We Americans have embraced the self-evident truths of our Declaration, which proclaims that each of us has been created equal with inalienable natural rights. But we tend not to embrace the abstract method proclaimed by John Locke and other modern philosophers for establishing those truths. This is a good thing. Instead of seeing the written Constitution as grounded merely by natural rights and autonomous individuals, we have looked to a prior, unwritten — “providential” — constitution.
“Providential” here does not refer to some intervention of Divine Providence into history. It has to do with the fact that no written constitution could emerge from nothing, but is necessarily dependent on various “givens” that limit and direct what is possible for statesmen at any particular time. These givens should not be seen as oppressive constraints but civilizational accomplishments that make the written Constitution and constitutional order possible. “Providential,” in this sense, means to be guided by what one is given by custom, tradition, and prior political experience, and even from philosophy and theology.
This unwritten constitution is found in a people's political culture, mores, customs, dispositions, and peculiar talents. The constitution of the government is built on this assemblage of order and is deeply connected to it. Thus, the authoritative law of a particular country can't be viewed apart from the context of the unwritten constitution. No government built to stand the test of time can be a merely willful construction that defies the historical, spiritual, and cultural materials that have shaped or formed a people.
Brownson's Critique of Lockean Contract Theory
Notice that the constitution that emerges from Lockean contract theory is consented to by self-interested individuals, and it exists to secure their universal natural rights. Governments are monolithic in their origin, form, and purpose, because individuals are monolithic in their origin, form, and purposes when uprooted from particular inheritances and even biological differentiation. This constitution devised solely in the interest of the rights of individuals is based on the unrealistic abstraction of unrelated autonomous individuals — beings divorced from the privileges and responsibilities of being parents, creatures, and even citizens. Lockean thought, thus, isn't political enough to be the foundation of government, and it isn't relational enough to articulate properly the limits of governments or the roles of family and organized religion.
It is true that Locke's social-contract teaching provided for many Founders the way to justify their independence from Great Britain and the formation of the American union. This fact, however, is tempered by the statesman-like compromises these men made to secure political unity. The content of those compromises made what they built better than what they knew through their theory, insofar as they took into account the political, religious, familial, and other relational dimensions of the human person that were slighted by Locke's individualism. That is to say, the process of political deliberation gave our country's foundation particular or providential content that fleshed out Locke's otherwise abstract theory.
According to Orestes Brownson, a 19th century New England intellectual associated with the transcendentalist movement who converted to Roman Catholicism, the equality of human persons is a fact. But it is a fact that entered the world through Christian revelation and was later affirmed as self-evident by philosophers. As Lincoln put it, equality is our proposition that inspires our devotion. It was brought to America, Tocqueville says, by our Christian Puritans. Brownson contends that such self-evidence is undermined by the pure Lockean dimension of the Declaration, where individual sovereignty becomes the foundation of government. Every man, Locke says, has property in his own person, and for Brownson that assertion of absolute self-ownership is, in effect, “political atheism.” But, with the providential constitution in mind, the Declaration really does become about the equality of all men by nature under God:
under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal rights as men, one man has and can have in himself no right to govern another; and as man is never absolutely his own, but always and everywhere belongs to his Creator, it is clear that no government originating in humanity alone can be a legitimate government. Every such government is founded on the assumption that man is God, which is a great mistake — is, in fact, the fundamental sophism which underlies every error and sin.
Brownson's rejection of the implicit atheism of the Lockean effort to transform all of human life in terms of contract and consent is based on his observation that such misguided liberationism or individualistic “secession” inevitably leads to the interlocking vices of modern political life: anarchism and consolidation. Social contract thought lacks an external standard higher than man's will that could limit, shape, and condition it. The highest being is man, who would self-create government by consent as to provide a protection against violent death and to secure property rights.
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