Robert Curry’s latest chapter on this important source of our nation’s original constitutional doctrine.
Abstract theories of liberal-progressive-socialism lead to collectivized tyranny, as we see in the long train of liberal-progressive obliterations of individual economic and political liberties, most recently under Barack Obama.
On Human Nature
By Robert Curry
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
James Madison
The Scottish theorists were very much aware how delicate this artificial structure of civilization was which rested on man’s more primitive and ferocious instincts…They were very far from holding such naïve views…as the “natural goodness of man,” or the existence of a “natural harmony of interests”…[They] 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.
F. A. Hayek
Neither the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment nor the Founders were under any illusions about human nature.
If we want to understand the efforts of the Founders during that hot summer in 1787, we must see them as trying to design self-government with a very sober assessment of human nature in mind. When in the next century Lord Acton wrote “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he captured in a ringing aphorism the view the Founders shared with the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment.
This view of the effect of power on human nature explains the Founders’ focus on defining and limiting federal power by distributing power among three branches, preserving the political independence of the states and creating a zone of liberty around the individual--even by further dividing the (supreme) legislative power itself, crafting two legislative bodies with separate powers and potentially competing interests.
Put yourself for a moment in the place of one of the Founders. Imagine that it is your responsibility to craft a government by the people and for the people that can succeed and endure. And, just for the moment, also imagine that you are, like them, under no illusions about the natural goodness of man. Now, how do you define your challenge?
Hayek’s contemporary, the philosopher Karl Popper offered a statement of the task of making a government that, I believe, illuminates the wisdom of the Founders. He proposed that if we face from the beginning the possibility of bad government, the question then becomes “how can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” And that is just how the Founders approached their task.
It is perhaps the great tragedy of the modern world that the French did not follow the cautious example of the Founders or, like the Founders, make use of the wisdom of the Scottish Enlightenment. After their Revolution of 1789 and under the influence of the rationalist utopianism of the French Enlightenment, France quickly descended into the Terror and soon plunged the world into war. Even worse, it was the tragic destiny of France to create almost immediately the first model of the modern perversion of self-government, the evil twin of the Founders’ creation, and to bequeath it to posterity. It is important to remember that Napoleon gained power through a series of plebiscites. Sophia Rosenfeld describes his accomplishment succinctly:
Napoleon’s great innovation…was to keep alive the idea of unlimited popular sovereignty…in the service of the curtailment of individual liberty and his own personal seizure of power. He successfully mobilized ‘the people’ in support of policies that disempowered them.
By 1799 Napoleon had seized power and was on his way to the military conquest of Europe; Washington had already left office two years earlier and retired to Mount Vernon.
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