Crowdsourced Government
The Autobiography of a Republic, Part 4
The parts of Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution that we’ve covered so far are mostly introductory, setting the context for the pamphlets that debated and developed the ideas at the root of this country. The next chapter, “Power and Liberty: A Theory of Politics” brings us straight into the substance of that theory.
By first a side note: I have not yet reviewed Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, and I feel bad about that. The whole culture is engaged in knock-down, drag-out debates about the proper interpretation of an Ancient Greek poem, and I will not be left out of it. I’m able to peel away just enough time from the last days of my campaign to see the film during the middle of the day tomorrow, so readers should expect some commentary on it this week.
The title of Bailyn’s Chapter 3 talks about a “theory of politics,” and this is more than just a political philosophy. American political theory rises out of a philosophical view about individual rights and the proper role of government—but it combines that with a view of how a government should be structured to defend these rights and what the social forces are that tend both to threaten and to preserve liberty.
The underlying political philosophy has two main elements, which are also named in the chapter title: power and liberty.
“Liberty” refers to “the natural, absolute, personal rights of individuals…which everyone summarized, with minor variation in phrasing, as ‘personal security,’ ‘personal liberty,’ and ‘private property.’”
Note how individual and “personal” this conception of liberty was. The Founders—and the Enlightenment culture they were a part of—was highly individualist, even if they didn’t quite have the word for it yet.
This conception of liberty is also broad and open-ended. Existing, traditional guarantees of rights were not regarded as exhaustive. As Bailyn puts it, they “marked out the minimum not the maximum boundaries of right.” This is contrary to certain modern theories of interpretation in which a right is only enforceable if it has already been explicitly enumerated and protected.
Opposed to liberty was power.
