bigoted Alabama sheriff “Bull” Connor “didn’t know history. He knew a kind of physics that didn’t relate to the transphyics that we knew about” (TOH 281). This is Gandhian. It is also transcendentalist, and thus a theme of American ‘Germanism’ starting at its source, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is likely that King came to German philosophy at Boston University, where he studied the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, qualified it with the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr (both profoundly influenced by German thought) and also encountered Hegel—whose dialectic is explained in precisely the terms that would galvanize King’s attention: the master-slave relationship—as well as Marxism and ‘personalism’ or Christian Kantianism (Garrow 64).
Thus, indirectly King does indeed strike many characteristic chords of ‘Germanism.’ He does so more insistently or at least more openly in his later career. The call for a “revolution in values,” rejecting orientation in terms of things and embracing orientation in terms of persons (TOH 241) is a Kantian motif. The emphasis on “psychological freedom” or noumenalism goes with that call, while the demand that “the Negro must rise up with an affirmation f his Olympian manhood” (TOH 246) more nearly resembles such later philosophers in the German tradition as Marx and Nietzsche. (But was Nietzsche an advocate of nonviolence? Consider Nietzsche’s Aphorism 284 in Human, All too Human, “The Wanderer and His Shadow”: “And perhaps there will come a great day on which a nation distinguished for wars and victories and for the highest development of military discipline and thinking, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices on behalf of these things, will cry of its own free will: ‘we shall shatter the sword’—and demolish its entire military machine down to its last foundations.”) King’s worries about technology—that our ends means have outrun our ends, that industrialism and automation are threats (TOH 211), are standard themes of German Romanticism, repackaged in King’s century by Heidegger. They are also quite Gandhian. In fact, the interplay between German philosophy and Hinduism dates at least to Schopenhauer’s The Fourfold Root and may be seen in Nietzsche, as well.
King consistently thinks in the ‘German’ terms of constructivist dialectic (as distinguished form the analytical dialectic of the Greeks). Nonviolent coercion for “social revolution” (Garrow 418) or “social transformation” (TOH 225), for “a change as far-reaching as the American revolution” in opposition to America’s “inner core of despotism” (TOC 17) seen in its persistent racism, depends upon a dialectic in action, a dialectic that exploits the ‘antithetic’ stupidity of a Bull Connor to achieve a desired ‘synthetic’ end. Further, the end itself will be a synthesis of capitalism and communism, the individual and society (TOH 251). This Hegelian constructivism parallels Gandhian/Hindu syncretism (as seen, for example, in King’s relaxed attitude toward Marxist allies, very much in accordance with Gandhi’s example).
Capitalism is materialistic and in King’s opinion tends toward atheism or the worship of the self (STF 25, STL 93). Communism is equally materialistic and atheistic, as well as relativist and tyrannical (STF 73-74). Their synthesis, seen in the social democracies of Scandinavia (Garrow 364), “a modified form of socialism” (STF. 382) enforcing “economic justice” (STF 367), is really a German-idealist ensoulment or progressivist spiritualization that subordinates material means for spiritual ends.
King thereby breaks with the older American liberalism, with its emphasis (seen in the tenth Federalist, in Jefferson’s writings, and elsewhere) on the broad definition of property advanced by Locke: property not only as external possessions but natural faculties. This is the core of self-government in Locke, and King is right to suspect it of materialism; Locke’s emphasis on human property clearly undermines tradition, theistic ideas of the world and indeed of the human mind itself, as rightfully the property of the Creator-God.
King’s revolution would both fulfill American liberalism, the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation, but ‘synthesize’ them into what he conceives as a much grander vision. Pacifism, for example, goes beyond the principles of the Declaration, as King says (STF 18). The only just war is nonviolent coercion. This war must be America’s firstly genuinely civil war, fought within civil society with ‘civil’ or nonviolent methods. It is, however, to be supplemented by the genuinely civil methods of public argument and political organizing. King opposed Jim Bevel’s unrealistic ambition of using nonviolent coercion to overthrow Alabama Governor George C. Wallace (Garrow Ch. 6). “Direct action is not a substitute for work in the courts and the halls of government” (WWBW 42). Nonviolent coercion is indeed coercive, and can too easily comport with decidedly uncivil discourse. Dr. King was an eminently prudent man. He made errors, but never descended to crankishness. Although theoretically problematic, King’s appropriations of disparate and even contradictory ideas were often fruitful in practice. He is easily the most politically successful American pacifist, and one of the most successful American social activists.
At the end of his career, King was increasingly radical, and quite isolated from the Progressive/New Deal type of liberalism seen in the Johnson Administration. Had he been granted a full lifespan, it is impossible to say where he would have taken his thought and his movement. It is reasonable to think that the American Left has missed him—a real link to a genuinely heroic past, and a real link to American religiosity.
Malcolm X
Malcolm X’s political thought is a moving target. An autodidact, but much smarter than most, his thought was still maturing when he was murdered. His father was a Garveyite, and Garveyism has a somewhat attenuated but still discernible connection to American liberalism; with its doctrines of self-help and race-consciousness, it might be described as an African-American Whiggism. The Whig theme of anti-statism sounds early in the Autobiography: “If ever a state social agency destroyed a family, it destroyed ours…. [T]hey looked at us as numbers and not as human beings.” (A 22) This succinctly expresses opposition to a neo-Hobbesian strategy of equality through atomization, and might easily be quoted in a polemic by some latter-day Jeffersonian ‘conservative.’ The Garveyite advocacy of business ownership by blacks, for blacks, echoes the Whig esteem for the self-sufficient farmer (A 275). Malcolm X’s advice to foreign countries sounds much like some of Jefferson’s strictures on the menace posed by British international bankers: “Don’t escape from European colonialism only to become even more enslaved by deceitful, ‘friendly’ American dollarism” (MXS 77).
Malcolm X also has a strong notion of self-government, not merely self-determination. His account of the Nation of Islam’s way of curing men of heroin addiction well exemplifies this (A 260-261). An Islamic man must engage in “no lying or stealing, and no insubordination to civil authority, except on the grounds of religious obligation” (A 221); this is, if anything, more ‘conservative’ than Whiggism. Strict moral self-government translates into political self-government: “Whenever any group can vote in a bloc, and decide the outcome of elections, and it fails to do this, then that group is politically sick” (A 314)—no conflict with liberalism there. His advocacy, at some points, of black separation, as distinguished from the dominance-game of segregation and the hypocrisy of integration, mirrors Jeffersonianism exactly (a 246).
Overall, however, Malcolm X is a firmly anti-liberal thinker. M. S. Handler, author of the introduction to the Autobiography, calls him “a born aristocrat” (A ix), and truer words were never written. If there ever was a man of thumos in American public life, it was Malcolm X. He hadn’t a democratic bone in his body, and this traits remains constant throughout the course of many changes in his life. “I love too much to do battle,” he admits, rightly (A 205). And in a humorous moment: “I do believe that I might have made a good lawyer” (A 205)—lawyers being an aristocratic exception to American democracy, in Tocqueville’s just aperçu. Only a fool would deny that Malcolm X would have made a very good lawyer, indeed.
“More wives would keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men” (A 92). “All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak; they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength” (A 93). Islam endorses, but does not bring him, this thumotic and masculine insight (A 226).
On the streets, “Red” followed a kind of aristocrat’s code. “For a hustler, in our sidewalk jungle, ‘face’ and ‘honor’ were important” (A 127). He lived and thought “like a predatory animal” (A 134)—more lion than fox, but not devoid of the fox. “Deep down, I actually believed that after living as humanly as possible, one should die violently” (A 138)—precisely the choice of the warrior-aristocrat, Achilles. (And, given Malcolm X’s wide reading, I should not be surprised if he knew that.) In prison, where he read Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—critics of ‘Lockean liberalism,’ all—his nickname was “Satan,” a being of pure thumoerotic ‘negativity.’
His conversion to the Nation of Islam simply reversed the direction of these passions. Instead of demonizing himself, he demonized whites (A 163). Satan means ‘enemy’: “Our enemy is the white man” (A 257). At this stage he proposed a sort of revolutionary Mackinderism, or race-based Marxism: Whites are a minority, worldwide, and the Nation of Islam minority within the U. S. minority community could ignite a worldwide revolution (MXS 46; see also A 275). In describing Nation of Islam’s ‘Prophet’ Elijah Muhammad’s hypocrisy, he writes, “I could conceive death. I couldn’t conceive betrayal.” (A 305) Loyalty is the eroticism of the man of thumos.
The turn to a more traditional Islam seen in his trip to Mecca rechanneled his thumos yet again, although this time it also moderated it. Islam is the most thumotic of the Bible-based religions, exalting the warrior simply, and not only the ‘warrior of the spirit.’ “All honoring the same God Allah, all in turn giving equal honor to each other” (A 323, emphasis added). This is a step toward democracy, but it is a democracy couched in ‘aristocratic’ terms—pure ‘recognition,’ with no admixture of ‘bourgeois’ easygoingness. If racism is “psychological castration,” Islam re-masculinizes the world, bringing absolute loyalty and fraternity. It is therefore “the one religion that erases fromits society the race problem” (A 340). This re-masculinizing of the world opposes something fundamental in liberalism, the Lockean strand of which nearly begins with a critique of Filmer’s patriarchalism and, by implication, the patriarchy of the Biblical God. “Human rights!” he exclaims indignantly. “Respect as human beings! That’s what America’s black masses want.” (A 272). Could this dismissal of human rights, coupled with a pure ‘politics of recognition,’ ever be genuinely democratic? Is traditional Islam, with its sha’ria, likely to be democratized, commercialized, or republicanized?
After the widening and deepening of his Islamic faith diluted his racism, Malcolm X “was no less angry than I had been, but at the same time the true brotherhood I had seen in the Holy World had influenced me to recognize that anger can blind human vision” (A 375). I can make no confident guess about the possible fate of this extraordinary man, had he lived. I am willing to bet he would not be chairing Americans for Democratic Actions, People for the American Way, or some other progressive-liberal body. He surely would have attempted to channel the anger of young black men away from crime, drugs, and other means of self-destruction, aspects of life he knew firsthand far better than King did.
Concluding Brief Comparison
For most of his career, King publicly stayed within the confines of American liberalism, as it existed in his time. He harbored—perhaps since his graduate student days, perhaps later—radical misgivings about that liberalism, particularly with respect to its commercial character. As long as he did not put his misgivings front-and-center, his movement made remarkable progress, although it is not certain that it could have gone much farther. Would he have been able to think of a way out of the tension between statist liberalism and Whiggish (and Gandhian) localism and self-government generally? It is more likely that he would have become a revered elder statesman of the Left, unable to find a practical counter to the increasingly ‘Rightward’ tendency of the American population at large during the two decades after his murder. He would not have endorsed the violence of the Black Power movement, and in fact condemned it as late as 1967: “The weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man” (WDWGFH 52). Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is no substitute for the Bible; “violence will not work” for American blacks (WDWGFH 56).
For much of his career, Malcolm X claimed that violence could work for American blacks, if in conjunction with a worldwide revolution of peoples of color. This strikes me as even less likely than King’s democratic socialism. Unlike King, Malcolm X could point to no concrete achievements other than the strengthening of the Nation of Islam and, at the end, the founding of his own breakaway sect. With maturing judgment, he might have been able to build a new organization, linking it with Islamic groups in other countries. The future of Islam in the United States will be fascinating to watch: How will it interact with commercial republicanism? Malcolm X might have played a major role in that collision.
Works Cited
Garrow, David J.: Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986.
A: Malcolm X (with Alex Haley): The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965.
MLKT: Cain, Alfred E., ed.: A Martin Luther King Treasury. Yonkers: Educational Heritage, Inc., 1964.
MXS: George Breitman, ed.: Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1966.
STF: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Stride Toward Freedom. New York: Ballantine Books, 1961 [1958].
STL: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Strength to Love. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
TMOM: King, Jr., Martin Luther: The Measure of Man. Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1968.
TOC: King, Jr., Martin Luther: The Trumpet of Conscience. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
TOH: Washington, James Melvin, ed.: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writing of Martin Luther King. San Francisco, HarperCollins, 1986.
WDWGFH: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Where Do We Go From Here? New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
WWCW: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Why We Can’t Wait. New York: New American Library, 1964.
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