Lecture first delivered at the Center for Teaching Excellence, Hillsdale College, July 2006.
The challenge of teaching the American Founding is that their political theory was simple—indeed, self-evident—but understanding their actions, their practice, is hard. The notion that no one has the right to murder you, enslave you, or otherwise ruin your life isn’t hard to understand. It’s the way that the Founders acted to secure the unalienable rights of American citizens, and the reasons for their failure fully to secure them that requires intensive study.
The challenge of teaching the Progressives’ re-founding of the American regime is fairly easy to understand in practice. We see their successes all around us in such institutions as the administrative state, in such Constitutional measures as the income tax and the popular election of U. S. Senators, and in our expectation that politicians serve as leaders of their American people. But the political theory animating Progressivism is anything but self-evident. Progressivism breaks radically with previous American political principles. To see this, consider a question I asked students many times, without ever hearing the right answer.
The Declaration of Independence begins: “When in the course of human events.”
Why not, “When in history….”?
Because for the Founders the word ‘history’ did not mean the course of human events. At their time, ‘history’ meant the historia rerum gestarum —the story or account of things that are born and pass away, the story of the course of human events. A ‘history’ was a narrative, a literary genre, and a mode of inquiry.
Philosophy and poetry are also modes of inquiry. Following the well-known imagery of Plato’s Republic philosophy was considered the rational ascent from the cave of conventional opinions, into the daylight of truth. Plato’s Socrates engaged in ‘dialectic’—argumentation governed by logic, which is thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. The first statement of that principle in Western thought is enunciated by Socrates in that dialogue: The same thing will not do, or have done to it, opposites, at the same time, with respect to the same part, or in relation to the same thing. So, for example, an object might be black and white, or gray, but it cannot be ‘blackwhite.’ You can inscribe a circle in a square or a square in a circle, but you can’t draw a square circle. Philosophic inquiry governed by that principle eliminates false or self-contradictory arguments.
Poetry was understood as an imitation or ‘imaging’ of true things—holding the mirror up to nature, as Dr. Samuel Johnson said, around the same time the Declaration was written. The equivalent of dialectic in poetry is drama, a sort of argument in action: Achilles against Hector, God against Satan, Hamlet against himself.
History, however, put into words what had been seen, in the course of human events. Only then can those events last, be remembered, continue to be inquired into. By writing a ‘history,’ the historian fixes events, holds them in place, making the comprehensible to the intellect, which can understand only that which ‘stays put.’ Like philosophic dialectic and poetic drama, a history also presents conflict. Thus Thucydides tells us that he writes a work “for all time,” after having seen “the greatest war of all time.” He chose a course of events—a massive, violent change—which revealed something great and permanent in human nature, which does not change.
Poetic drama, philosophic dialectic, and political history all aim at inquiring about the permanent things by an ascent from the human-all-too-human conflicts or contradictions we see all around us. All of these genres of writing and of thought comport with the doctrine of natural right familiar to us in the Declaration of Independence, because natural right is a permanent thing. In the American regime, the Founders sought to secure the natural rights of citizens by means of a well-defined, limited constitutional government.
But around the same time the Founders lived, ‘history’ began to be redefined not as the story of the course of human events but as the res gestae —the course of events itself. What is more, philosophers soon began to turn to the course of human events not merely as a source of what human nature is, but as something that constituted human nature. That is, they began to think of human nature—and of all nature—as something not fixed but evolving. According to historicism, man is fundamentally a historical being, not a natural being. Nature itself is historical, constantly changing or evolving; nature has no permanent ‘nature,’ so to speak.
Still further, the early nineteenth century philosophers—the greatest of them was the German, G. W. F. Hegel—looked to ‘history’ or the course of events as the source of moral and political authority. Why? European philosophy had already abandoned religion as a source of moral and political authority. The Enlightenment tended toward atheism. The French Revolutionaries’ appeal to moral authority issued in “The Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” that is to say, by the time the United States Constitution had been ratified, ‘enlightened’ Europeans had rejected divine right as a monarchic myth and substituted for it the natural rights of man.
The problem with deriving moral and political authority or rights from nature, for these European philosophers, was simple. They were materialists. And they conceived of matter ‘atomistically.’ If all nature, including human nature, is nothing but matter in motion, how do you get morality out of that? If human beings are nothing but bodies composed of vibrating atoms, if that’s what human nature is, then there is no ‘ought’ to be extracted from it, no right to be derived from it. for human life to have moral significance it needs a purpose, a telos. But if human nature has no built-in purpose, because it’s nothing but matter in motion, and if there is no God to give Creation a purpose, both natural teleology and religious teleology make no sense Enlightenment seems to result in nihilism, in darkness rather than light.
Further, even as the Enlightenment rejected God and began to reject nature as sources of moral and political authority, it also rejected human laws and other conventions. The Enlighteners were, after all, revolutionaries, dissatisfied with the status quo of existing laws and other conventions. Where would human beings turn for guidance, with all the existing sources of authority now discarded?
Here is where the German philosophers stepped in. Hegel contended that the only possible source of moral and political authority remaining to ‘enlightened’ human beings was history itself. Human history, he said, has been working toward an end, a telos, a purpose, all along, although until Hegel’s time no one had been able to see what that purpose is. According to Hegel, human history is the course of events by which human beings have conquered nature, subjecting it more and more to the human will. The story of the conquest of nature is thus the story of human progress toward ever greater freedom of the exercise of the human will over nature or brute matter. The meaning of ‘history’ or the course of events, its purpose, is that progressively unfolding freedom over nature, through time. Doctrines centered on divine revelation and doctrines centered on nature right now must give way to doctrines we may call, as a group, historicist or progressive. The ‘progressive’ person is, to use the word deployed by both Hegel and Marx, conscious of his place in history’s movement; a leader is conscious of how to hasten history’s forward movement toward the end of history.
To see how radical this philosophic turn to historicism was, consider it in contrast to the teaching of the Bible. the Bible also tells us that the course of events has meaning. God guides the course of events. Theologians call this ‘providence.’ How does providentialism differ from historicism?
The God of the Bible creates the heavens and the earth out of nothing. He then forms an out of part of that creation, earth, and breathes His Spirit into that clay, thus creating man as an image of Himself. Thus God differs radically from all of His creation; He did not make the heavens and the earth out of Himself, extruding them in the manner of an amoeba. Again to use theological language, the God of the Bible is not ‘immanent’ in His creation. The created being closest to God, man, derives his authority over the rest of God’s creation from the breath of divine Spirit that constitutes part of him. But this creature quickly learns that he is not God, whatever the Serpent may whisper in his wife’s ear. More, his Creator issues increasingly elaborate sets of commands which serve as standards for his conduct, standards that do not change until the Creator Himself changes them. Both laws and Lawgiver are ‘above’ man.
Hegel’s historicism is entirely different. Hegel argues that the course of human events or history is not guided by a radically separate Creator-God. Hegel teaches that history is infused with rationality, with what Hegel calls the Absolute Spirit. The Absolute Spirit has nothing to do with God, the Holy Spirit. Holiness implies purity, separation from matter; the Absolute Spirit dwells within matter. Indeed, matter is nothing but a congealed form of the Absolute Spirit. Matter evolves in accordance with a logical pattern. Instead of “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” historicism posits laws of history, laws of the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit.
Each historical epoch has its own spirit. The “spirit of the age” or Zeitgeist is the Absolute Spirit in its current stage of evolution or development. As in a logical syllogism, all contradictions will finally disappear. History behaves logically; the clash of opposites—whether opposing ideas, opposing social classes, opposing races, opposing armies—eventually resolves itself into the end of all historical conflict, namely, a world state that results in peace. History consists, therefore, of a logical dialectic, a set of knowable laws of progress. The dialectic previously understood as man’s rational inquiry into the nature of things—in poetry, philosophy, and history—now came to be conceived as the process whereby human beings, over time, mastered nature while disposing of previous systems of thought (including the Bible) as retrograde mythology.
The scholar Eric Voegelin rightly said that historicism “immanentizes the eschaton.” It puts ‘god’ into creation, into the course of events caused by matter in motion. It fuses the ‘is’ with the ‘ought,’ might with right—on this earth, not in Heaven. What happens is also what should happen, because progress, moral rightness, is built into the historical process itself. In Christianity, a religion of the Creator-God, the eschaton has only been ‘immantized’ on one occasion, so far: in the life and person of Jesus Christ. And that life, on this earth, ended with a return to the separation of Creator from created—with the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, that is, with the return of Jesus to His Father in Heaven. Jesus left behind His assembly or church, but, a Paul shows in his epistles, God’s assembly proves eminently fallible. The Kingdom of God on earth will only begin when Jesus rules a new heaven and a new earth—a new creation. And even that new creation won’t be infused with God, who will rule it as the holy God.
Speaking of ruling, I turn from the moral to the political dimension of historicism. Hegel and his philosophic followers understood moral and political authority to consist of this ever-widening sphere of human freedom or human conquest of nature. Intellectually, the saw the locus of the conquest of nature in modern science, and the powerful technologies that already had begun to bring space and time under ever-increasing human control or mastery. They saw the political locus of the conquest of nature in the modern state. The modern state, which crucially centralizes human control of persons and territories in one location, one capital city, and which then extends its administrative power to its borders by means of a rule-governed bureaucracy, struck historicists as the very embodiment of the modern project of freedom or rule over nature.
This means that the highest form of human freedom is located not in the individual or the family, or in the free enterprise of the people, or in the governmental institutions to which the people elect their representatives, but in the state, especially in its ‘technocratic’ element, the bureaucracy, not elected and at best ‘overseen’ by the people’s elected representatives. So constituted, the state masters nature more effectively than any individual or family can ever do.
Historicism also means that the most ‘authoritative’ things will happen in the future. In taking his moral bearings, a historicist does not ‘look back to “In the beginning,” to the Creator-God. Nor does a historicist ‘look around’ to the nature created by that God. Nor does he look within himself, at human nature. A historicist must rather look forward, forward to the ‘end of history’—to the World State, as in Hegel, to communism, as in Marx, or to the supreme Aryan world empire, as in Nazism. To put it another way men are not by nature angels now, but as mankind evolves, becoming more and more masterful, we will become much more like angels. The Absolute Spirit is working itself out in us.
Politically, this means that historicism requires of politicians not governance in accordance with stable principles but leadership. The leader leads his people into the morally authoritative future. The leader is the secular prophet of a promised land to be built entirely with human hands and brains. Human hands and brains are the Absolute Spirit at work.
The leader himself does not suffice to get us there, however. The prophets of God in the Bible know what to do and where to go because God tells them. God knows what to tell them because he is all-knowing: He knows not only the overall goal but He also knows every step of the way, the number of hairs on every head, every sparrow that will fall. A human leader, by contrast, may know the goal but he cannot know every detail that needs tending. For rule over the details, for effective human providence, he needs bureaucracy—a systematic and centralized administrative state.
Here’s where the American Progressives come in. Historicist ideas entered the United States in the early decades of the nineteenth century through a variety of what might be described as ‘cultural middlemen’—intellectuals who studied German philosophy, translating its ideas to the American context. One of the most famous of these figures was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Later on, an important figure in the American historicist movement was the educator William Torrey Harris, among the most prominent of the Saint Louis Hegelians, who served as President Grant’s Education Commissioner in the 1870s; other historicists settled into positions at major universities.
But the ontological historicism of these disparate figures did not yet advocate statism in America. One of Emerson’s most famous essays celebrated American individualism, and Harris was a Social Darwinist. The movement toward an American statism centered in academia, beginning in the decades after the Civil War. Historicism linked itself to statism earlier in Europe because in Europe statism preceded historicism.
Throughout Europe, universities initially had been instituted by the Roman Catholic Church, an eminently international, not statist, institution. When Niccolo Machiavelli conceived of the modern, centralized state in the early sixteenth century, he intended it as the key institutional weapon against the rule of the Church, and therewith the influence of Christianity. But after Machiavelli’s young, and Christian, contemporary Martin Luther broke with the Church, his followers discovered that states could serve as guardians of Protestant Christianity; only states were politically strong enough, because sufficiently centralized, to resist the international Papacy and its military and political allies. This circumstance in turn made the Protestant universities in the German countries ally themselves with their respective states. That is, by the time the Peace of Westphalia solemnized the modern international system of states in 1648, norther German universities had adapted themselves to statism. And when Bismarck and the Hohenzollern monarchy consolidated most of the many German states into one large nation-state in the middle of the nineteenth century the German universities were structured as appendages of that state. The study of political life consisted primarily not of the study of natural rights and regimes but the study of administration or bureaucracy as the authoritative instantiation of historical and dialectical progress.
German academics set themselves the task of finding scientific methods by which the state might rule more efficiently and thus, in the words of University of Nevada Professor John Marini, to “establish the rational structures whereby organized intelligence, or knowledge derived from the scientific method, would begin the process of solving, progressively, the political, social, economic, and cultural problems of the nation.” As Marini also observes, the young scholars who established political science as a separate discipline within the American universities typically attended graduate school in Germany in the late nineteenth century, thus absorbing the principles of German social science, the handmaiden of German statism. It is important to understand that the German unification of the states via the institutional structures of the administrative state must have looked especially attractive to young Americans who grew up during the Civil War, not only because such a state promised to end the political corruption associated with political parties and the party ‘bosses’ but because rule by professional bureaucrats looked like an efficient way to bind small and medium-sized states into one big national state—precisely the problem the federal republic of the American Founders had solved only at the cost of a catastrophic war. With this institutional reform came the vast reconstruction of philosophic doctrine mentioned earlier, the move from natural right to historical right. By 1895, John J. Lalor’s Cyclopedia of the Social Sciences classified “Natural Law” under “Fictions”—this, in an article assuring readers that “the sphere of fiction must steadily diminish as that of inductive and positive science advances and as man’s mind becomes stronger, clearer, and more discerning.”
The best known of these young American scholars studied politics and administration as a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University—the first American university modeled after the German research universities, staffed with professors who had done their own graduate studies at those universities. His name was Woodrow Wilson. He of course went on to the presidency of Princeton University, the governorship of New Jersey, and the presidency of the United States.
As a twenty-year-old undergraduate, one who spent ten years of his boyhood and early adolescence in Augusta, Georgia during the Civil War and the hated Reconstruction, Wilson confided to his diary serious reservations about the American regime of 1876: “The American Republic will in my opinion never celebrate another Centennial. At least under its present Constitution and laws.” The United States is only “a miserable delusion of a republic…founded upon the notion of abstract liberty!”—that is, natural right. As had several of his most prominent Southern intellectual forebears, particularly John C. Calhoun, Wilson admired England’s mixed regime; “the English form of government is the only true one.
Any Ivy League education and subsequent graduate training turned this Burkean Southern conservative into a devotee of ‘Germany.’ In a book written for college students, Wilson engaged in that sub-discipline of political science that would come to be called ‘comparative regimes.’ ‘Comparative’ politics as the Germans conceived it compared the supposedly inherent characteristics of different nations or races. Which ones are the strongest, the most vital, the most likely to win the struggle for survival and domination? Nations and states are organisms which interact dialectically. He distinguished political systems that are “defeated or dead” from “those which are alive and triumphant”—a point any American southerner would find compelling. Because peoples of German origin dominated the world at the time, “it is Aryan practice we principally wish to know.” England remained Wilson’s favorite among the Aryan nations, for its gradualism of development. The United States, insofar as it had any political merit at all, derived it from its adaptation of English institutions. Wilson tried to account for the Civil War not at all in terms of unalienable right or of American republicanism but entirely in terms of “national feeling”—nationalism—itself based primarily upon social and economic differences between the North and the South.
Wilson thus took German historicism and democratized it for American use. The esteem for democracy is the distinguishing feature of American Progressivism. Wilson claimed that democracy, not monarchy, was the final stage of human development. Its “true concept…is inseparable from the organic theory of the state.” Wilsonian ‘democracy’ bears as close a resemblance to Hegelian monarchy as it can, without ceasing to be democratic. “Properly organized democracy is the best government of the few,” representative government. But—and here the Hegelian surfaces—bureaucracy or “civil service” is “but another process of representation.” The science of administration is “the latest fruit of [the] science of politics,” a science “developed by French and German professors.” It “must inhale free American air,” but it nonetheless embodies the Hegelian “spirit of the time,” that is, the current stage of the dialectical development of the Absolute Spirit.”
Thus Wilson presented an extraordinary and revolutionary political agendum as an act of incremental conservatism. He cautiously assayed the political difficulties of his project. Convinced that “the democratic state” as yet lacked the means for carrying “those enormous burdens of administration which the needs of this industrial and trading age are so fast accumulating,” yet mindful that “it is harder for democracy to organize administration than [it is] for monarchy” to do so because public opinion rules democracy, often in a “meddlesome” way, Wilson sought to exercise a new kind of statesmanship to found a new kind of regime.
The new, historicist statesmanship would not so much defend the existing regime as lead the people to new modes and orders of life. “Society is not a crowd, but an organism, and, like every organism, it just grow as a whole or else be deformed.” “Leaders of men” precipitate the “evolution of [society’s institutions” with “creative power”—the most recent example of these having been Otto von Bismarck. The leader is a sort of secular prophet: “He must read the common thought: he must calculate very circumspectly the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics…. the nice point is to distinguish the firm and progressive popular thought from the momentary and whimsical popular mood, the transitory or mistaken popular passion.” The leader is the good shepherd of the spirit of the age.
Thus the new historicist leadership of progress requires a new kind of prudence. The new prudence foresees the course of events; it is literally promethean. Jane Addams, the prominent Progressive reformer whom Wilson cultivated as a political ally, described herself as “a little uneasy in regard to [Wilson’s] theory of self-government.” He seemed “as if he were not so eager for a mandate to carry out the will of the people as for an opportunity to lead the people whither in his judgment their best interest lay.” There has been no more sensible insight.
This also means that the United States Constitution as written and amended simply won’t do. It is ‘Newtonian,’ not ‘Darwinian,’ aimed at balance instead of growth. It is, as Wilson titled an important essay, “The Elastic Constitution.” A more recent jurist called it “the Living Constitution.”
Ultimately, Wilson contended, the best interest of the people lies in socialism, the logical result of ‘democratic’ Hegelianism. If society is an organism, then “the community” has “the absolute right…to determine its own destiny and that of its members,” for “men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.” While “wisdom and convenience” may require the limitation of public control over economic activity, “limits of principle” upon that control “there are, upon strict analysis, none.” Democracy finally requires socialism. To achieve it, an existing political democracy needs a modern bureaucracy founded by a “leader of men”—a new kind aristocracy, eventually calling itself ‘meritocracy,’ claiming to rule not on the basis of warrior and civic virtues or social and intellectual refinement but on technical expertise.
That is to say, political progressivism appropriates two pieces of the modern scientific project. The dramatic and bold part of that project, the conquest of nature, may be seen in the person of the leader. The mundane, routine, precise, and detailed part of the project may be seen in administration. The popular support for the statist project comes not from natural right form the sentiment of nationalism (eventually to be replaced by an international world state), which registers the vitality of the national organism. In contrast to the Declaration of Independence, progressivism substitutes historical progress for natural right, taking the task of government not to be limited to securing the natural rights of individuals and nations but rather as the much more ambitious task of guiding humanity toward the end of history, the unlimited universal state.
In making these changes, in making a mantra of ‘change’ itself, did American Progressivism actually cost Americans anything valuable? Did it cause us to abandon any of the individual and national rights we secured under the Founders’ regime? Consider the first establishment of a solid structure of Progressive institutions during the New Deal, an establishment prepared by the passage of the Constitutional amendments to legalize the income tax and to require popular votes for United States senators, accomplished a generation earlier. The best description of the administrative state Franklin Roosevelt and his allies bequeathed us was published exactly 100 years before his landslide re-election in 1936. It was Alexis de Tocqueville who coined the term “administrative despotism,” which he described in a famous passage near the end of the first volume of Democracy in America:
“I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them…he exists only in himself and for himself alone….
“Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living”
“So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizens. Equality has prepared men for all these things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit.
“Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.
“Our contemporaries are incessantly racked by two inimical passions: they feel the need to be led and the wish to remain free. Not being able to destroy either one of these contrary instincts, they strive to satisfy both at the same time. They imagine a unique power, tutelary, all powerful, but elected by citizens. They combine centralization and the sovereignty of the people. That gives them some respite. They consoled themselves for being in tutelage by thinking that they themselves have chosen their schoolmasters….
“In our day there are many people who accommodate themselves very easily to this kind of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people, and who think they have guaranteed the freedom of individuals well enough when they deliver it to the national power. That does not suffice for me. The nature of the master is much less important to me than the obedience.”
Many of us here today teach civics. To rebuild an active, civic spirit of self-government—as against the passivity of the administrative state—is what we do. We can only do it effectively if we recall the principles and practices of the American Founders, notice the contrast between them and those of the Progressives, then teach that contrast to our students.
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