The word “republic” means public things, the commonwealth, the general welfare as expressed in political forms. The idea of the Republic lies at the heart of American conservative thought. We have not known monarchy since 1776, and we always have been suspicious of “pure democracy”—that is, government by the masses, without constitutional checks, protection for minorities, and representative institutions. Our government, as Calhoun said, “is, of course, a Republic, a constitutional democracy, in contradistinction to an absolute democracy; and . . . the theory which regards it as a government of the mere numerical majority rests on a gross and groundless misconception.”
The aim of the collectivistic state is to abolish classes, voluntary associations, and private rights, swallowing all these in the formless blur of “the general will” and absolute equality of condition—equality, that is, of everyone except the clique which rules the state. The aim of our Republic, on the contrary, has been to reconcile classes, protect voluntary associations, and nourish private rights. We do not recognize any “general will,” but only the opinions of private citizens and legitimate groups. We do not seek equality of condition, but only equality of legal rights—the classical principle of justice, “to each his own.”
For Americans, the good commonwealth has been the state in which men and women might follow their own bent, subject only to the dictates of morality and the regulations necessary to the administration of justice. We have reserved to private persons a great body of rights. We have conferred upon local and state governments only such powers as are necessary for keeping order and undertaking duties that no individual or voluntary association can perform. We have delegated to our federal government only certain explicit powers, dealing with matters beyond the general competence of the states. And though this original arrangement of rights and powers has been altered in some degree since the founding of our Republic, in general these theories of right and responsibility still prevail among us, and we continue to believe that the just Republic is a commonwealth in which as many things as possible are left to private and local management; and in which the state, far from obliterating classes and voluntary associations and private rights, shelters and respects all these.
We never have fallen, most of us, into the error that “commonwealth” means “collectivism.” Our common freedom and our common prosperity have been nurtured, one may say, by a salutary neglect of the notion of an absolute central sovereignty. This original conservative cast of our politics has not departed from among us. We have not been enchanted by the fallacy that the will of the majority is the will of God: for us, on the contrary, the successful Republic is marked by sound security against the will and appetite of temporary and unthinking majorities.
Our Republic, in short, has been a complex of private and local liberties. Its great merit has been not equality, but freedom. Yet there are signs that public affection for this Republic, and understanding of it, are diminishing in our day. Sometimes we seem nearly to have arrived at the condition in which Cicero found the Roman Republic in his time. He describes that crumbling commonwealth in his treatise called The Republic:
Long before our own time, the customs of our ancestors moulded admirable men, and in turn these eminent men upheld the ways and institutions of their forebears. Our age, however, inherited the Republic like some beautiful painting of bygone days, its colors already fading through great age; and not only has our generation neglected to freshen the colors of the picture, but we have failed to preserve its form and outlines. For what remains to us, nowadays, of the ancient ways on which the commonwealth, they tell us, was founded? We see them so lost in oblivion that they are not merely neglected, but quite forgot. And what am I to say of the men? Our customs have perished for want of men to stand by them, and now we are called to an accounting, so that we stand impeached like men accused of capital crimes, compelled to plead our own cause. Through our vices, rather than from chance, we retain the word “republic” long after we have lost the reality.
Lest we Americans, too, retain only the word “republic” but not the reality, we need to undertake the conservative task of restoring in our generation an understanding of that freedom and that order which have expressed and encouraged our national genius. This has been one of the principal ends of my little book.
When many people use the word “freedom” nowadays, they use it in the sense of the French revolutionaries: freedom from tradition, from established social institutions, from religious beliefs, from prescriptive duties. But this is not the sense in which the founders of our Republic understood freedom. For them, freedom and order were not at opposite poles; instead, they knew that one cannot possibly have enduring freedom without order, and that there can be no really just order without a high degree of private freedom. It is this apprehension of freedom which we must refresh, if our Republic is to endure.
The conservative endeavors to conserve certain great and ancient things. He endeavors to conserve the religious and moral traditions that make us more than beasts. He endeavors to conserve the legacy of Western civilization, the wisdom of our ancestors, that makes us more than barbarians. And he endeavors to conserve that civil social order, political and economic, which has been developed through the experience and trials of so many generations, and which confers upon us a tolerable measure of justice and order and freedom. In the present age, the conservative is particularly zealous to conserve freedom. We stand in no immediate peril of material want or of anarchy. But we are in danger, almost imminently, of a loss of freedom that would make us less than truly human. Therefore, the modern conservative tends to emphasize the claims of liberty, although in another age he might need to emphasize the claims of charity and duty. But, if he is true to his own principles, he does not forget that every freedom is married to a responsibility.
In my previous chapters, I have said little enough about political economy, principally because I think that economics has been over-emphasized in our generation. I do not believe that the great contest in the modern world is simply between two theories of economics, “socialism” and “capitalism,” as Bernard Shaw tried to convince women a generation ago. No, I happen to think that the real struggle is between traditional society, with its religious and moral and political inheritance, and collectivism (under whatever name) with its passion for reducing humanity to a mere tapioca-pudding of identical producers and consumers. There is far more to this struggle, in short, than questions of profits and wages and management. But nowadays we are menaced by an economic collectivism which, if triumphant among us, would put an end not merely to a free economy, but to freedom of every description. Therefore, I think it worthwhile to write a little about the necessities of economic freedom.
Without a free economy, freedom of any sort is most difficult to maintain. The Republic is more important than any especial economic system; yet the Republic cannot endure without an economy substantially free. There are two principal reasons why—given the conditions of modern America, and the political institutions that are ours—a free economy is essential to the preservation of freedom in general: to intellectual freedom, to civil liberties, to representative government, to freedom of private character. The first of these is that men and women can enjoy external freedom only if they are subject to no single, absolute master for their subsistence. The second of these is that ordinary integrity requires ordinary rewards, and that in a collectivistic economy (whether called “capitalistic” or “communistic” or “socialistic,” or what you will) the old motives to integrity, the ancient reasons for responsible conduct, are lacking.
First, a few words about the former reason. Men and women must eat. If they are dependent upon a solitary power or a solitary individual for their subsistence, they are slaves. They can act in any external respect only upon the sufferance of that master. If that master is the state, they have no alternative employment; they must obey, or live on air; and the state, because of its impersonality, can be a harder master, more devoid of charity and generosity, than any medieval lord.
To say that the “democratic” state would not deprive anyone of liberty is to play upon words. The democratic state, like any other, is directed by individuals, with all the failings to which humanity is heir, especially the failing of the lust for power. To suppose that the mass-state would be always just and generous toward its slaves is to suppose that there would exist, upon all its levels, a class of philosopher-kings superior to human frailty, purged of lust and envy and petty ambition. But in modern America we have no such class to draw upon; indeed, often we seem to be doing what we can to abolish that sense of inherent responsibility and high honor which compensates a patriarchal or feudal society for its lack of private liberty. It is more probable, as George Santayana suggests, that we would be the subjects of a host of squalid oligarchs, devoid of the high sense of responsibility. The Republic would have perished.
And a few words about the second reason. Most people do not act, and cannot, out of a regard for the general welfare. In any economy, our natural indolence and selfishness require incentives. Some few persons always will act out of altruism; but they will not be numerous enough to sustain a modern economy, once the old incentives of advancement, profit, and acquisition of property are gone. This sad truth already has flashed upon the minds of the more serious socialists in England, dismayed at the flaws in their own creation, and has led to ominous talk among them of “new incentives”—“the stick as well as the carrot.”
For the conserving of freedom of any sort, then, the economy must be free in considerable measure. I repeat that much of the popular discussion of economic questions is obsolete, because it is founded, especially in America, upon the assumption that we still are living in a nineteenth-century condition characterized by the pressure of population upon food supply. But the real problems of the twentieth century are different from those of the nineteenth century, often, especially in the economic sphere, and are in some respects more difficult to approach. Our conservative task is to reconcile personal freedom with the claims of modern technology, and to try to humanize an age in which Things are in the saddle.
The triumph of technology, though it has solved for the time being, here in America, the ancient problem of material want, has created new problems. But we need not march on, as if propelled by some ineluctable destiny, toward a complete collectivization of economic life, the exploded ideal of the nineteenth-century socialists. We can no longer afford to bow before ideology. Thinking is a painful process; but only by thought can ideology be kept in check; no ideologue ever was beaten on his own ground, except by another ideologue. It is vain to appeal to a theoretical “freedom” of the nineteenth century. It is worse than vain to suppose that, by simply repeating the words “freedom,” “democracy,” and “progress,” we can reconcile a system of impersonal economic consolidation with the ancient personal liberties of our civilization. The person whom Mr. Sidney Hook calls the “ritualistic liberal” seems to think that all we have to do to keep our freedom is to complain constantly and irresponsibly that our freedom is being lost. Yet many of these same ritualistic liberals applaud the very economic and social processes that are reducing the domain of freedom. I hope that conservatives will do something more than this.
We cannot afford merely to drift with the current of events, applying the pragmatic solution of considering every case simply upon its own passing merits. Present policies tend directly toward the establishment of an economic collectivism, under one name or another, inimical to the Republic. Certain measures of taxation, for instance, most conspicuous in Britain but differing only in degree in America, operate to destroy private enterprise in the old sense, to abolish the inheritance of property and the sense of responsibility that accompanies inheritance, and to substitute, in the long run, state compulsion for the ancient motives to integrity.
Little serious thought seems to be given to the consequences, for one thing, of continuing inheritance-taxes at their present rate; yet they now constitute confiscation, and are a levy upon capital, not a voluntary contribution out of income toward the maintenance of the Republic. A society so rich as ours can afford to tolerate rich men and women—and can afford to encourage, indeed, the bequest and inheritance of large properties. No social institution does more to develop decent leadership and a sense of responsibility than does the inheritance of large properties, and of the duties that accompany those properties. Tocqueville, observing a century and a quarter ago the American hostility toward inherited wealth, remarked that great fortunes confer benefits of many sorts upon the whole of society—in leadership, in the encouragement of the arts, in the support of letters, in the nurture of novel undertakings; while a multitude of petty competences, rags to riches and back to rags in one generation, encourages only arrogance and the expenditure of wealth in evanescent display and creature-comforts. I am not suggesting that the remedy for all our ills lies in repealing the inheritance-tax; I am merely saying that we need to think through such problems as this afresh, and to do our thinking free from the slogans of the ideologues.
And, if inherited wealth brings some measure of responsibility to a commonwealth, so do the old disciplines of thrift, self-advancement, and personal ownership. Some of the more intelligent Americans, in every class and occupation, now are aware of the menace of irresponsibility in economic life, which soon communicates itself to political life: the irresponsibility of the salaried managers of vast corporations, the irresponsibility of civil servants vested with brief authority upon which there is small check, the irresponsibility of labor- union officials who may have risen to high place principally through the arts of the demagogue. A Republic does not endure forever upon the moral and social capital of an earlier time. A sense of responsibility is produced by hard lessons, by private risk and accountability, by a humane education, by religious principle, by inherited rights and duties. A Republic whose leaders are the flies of a summer cannot expect to obtain ordinary integrity without the old motives to integrity; it will turn, in desperation, to the hero-administrator, the misty figure somewhere at the summit—and, in the end, that hero administrator no longer will be found.
It is not only the process of economic consolidation and the operation of positive law that diminish the sense of responsibility guarding ordered freedom in the Republic. Other measures, more technological than directly political, operate to make man into a machine-server, with a great deal of idleness but little true leisure, free in the sense that no one oppresses him directly, but servile in the sense that he has been deprived of the old interests and hopes in life: failing to come to man’s estate, he remains a perpetual child. In our present equilibrium, here in America, we may seem to have given a large measure of economic prosperity to the mass of men and women, at small cost in freedom. But I am thinking of what this Republic, and all the world, may be fifty years from now.
Not being high-school debaters, conservatives do not possess facile and simple solutions to all these discontents. They merely say that the first step toward curing a malady is to diagnose the disease correctly. I suggest that we must find our happiness in work, or not at all; and that servile work, however economically profitable, is irreconcilable with social freedom. With John Henry Newman, in his reply to Sir Robert Peel more than a century gone, I am not offering any new ideology; I am merely appealing to those principles of morals and politics which have been known to mankind for a great while. “I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy, and resisting a pretense. Let Benthamism reign, if men have no aspirations; but do not tell them to be romantic, and then solace them with glory.”
Freedom, after all, is a romantic aspiration, earnestly desired by only a minority of men and women. (Romantic aspirations, I may add, are what make life worth living.) Only a small minority, too, feel clearly the call of responsibility. But, that freedom and that responsibility gone, the habitual freedom and the security of the great mass of men and women must slip away, also, in the economic sphere as in the political. There are some among us who do not desire to be solaced with the glories of Brave New World. Political economy had its beginnings in the work of philosophers who, whatever their deficiencies, were concerned primarily with the extension of freedom. Political economy is far gone in decay when it becomes no better than an apology for the reduction of men and women to a condition of prosperous servility.
The success of the American Republic, and the preservation of our old liberties, have been achieved in considerable part by our aversion, here in America, to divorcing theory from prudence. No other society ever had problems so complex as ours; but no society before our age ever had such a wealth of learning available, and such an economic margin, to aid in the solving of problems. The analysis of the real meaning of freedom, and the examination of the nature of responsibility, are available to us Americans at the slight cost of a little of our idle time. Yet many of us seem to prefer to wander, thoughtless, into a devil’s sabbath of whirling machinery, presided over by the commissar.
Liberals and radicals offer us no solution to our grand difficulties; they either are content to drift with the current of events, or urge us actually to row faster down the stream which they call Progress, but which the conservative knows to be Decadence. The liberals and the radicals have forgotten the meaning of the Republic. But conservatives, who were not born yesterday, know that men and women have free will. A Republic dies only when its citizens have neglected the wisdom of their ancestors and the methods of right reason. There are more conservatives left among us than there were good men left in Sodom; and I think that, God willing, the conservatives will yet prevail.
One of the most eloquent of American conservative thinkers was a woman, Agnes Repplier. Miss Repplier was not inclined to exchange the reality of the American Republic for some utopia of the collectivists. Loving her country, she wrote, “If patriotism becomes an emotion too expansively benevolent to make men willing to live and die for something concrete like a king or a country, we shall have nothing left to fall back upon but sexual love, which is a strong individual urge, but lacks breadth and scope of purpose. It burned Troy; but it did not build Rome, or secure the Magna Carta, or frame the Constitution of the United States.” Love of the Republic shelters all our other loves. That love is worth some sacrifice.