Thomas G. West: "The Political Theory of the American Founding"

The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom
by Thomas G. West
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (April 3, 2017). 428 pp.

This book provides a complete overview of the American Founders' political theory, covering natural rights, natural law, state of nature, social compact, consent, and the policy implications of these ideas. The book is intended as a response to the current scholarly consensus, which holds that the Founders' political thought is best understood as an amalgam of liberalism, republicanism, and perhaps other traditions. West argues that, on the contrary, the foundational documents overwhelmingly point to natural rights as the lens through which all politics is understood. The book explores in depth how the Founders' supposedly republican policies on citizen character formation do not contradict but instead complement their liberal policies on property and economics. Additionally, the book shows how the Founders' embraced other traditions in their politics, such as common law and Protestantism.

Reviews and Discussion

• Founding philosophy, by Michael Anton. [Review]. The New Criterion June 2018:

  West sets for himself the seemingly modest task of “explaining” the American founders’ political views—first, their political theory per se, and second, how they applied that theory to the practical task of building a new government. The qualifier is necessary because while we think we understand the founding, West shows that we—especially, all too often, those who’ve been specifically trained to explain it to others—do not.

• A Partial Vindication of Thomas West, by James Stoner. Law and Liberty 12/11/17.
  
• The Founders in Full, by Vincent Phillip Munoz. Claremont Review of Books 10/19/17:

  By reintroducing the moral underpinnings of the founders’ natural rights republic, Thomas West has made an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of American political thought. He shows that the founders’ republicanism is a part of their liberalism; that duties and rights, properly understood, are not at odds. In doing so, The Political Theory of the American Founding not only helps us better understand America’s principles, it explains why we ought to cherish them and fight to restore them to their rightful place in our political life.

• Roundtable on The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom by Thomas G. West. Hillsdale College. 09/19/17. [Video]
  
• Making Sense of the Founders: Politics, Natural Rights, and the Laws of Nature by Justin Dyer. Public Discourse> 06/09/17.

  [West argues] that the founders did in fact share a “theoretically coherent understanding” of politics rooted in natural rights philosophy. Other traditions were of course present, but the founders, West insists, embraced these other traditions in their official public documents and pronouncements only to the extent that those traditions could be enlisted as allies of the natural rights philosophy. When natural rights conflicted with elements of the common law, customary practices, or religious tradition, it was the natural rights tradition that won the day. Public documents and the affairs of state—rather than sermons, commentaries, private letters, or other musings—“point to natural rights and the laws of nature as the lens through which politics is understood.”[...]

  The Political Theory of the American Founding does a wonderful job of correcting some of the caricatures of the political thought of eighteenth-century Americans as amoral, areligious, individualistic, or otherwise hostile to public virtue and the moral conditions of freedom. The key, for West, is recognizing that the founders distinguished the purpose of politics (securing rights) from the purpose of life (happiness), and the founders created a society that remained open to the private pursuit of nobility, wisdom, piety, and the higher goods that were supposedly sublimated by the founders into the base pursuit of material gain.
  

  Throughout, West leaves open the question whether the founders’ philosophy is true. I venture a preliminary answer: yes, for the most part, but only because they were buoyed by those other traditions—notably Christianity, the common law, and elements of classical theological natural law—and thereby built better than they knew.

Debating Integralism

• In Defence of Catholic Integralism, by Thomas Pink. The Public Discourse 08/12/18. "States that do not recognize both natural law and the transformation of law and public reason brought about by the raising of religion to a supernatural good will become confessors of false belief opposed to Christianity, and their great power will turn from supporting Christianity to opposing or even repressing it, especially in relation to its moral teaching."
  
• Integralism and Catholic Doctrine, by Robert T. Miller. The Public Discourse 07/15/18. Catholics today are not required to believe in a Catholic confessional state. If anything, they are required to believe that everyone has a right under the natural law to religious freedom, that the state has no authority in religious matters, and that coercion of religious activity by the state is morally wrong. In short, integralism is contrary to Catholic doctrine.
  
• Can States "Confess" Religious Belief? Should They?, by Christopher O. Tollefsen. 06/05/18. The confessing state exceeds the limits of its authority, either by acting to no good effect, or by acting contrary to good effect. Thus, the confessing state seems inappropriate as a matter not simply of prudence, but of principle.
  
• The Catholic Church, the State, and Liberalism, by Joseph G. Trabbic. The Public Discourse 05/02/18. "According to previous papal teaching, a Catholic confessional state is the ideal, even if in most modern situations it’s not a practical possibility, and prudence would steer us away from it. That teaching continues to be normative for Catholics."
  

Richard M. Reinsch II: "Full-Spectrum Reason"

It is in this intellectual-moral-cultural space that the autonomous liberal individualism and the “naked reason,” which are what Deneen is most concerned with, is able to do its damaging work. But as Nathan Schlueter insightfully noted in an essay comparing the thought of Pope Benedict and Leo Strauss, for all of the former’s criticisms of the modern undermining of human reason, and with it our ability to access the metaphysical depth of the human condition, Pope Benedict never turned his back on liberalism or the Enlightenment tout court. There is no "putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age," whose "positive aspects . . . are to be acknowledged unreservedly."

Pope Benedict sought to engage liberalism with a record of Western achievement rooted in the Socratic dialogues of classical philosophy and in the analogy of being found in medieval philosophy, whose import is to show the complex but real connection between the soul of the person and the personal God of the biblical tradition. Liberalism is, ultimately, an attempt to limit power and to bind its necessary use with a promise of fidelity to a fundamental document, a set of claims, a constitution that forms and animates political life. Liberalism protects the relational human person — who has economic, familial, political, and religious dimensions to his being — from rationalist ideology or the claims of sheer bigotry.

This relational person who is open to the full truth of what it means to be a human person is the being that liberalism at its best is designed to protect and to nurture. However, liberalism is also an inheritance, one that incorporates the best achievements in the full record of Western theological, philosophical, political, and legal excellences. We must always engage liberalism with "the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur," as Pope Benedict reminded us at Regensburg. We should have gratitude, respect, and piety for our liberal democratic traditions and shore these up where they are faltering rather than pine for a premodern past. The clock for liberalism did not begin with Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Justice Anthony Kennedy will not tell its final story. But to ensure that will be the task of those fully engaged with the Western corpus of philosophy, theology, law, politics and the living tradition that holds this together and provides for new applications.

Richard M. Reinsch II, In Defense of Full-Spectrum Liberalism 02/19/18.

Patrick J. Deneen: "Why Liberalism Failed"

"Why Liberalism Failed"
by Patrick J. Deneen
Yale University Press (January 2018).

Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

Reviews and Related Articles

• Did Liberalism Fail? [Panel discussion]
• We Still Need Liberalism, by Christian Alejandro Gonzalez. National Review 06/22/18. "Patrick Deneen’s critique of liberalism exhibits an undue nostalgia for the past and ingratitude for the virtues of the present."
  
• An Autopsy: Why Liberalism Failed, by Daniel McCarthy. National Interest 06/14/18.
  
• In Defense of Full-Spectrum Liberalism, by Richard M. Reinsch. National Review 02/18/18.
• Why Liberalism’s Critics Fail, by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. Modern Age
  
• Against the Deformations of Liberalism, by David Corey. American Affairs
  
• Has Liberalism Failed?, by Patrick Lee Miller. Quillette 02/12/18.
  
• Liberalism's Failure - and It's Success, by David French. National Review 02/05/18: "As a critique of the godless libertinism of the modern West, Deneen’s book is devastating. As a critique of the American Founding, it’s far less convincing."
  
• Patrick Deneen Explains Why Liberalism Failed, by Jerry D. Salyer. Crisis Magazine 11/16/17.