From the twelfth to the eighteenth century governmental authority grew continuously. The process was understood by all who saw it happening; it stirred them to incessant protest and violent reaction. In later times its growth has continued at an accelerated pace….And now we no longer understand the process, we no longer protest, we no longer react. This quiescence of ours is a new thing, for which Power hast to thank the smoke-screen in which it has wrapped itself….[M]asked in anonymity, it claims to have no existence of its own, and to be but the impersonal and passionless instrument of the general will.
Bertrand de Jouvenel
Historian and political thinker, Lord Action, provided a warning for all students of liberty with his famous statement: “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This is a principle that our Founding Fathers understood very well when they took up the cause of establishing a Constitutional Republic intent on ensuring liberty for all its citizens. Author James Bovard provides us with some insight on the Founders thoughts on the problem of government power in his excellent book Freedom in Chains. Bovard writes:
The Founding Fathers took a dim view of claims of the unlimited beneficence of government. George Washington declared, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force.” John Adams wrote in 1773: “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1799, “Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power….In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitutions.” James Madison bluntly warned: “The nation which reposes on the pillow of political confidence will sooner or later end its political existence in a deadly lethargy.”
The Founders knew that is was not enough to understand the temptations of political power and its inevitable abuse and destruction of individual liberty by men who would be corrupted by unfettered power. Therefore they took pains to construct a Constitution that would limit government and protect its citizens. Again, as Jefferson opined, “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
I wish the story ended here, but it doesn’t. Why,? one wonders, who would want to remove the chains which protect us from tyranny? Who doesn’t believe government should remain within its constitutional limits and protect the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Not surprisingly, there was, “a different intellectual tide…rising in continental Europe,” writes Bovard, which continues its march toward the elimination of individualism, private property, and the last beacon of liberty the U. S. Constitution.
To understand this march toward political and historical darkness we must read the philosophical ideas of the founders of and purveyors of government paternalism. I resist providing commentary on the parallels with today’s political leaders (both right and left), but once you read the ideas and quotes of the political/social philosophers, in this series, you will be able to make those connections yourself.
Freedom In Chains: How The State Became Immaculate*
Bovard writes:
“[a]s political scientist Carl Friedrich observed in 1939, ‘In a slow process that lasted several generations, the modern concept of the State was…forged by political theorists as a tool of propaganda for absolute monarchs.’’ “Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651, labeled the State Leviathan ‘our mortal God.’”
“Jean Jacques Rousseau, with his 1762 book, The Social Contract, effectively made self-delusion about the nature of government into the highest political virtue. British political philosopher Harold Laski later noted, ‘Rousseau’s theory of the general will made him…the modern founder of the idealist school of politics.’ Rousseau’s ‘idealistic’ method was rarely more clearly stated than in the opening of his book, Discourse on inequality: ‘Let us begin by laying facts aside, as they do not affect the question.’ Rousseau propagated faith in absolute power at the same time he appeared to be preaching democracy: ‘The sovereign, being formed wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs; and consequently the sovereign power need give no guarantee to its subjects, because it is impossible for the body to wish to hurt all its members…The Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, is always what is should be.’ Rousseau’s doctrine of the General Will also created the perfect pretext to pretend that government is not coercive: the people were willing whatever government did to them. Rousseau recommended that a lawgiver ‘ought to feel himself capable…of changing human nature, of transforming each individual…into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being.’”
“In a short essay entitled ‘On Public Happiness,’ Rousseau declared in 1776, ‘Give man entirely to the State of leave him entirely to himself.’ And Rousseau clearly believed that men could not be left to themselves. Rousseau also foresaw the need for the government to nullify private property. In an essay on a proposed constitution for Corsica, Rousseau declared, ‘In a word, I want the property of the state to be as great and powerful, and that of the citizens as small and weak, as possible…With private property being so weak and so dependent, the Government will need to use very little force, and will lead the people, so to speak, with a movement of the finger.’”
“In The Social Contact, Rousseau declared, ‘The citizen is no longer the judge of the dangers to which the law desires him to expose himself; and when the prince says to him: ‘It is expedient for the State that you should die,’ he ought to die, because it is only on that condition that he has been living in security up to the present, and because his life is no longer a mere bounty of nature, but a gift made conditionally by the State.’” Rousseau implied that people should be grateful that the government had not yet killed them. Thus, Rousseau vested in the State more power over the lives of the citizens than many southern states in the United States vested in slaveowners. (It was a crime for a slaveowner to wrongfully kill one of his slaves, though such killings were not often punished.) Rousseau based his political philosophy on his own peculiar version of the ‘social contract’: ‘The State, in relation to its members, is master of all their goods by the social contract, which, within the State, is the basis of all rights.’ But Rousseau never explained why people would voluntarily put their heads on a political chopping block.
“Rousseau’s consecration of government power had vast influence on subsequent philosophers. German philosophers zeroed in on some of Rousseau’s more absurd ideas and refined them into sufficiently obscure language that they commanded respect among academics for generation to follow.”
In part two we will look at the German and British philosophers who perpetuated the ideas of a “benevolent” and paternalistic state.
*I want to credit James Bovard with the quotes and ideas in this section from his book, Freedom in Chains: The Rise Of The State And the Demise Of The Citizen. If you have not read this book, buy it today, and read it.
