Liberty and Equality - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Liberty and Equality

Discussion of liberty and equality concerns one of the most relevant topics in political science. For liberty and equality are basic to constitutional government. Authoritarianism is by and large condemned because it supposedly denies liberty and equality, whereas constitutionalism is praised because it supposedly protects these values. However, this does not mean that the fellowship of liberty and equality under a constitutional government is an unproblematic one. Advocates of constitutional government like Montesquieu and Tocqueville, much as they were interested in a society characterized by liberty and equality, recognized an inherent conflict between these values. As a matter of fact, both seem, in an absolute sense, to be competitive, if not incompatible. In the last analysis, an egalitarian is unable to accept the liberty of his fellow men to do and to live better than himself on account of the free use of their greater abilities. Likewise, a libertarian will be opposed to egalitarian restrictions of the free employment of his abilities to do and to live better than his fellow men. Man’s quest for liberty has been as insatiable as his quest for equality. The former is likely to result in anarchy and the latter in absolute conformity and regimentation, and one is as incompatible as the other with constitutional government. Perhaps that form of government can be measured by its ability to protect liberty and equality to such a degree only as to assure their co-existence. It must protect only the liberty to do what is permitted by the (basically liberal) law and only the equality before that law, a law which is devoid of privileges which are not the result of the free and legal employment of human faculties and are thus artificial and unjust. Constitutional government thus seems to stand or fall with the maintenance of a neat balance between a qualified, and not absolute, liberty and a qualified, and not absolute, equality. The tenuous situation in which we find constitutional government today is probably due to an undue increase of equality at the cost of liberty, an increase which destroys that balance.

The Declaration of Independence can be considered a true document of constitutional government because it confesses both to the principles of liberty and equality when it states “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certainunalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” happiness in all probability meaning the protection of property rights, i.e., of the rights to enjoy achievement and what has been gained as a result of the free employment ofthe unequal faculties of man. In proposing popular government, the Declaration became more than a mere document of constitutional government. It became a document of constitutional democracy. Since democracy is majority rule which has more and more come to tend toward egalitarian rather than libertarian values, the constitutionalism of modern democracy has come to depend largely upon the majority’s ability to contain egalitarian passions by a reasonable appreciation of liberty.

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Professor Jaffa’s well written book, consisting of previously published addresses, articles and book reviews, is concerned with equality and liberty in the United States. It makes the reader reflect upon these values and ponder over the theory and practice of American politics. Whereas Erik von Kuchnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality, published in 1952, suggests the basic competition between, if not incompatibility of, liberty and equality, the title of the book reviewed indicates a general acceptance of the co-existence of the two values.

If we ask the further question as to which of these values is the more important one, the title, putting equality before Liberty, seems to suggest that the author attributes priority to equality. According to the foreword by Charles H. Percy, currently Republican candidate for U.S. Senator from Illinois, it is Professor Jaffa’s view that American politics, like American independence, was and is generated bythe dedication of the American people to the principle of human equality. This principle is, according to the author, the most important cause of the most important events in our past . . . the cause forwhich we as a free people ought to live.” The impression that Professor Jaffa tends to elevate equality over liberty is strengthened by his many references to the importance of equality rather than to that of liberty; by his considering “liberty as an implication of equality” ( 128); by the fact that his statement that the assertion of the self-evident truth that all men are created equal “cannot mean that all men are equal in intelligence, strength, beauty, or in moral or intellectual capacity . . . that there is no natural difference between man and man” ( 13), is not followed by a statement that different natural abilities and their free employment entitle men to different standards of living; by the fact that whereas he writes that equality in the Declaration of Independence can only have meant that people have an equal right to participate in government, he refrains from pointing out how the abolition of property qualifications for voting led the emancipated toward passing social legislation which interfered with property rights as well as the right to work for the acquisition of property. He admits that the government can interfere with property rights; rights the protection or which can be considered a bulwark against egalitarianism—if such interference is approved by the representatives of the people (126).

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In spite of his obvious foible for equality, it would be unfair to call Mr. Jaffa an egalitarian. For he also favors a constitutional democracy in which there exists liberty, and thus appears as an advocate of a certain balance between egalitarian and libertarian principles. To him the Declaration of Independence provides that “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of equals who join in civil society to secure their inherent rights to life and to liberty. Property is a support of life, and the enlargement of property an enlargement of liberty. For this reason it is a duty of government to make property secure” (126). The author emphasizes that Jefferson favored enlightened self-government, and that “[t]he transformation of majority rule from a quantitative to a qualitative concept . . . was the work that the founders set out to achieve and upon which the truth of the proposition of equality, for all its self-evidence, depended” (51). Majority rule was to be one in which the natural aristocracy, an aristocracy based upon virtue and talent, played a predominant role, for “[a]ccording to Jefferson, the best form of government was democratic precisely because it was also aristocratic, in the true sense of the word” (51). It appears that equality served the purpose of permitting everyone of virtue and talent to rise to membership in the natural aristocracy, and was a means for a libertarian end. Professor Jaffa’s belief in a balance of liberty and equality rather than a priority of equality can be gathered also from his acceptance of the idea that the Constitution, drafted in large measure to prevent infringements upon property rights, to maintain the unequal distribution of property and to prevent economic egalitarianism, “was framed by men who . . . were committed by and large to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, whatever their differences all expressed their belief in the principles of the Declaration, and all conceived the Constitution as the frame of a government instituted to secure the rights announced in the Declaration. Not one of them would have recognized any more fundamental difference between the Declaration and the Constitution than, broadly speaking, the difference between a statement of ends and a statement of means” (81). Jaffa’s concern about the protection of liberty is perhaps most evident in the chapter “On the Nature of Civil and Religious Liberty.”

That chapter deals with the problem of whether there is a justification for constitutional reason of state, i.e., whether in a constitutional democracy the government ought to be permitted to restrict civil rights if these rights are being abused by forces that want to overthrow the constitutional order providing for liberty and equality. Professor Jaffa, marshalling support from John Stuart Mill, answers thisquestion in the affirmative, having “seen Weimar Germany, the freest market plate of ideas the world has ever known, give itself up to the Nazis” (183). (The government under the Weimar Republic, it will be remembered, extended the protection of its Bill of Rights to Nazi activities, something Goebbels himself branded as a foolish and suicidal policy.) This reviewer, having observed the last years of the Weimar Republic in Germany at close range, agrees with this. However, he is more reluctant to support the author’s negative answer to the question whether restrictions of civil liberties for the sake of the preservation of constitutional democracy in the United States, while justifiable, would be wise and expedient. Professor Jaffa believes “that the United States is a sufficiently civilized and a sufficiently stable community to hear the advocacy of almost anything, whether it be national socialism, communism, or cannibalism.” He takes his stand with Jefferson, who in his first inaugural address said, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat” (181). Lincoln, with whom the author deals at length, seems to have been influenced by this statement even during the Civil War. His restrictions of civil rights, serious as they were, were of relatively minor nature. Similarly, this country could afford relatively mild restrictions of civil rights during the two World Wars. Whether it can afford liberality with respect to Communists and their fellow travellers, remains to be seen. Mr. Jaffa himself perhaps harbors doubts in this respect, when outside the chapter just discussed, he states: “We hope to control the future by recapturing the past. I believe something very like this is the only policy by which we will be saved, if we are saved” (43).

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