Statement delivered at the Faculty Roundtable
“Lincoln, Tocqueville, and America”
Center for Constructive Alternatives Conference
Hillsdale College
Hillsdale, Michigan
September 17, 2009
Aristocracies seem artificial to us—lords and ladies, with elaborate punctilio, finding quarrel in a straw when honor’s at the stake. But in perpetuating their rule aristocrats behave quite naturally; they transfer social and political authority through the straight path of family inheritance. The Second Duke of Arras receives lands (complete with peasants) and ruling authority over them from his father the First Duke, and intends to pass these down to his firstborn son, the future Third Duke. That’s quite natural, in a way.
Every regime needs to secure its social and political inheritance through the generations. The Bible records that King David had many sons, most of them worthless. In His wisdom, the LORD takes a firm hand; Solomon inherits.
How will regimes like ours—commercial and democratic republics—how will they endure? In principle they reject aristocratic and monarchic modes of inheritance. If all men are created equal, what then?
This conference brings generations of Americans together in order to consider our republic, together. This is the way we Americans pass on our political inheritance—by teaching and learning with and from one another.
As a young man Abraham Lincoln already understood this. in his 1838 Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, he observed that the generation of the Founders had now passed away. Those men secured the blessings of liberty in a noble quest for honor. As for the lesser souls among the Americans of that time, the hatred and vengefulness they had felt toward the British—”the basest principles of our nature”—had nonetheless advanced the noblest cause: civil and religious liberty. Both the best and the worst in that generation had contributed to the good.
But today, Lincoln, says, in 1838, the passions of the founding generation, noble and base, have disappeared into the graveyards along with the men they animated. Today, great ambition and petty resentment alike might seek to overthrow the Founders’ republic. What to do?
Revere the laws, Lincoln answers, including the supreme law of the land, the Constitution. Let “reverence for the laws” become “the political religion of the nation,” not to replace the Christian religion but to reinforce “reason, cold, calculating unimpassioned reason,” which commends the republican constitutional union to us. Under the circumstances of 1838, passions noble and base no longer serve to unite Americans but to divide them. In the absence of passions which happen to work for the good, reason will now supply all the materials for this political religion. But its energy will come from the sentiment of reverence not only for the laws but for the Framers of those laws, of whom the greatest was George Washington.
Tocqueville also understood the subtle complementarity of reason and reverence with respect to the perennial problem of political inheritance. In upholding a regime founded upon natural rights, and particularly “the natural equality of man,” the French revolutionaries had followed the Americans and their intellectual sources, the writings of the philosophers of natural rights. But in attacking Christianity the French revolutionaries had departed from the American way, and in this manner as in so much else Tocqueville stood with the Americans.
The rules of conduct prescribed by religions, he explained, “are based on human nature itself.” Christianity—in one sense the precious inheritance of aristocracy because it, like aristocracy, urges men to look above themselves, not around themselves, for their moral compass—these Christian laws, these rules of conduct finally undermined societies of masters and slaves. At the same time, despite its indirect influence, Christianity had often proved politically feeble: “The Roman Empire in its greatest decadence was full of good Christians,” Tocqueville writes. “But what will never exist in such societies [as the Rome of Suetonius] are great citizens, and above all a great people, and I am willing to state that the average level of hearts and minds will never cease to decline as long as equality and despotism are combined.” To achieve human greatness, to actualize the nature of man that Christianity fully reveals, peoples must combine equality with self-government, with republicanism, for only in political life—in discussion, in responsibility, in civility—can what Tocqueville calls the natural greatness of man find a home in the modern world, the world of social equality.
At the same time, both religion and republicanism can act fanatically, as Christianity had done, as Islam had done, as the French revolutionaries did. Robespierre may have been personally ‘incorruptible,’ but unlike genuine Christians the people he sought to govern lacked “the desire to help one another,” a desire that had atrophied after 150 year under a monarchic and centralized state. With their civil associations and their republicanism, Americans (at that time, Americans very nearly alone) governed themselves and helped one another, displaying the humility of Christian equality before God, charity toward one another, along with the natural greatness of man, the capacity to rule and to be ruled reasonably, and to defend themselves against those who sought to stop them.
Tocqueville and Lincoln alike never forgot the truth of the self-evident truth that all men are created equal or the hard fact that it and other truths are not self-evident to everyone. The Founders wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” not that you do. King George III didn’t. John C. Calhoun didn’t. Stephen Douglas didn’t. Most Europeans didn’t—to say nothing of Asians and Africans. Tocqueville observes that even the Greek philosophers didn’t—that “it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.” An American generation might arise that no longer saw this; both worried that such a generation might already have arisen. A generation might even need to fight a great civil war in order to humble itself so as to see those truths again. And it might need a statesman to show them what the war meant. The Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address are to the Declaration and the Constitution what the New Testament is to the Old Testament in the eyes of Christians: a renewal of the old law and its extension in practice to all human beings under its rule. A consideration of the Biblical allusions Lincoln places in those speeches confirms this. For their part, the American Founders had had occasion to consider what one of their philosophic mentors calls the reasonableness of Christianity. With Tocqueville, Lincoln saw that reason and its insights need the right kind of regimes—the right human political order and the real City of God—to see more clearly and to act with more justice. To perpetuate such regimes and to cause them to flourish on, not perish from, the earth will continue to require us to learn from the American Founders, from Tocqueville, and from Lincoln in places like this, whose numbers are diminishing.
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