Posted on 07/25/2010 1:37:12 PM PDT by betty boop
At best he was a pamphleteer, a very good one who was clearly helpful in inspiring the Patriots during the American Revolution.
But his "Age of Reason" was written much later when he was imprisoned in France. American leaders honored him for his service in his declining years but his religious views were NOT roundly embraced by the Americans as his inspirations to revolt were by the Patriots.
His career turned to journalism while in Philadelphia, and suddenly, Thomas Paine became very important. In 1776, he published Common Sense, a strong defense of American Independence from England. He traveled with the Continental Army and wasn't a success as a soldier, but he produced The Crisis (1776-83), which helped inspire the Army. This pamphlet was so popular that as a percentage of the population, it was read by or read to more people than today watch the Super Bowl.
But, instead of continuing to help the Revolutionary cause, he returned to Europe and pursued other ventures, including working on a smokeless candle and an iron bridge. In 1791-92, he wrote The Rights of Man in response to criticism of the French Revolution. This work caused Paine to be labeled an outlaw in England for his anti-monarchist views. He would have been arrested, but he fled for France to join the National Convention.
By 1793, he was imprisoned in France for not endorsing the execution of Louis XVI. During his imprisonment, he wrote and distributed the first part of what was to become his most famous work at the time, the anti-church text, The Age of Reason (1794-96). He was freed in 1794 (narrowly escaping execution) thanks to the efforts of James Monroe, then U.S. Minister to France. Paine remained in France until 1802 when he returned to America on an invitation from Thomas Jefferson. Paine discovered that his contributions to the American Revolution had been all but eradicated due to his religious views. Derided by the public and abandoned by his friends, he died on June 8, 1809 at the age of 72 in New York City.
Excellent post SFA. Thomas Paine, John Adamas (Unitarists), Bejamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (Deists) did not write a triniatrian Christian doucment.
Excellent post.
“”Thomas Paine, John Adamas (Unitarists), Bejamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (Deists) did not write a triniatrian Christian doucment.””
They set up a system of false liberty that is counter to Orthodox /Catholic teaching
Pope Leo XIII recognized much of this and knew the Reformation was the driving force behind this heresy
From Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical DIUTURNUM
“On the other hand, the doctrines on political power invented by late writers have already produced great ills amongst men, and it is to be feared that they will cause the very greatest disasters to posterity. For an unwillingness to attribute the right of ruling to God, as its Author, is not less than a willingness to blot out the greatest splendor of political power and to destroy its force. And they who say that this power depends on the will of the people err in opinion first of all; then they place authority on too weak and unstable a foundation. For the popular passions, incited and goaded on by these opinions, will break out more insolently; and, with great harm to the common weal, descend headlong by an easy and smooth road to revolts and to open sedition. In truth, sudden uprisings and the boldest rebellions immediately followed in Germany the so-called Reformation, the authors and leaders of which, by their new doctrines, attacked at the very foundation religious and civil authority; and this with so fearful an outburst of civil war and with such slaughter that there was scarcely any place free from tumult and bloodshed. From this heresy there arose in the last century a false philosophy - a new right as it is called, and a popular authority, together with an unbridled license which many regard as the only true liberty.”
When our Lord Jesus Christ Who alone has the authority, righteousness and power to rule the nations with a rod of iron comes, then sincere hopes for righteous dictators, monarchs and religious authorities will be fulfilled.
Until then our own form of government in the U.S. is by far the best man can do.
And the armies [which were] in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.
And he hath on [his] vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS. – Revelation 19:11-16
One of the best ways to study the difference between the two revolutions is to study the life of the Marquis de Lafayette.
http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/americanrevolutio1/p/lafayette.htm
The representative of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being constantly before all the members of the social body, shall remind them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the ends of all political institutions and may thus be more respected; and, lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness of all. Therefore the National Assembly recognizes and proclaims, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen:
Article 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may only be founded upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
5. Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law.
6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally or through his representative in its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.
7. No person shall be accused, arrested or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing or causing to be executed any arbitrary order shall be punished. But any citizen summoned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.
8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law passed and promulgated before the commission of the offense.
9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner s person shall be severely repressed by law.
10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.
l1. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.
12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires public military force. These forces are, therefore, established for the good of all and not for the personal advantage of those to whom they shall be entrusted.
13. A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in proportion to their means.
14. All the citizens have a right to decide, either personally or by their representatives, as to the necessity of the public contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is put; and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment, and of collection, and the duration of the taxes.
15. Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.
16. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.
17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified.
Well then, you’ll have to number Jefferson among those fools. He declared himself a Christian.
“”Until then our own form of government in the U.S. is by far the best man can do.””
Ah yes, legalized abortion ,pornography,soon to be legalized gay marriage etc... you name and it and more will be here soon all under the guise of false liberty,dear sister.
More from another encyclical “IMMORTALE DEI” from Pope Leo XIII....
“In the same way the Church cannot approve of that liberty which begets a contempt of the most sacred laws of God, and casts off the obedience due to lawful authority, for this is not liberty so much as license, and is most correctly styled by St. Augustine the “liberty of self ruin,” and by the Apostle St. Peter the “cloak of malice.”(23) Indeed, since it is opposed to reason, it is a true slavery, “for whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin.”(24) On the other hand, that liberty is truly genuine, and to be sought after, which in regard to the individual does not allow men to be the slaves of error and of passion, the worst of all masters; which, too, in public administration guides the citizens in wisdom and provides for them increased means of well-being; and which, further, protects the State from foreign interference.”
We all better start praying very hard for this country to cease abortion and all the other moral atrocities
I agree. But I disagree that the country was founded on a Document calling on a Christian (Trinitarian) Deity.
The Founders were Christian with very few exceptions, and even Jefferson was a Christian deist. Therefore, the intent was a Judeo-Christian culture. The text, particularly the Sunday exception, supports that.
bookmarking
SFA, that is not the fault of the way the country was constituted but what we as a nation did with our freedom. In short, we have embraced immoral values and lifestyles.
Asa society we are changing racially, culturally and religiously. At the root of this trend are Bobby Kennedy and LBJ, who in mid 1960's pushed the immigration reform (through a Democrat-controlled Congress), favoring 3rd world groups over Europeans.
The aim was to change the demographics of the US to give Democrats an election advantage because non-European minorities generally voted Democratic. Until the mid 1960's, US Immigration laws heavily favored European quotas.
Our open border, which was equally ignored by the Bush administration as by the Clinton or the Obama administrations, only hastened the rate of this change. We have a flood gate open with no signs of anyone being willing or able to plug the leak.
So many are smug about it. Back in the Bush days I was called all sorts of nasty things for pointing to his passive stance on enforcing illegal immigration laws, because it was good for business, it kept the prices down and unless you lives in one of the border states you didn't have to worry about it too much.
Hispanics are happy, businesses are happy, Democrats are happy, and even some Republicans are happy with the way things are.
Our problem is much bigger than just abortion, pornography and contraception. Asa society, we are falling apart at the seams on all fronts.
By 2050, the US white population will cease to be the majority race in the US. In other words in just over 3/4 of a century this country will have become something completely different racially, socially, religiously, etc. from what it was since its foundation, not because the foundation was bad but what we did with it.
There is also an active rewriting of the history at play, along with changing values the kids are taught in school and in the movies. The other day I was watching a documentary about first European settlers here. The whole point of the movie was how the settlers came and poisoned and took over the nature here with their flees, bees, disease, and cattle. Obviously being of European heritage is a bad thing nowadays.
At the rate we are going we will be the largest third world country in the world in not a too distant future. And we did all on our own.
Look to the beam in your eye, Pilgrim. I spoke, mocking your own bald assertion in response to a carefully crafted exposition supporting the thesis that The Declaration is infused with Judeo-Christian values. Apparently you value your own naked assertions a great deal more than that of others (the mockery exposing the blindness you possess with respect to your own faults) . . . ( ^8 }.
In reality there is a very great deal of Judeo-Christian values in The Declaration and The Constitution. What neither document does is demand adherence to a particular religious denomination. Consequently, there is very little “God” in The Constitution, the Founding Fathers being convinced that government (at least the Federal government) should have little to do with issues of conscience, looking to exercise a minimum control over human action and to exercise no restraint on thought. Ever since that time nihilists have sought to gain advantage of the Founders’ circumspection by insisting the documents are devoid of Judeo-Christian values (and will pitch a fit at any contrary understanding).
You elect to demand that the Founding Fathers’ choice of language must conform to your expectations or you will impose your interpretation on their thoughts. The Founding Fathers spoke as they saw fit without consulting you as to how they might properly phrase their thoughts. Apparently you believe, as Jefferson once wearily observed of the remarks of angry Baptists and Episcopalians, that those who advocate religion’s freedom have no religion.
“Besides, capitalizing the word "Creator" means nothing.”
Not according to Etymology, which in this case, has noted that the word Creator was not capitalized until the publishing of the KJ Holy Bible in 1611. So far as I know, there are at least 35 instances where the KJ refers to God as “Creator.” But you apparently think your knowledge superior to the wisdom of ages. Not, however, to the extent of being able to quote a citation supporting your allegation that John Adams once wrote a letter (when? and to whom?) stating that the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. Which Atheist website did you get that quote from?
But if you think Adams to be an impeccable authority on the spirit that moved the American people to revolution and a new government, his most definitive testimony, of which I am aware, is to be found in a letter written to Thomas Jefferson, dated June 28, 1813 . . . “Who composed that army of fine young fellows that was then before my eyes? There were among them Roman Catholics, English Episcopalians, Scotch and American Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Anabaptists, German Lutherans, German Calvinists, Universalists, Arians, Priestleyans, Socinians, Independents, Congregationalists, Horse Protestants and House Protestants, Deists and Atheists; and "Protestans qui ne croyent rien." Very few however of several of these species.
“Nevertheless, all educated in the general principles Of Christianity; and the general principles of English and American liberty. Could my answer be understood by any candid reader or hearer, to recommend to all the others the general principles, institutions, or systems of education of the Roman Catholics? Or those of the Quakers? Or those of the Presbyterians? Or those of the Menonists? Or those of the Methodists? Or those of the Moravians? Or those of the Universalists? Or those of the Philosophers? No. The general principles On which the fathers achieved independence, were the only principles in which that beautiful assembly of young gentlemen could unite, and these principles only could be intended by them in their address, or by me in my answer.
“And what were these general principles? I answer, the general principles of Christianity (emphasis mine), in which all those sects were united; and the general principles of English and American liberty, in which all these young men united, and which had united all parties in America, in majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her independence. Now I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God; and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature, and our terrestrial mundane system. I could therefore safely say, consistently with all my then and present information, that I believed they would never make discoveries in contradiction to these general principles . . . “ (The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Albert Ellery Bergh Editor, in 19 volumes)
Jefferson says: “The fundamental principle of all philosophy and all Christianity, is ‘Rejoice always in all things!’ ‘Be thankful at all times for all good, and all that we call evil.’” Those who are today the doubters and defamers of Christianity, might take heed of his word, just as Jefferson wished their antecedents of his day might have done the same. Like the Democrats of today, who could take no solace in anything so long as a Republican resided at 1600 Pennsylvania, the haters of Christianity can take no solace so long as a Christian is permitted to appear in the public square. (see Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Jefferson, December 25, 1813, Ibid)
Oh, we are weary pilgrims; to this wilderness we bring
A Church without a bishop, a State without a King.
anonymous poem, The Puritans’ Mistake, published by Oliver Ditson in 1844
I have just begun to fight! ( ^8 }
The way the Document reads, a Hindu, a Jew, a Musilim, a Mormon, Christian, etc. will all read it as “their own.”
Modesty forbids more than a quiet thanks ( ^8 }
Reminds me of my favorite Chapter of Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty where he is speaking of the two different traditions of Liberty, really the difference between the Scottish/English Enlightenment and the French Enlightenment.
Hayek goes on at length in the balance of this chapter to discuss the role of religous belief in moral structure and how the two traditions accept it or reject it.CHAPTER FOUR
Sub-chapters 1 - 5
1. Though freedom is not a state of nature but an artifact of civilization, it did not arise from design. The institutions of freedom, like everything freedom has created, were not established because people foresaw the benefits they would bring. But, once its advantages were recognized, men began to perfect and extend the reign of freedom and, for that purpose, to inquire how a free society worked. This development of a theory of liberty took place mainly in the eighteenth century. It began in two countries, England and France. The first of these knew liberty; the second did not.As a result, we have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty: one empirical and unsystematic, the other speculative and rationalistic –the first based on an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up and were but imperfectly understood, the second aiming at the construction of a utopia, which has often been tried but never successfully. Nevertheless, it has been the rationalistic, plausible, and apparently logical argument of the French tradition, with its flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason, that has progressively gained influence, while the less articulate and less explicit tradition of English freedom has been on the decline.
This distinction is obscured by the fact that what we have called the “French tradition” of liberty arose largely from an attempt to interpret British institutions and that the conceptions which other countries formed of British institutions were based mainly on their descriptions by French writers. The two traditions became finally confused when they merged in the liberal movement of the nineteenth century and when even leading British liberals drew as much on the French as on the British tradition. It was, in the end, the victory of the Benthamite Philosophical Radicals over the Whigs in England that concealed the fundamental difference which in more recent years has reappeared as the conflict between liberal democracy and “social” or totalitarian democracy.
This difference was better understood a hundred years ago than it is today. In the year of the European revolutions in which the two traditions merged, the contract between “Anglican” and “Gallican” liberty was still clearly described by an eminent German-American political philosopher. “Gallican Liberty,” wrote Francis Lieber in 1848, “is sought in the government, and according to an Anglican point of view, it is looked for in the wrong place, where it cannot be found. Necessary consequences of the Gallican view are, that the French look for the highest degree of political civilization in organization, that is, in the highest degree of interference by public power. The question whether this interference be despotism or liberty is decided solely by the fact who interferes, and for the benefit of which class the interference takes place, while according to the Anglican view this interference would always be either absolutism or aristocracy, and the present dictatorship of the ouvriers would appear to us an uncompromising aristocracy of the ouvriers.”
Since this was written, the French tradition has everywhere progressively displaced the English. To disentangle the two traditions it is necessary to look at the relatively pure forms in which they appeared in the eighteenth century. What we have called the “British Tradition” was made explicit mainly by a group of Scottish moral philosophers led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, seconded by their English contemporaries Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke and William Paley, and drawing largely on a tradition rooted in the jurisprudent of the common law. Opposed to them was the tradition of the French Enlightenment, deeply imbued with Cartesian rationalism: the Encyclopedists and Rousseau, the Physiocrats and Condorcet, are their best know representatives. Of course, the division does not fully coincide with national boundries. Frenchmen, like Montesquieu and, later, Benjamin Constant and, above all, Alexis de Tocqueville are probably nearer to what we have called the “British” than to the “French” tradition. And in Thomas Hobbes, Britian as provided at least on e of the founders of rationalist tradition, not to speak of a whole generation of enthusiasts for the French Revolution, like Godwin, Priestly, Price, and Paine, who (like Jefferson after his stay in France) belong entirely to it.
2. Though these two groups are now commonly lumped together as ancestors of modern liberalism, there is hardly a greater contrast imaginable than that between their respective conceptions of the evolution and functioning of a social order and the role played in it by liberty. The difference is directly traceable to the predominance of an essentially empiricist view of the world in England and a rationalist approach in France. The main contrast in the practical conclusions to which these approaches led has recently been put, as follows: “One finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose”, and “one stands for organic, slow, half-conscious growth, the other for doctrinaire deliberativeness; one for trail and error procedure, the other for an enforced solely valid pattern.” It is the second view, as J. L. Talmon has shown in an important book from which this description is taken, that has become the origin of totalitarian democracy.
The sweeping success of the political doctrines that stem from the French tradition is probably due to their great appeal to human pride and ambition. But we must not forget that the political conclusions of the two schools derive from the different conceptions of how society works. In this respect, the British philosophers laid the foundations of a profound and essentially valid theory, while the rationalist school was simply and completely wrong.
Those British philosophers have given us an interpretation of the growth of civilization that is still the indispensable foundation of the argument for liberty. They find the origin of institutions, not in contrivance or design, but in the survival of the successful. Their view is expressed in terms of “how nations stumble upon establishments which are indeed the result of human action but not the execution of human design.” It stresses that what we call political order is much less the product of our ordering intelligence than is commonly imagined. As their immediate successors saw it, what Adam Smith and his contemporaries did was “to resolve almost all that has been ascribed to positive institution into the spontaneous and irresistible development of certain obvious principles—and to show how little contrivance or political wisdom the most complicated and apparently artificial schemes of policy might have been erected.”
This “anti-rationalistic insight into historical happenings that Adam Smith shares with Hume, Adam Ferguson, and others” enabled them for the first time to comprehend how institutions and morals, language and law, have evolved by a process of cumulative growth and that it is only with and within this framework that human reason has grown and can successfully operate. Their argument is directed throughout against the Cartesian conception of an independently and antecedently existing human reason that invented these institutions and against the conception that civil society formed by some wise original legislator or an original “social contract.” The latter idea of intelligent men coming together for deliberation about how to make the world anew is perhaps the most characteristic outcome of thos design theories. It found its perfect expression when the leading theorist of the French Revolution, Abbe Sieyes, exhorted the revolutionary assembly “to act like men just emerging from the state of nature and coming together for the purpose of signing a social contract.”
The ancients understood the conditions of liberty better than that. Cicero quotes Cato as saying that the Roman constitution was superior to that of other states because it “was based upon the genius, not of one man, but of many: it was founded, not in one generation, but in a long period of several centuries and many ages of men. For, said he, there never has lived a man possessed of so great a genius that nothing could escape him, nor could the combined powers of all men living at one time possibly make all the necessary provisions for the future without the aid of actual experience and the test of time.” Neither republican Rome not Athens – the tow free nations of the ancient world—could thus serve as and example for rationalists. For Descartes, the fountainhead of the rationalist tradition, it was indeed Sparta that provided the model; for her greatness “was due not the pre-eminence of each of its laws in particular…but to the circumstance that, originated by a single individual, they all tended to the same end.” And it was Sparta which became the ideal of liberty for Rousseau as well as for Robespierre and Saint-Just and for most of the later advocates of “social” or totalitarian democracy.
Like the ancient, the modern British conception of liberty grew against the background of a comprehension, first achieved by the lawyers, of how institutions had developed. “There are many things specifically in laws and governments,” wrote Chief Justice Hale in the seventeenth century in a critique of Hobbes, “that mediately, remotely and consequentially are reasonable to be approved, though the reason of the party does not presently or immediately and distinctly see its reasonableness…Long experience makes more discoveries touching conveniences or inconveniences of laws than is possible for the wisest council of men at first to foresee. And that those amendments and supplements that through the various experiences of wise and knowing men have been applied to any law must needs be better suited to the convenience of laws, than the best invention of the most pregnant wits not aided by such a series and tract of experience…This add to the difficulty of the present fathoming of the reason of laws, which, though it commonly be called the mistress of fools, yet certainly it is the wisest expedient among mankind, and discovers those defects and supplies which no wit of man could either at once foresee or aptly remedy…It is not necessary that the reasons of the institution should be evident unto us. It is sufficient that they are instituted laws that give a certainty to us, and it is reasonable to observe them though the particular reason of the institution appear not.”
3. From these conceptions gradually grew a body of social theory that showed how, in the relations among men, complex and orderly and, in a very definite sense, purposive institutions might grow up which owed little to design, which were not invented but arose from the separate action of many men who did nto know what they were doing. This demonstration that something greater than man’s individual mind may grow from men’s fumbling efforts represented in some ways an even greater challenge to all design theories than even the later theory of biological evolution. For the first time it was shown that an evident order which was not the product of designing human intelligence, but that there was a third possibility—the emergence of order as the result of adaptive evolution.
Since the emphasis we shall have to place on the role that selection plays in this process of social evolution today is likely to create the impression that we are borrowing the idea from biology, it is worth stressing that it was from the theories of social evolution that Darwin and his contemporaries derived the suggestion for their theories. Indeed, one of those Scottish philosophers who first developed these ideas anticipated Darwin even in the biological field, and later application of these conceptions by the various “historical schools” in law and language rendered the idea that similarity of structure might be accounted for by a common origin a common place in the study of social phenomena long before it was applied to biology. It is unfortunate that at a later date the social sciences, instead of building on these beginnings in their own field, re-imported some of these ideas from biology and with them brought in such conceptions as “natural selection,” “struggle for existence,” and “survival of the fittest,’ which are not appropriate in their field; for in social evolution, the decisive factor is not the selection of the physical and inherited properties of the individuals but the selection by imitation of successful institutions and habits. Though this operates also through the success of individuals and groups, what emerges is not an inheritable attribute of individuals, but ideas and skills – in short, the whole cultural inheritance which is passed on by learning and imitation.
4. A detailed comparison of the two traditions would require a separate book; here we can merely single out a few of the crucial points on which they differ.
While the rationalist tradition assumes that man was originally endowed with both the intellectual and moral attributes that enabled him to fashion civilization deliberately, the evolutionists made it clear that civilization was the accumulated hard-earned result of trial and error; that it was the sum of experience, in part handed from generation to generation as explicit knowledge, but to a larger extent embodied in tools and institutions which had proved themselves superior—institutions whose significance we might discover by analysis, but which will also serve men’s ends without men’s understanding them. The Scottish theorists were very much aware of how delicate this artificial structure of civilization was which rested upon man’s more primitive and ferocious instincts being tamed and checked by institutions that he neither had designed not could control. They were very far from holding such naïve views, later unjustly laid at the door of their liberalism, as the “natural goodness of man,” the existence of “a natural harmony of interests,” or the beneficent effects of “natural liberty” (even though they did sometimes use the last phrase). They knew that it required the artifices of institutions and traditions to reconcile the conflicts of interest. Their problem was “that universal mover in human nature, self love, may receive such direction in this case (as in all others) as to promote the public interest by those efforts it shall make towards pursuing its own.” It was not “natural liberty” in any literal sense, but the institutions evolved to secure “life, liberty, and property,” which made these individual efforts beneficial. Not Locke, nor Hume, nor Smith, nor Burke, could have argued, as Bentham did, that “every law is an evil for every law is an infraction of liberty.” Their argument was never a complete laissez faire argument, which, as the very words show, is also part of the French rationalist tradition and in its literal sense was never defended by any of the English classical economists. They knew better than most of their later critics that it was not some sort of magic, but the evolution of “well constructed institutions,” where the “rules and privileges of contending interests and compromised advantages” would be reconciled, that had successfully channeled individual efforts to socially beneficial aims. In fact, their argument was never antistate as such, or anarchistic, which is the logical outcome of the rationalistic laissez faire doctrine; it was an argument that accounted both for the proper functions of the state and for the limits of state action.
The difference is particularly conspicuous in the respective assumptions of the two schools concerning individual human nature. The rationalistic design theories were necessarily based on the assumption of the individual man’s propensity for rational action and his natural intelligence and goodness. The evolutionary theory, on the contrary, showed how certain institutional arrangements would induce man to use his intelligence to the best effect and how institutions could be framed so that bad people could do least harm. The antirationalist tradition is here closer to the Christian tradition of the fallibility and sinfulness of man, while the perfectionism of the rationalist is in irreconcilable conflict with it. Even such a celebrated figment as the “economic man’ was not an original part of the British evolutionary tradition. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that, in the view of those British philosophers, man was by nature lazy and indolent, improvident and wasteful, and that it was only by the force of circumstances that he could be made to behave economically or could learn carefully to adjust his means to his ends. The homo oeconomicus was explicitly introduced, with much else that belongs in the rationalist rather than the evolutionary tradition, only by the younger Mill.
5. The greatest difference between the two views, however, is in their respective ideas about the role of traditions and the value of all the other product of unconscious growth proceeding throughout the ages. It would hardly be unjust to say that the rationalistic approach is here opposed to almost all that is the distinct product of liberty and that gives liberty its value. Those who believe that all useful institutions are deliberate contrivances and who cannot conceive of anything serving a human purpose that has not been consciously designed are almost of necessity enemies of freedom. For them freedom means chaos.
To the empiricist evolutionary tradition, on the other hand, the value of freedom consists mainly in the opportunity that it provides for the growth of the undesigned, and the beneficial functioning of a free society rests largely on the existence of such freely grown institutions. There probably never has existed a genuine belief in freedom, and there certainly has been no successful attempt to operate a free society, without a genuine reverence for grown institutions, for customs and habits and “all those securities of liberty which arise from regulation of long prescription and ancient ways.” Paradoxial as it may appear, it is probably true that a successful free society will always in a large measure be a tradition-bound society.
This esteem for tradition and custom, of grown institutions, and of rules whose origins and rationale we do not know does not, of course, mean – as Thomas Jefferson believed with a characteristic rationalist misconception – that we “ascribe to men of preceding age a wisdom more than human, and… suppose what they did beyond amendment.” Far from assuming that those who created the institutions were wiser than we are, the evolutionary view is based on the insight that the result of the experimentation of many generations may embody more experience than any on man possesses.
Gertrude Himmelfarb also has a great book comparing the two and adding in an "American Enlightenment" for a third distiction.
R. Kirk often called the American Revolution a "revolution averted, not made" as he along with many characterize it in actuality a colonial rebellion, meant at preserving the status quo in place in the colonies for the prior 200 years in the face of King-in-Parliment encroachment on liberty.
EXCELLENT.
WELL AND ACCURATELY PUT, imho.
Thx.
LOL.
The misunderstanding of freedom lead to slavery and ripping apart families in Africa from the practically the beginning in order to grow a country ,so it was not constituted very well
At the rate we are going we will be the largest third world country in the world in not a too distant future. And we did all on our own.
No big surprise because the roots were not holy and moral in the first place. That Said, certain people were moral and still are but a society built on false sense of freedom id destined to fail.
I pray it does not fail completely and stand up for morality but more and more people don't want to hear it,especially the youth.
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