The two principles which more than any other lie at the base of contemporary practical forms of government in the West, and which consequently go far toward defining its virtues and vices, are the humanistic concepts of liberty and equality. It is almost taken for granted in our day that these principles are not only compatible, but even mutually requisite: without the one, the other falls. And yet there are some voices even today which question this fact, and posit some tension, even some strife, between them. How now?
Not one hundred years ago, Thomas Mann could still assert that “Equality and freedom — but this has probably been said all too often — obviously exclude one another.”19
American Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke implied the distinction quite succinctly two centuries back when he stated that he loved liberty, but hated equality. H. L. Mencken, in his Preface to his translation of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, made the point with his usual aplomb: “Democracy and freedom are not facets of one gem; democracy and freedom are eternal enemies.” No less an authority than Alexis de Tocqueville had this to say of the relation between the two:20
I think that democratic peoples have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves they seek it, they love it, and they will see themselves parted from it only with sorrow. But for equality they have an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion; they want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery. They will tolerate poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not tolerate aristocracy.
This is true in all times, and above all in ours. All men and all powers that wish to struggle against this irresistible power will be overturned and destroyed by it. In our day freedom cannot be established without its support, and despotism itself cannot reign without it.
Elsewhere, he is yet more explicit: “The distance that separates the spirit of liberty from the spirit of extreme equality is no greater than that between the heavens and the earth.”
Of course, the existence of dissenting opinions (even from men of such rank as Mann and Tocqueville) is not sufficient to prove the point, but at the very least it demonstrates that the modern assumption that liberty is perfected to the precise extent that equality is perfected, cannot be adopted without some defense. Moreover, given the difference in our views of freedom and equality with respect to that which was evidently commonplace even one hundred years ago, it would seem that there has been some essential mutation in the nature of our concepts which it behooves us to attempt to understand.
Both liberty and equality are concepts with many possible meanings, but, for reasons we will soon surmise, equality is quickly becoming the less ambiguous of the two. Liberty has two primary senses, one that we may call the classical, which was wed with classic philosophy and classic teleology, and a second which we may call the modern, and which emerged from, or together with, our non-teleological science. The great problem of liberty in all its aspects is bound up essentially with the question of teleology, and this key question surpasses our purview here. It suffices for us to consider the concept of liberty as it is understood here and now.
The majority of people today adhere to the Enlightenment vision of freedom. To quote that stolid liberal Benjamin Constant, “The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures; and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures.’21
It is most candid of the good Mr. Constant to make reference here to “pleasures” (and, incidentally, it is probably a goodly part of the reason he so constantly misunderstood the classic conception of liberty). Put in its simplest form, we moderns believe that liberty, or freedom as we are increasingly wont to call it, is the ability to do as one pleases, within the limits established by law.
Now, those limits are to some extent arbitrary: for the limits imposed by the law in one country will not coincide with those imposed by another, and in some nations these limits will be so extreme as even to abolish the very notion of freedom that we presently adhere to. This means that the modern conception of freedom is possible or meaningful only in certain distinct kinds of governments — speaking generally, in “liberal” ones.
Yet we perceive at once a problem. The laws of all liberal nations, without exception, place bounds on “the enjoyment of security in private pleasures,” which is to say, they place limits on freedom, they stand in tension with freedom. Consider for example laws against prostitution, laws limiting the use or purchase of firearms, laws restricting the manner in which one builds one’s house on one’s private property, or laws prohibiting the misuse or murder of one’s fellow man. It may be responded, in good egalitarian vein, that certain of these restrictions, and surely all those which are indisputably justifiable, are established to protect freedom from itself; for without them men should exercise their freedom in ways which are injurious to the freedom of others and thus “self-contradictory,” or in ways which are self-destructive. For this reason good laws do not stand in tension to freedom, but rather form its necessary underpinnings. But despite the fact that this objection stands or falls by the superior dignity of equality over liberty, this at best would prove, not that a tension between law and freedom is nonexistent, but only that it is necessary, mandated by something self-contradictory or inadequate within the very idea of freedom itself.
Now, it is clear that the concept of equality defines in large part the precise legal boundaries set around freedom in many contemporary cases. Laws in favor of equality of any sort necessarily in some measure restrict the “freedom to do as one pleases.” An extreme example: to manumit a slave, and to grant him rights equal to those that pertain to his free master, requires the abolition of the master’s freedom to own and dispose of another human being’s labor. One may call that a detestable freedom, but by our modern understanding, freedom it is, and the point stands: the expansion of equality represents a corresponding contraction of freedom on the social scale.
The egalitarian response is, of course, that as the liberty of the master is reduced, the freedom of the slave is augmented, so that the overall level of freedom remains the same, if it does not improve, while the level of equality receives a net increase. In other words, by any large-scale calculus, we may posit a point at which both human freedom and human equality are maximized. This is the point sought after by all classical Enlightenment thought, and it accords pleasantly with the economic vision of the world touted by the liberal, who suffers eternally the disease of Midas, forced as he is by some secret curse to quantify everything he touches.
Yet this “calculus” is not so clean-cut as it might seem. Indeed, by the logic just submitted we may get to the very root of the conflict between liberty and equality. For this liberal reasoning stands only insofar as every individual can be considered perfectly interchangeable with every other. If we suppose for a moment that one person has a greater capacity for liberty, a greater degree of possibility at his disposal on account of what he is, then it becomes clear that restricting the liberty of one while augmenting the freedom of another does not necessarily result even in a net stasis of the quantity of liberty, but much more probably results in a diminution or in an increase in the same — even a very dramatic diminution or increase, depending on the individuals in question. But this conclusion is surely anathema to the partisan of equality, for it suggests that profound inequalities are innate in human beings, and that the just society should attempt as much as possible to reflect these inequalities in law, limiting equality to promote liberty. This is the despised position which today goes by the epithet of “elitism” or the anathema name of aristocracy. For if human beings differ fundamentally in caliber, it follows as a precept of justice itself that elitism should be the guiding principle of law: suum cuique. The only argument which can be brought against this conclusion is then the purely pragmatic one — namely, that it is practically impossible to arrange a society in which the true elites are consistently favored or in which the best, the ἄριστοι, really do rule. But, as all merely pragmatic arguments, this objection grows but feeble and wan before the uncompromising iron of human justice. It amounts to a shrug and a resigned sigh in the face of actual politics — an attitude akin to saying, “It is too difficult to be just, so let us lay the question of justice aside altogether.” Such a view is pusillanimous in the extreme, and its fundamental inadequacy is indicated by the fact that no one ever truly stops at such a position; its proponents always continue past it, by then attempting to show that, behind this presumed exclusively pragmatic superiority of “free systems,” there stands also a theoretical superiority, for such “systems” are alone possible of obtaining the greatest possible agumentation of the public good: liberal democracy or laissez-faire capitalism and its “spontaneous order” really is the truly just “system.”
Given the problem just indicated, the problem of elitism, the only way of demonstrating the theoretical superiority of liberal democracy is by defining freedom in purely potential terms: freedom represents nothing but possibilities, never capacities. Freedom does not pretend to consider what is not objectively measurable in any case, namely, the internal capability of a given individual to do this or that, but restricts itself merely to establishing that the external possibility of doing this or that is granted equally to all individuals without exception. In other words, freedom represents what one may do, never what one is. It is a question of potential, not of power.
Freedom, the very concept of freedom, is thus slyly redefined so as to make it subservient to the concept of equality. And therefore we perceive that egalitarianism does not limit liberty first in law, but rather first in custom and in theory; as is ever the case in modern politics, the law merely follows, doglike and servile. In a given society, equality and freedom do not necessarily clash at every point; but in philosophy, liberty and equality very necessarily do. Liberty and equality inhabit two diverse conceptual realms that border one on the other, so that as the extent of one grows, that of the other diminishes. The one territory is inhabited by the few, and the other by the many; and thus the one territory is in general more vulnerable than the other, particularly insofar as the former are taught to be ashamed and to debase their innate virtues, and the latter are spurred to brazenness.
It is difficult for us of the present day to appreciate the extent to which these principles might collide, and we owe our dim vision precisely to the astounding success that the founders of the modern era have had at reconciling them. But prior to modernity the very clash between liberty and equality formed the stuff of civil wars, popular uprisings, conflicts between nations and the collapse of governments. We can now understand this tension with a degree of clarity.
Equality is without any doubt whatsoever the essential principle of democracies; liberty, meanwhile, is a guiding principle of aristocracies. This will seem to our modern eyes strange, for aristocracy seems predicated on the existence of gross inequalities of wealth and status, which result necessarily in a degree of “illiberalism,” if not in outright slavery. Yet all aristocratic societies are founded on the presupposition that liberty is a consequence of the perfection of human nature, and that this perfection can be approached only by a select few, a small number of specially endowed human beings. Human liberty thus requires a social structure that favors the few over the many, and which promotes, though it can never guarantee, the consummation of human liberty in that few. And as with all essentially human things, no mere scientific or mathematical calculus can prevail here: for the perfected liberty of a single man is worth infinitely more than the sum total of fragmentary, equalized, crippled or crabbed liberty of all the world’s masses.
Equality and liberty are thus inculcated respectively by two contrary social orders, two opposed worldviews. The successful reconciliation of liberty with equality for any quantity of time whatsoever is possible only in a mixed regime, in which the aristocratic and democratic principles have been harmonized through adherence to law. The republics of the modern era on the other hand sought to resolve the conflict between liberty and equality finally and forever through that most elegant principle of “equality before the law,” which is the republican principle par excellence. This principle stipulates that there be one and a single law for all the citizens of the state — a law which makes no exception between group or kind, class or individual, rank or power. Its lack of exceptionalism is of the essence of the principle; so soon as one makes exceptions of any kind for any reason whatsoever, the principle of “equality before the law” reduces itself to a mere tautology, indicating that “even discriminatory laws apply to all the citizens.” But that is a principle which describes any nation, of any form whatsoever, in which the laws are obeyed.
An example: supposing that in a given Communist state, all the members of the Party, and only the members of the Party, have the right to vote, to hold property, or to stay outside of their homes after the hour of nine in the evening. No one will claim that the state in question enjoys equality under the law, merely because no infractions to these unequal rules are ever permitted by the authorities. For the law itself, as we would rightly retort, exists in violation of the true principle of equality before the law. Equality before the law therefore can mean only this: the law may justly discriminate between citizens on the basis of what they do (i.e., criminals forfeit some portion of their rights), but never on the basis of what they are. This is one of the key changes that the founders of the modern era effected in the realm of political philosophy — a change so radical that it is hard to imagine it should have been so successful, and so successful that it is almost impossible any longer to perceive how radical it is.
Now, if we are wakeful, we will see at once that many of the laws of our day violate this principle. Some of these violations are more or less benign, and would be considered unobjectionable by most of our citizens: as that law which excludes children and the mad from the vote, or which prohibits the blind from driving, or which places a higher percentage of taxation on the rich than on the poor. There are, to be sure, real difficulties concealed even in such laws from the point of view of democratic theory, but they need not concern us here. More to our point are those examples which are widely controversial even here and now, such as legislation against “hate speech” or laws based on so-called “affirmative action” or “equal opportunity.” For these laws, given what we have stated, exist in flagrant and contentious violation of the principle of equality before the law.
We perceive here an essential point: equal opportunity and equality before the law, so far from being the twin principles they are too often taken to be, stand in fact precisely contrary to one another.
As demonstration of this fact, it suffices to pose a simple question, and to follow it through to the end: namely, in what way does “equality of opportunity” differ from “equality before the law” — or, put otherwise, why does the concept “equality before the law” not suffice? Why must we speak of “equality of opportunity” at all? The answer can only be that laws regarding equal opportunity seek to procure or secure certain conditions for “disadvantaged groups.” These conditions may be, for instance, that no one hires or rents on a “discriminatory” basis, or else they might entail something like racial quotas in academia or in work, or else they might go so far as to demand “reparations for past wrongs” from certain individual groups of human beings, in favor of others who have been subject to real or imagined injustices. What is important to our present purposes is this: these laws grant a select group legal privileges which are denied to all other groups; these laws wish to step beyond mere legal equality, and to establish a much more concrete equality, at the expense of “personal liberties.” This development should not be surprising: once freedom has been made conceptually subservient to equality — this being the crux, as we have seen, precisely of the idea of “equality before the law” — it is only a matter of time before equality extracts its dues from its serf and servant. The laws regarding “equality of opportunity” are but taxes to the lord: they form a movement away from republican equality before the law, away from the vestigial aristocratic privileges and aims vaguely preserved in republican government, and toward pure democratic egalitarianism as such.
This peculiar dynamic, this inevitable republican movement toward equality and away from liberty, is known as progressivism, and could not be more modern; it is implicit in all the great acts of modernity with but few exceptions. For anyone with eyes to see, it stands in every case as a visible practical demonstration that the Enlightenment has failed in its attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable: equality and liberty cannot be brought into harmony with one another; every attempt toward reconciliation here must, but must, sacrifice or subjugate the one to the other in at first some subtle but finally decisive respect.
So far as we are concerned, we of the New Right, this much must be clear: the political alternative in our troubled day is not between liberalism and egalitarianism; liberalism is but an elder form of egalitarianism, a proto- and crypto-egalitarianism, the ground and breeding bed of egalitarianism. Nor is the rejection of liberalism or egalitarianism respectively equivalent to the rejection of liberty on the one hand and equality on the other; egalitarianism is indeed the political expression of equality, but liberalism was nothing but the impossible effort to unify liberty with equality, which was premised on a basic surrender of true liberty from the start. The erroneous identification of liberalism with liberty (as is falsely implied, to be sure, in the very name of “liberalism”) has been characteristic of certain groups, as the “libertarians” who seek to “preserve liberty” and even to “extend it” as far as it can possibly be “extended,” and who are incapable of imagining any way of doing this other than “limiting government” and erasing merely legal and physical boundaries — as if one could free a natural slave merely by furnishing him the greatest possibilities to obey his native slavishness and to play the servant of his passions. To these idealists, we can only say, in voice united with the still young and unspoiled Thomas Mann, that “freedom and fatherland belong together.” The same erroneous identification has also been characteristic of certain modern totalitarian states, the which, in order to destroy “liberal democracy,” believed they had to deracinate both liberty and equality in equal measure. In truth, they thereby accepted the basic premise that liberty and equality are brother-concepts; they adopted the basic scheme of the Enlightenment by negating it entirely. They were nothing but the Enlightenment inverted and turned on its head, and therefore were, however, as all antitheses, still governed fundamentally by the thesis.
We of the Deep Right, who would not invert but would supplant this “thesis” — we, who are anything but “Hegelians” barreling complacently down the slipstream of “History” or blithe Marxists still faithfully awaiting its inexorable denouement— take a more radical stance: we uphold a new vision of the old ideal of the truly free man, and insist upon nothing so much as this: the deep and original meaning of freedom must be disinterred, reconstituted, and resurrected to the world, before we are all of us transformed into slaves fit for a new and absolute slavery.