The fifth conception of liberty has been in the American air for a long time, as evident in certain pronouncements from Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. Aspects of it had been affirmed by the Supreme Court in a number of landmark First Amendment decisions since the s regarding political expression, the regulation of obscenity, and the non-establishment and free-exercise of religion.
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Connecticut , Roe v. Wade , and Lawrence v. The core idea of personal-autonomy liberty is the notion that the individual should be allowed to do whatever he wishes, so long as he does not harm others or violate their rights. Personal-autonomy liberty pushes against societal regulation of all these aspects of life and flatly rejects it with respect to consensual sex and religious opinion. But this understanding was not embraced by all or even most of the founders. Many states went on enacting laws, or even constitutional provisions, that expressly promoted Christianity well into the late 19th century.
And with respect to sexuality, the record of state legislation was even more repugnant to the personal-autonomy idea of liberty. We could turn to various political theorists to more fully understand personal-autonomy liberty, but simpler articulations of it may be found in the public declarations of two of our Supreme Court justices: The Constitution on its face is The text marks the metes and bounds of official authority and individual autonomy. When one studies the boundary Casey , the decision that reaffirmed the core holding of Roe v. Wade , spoke of the same vision:.
Our law affords constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. It is now clear that, so long as the Court remains dedicated to this understanding, it will eventually overturn laws that prohibit same-sex marriage.
It has also become clear that many Americans now regard this individual-autonomy notion of liberty as the central feature of our democratic heritage. This fifth conception of liberty is clearly ascendant in our time. On the right, this has meant the rise of a libertarian social ethic rather than a communitarian conservatism. And on the left, it has meant a de-emphasis of the progressive ideal of liberty even as progressivism has appeared resurgent in the Obama years.
As recently as the s, there were large numbers of pro-life Democrats who, like the social-gospel Progressives or New Deal Catholics of old, mainly cleaved to the progressive notion of liberty and certainly did not accept the overall personal-autonomy conception. But they are a dying breed now, and typically in those instances when the progressive ideal of liberty comes into conflict with personal autonomy on the left, it is the progressive ideal that must make way.
The classical-communitarian conception of liberty, meanwhile, is the least championed one today in American politics. It tends to oppose itself to both the Democratic and Republican coalitions, and thus far its political impact has been negligible. While each of these five conceptions of liberty has had its specific historical origin and heyday, all of them are alive in our time.
Liberals today emphasize and to some degree combine conceptions four and five, conservatives one and three, and libertarians three and five, although all tend to assume they hold only a single and straightforward conception of liberty. In fact, one benefit of the five-fold framework offered here is that it leads us away from the dichotomous frameworks typically used to analyze liberty, and it allows us to see not only that liberty means different things to different people, but that it can mean multiple things to each of us.
The same people similarly make no distinction between the progressive and personal-autonomy conceptions of liberty. Everything is reduced to two opposing sides.
Alexis de Tocqueville
All of these dichotomies are too simplistic for making fair judgments or adequate accounts of history. The five-fold framework offered here avoids such reduction. It thus allows the examination of liberty to become dialogic and dynamic, shedding light on American history and on our misunderstandings or misrepresentations of it. Why did our conceptions of liberty develop as they did?
By this account, our journey from the founding to the present has involved two key corrective steps.
The Five Conceptions of American Liberty | National Affairs
First, the progressive conception was formulated in response to the way the natural-rights conception developed over time into an economic-autonomy ideal of liberty. This response involved something of an overreaction, however, for the progressive conception was too negligent of civil liberties, as these were associated with the natural-rights tradition, and too complacent about the potential for government expansion into all areas of life.
So a second corrective step was taken, involving both a re-appreciation of inviolable individual liberties tied to the Bill of Rights and a further carving out, particularly through the right-to-privacy cases, of a much larger sphere of personal autonomy in non-economic matters. And regarding the trend illustrated by the right-to-privacy cases, the following from Justice Brennan is similarly revealing:. Until the end of the nineteenth century, freedom and dignity in our country found meaningful protection in the institution of real property To a growing extent economic existence now depends on less certain relationships with government In the old days, the dignified sphere of individual liberty was economic, but now, given the growing power that progressives had given and think they ought to continue to give to government, a new approach was needed.
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Originalist constitutional scholars harp on the inconsistency of a liberal court that, after emphatically rejecting economic substantive due process in the late s, turned to what was essentially non-economic substantive due process from the s forward. But if it was not a move that made perfect sense as an interpretation of the 14th Amendment, it is easily understood as being motivated by a need to guarantee the individual some arena for autonomous action.
And it also helps explain the mix of progressive liberty and autonomous-individual liberty that now defines the left.
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This development of American progressivism and liberalism is certainly an important part of the story of our conceptions of liberty. But two alternative conservative explanations give us reason to think it is not the whole story. The Progressives rejected these elements and began to shape the government in a manner, later taken much further by New Deal and Great Society liberals, which undermined each of them.
It is crucial to understand how novel this interpretation of Progressivism has been. Prior to the work of these scholars, the dominant academic understanding was that Progressivism had been an obviously necessary response to growing corporate power in America, and that, in comparison with more fundamental critiques of capitalism, it was in many ways quite tepid. But the newer scholarship has called that account into question and most importantly has shown that the Progressive departure really was a radical one.
It was deeply influenced by historicist ideas propounded by German philosophers like Hegel, and these ideas prove to be incompatible with natural rights. He argues that the collapse of aristocracy lessened the patriarchal rule in the family where fathers would control daughters' marriages, meaning that women had the option of remaining unmarried and retaining a higher degree of independence.
Married women, by contrast, lost all independence "in the bonds of matrimony" as "in America paternal discipline [by the woman's father] is very relaxed and the conjugal tie very strict". Because of his own view that a woman could not act on a level equal to a man, he saw a woman as needing her father's support to retain independence in marriage.
Consistent with this limited view of the potential of women to act as equals to men, as well as his apparently missing on his travels seeing the nurturing roles that many men in the United States played, particularly in the Delaware Valley region of cultures where there was a lot of influence by Society of Friends as well as a tradition of male and female equality, Tocqueville considered the separate spheres of women and men a positive development, stating: As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, The primary focus of Democracy in America is an analysis of why republican representative democracy has succeeded in the United States while failing in so many other places.
Tocqueville seeks to apply the functional aspects of democracy in the United States to what he sees as the failings of democracy in his native France. Tocqueville speculates on the future of democracy in the United States, discussing possible threats to democracy and possible dangers of democracy. These include his belief that democracy has a tendency to degenerate into " soft despotism " as well as the risk of developing a tyranny of the majority.
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He observes that the strong role religion played in the United States was due to its separation from the government, a separation all parties found agreeable. He contrasts this to France where there was what he perceived to be an unhealthy antagonism between democrats and the religious, which he relates to the connection between church and state. Tocqueville also outlines the possible excesses of passion for equality among men, foreshadowing the totalitarian states of the twentieth century.
Insightful analysis of political society was supplemented in the second volume by description of civil society as a sphere of private and civilian affairs mirroring Hegel. Tocqueville observed that social mechanisms have paradoxes, as in what later became known as the Tocqueville effect: Tocqueville's views on the United States took a darker turn after , however, as made evident in Aurelian Craiutu's Tocqueville on America after Letters and Other Writings.
Democracy in America was published in two volumes, the first in and the other in It was immediately popular in both Europe and the United States, while also having a profound impact on the French population.
By the twentieth century, it had become a classic work of political science , social science , and history. It is a commonly assigned reading for undergraduates of American universities majoring in the political or social sciences, and part of the introductory political theory syllabus at Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton and other institutions.
In the introduction to his translation of the book, Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield calls it "at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America. Tocqueville's work is often acclaimed for making a number of astute predictions. He anticipates the potential acrimony over the abolition of slavery that would tear apart the United States and lead to the American Civil War as well as the eventual superpower rivalry between the United States and Russia, which exploded after World War II and spawned the Cold War.
Noting the rise of the industrial sector in the American economy, Tocqueville, some scholars have argued, also correctly predicted that an industrial aristocracy would rise from the ownership of labor. He warned that ' On the other hand, Tocqueville proved shortsighted in noting that a democracy's equality of conditions stifles literary development.
Equally, in dismissing the country's interest in science as limited to pedestrian applications for streamlining the production of material goods, he failed to imagine America's burgeoning appetite for pure scientific research and discovery.
The Five Conceptions of American Liberty
The Jewish artillery captain, convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular Three months after a new French constitution was approved, Charles de Gaulle is elected the first president of the Fifth Republic by a sweeping majority of French voters. The 16th-century Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernando de Soto c. During a French political crisis over the military and civilian revolt in Algeria, Charles de Gaulle is called out of retirement to head a new emergency government. Considered the only leader of sufficient strength and stature to deal with the perilous situation, the former war The Arc de Triomphe.
French Revolution The French Revolution was a watershed event in modern European history that began in and ended in the late s with the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte. Alfred Dreyfus In December , French officer Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason by a military court-martial and sentenced to life in prison for his alleged crime of passing military secrets to the Germans.