• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 324 0

democracies, America would be that society. He believed that the American people would not be easily tempted by radical egalitarianism, dispirited, and willingly ruled over by a centralized governing authority, whether the tyranny of a single despot or an elected assembly and its administrative state, even in the unlikely event such an effort should be attempted. The history, traditions, experience, and mores of the American people, and their love of freedom, independence, pride, and self-sufficiency—as well as the breadth and diversity of American society, with its multitude of local governing bodies—would seem to make such an undertaking impracticable if not impossible. Tocqueville noted that the American constitution itself is a document of forethought and purpose, imposing detailed and defined limits and obstacles on the federal government, and beyond them, walling society from it.

Still, Tocqueville knew that the governing despotism of which he wrote, and which can accurately and broadly be characterized as utopianism, is, for free men, living in civil societies, a perpetual and existential threat—even in America. In the end, he wondered if any democracy could withstand it. He concluded that ultimately it is up to the people. They will decide whether they shall be free or not. “I am full of apprehensions and hopes. I perceive mighty dangers which it is possible to ward off, mighty evils which may be avoided or alleviated; and I cling with a firmer hold to the belief that for democratic nations to be virtuous and prosperous, they require but to will it.… The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness” (II, 334).

PART III

ON UTOPIANISM AND AMERICANISM

CHAPTER ELEVEN

POST-CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA

WHEN JOHN LOCKE WROTE about the nature of man in the state of nature, he faced skepticism from some contemporaries. But his description was not theoretical. Indeed, not only was his influence on the American founding significant, but he rightly pointed to America as evidence for his observations and conclusions that individual self-interest and self-preservation, the right to life and liberty, the use of labor to improve and possess property, and equality in justice formed the natural state of human existence. And the quality of this existence promotes industriousness, sociability, civility, economic prosperity, and charity among men. “Everyone as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station willfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he as much as he can to preserve the rest of mankind, and not unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away or impair the life or what tends the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another” (Second Treatise, 2, 6). “It is often asked as a mighty objection, where are, or ever were, there any men in such a state of Nature? … The promises and bargains for truck [trade], etc.… in the woods of America, are binding to them, though they are perfectly in a state of Nature in reference to one another for truth, and keeping the faith belongs to men as men, and not as members of society” (2, 14).

Concisely put, this is the heritage and lineage of the American people, which dates hundreds of years before the American Revolution and transcends all else. From the earliest settlers escaping persecution or seeking opportunities in the New World, to the original colonies asserting self-rule through popular sovereignty and numerous local governing bodies; from the demand for independence, the assertion of inalienable individual rights, and the Revolutionary War, to the founding of the constitutional republic to secure individual liberty and the civil society, the American people engaged in the most widely considered and far-reaching exploration of humanity—its meaning, cultivation, and application—in