Government homework for Eng.Kelvin

The Early Modern Body Politic

In the last two weeks we looked at two types of Christian Body Politic, the Medieval, which was a synthesis between centralized religious authority and regional politics, and the Reformed variations, which featured religious separation from Rome and some reorganization of local civil and religious offices. While there existed different ideas of how to organize a Christian state, the overall purpose of life was primarily religious. However, once states began choosing which of several forms of Christian practice to establish, they had a hard convincing all of their citizens that this was the only valid one, and political thinkers began seeking a means whereby more than one Christian confession could be practiced within the same state. This week we will look at some theories in which states began moving religion into the private sphere, the hallmark of modern Western political theory. Before we look at those theories, which we will designate variations of the Social Contract, we need to mention a few influential thinkers who helped set the stage for them. Each of them questioned some aspect of the Christian basis of the Medieval and Reformed understandings of the Body Politic.

Machiavelli

Of the thinkers under consideration this week, Machiavelli was perhaps the most overtly opposed to the Medieval Body Politic. For him, Western Civilization had taken a wrong turn with its embrace of the Gospel since it weakened humanity's attachment to the temporal world and turned too much of its ambition and art to spiritual matters. His own personal situation as a frustrated Florentine courtier, which motivated his rather immoral advice book, The Prince, made him long for the days when men of talent could make a name for themselves in the Roman Republic, which he idealized in his Discourses on Livy. In this latter work, Machiavelli sketched an ideal political philosophy quite similar to the Roman variation of Aristotle's mixed constitution, or polity, that Cicero thought was the best political achievement of mankind. In this arrangement, princes are powerful enough to lead but restrained from tyranny by the democratic elements of the constitution, such as legal referenda, certain elected offices, etc. The political world of his own time, dominated as it was by civil and ecclesiastical princes, was repugnant to Machiavelli; in his view, not only was the Church superfluous to politics, it was also hideously corrupt and incompetent. While his work was fairly well known, it was not until a truly secular politics emerged in Europe that his ideas were taken seriously.

Bacon

Francis Bacon, like Machiavelli, is better known for the use made of his work after his death than any influence that he exercised while living. His own personal actions were checkered as he fell in and out of favor with the various factions that contested the shift of power from Henry VIII to his sickly and short-lived son Edward VI, his Catholic daughter Mary, and his Protestant daughter Elizabeth. He rose as high as Chancellor of England under James, whose assent to the English throne solved the dynastic problems until the English Civil War, but Bacon was forced from office in disgrace as he had taken bribes to alleviate his own personal debts, which had been a constant problem. He is considered the Father of Empiricism, the scientific technique of only considering physically measurable evidence, but this owes more to the metaphysical commitments of those who followed him than to any excellence of his employment of the same. As we have been noticing, Western Civilization was moving steadily away from its religious foundation and was looking for new philosophies. However, unlike Machiavelli, Bacon was not an overt enemy of Christian religion, just the particular combination of religious and civil interests of his day. His political theory describes an ideal society in which the Gospel is embraced without the need of strong religious authority. Bacon hoped that in such a society, empirical science would be freed of some of the moral and religious constraints imposed upon it in late medieval Europe. As we will see, this idea of a scientific Christian nation would be embraced, in different ways, by both Hobbes and Locke.

Grotius

Hugo Grotius is important to the development of Western political theory for two main reasons, his contributions to the modern understanding of international law and religious toleration. As a Dutchman, Grotius lived in a world dominated by international concerns and religious turmoil: the Netherlands were the main shipping lane between Great Britain and the Continent, and thus were a very important economic holding of the Catholic Holy Roman Empire, which by this time was dominated by the Spanish monarchy. Grotius' writing in defense of freedom of the seas helped form the basis of modern understandings of maritime law. The Dutch had been attempting to break away for economic and religious reasons for some time: political independence meant freedom from imperial taxes and freedom to institute Calvinist theology and ecclesiology. Once this freedom was achieved, with the aid of newly Protestant England, the Dutch state converted the previously Catholic seminary system into a Calvinist university structure where it trained its ministers. Problems arose when a large portion of the religious faculty started to dissent from several Calvinist theological tenets, such as the mechanism of predestination to salvation. Grotius was allied with the dissenters and suffered persecution from the state, which led him to argue for Christian civil authority that only protects certain tenets of the faith, while leaving the rest to conscience. Grotius thus holds a similar position to one we will find in Locke as an important figure in the transition from the Medieval and Reformed Bodies Politic that protected a single, unified faith to a secular state that allowed individual conscience to determine religious belief and practice.

Descartes

Rene Descartes is perhaps the greatest of our authors this week since his philosophical ideas were to form the epistemological basis for a majority of the innovations in Western philosophy even to the present day. He was to Francis Bacon what Newton was to Galileo: a much more subtle and rigorous completer of earlier guesses. Descartes tried to rethink all of life based on what could be demonstrated by observation and formal logic alone. He was not necessarily opposed to the metaphysics of the medieval Scholastics, like Aquinas, but he wanted to place their findings on what he considered a surer foundation; he wanted the conclusions of moral philosophy to attain the firmness of mathematical demonstration. It is not too strong an assertion to suggest that most of Western political study subsequent to Descartes has been an attempt to study human society as a mathematical science. Unfortunately, as we will see in the remainder of the course, this attempt has met with less than the great hopes of its early enthusiasts.

The Social Contract

Now that we have looked at the general trajectory of the critiques of the Christian Bodies Politic, we are ready for some actual early modern political theorists. They are called modern because their theories either establish or try to explain the political philosophy of current nation states. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were among the first political philosophers to provide completely new ways of imagining Christian society. Instead of viewing society as one big group of Christians that needed ecclesiastical and political offices for its maintenance, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau understood the state as an agglomeration of individuals, each of whom could choose how they were going to believe and live. These individuals were morally free to form a Social Contract with the state, in which they would cede some of their liberties to the state for the greater goods provided them by organized society. Hobbes, who lived through the English Civil War, was concerned primarily with strengthening the government to prevent its dissolution; therefore, he gives the people one option in the contract: submission to authority. Locke, on the other hand, was optimistic about the free choices of individuals and wanted the state to act as a referee to make sure that all individuals had a chance to exercise their choices without violating the same rights of others. If Locke's ideas seems familiar, it is because his theory had a large influence on the American Founders, especially Jefferson. Finally, Rousseau is famous for contradiction: he argued that government itself is overly constrictive of individual liberty; but if man must be governed, Rousseau favored the modern secular, democratic state, which became the goal of the French Revolutionaries.

Hobbes and the English Civil War

Thomas Hobbes seems like the most medieval of the three Social Contract thinkers since he favored autocratic centralized power vested in a sovereign monarch. However, as we noticed in our development of the Medieval Body Politic, the actual medieval political arrangement was one in which local civil authority was checked by the ecclesiastical authority of the popes. Since this religious authority was exercised locally by bishops, the appointment of bishops was hotly contested as we saw in the Investiture Conflict. It was not until after the Reformation that local political sovereigns found themselves with complete control over both political and religious matters. This was a difficult situation, both for the government and citizens, especially in the English case. Henry VIII and his Protestant successors had attempted to keep the episcopal hierarchy, the religious authority of bishops united under a primate, even if free from papal control. However, the overall religious tenor of the Reformation favored individual conscience rather than institutional authority. Not surprisingly, this English religious and political uncertainty incited a crisis, and the English Civil War pitted the Puritans, who favored abolition of the episcopacy (bishops) and the monarchy, against the Royalists, who wanted to keep both. The Glorious Revolution, which solved the problem, resulted in retention of the monarchy and bishops but with greatly reduced powers: after the installation of William and Mary, English monarchs were beholden to Parliament, and a policy of religious toleration allowed dissenters from the established Church of England, with its episcopal hierarchy, to have their own houses of worship.

Hobbes was writing during the beginning of the conflict, and he argued that a re-empowered monarchy that had total control over both civil and ecclesiastical offices was the solution. The object of his scheme was not really new as it had been the Royalist position for a century; however, his method of argument was almost completely novel: he attempted to prove in a mathematical fashion that centralized authority is the conclusion given by careful observation of nature.

The first half of his great work, Leviathan, is a discourse on new quantitative methods of empirical natural science, which he then applied to human social structures to produce a truly new thing in political theory, the scientific Christian state. As we have seen in other Christian political thinkers, earlier Christian political theory had consisted of a demonstration of how the revealed Gospel was to revolutionize human life by making it concerned with eternal matters of the soul. In such an arrangement, described by Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, the state exists as a support to the Church, but not as an end in itself. For Hobbes, the state still has a Christian nomenclature, but its object, progressive material human improvement based on scientific discovery, is now more important, or at least as important, as its religious life. In fact, Hobbes was so worried that religious questions would disrupt the state's real purpose that he wanted to give the civil sovereign total control of its ecclesiastical institutions; restriction of religious liberty was a price Hobbes was more than willing to pay. For Hobbes, the Social Contract is fulfilled as long as the sovereign can prevent dissolution of society into civil war, and every means necessary to do so is licit to the sovereign since the people have only this one demand in the agreement.

As I just mentioned, Hobbes’ strong monarchy was the Royalist position in the English Civil War. When that faction was defeated by the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell, it lost some of its attractiveness. Although Puritan Republican England was a complete failure and replaced during the Glorious Revolution, the English monarchy that was re-founded was not based on Hobbes’ Social Contract, but rather on that of John Locke.

Locke and the American Founders

John Locke's contribution to Western political philosophy is almost completely in contradiction to Hobbes. Locke wished to demonstrate that religious liberty would not imperil the state; indeed, he argued that liberty in general is the best protection against tyranny that would otherwise make the state intolerable. Like Hobbes, Locke was a natural philosopher, taking his lessons from empirical observation and mathematical analysis, but his application of those principles to political life led to a conclusion opposite of Hobbes: rather than folding all authority into the sovereign, Locke argued for a state that balanced its powers in a Social Contract between the sovereign people and elected office-holders empowered to do the people’s will. Locke was writing at the end of the English Civil War when despotic power, of the type favored by Hobbes, manifestly had failed to prevent unrest. The outcome of the Glorious Revolution, constitutional monarchy in which a nominal monarch acts as the head of state but most actual governing is done by Parliament, is almost a perfectly Lockean separation of powers. His institutional prescriptions were also greatly influential on the American Founders.

Locke's contributions to the ideas of religious pluralism and toleration are at least as important for modern political theory as his institutional design. For centuries, the Catholic Church was the only Christian body in England and the rest of Europe. As we saw in Aquinas' work, the Medieval Body Politic envisioned a situation in which kings defend the Catholic faith, but the clergy are free from civil control and answer, ultimately, to the popes. In practice, the civil and religious powers had a fairly uneasy relationship, and ambitious secular and ecclesiastical princes often competed for control over each other. When Henry VIII officially removed England from papal religious authority, all religious power was assumed by the civil sovereign. This move almost immediately caused strife between three camps: English Catholics wanted a return to Catholic unity; Anglicans wanted religious uniformity but without papal influence; and dissenters wanted religious freedom based on individual conscience. Although officially Protestant after Elizabeth's reign, the Crown appeared to be creeping back towards the Catholic Church on the eve of the English Civil War, and the Puritans were fighting this as much as they were trying to implement a republic.

All of this religious strife led Locke to write his famous Letter Concerning Toleration. In it, he argued that no uniformity of religious practice is necessary to the state as long as the civil authority works to promote an environment in which men of good will can learn and follow after Christian principles of salvation and virtuous living. In this argument, he explicitly stated that government should concern itself not with religious doctrine but with public order. While this may seem familiar to us, as described above, this idea of a religiously disinterested state was completely novel to Christendom. Even so, the preceding religious conflict made the English public ready to receive such an idea, and laws of toleration were passed guaranteeing freedom for religious pluralism. Thus, for Locke, the Social Contract was a complex balance of limited government and religious liberty.

Although Locke’s ideas were quite influential in England after the Glorious Revolution, they found a much purer application during the American Founding. Even though the English Civil War convulsed the English polity, it still had the accumulated experience of many centuries of monarchy and centralized ecclesiastical administration. The American Colonies, when they decided to end their strained association with Great Britain and when they had gained that freedom, drew on Locke’s theories for support and guidance. They did not have to worry about an existing monarchy or established church; they had only to prevent their creation. They were certainly successful in the religious component. Their constitutional language regarding separation of church and state continues to push religion further and further from public life. The rapid growth of the powers of the central government and the presidents leave some doubt about the prudence of their political design.

Rousseau and the French Revolution

Finally, Rousseau proposed a version of the Social Contract that we might consider the first truly secular Western theory of government since the Reformation since it really does banish Christian religion to a purely private sphere without any recommendation of its virtues, even the qualified one of Hobbes and Locke.

Rousseau was writing after two centuries of very strong monarchy in France. France had experienced its own turmoil during the Reformation: the monarchy, which previously had not been as strong and centralized in France as in England, had wavered between toleration and repression of the French Protestant Huguenots, the Calvinist expression in France. This temporary peace violently ended during the turmoil surrounding the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre and the succession crisis that followed it as the Valois dynasty collapsed. When Henry IV, a cousin of the royal family who had been raised Protestant, joined the Catholic Church in order to ascend to the throne, he promulgated the Edict of Nantes, which established Protestant zones within officially Catholic France. In these areas, Protestant nobles were allowed to oversee Protestant worship. Henry's heir, Louis XIII, significantly weakened the Protestant side of the pact through military and political harassment, and his son, Louis XIV, together with Cardinal Richelieu, ended the policy of toleration about 100 years after its creation, causing a diaspora of French Huguenots throughout Protestant Europe. France returned to a uniform establishment of the Catholic faith, but now with a very strong, centralized monarchy that had gained its powers in the struggle just described. That monarchy eventually suffered the fate of most powerfully centralized governments: public unrest caused by incompetence and corruption at the center. Public dissatisfaction became so great that the people were ready to consider a radical scheme like Rousseau's.

Rousseau, the estranged son of a Swiss watchmaker, had risen to public notice in Paris by his authorship of A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, which was submitted as part of an essay contest. In this work, Rousseau began his argument about the corrupting influences of society and education on the inherent goodness of man's nature, a theme he would expand in his Discourse on the Origins of Human Inequality and the later Social Contract. While often contradictory, Rousseau's basic prescriptions for the ills of French government and society were rapid democratic reform and an almost complete break with customary traditions. Most significantly, echoing Machiavelli, he argued that Christian religion had corrupted the public spirit needed for good government because it made citizens too concerned with the afterlife and weakened their military resolve. Rousseau recommended a general civil religion of human dignity as a replacement. His version of the Social Contract was a complete rethinking of Western institutions of government and religion on the basis of secular humanism as opposed to the Christian tinkering in Hobbes and Locke. These recommendations were followed almost to the letter during the French Revolution, which changed France from a monarchy to a republic and brought an end to the public establishment of the Catholic Church in France of nearly 1200 years.

Preparing for the Modern Total State

The Social Contract was an attempt to address the problems of the Medieval and Reformed Christian Bodies Politic. Rousseau’s version, the last and most radical, ended with a persecution of Christian religion that ended only when Napoleon established a military dictatorship in France. The next century of European government was beset with further revolutions that tried to remove the last vestiges of a Christian Body Politic. Next week we will look at two of these attempts, Communism and Fascism, which were more like diseases of the Body Politic than coherent alternative theories.

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