“An Inheritance So Proper and Convenient for a Band of Brethren”
John Locke has sometimes been revered as “America’s philosopher.” Widely read among our Founders, the seventeenth-century Englishman’s ideas about human nature, society, and government were in the air during the Revolution. His fingerprints, it is thought, may be detected in the Declaration of Independence itself, especially the ringing phrases about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The rousing assertion that “all men are created equal” has even become a slogan for a host of egalitarian political movements, successors in one way or another to the liberal ideology Locke, in some sense, founded.
And yet, even in this semiquincentennial celebration of our national independence, the Lockean account of the Founding leaves many dissatisfied. Rather than find the Declaration’s call to equality inspiring, critics of the Republic find the idea that American liberalism somehow “lowered the aims” of political life unsettling. Our social contract lies in tatters; rank individualism has led to an epidemic of loneliness; Americans’ faith in government institutions is at an all-time low. It is perhaps understandable why some have come to believe that liberalism has failed and the American Republic is in need of “regime change.”
One figure who would counsel against this despair is Orestes Brownson, among the nineteenth century’s greatest American men of letters. Rather than identifying the American Founding with a morally vacuous liberal ideology, he sought to uncover the deeper roots of our republican institutions and articulate an unwritten constitution supporting our political tradition. Especially in his 1865 magnum opus, The American Republic, Brownson demonstrated that the Union was something more than a Lockean social contract — he believed that Americans were blessed by what he called a “providential constitution.” Recovering Brownson’s wisdom will not only provide a patriotic answer to those discontented with liberalism, but also help us understand the true meaning of the American political tradition.
It is true that one must caution against overstating Locke’s influence on the Founding. As Russell Kirk put it in The Roots of American Order, “Locke has an eminent part in the American political mind, true, but he is no monarch in that realm.” Other historians, such as Donald Lutz and Forrest McDonald, have demonstrated that the Founders may have taken a rhetoric of revolution from his Second Treatise, but they looked to other sources of inspiration for actually constituting the American Republic. References to the Baron de Montesquieu, common law, and even the Bible came to the Framers’ lips far more readily than to Locke. Neither the Continental Congress nor the Philadelphia Convention acted as though the Second Treatise was a roadmap for creating a republic; other luminaries lit the way for them.
Read more in American Catholic Quarterly Review.
