I. Introduction
Progressive thinkers were revolutionary in their ends, not in their means. They generally condemned what John Dewey (1859–1952) called “radicalism,” meaning efforts to overthrow the government by action beyond established law, let alone through violence. Progressivism, wrote Dewey, “both by its theory and by its own nature is committed to democratic methods of effecting social change.”Footnote 1 At the same time, Progressives made clear their plans to attempt to change the basic character of the political and economic system and to discard the theoretical foundation of natural rights philosophy that underlay it.
The immediate target was the Constitution. Progressives saw it as an instrument that thwarted the democratic will and prevented the enactment of policies needed to meet the challenges of the new Industrial Age. (It was virtually an article of faith among Progressives that the people wished for, or could be persuaded to support, the programs that Progressives favored.) An effective system of modern policymaking, Progressives argued, required above all a capacity for planning and experimentation without the imposition of artificial limits on discretion. The Constitution, however, had as one of its primary aims the protection of liberty, understood in large part as individual rights. This objective was built into the structure of the government, with its fragmentation of authority among different institutions and its restrictions on governmental power; and it was further promoted by the listing of different rights in the original Constitution and in the Bill of Rights. The Constitution, as Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) explained, was based on a “Newtonian” model, whereas what the nation needed was a system that rested on “Darwinian” principles: “There can be no successful government without leadership or without the intimate, almost instinctive, coordination of the organs of life and action… Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.”Footnote 2
For many Progressives the mere mention of “economic individualism” was enough to condemn the system. Walter Weyl (1873–1919), a well-known writer, was content to describe individualism as “self-confident, short-sighted, lawless, [and] doomed in the end to defeat itself.”Footnote 3 But deeper thinkers like Dewey and historian Carl Becker (1873–1945) understood that opposition to individualism implicated the general doctrine of natural rights; that doctrine too, therefore, had to be exposed and rejected. No matter how much these thinkers praised the democratic “spirit” of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)—Dewey celebrated him as “the first modern to state in human terms the principles of democracy”Footnote 4—they could not support the letter of Jefferson's goals. For Jefferson “nothing … is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man,” whereas for the Progressives nothing was unchangeable, including therefore the idea of natural rights. Jefferson's fondest hope was that “all eyes are … opening to the rights of man,” whereas the Progressives urged our gaze to be turned elsewhere, to the Great Society in the future. For the Progressives, as Dewey made clear, the doctrine of natural rights was the foundation on which the old American system had rested. It was an idea, he wrote, “located in the clouds,” whose “falsity may easily be demonstrated both philosophically and historically.”Footnote 5 It would need to be swept away before the new system could come into being.
Progressives were not, of course, critical of the Enlightenment scientific project that Jefferson had helped introduce into America. On the contrary, they insisted that they were its modern champions. A new and expanded form of social science—what Dewey referred to famously as a “reconstruction” of the Enlightenment project—was their goal. It was just that economic and social conditions had reached a new stage in which old forms had to be set aside. Liberty in our time was to be achieved not by the recognition of rights, but by collective social action that supplied powers or capacities to individuals.
Political communities gravitate to a central principle of right. If, as Progressives asserted, the doctrine of natural rights was the reigning idea among the public, its elimination would create a vacuum. It is important therefore to ask what Progressives thought would take its place, and whether their answer (if they had one) has proven to be viable. An inquiry into this question is of more than merely historical interest. Adherents to contemporary liberalism have reclaimed the old label of “Progressives” and sometimes consider themselves—or are considered by others—as the heirs of that older movement. Some of the issues and problems that Progressives confronted in seeking to establish a new foundation in their time may shed light on challenges that liberals face today.
II. Progressive Interpretations of Natural Rights in the American Founding
Progressive historiography has been clear on one point. Progressives never doubted the primacy or ascendancy of the natural rights doctrine for the American Founders. Carl Becker, in his famous study on the Declaration of Independence, noted: “The doctrine of natural rights was, I found to be, in the eighteenth century, so commonly accepted as the foundation of all social philosophy that Jefferson could defend his formulation of it by saying that he was only expressing ‘the common sense of the matter.’ ”Footnote 6 Much historical writing since the Progressive era has called this claim into question, arguing that the importance of general philosophical speculation in the Revolution has been greatly exaggerated. The historian John Reid provocatively summed up this line of argument by referring to “the irrelevancy of natural rights.”Footnote 7
There appears on first glance to be a refreshing frankness in the Progressives' treatment of the Founders. As much as Progressives opposed the doctrine of natural rights, they never sought to read their opposition to it into the Founders' thought; they eschewed a reliance on “useable history,” the practice of finding one's general position inside a privileged historical moment. (Consider how many strands of thought today, from a left-wing communitarianism to a conservative traditionalism, have discovered interpretations of the Founding that correlate with their own public philosophy.) Yet before crediting the Progressives with too much probity, one should ask whether their interpretive account might not also have derived from strategic considerations of their own. Progressives delighted in sharpening their conflict with the Founders, which was a stance consistent with their “revolutionary” project. If the plan was to replace the Founding, it was necessary to diminish the Founders' stature. The Founders' support of an erroneous or outmoded doctrine is of a piece with this approach. The Progressives also thought that they had a winning rhetorical strategy, one that fit with a powerful modern prejudice against custom or history. As John Dewey commented in Reconstruction in Philosophy: “The future rather than the past dominates the imagination. The Golden Age lies ahead of us not behind us.“Footnote 8
Setting aside further speculations about motives, were the Progressives correct in their assessment of the primacy of nature and natural rights at the time of the founding? One thing that even the modern doubters do not question is that the natural rights doctrine was important to a large segment of America's leaders, who regarded the introduction of a philosophical foundation into the political world as one of the great intellectual revolutions in human affairs. Nor did these leaders embark on this change casually. As John Adams (1735–1826) noted in recounting a key debate in the Continental Congress in 1774: “We very deliberately considered and debated … whether we should recur to the law of nature” along with the historical foundations of the tradition, such as the “common law” and “the charters” or “the rights of British subjects.”Footnote 9 Here and elsewhere the Founders aired fundamental issues about natural law doctrine, including whether natural law could be a comprehensible political foundation, and, if so, whether it should be introduced. Many of the Founders were aware of philosopher David Hume's (1711–1776) warnings that a recurrence to the standard of nature might prove destabilizing to political society by providing a source of right beyond the positive law.Footnote 10
If the importance of the doctrine of natural right to a segment of the leadership class is indisputable, determining its significance for the mass public is, and will likely remain, a difficult challenge. It may well be, as modern historians claim, that few went into battle during the Revolutionary war singing hymns to nature or nature's God. Yet this fact, if it is one, carries nowhere near the theoretical import that some have tried to ascribe to it. For even if the doctrine of natural rights was not, as Jefferson asserted a half-century later to Henry Lee (1756–1818), an “expression of the American mind” in 1776, it certainly became so sometime thereafter.Footnote 11 At some point in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century Americans acknowledged, at least ritually, its primacy. As John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) observed in his July 4 Oration in 1821: “America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.”Footnote 12 Further proof of the importance of natural rights theory, if it is needed, is supplied, ironically, by its opponents. In the 1840s, defenders of slavery began a widespread public campaign to denounce the doctrine for being (in John Calhoun's (1782–1850) words) “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.”Footnote 13 If the theory had been “irrelevant,” there would have been no need to attack it.
In the end, then, setting aside the quarrels about the timing of the popular acceptance of natural rights doctrine, Progressive historians seem to have gotten right the importance of natural rights philosophy to the American experiment. Can the same be said of the way in which they characterized natural rights doctrine? Most Progressives, in line with Carl Becker's analysis, interpreted the Founders to have understood the doctrine of natural rights as a discovery full of Enlightenment thought. Natural rights doctrine borrowed from the general spirit of modern science (with Newton in the background) and especially from the works of John Locke (1632–1704). The concept of nature referred to what man could grasp by the use of his reason about the permanent arrangement of the world. Nature, to the Founders, designated both the essential character of empirical phenomena, as in the constitution of man (human nature), and the necessary relations that exist among things. These relations were “laws of nature”; they could provide the intellectual understanding for the construction of models—not necessarily of things that currently existed but of things that could be brought into existence, in the way that an engineer builds something according to a plan. To construct government according to the laws of nature became the great aim of the Founders' doctrine of natural right. The science they followed began by distilling certain premises about psychology or human nature relating to man's strongest passions or needs; it then proceeded to construct a model of political organization that met or satisfied these needs, at least as they were relevant to political life, in a way that allowed for the establishment of just, decent, and enduring (legitimate) governments.
Subsequent historical scholarship has questioned this view of the Founders' understanding of natural rights, with some denying that they conceived of nature exclusively in terms of this Enlightenment rationalist framework. Instead, these scholars argue, many of the Founders worked from a view of nature influenced by deist Protestant thought or by older notions of natural law, both classical and Christian. Indeed, it has been pointed out that Jefferson himself, the Founder who was arguably most indebted to Enlightenment ideas, wrote in the same letter to Lee that the prevailing understanding of the doctrine was expressed “in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”Footnote 14 Edwin Corwin, the famous constitutional scholar, initiated this general line of criticism of the Progressive view in 1928, in his revealingly entitled work, The “Higher Law” Background of American Constitutional Law. Footnote 15 Those Founders holding to a “higher law” understanding of nature had different views of human nature and, in some cases, slightly different notions of the purposes of government than those who followed thought.
Much can be said in favor of this correction of the Progressive view. The Founders were probably less “Lockean” than the Progressives portrayed them. Or at any rate, they interpreted Locke in a less materialist or calculative sense than the Progressives make out. The question of the Founders' full understanding of the concept of nature—or different Founders' understanding—remains a topic for further research.
Yet even if we follow the Progressives on this point, and restrict the inquiry here to the natural rights doctrine as it derived from Enlightenment thought, it is important to note (as few Progressives did) that there were different interpretations of the character of rights within this tradition. One view emphasized the rights of individuals, while another put more weight on collective rights. The individualist view, which is the form Progressives stressed, identified the object of society as the protection of individual rights, whether untouched in their natural form or maximized in their practical realization by civil or municipal law. These rights needed protection not just from tyrants, but also (in James Madison's (1751–1836) words) from “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority” within republics.Footnote 16 Property rights were an important element needing this protection, and courts in early America sometimes intervened on their behalf.Footnote 17
The idea of collective rights, deriving from the Declaration's statement of “the right of the people to alter or abolish it [a form of government], and institute new government,” was favored in the early nineteenth century by many Jeffersonians, especially in the South, and later by Jacksonians. For many Americans, as the historian Daniel Rodgers has explained, “the hard core meaning of Natural Rights was a collective right: the revolutionary right to begin society over again.“Footnote 18 This idea of collective rights was extended almost to the point of identifying natural right with the wishes of the majority, or popular sovereignty. On the state level, the application of natural rights in this sense was often at odds with claims of property rights. Fearing the radical implications of this understanding of natural rights, some defenders of property therefore grew leery altogether of appeals to natural law, which they regarded as radical, and preferred instead to rely on the protections of positive law.
A final—and what became a highly contentious—Enlightenment understanding of natural law sought to anchor rights not just in the psychology of human beings (human nature) but in a much broader understanding of the relations among all things. This view, to which Progressive historians sometimes alluded, derived from the new science of political economy. It identified the natural with harmony or spontaneous order. George Logan (1753–1821), the American political economist whom Jefferson tasked to criticize Alexander Hamilton's economic plan, expressed the natural law as follows: “The same Great Being who created man for the purposes of his own glory has also appointed an order of conduct calculated to conciliate the interests of men united in society.”Footnote 19 This law was said to apply not just to economic exchanges, but to all political and social affairs as well—indeed, it seemed to pertain to the whole cosmic order. From this law derived the general inclination of Jeffersonians for noninterference.
Many strongly rejected this general understanding of nature, especially as it applied to political affairs. The intent of those with this understanding was to try to limit the exercise of government discretion beyond anything the Constitution had in mind. The Constitution, it should be remembered, envisaged a government endowed with many important powers. Some members of the Federalist Party in particular regarded the notion of spontaneous order as an unwarranted expansion of the concept of nature that unjustifiably brought principles of economics and physical science into political science. To them, it marked the beginning of a transformation of the political science of natural right into what one might call an “ideology.” It may be asked whether Progressives were attacking this “ideology” of laissez faireism more than the Founders' view of nature itself, just as it may be asked if they were assailing a Jeffersonian interpretation of the Constitution rather than the Constitution itself.
III. Natural Rights Doctrine in the Nineteenth Century
Progressive thinkers were so vocal and insistent in criticizing the doctrine of natural rights that many of their readers may be excused for thinking that the Progressives were the first, other than some of the defenders of slavery, to have seriously challenged this foundation. But this is not the case. It is a curious fact about our “natural rights republic” that the idea of natural rights was subjected to early and widespread questioning, not only within intellectual circles, but in broad public discussions as well.Footnote 20
The earliest critiques of natural rights doctrine grew out of opposition to the French Revolution, especially as expressed by Edmund Burke (1729–1797). The primary concern was that natural law discourse would encourage a turn, as it had in France, to radical or utopian politics. Proponents of this position were not hostile to individualism or property rights—usually just the contrary. What they now feared, however, was that property rights and social stability would be endangered by public recourse to “radical” natural rights philosophy.
This sentiment grew and went in a new direction in the 1830s under the influence of Romanticism, which turned a critical eye on the “materialist” philosophy of John Locke.Footnote 21 Without directly implicating the Founding or questioning property rights, many now argued that Locke's ideas were dismissive of higher and nobler virtues and inadequate for building social cohesion. The nation could not be held together by a foundation of natural rights. To create and sustain a strong and deep culture, America needed more than the thin gruel of abstract principles; it required powerful and moving accounts of Americans' common heritage (tradition) or a common civil religion. The nation needed a foundation that appealed to the heart as well as the head.
Accompanying this approach was a different understanding of the meaning of “natural.” Nature, at least as it applied in human affairs, was no longer conceived of as a pattern or set of relations that man could grasp in the abstract; it consisted instead of the actual laws of historical development in each particular context. Nature was the organic development of traditions. This understanding drew on new ideas from philosophy of science, although these had yet to be credited with the status of a genuine science. As events turned out, this account of nature found some of its strongest advocates in the South, among those who were preparing the ground for breaking up the union rather than for building a thicker nationalism. If nature was the organic growth of a community, then the community was where the heart felt at home. Southerners like John Calhoun began to insist that community, for them, was the South, not the artificial construction of the United States of America. As Carl Becker rightly observed, “Calhoun identified natural law with the positive law of particular states, the state of nature with the state of political society as history actually gave it rather than as it might be rationally conceived and reconstructed.”Footnote 22
Another challenge to the doctrine of natural rights came from philosophy of history. Its adherents claimed that the most important kind of knowledge about political life derived from an understanding of the movement of history (which included the future), rather than from an understanding of the relations among permanent factors understood as models. History supplied an understanding of right, on the view that history's course was onward and upward. Right consists in moving forward, in the direction toward which history is already tending; wrong is what seeks to maintain tradition.
Philosophy of history entered America in the 1790s under the influence of the thought of Nicolas de Condorcet (1743–1794), Jefferson's friend, who wrote the first full-scale universal history based on the idea of progress.Footnote 23 It achieved a greater following after 1830 in the form of a version of German Idealism, as introduced and modified here by the historian George Bancroft (1800–1891). Bancroft's central premise was that the next and likely the last phase of human history was the advent of democracy. America had been given the commission, so to speak, to bring democracy to the world. This theme became the central principle of late-Jacksonianism and found expression in such doctrines as Manifest Destiny. The influence of this view, insofar as it replaced the doctrine of natural rights, can be seen in the thought of Stephen Douglas (1813–1861), one of the main figures in this intellectual movement. Douglas ended in the 1850s by openly abandoning the doctrine of natural rights. This fateful step did not derive from a fondness to slavery but from his belief in philosophy of history. Diverting American energy from spreading democracy, which Douglas feared would be the effect of Lincoln's natural rights thought, thwarted progress.
Following the Civil War, a different version of philosophy of history—actually a return of the version that Condorcet had inaugurated—was imported into America. It was taken from Condorcet's chief adherent, French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857), and was introduced into America by Lester Ward (1841–1913). This version was less poetic, less dialectical, and less attached to the notion of a commission given to America. It claimed the mantle of strict science. It was Comte who coined both the words “positivism” and “sociology,” the latter designating the newest and latest scientific discipline that understood the laws of history. Lester Ward was the father of American sociology and the individual most responsible for shaping Progressivism, although he came too early—and wrote too abstrusely—to be counted as one of its main leaders. For Ward, sociology “stands at the summit of the scale of great sciences arranged in the ascending order of specialty and complexity according to the law of evolutionary progress.”Footnote 24 Its ultimate purpose was not just to describe how things worked, but, in line with Comte, to enable men to direct society. Sociology would emerge as a true and full science when “social phenomena shall be contemplated as capable of intelligent control by society itself in its own interest.”Footnote 25
A third critique of the Founder's doctrine of natural rights individualism grew out of the science of ethnology (or natural history), which was the most important of the empirical social sciences of the first half of the nineteenth century. Its key finding was that mankind was divided into different varieties or types corresponding to the different races. The varieties have distinct characteristics, not only in physical appearance, but also in such general endowments as reason, imagination, and artistic talent. Ethnology sat uncomfortably with the science of natural rights, even though there is nothing in theory incompatible between the alleged fact that different groups have different natural capacities and the fact that all individuals possess natural rights. The two sciences came into tension or conflict at the point where some ethnologists added further claims about nature. Jefferson, who introduced this science into America, argued that where varieties were unequal, they should not intermix. His reason was that nature bid or permitted man to maintain a hierarchy.Footnote 26 He accordingly called for a physical separation of the white and black races, with each, if possible, establishing a natural rights republic.
Some Southerners in the 1850s took the radical step of arguing that differences in the endowments of the races were so great that they justified slavery. This position asserted the additional claim, supposedly derived from nature, that the inferior should serve the superior, for the good of both. The inferior presumably could not establish decent government. Alexander Stephens (1812–1883), vice president of the Confederacy, explicitly denied the natural rights doctrine. The American Founding, he claimed, “rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races. This was an error …” He went on: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its corner stone rests upon the great truth that … slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his [the negro's] natural and normal condition.”Footnote 27 The South, Stephens maintained, was the first political order to be based on natural law correctly understood.
The final nineteenth-century challenge to the doctrine of natural rights came from Darwinism. “Darwinism” in this context refers not strictly to thought that derived from Charles Darwin (1809–1882), but to approaches that grounded political and social thought in biological theories of evolution. These approaches proceeded either directly, by charting the evolution of man as a species in the context of natural history, or indirectly or analogically, by arguing that social phenomena (institutions, languages, cultures) were governed by evolutionary laws similar to those found among biological species. The common element in such accounts was that the units in question were in a situation of struggle for survival, often against each other, and that the unit that was selected was stronger or better. The new “law of nature” described this reality. In the words of one of America's best-known Darwinists, the Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), “Competition is a law of nature. Nature is entirely neutral; she submits to him who most energetically and resolutely assails her.”Footnote 28 This law was a genuine scientific account, in contrast to the laws of nature described in natural rights philosophy. Although some proponents of Darwinism supported natural rights theories for tactical reasons, as a political doctrine protecting property rights, very few of them considered it to be true.
Despite the harshness of Darwinian natural law, it supported in its own way an idea of progress. Advancement might be slow and painful, but it was progress nonetheless. Part of the enormous appeal of Darwinism derived from the fact that it covered the categories of both science and history, folding them together into the same field of inquiry. No other foundational principle could claim the same kind of explanatory power. And no other science, then or now, could claim the same degree of influence over the thought of the intellectual community.
Darwinism assumed very different forms, depending on the unit that was held to be most important for political life. (The theory itself gave no clue as to which unit that would be.) An important variant, known as the laissez-faire approach, placed the primary emphasis on struggle among individual human beings. This variant favored a capitalist system with a very limited role for government as the arrangement that is in accord with nature. Economic liberty enables individuals to engage in the contest according to the range and application of their abilities, with the most productive forces being selected. This school counted on a steady, but hard-won kind of progress. It would be possible, of course, for societies to promote equality by curtailing liberty—this was the program of socialists and other sentimental reformers—but only at the cost of moving forward. The ultimate penalty for not respecting the law of nature was stagnation and decline.
Another variant of Darwinism held that the relevant unit in struggle was not the individual, but the collectivity, the people, or the race, or the nation. These collective units were locked in a struggle or competition, and the fate and survival of each collectivity depended on the outcome of this struggle. For these Darwinists, the power of the unit often depended on subordination of the individual to the collectivity, and they were often the most severe critics of the individualist approach. Theodore Roosevelt was of this school, and he attacked the Spencerians as being “the same types” who “stood against the cause of national growth, of national greatness, at the end of the century as at the beginning.“Footnote 29
IV. The Progressive Critique of the Doctrine of Natural Rights
These nineteenth-century critiques of the doctrine of natural rights, especially the challenge coming from Darwinism, were in the background when Progressives came on the scene. The doctrine of natural rights, at least within high intellectual circles, was already moribund, in large part because it could no longer draw on the prestige of science, as it had at the time of the Founding. The theory was now classified as an argument of philosophy or, worse, of “metaphysics,” in an age in which top billing went to science, understood as “positivism” or empiricism. Where natural rights doctrine survived was within the public mind and among jurists, but only, at least as Progressives told the story, as an inheritance of the constitutional tradition. “It was one of those ancient political ideas,” wrote Walter Weyl, “which still cumber our brains; [a] political heirloom of revered—but dead—ancestors.”Footnote 30
If the Progressives cannot therefore claim the honor of being the first in America to challenge the doctrine of natural rights, they can at least boast of taking the lead in discrediting it in the eyes of the educated populace. Their sustained critique was conducted on a broad range of issues by some of the nation's ablest thinkers, with the arguments here drawn mostly from the leading Progressive thinker, John Dewey.
First, their most frequent and effective line of analysis, Progressives criticized the doctrine of natural rights as part of a sweeping historical and political argument. The nation, according to the Progressives, was undergoing a fundamental transition from an agrarian order to an industrial age. The challenges were unprecedented and produced, in the words of economist Richard Ely (1854–1943), “the farthest and deepest reaching crisis known to human history.”Footnote 31 America had lost control of the forces shaping modern life and had degenerated from a democracy into a plutocracy. “The power possessed by the few,” according to John Dewey, had taken the place of the “liberty for all envisaged by the liberals of the nineteenth century.”Footnote 32 The chief cause of this dire situation was a continuing adherence to the idea of the old individualism, and there was no remedy as long as the nation operated under this ideology. The Progressives' main goal was to supply a new theory of governance. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
The problems posed by industrialism had an additional dimension. Mankind as a species, they argued, stood at a critical juncture in its evolutionary development, poised to take a new step, yet also on the precipice of disaster. A failure to meet the challenges at hand seemed to implicate the whole race, or at any rate its progress. Two kinds of history—ordinary political or social history and natural or biological history—thus intersected at the turn of the century, making this period one of the most momentous of all time. Progressivism was a philosophy of emergency.
Progressivism, as the word denotes, took its bearings from the idea of Progress. This idea was derived initially from philosophy of history, but it increasingly drew its strength from Darwinism, which was considered to be the most powerful of the sciences. Progressivism is thus a theoretical brother of Spencerian laissez-faire thought, although the fraternal bond between them resembled nothing so much as the relationship of Cain to Abel. Led by John Dewey, Progressives interpreted Darwin in a new way; they turned his first premise (adaptation and survival) against his second (intraspecies competition). The key to man's advancement as a species from the present period forward lay not in competition, but in intelligent cooperation. Man as a species has in his arsenal the distinctive quality of “intelligence,” which in its highest form consists in what Dewey called “the social conception of intelligence” or “intelligence as the method of directing social action.”Footnote 33 Until now man was able to progress without need of much social planning. The invisible hand had been sufficient. But no longer. Collective planning was an evolutionary necessity.
The Progressives' support of the “social conception of intelligence,” to be put into effect by public authority (the “state”) informed by social scientists, helps account for why Progressives were so opposed to rights, whether natural or conventional. Rights function as an automatic impediment to broad and intelligent government action; they institutionalize limitations on planning and discretion. But intelligent planning and discretion unfettered by artificial limitations were the best way to promote the public good and to provide individuals with the powers needed to promote liberty in a higher sense.
But would mankind accept the challenge to adapt and be willing to jettison the outmoded doctrine of natural rights? There were good reasons, Progressives argued, to think so. Besides being impelled to seek new solutions by the seriousness of the immediate crisis of industrial society, man had now also begun to develop a new theoretical consciousness. Darwin arrived, if not providentially, then at any rate in the nick of time. Darwin's thought set the stage for the abandonment of a fixed idea of nature that had dominated Western thought since the dawn of philosophy. “The influence of Darwin upon philosophy,” Dewey argued, was found in the fact that he “freed the new logic [of the scientific method] for application to mind and morals and life.”Footnote 34 Darwinism liberated man from metaphysics, allowing him to investigate social and political matters in a new and genuinely scientific spirit. Progressivism was the social philosophy that took cognizance of this fact. It was the intellectual vanguard of a new stage of human development.
A second, important Progressive critique of the doctrine of natural rights rested on what Dewey called the idea of “historic relativity.”Footnote 35 According to this idea, all theoretical concepts are said to be relative to the period in which they are developed. Thought is bounded by the context in which it emerges, down to the language in which ideas are expressed. The terms thinkers employ are not just a matter of their presentation or rhetoric; they embody a structure of thought and cannot transcend their age.
History had sent a message in the form of a change of language that now made the idea of natural rights meaningless. According to Carl Becker, “To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.”Footnote 36 It is meaningless because modern thought no longer assumes the form of reasoning from nature. Charles Beard (1874–1948) remarked, with even more clarity, “[E]fforts have been made to give force to rights by calling them natural [but] that was an eighteenth century custom.”Footnote 37 The custom of speaking in this manner had now waned.
In light of this “relativist” position about language, there would seem to be no further need to treat the concept of nature on its merits. For whatever one might think of the concept, it was impossible any longer to use the term. Natural rights doctrine is an idea whose time had passed. “With the founders of American democracy,” Dewey wrote, “the claims of democracy were inherently one with demands of a just and equal morality. We cannot well use their vocabulary. Changes in knowledge have outlawed the significations of the words they used” (emphasis added).Footnote 38 Historical shifts by this account can criminalize past concepts. The philosopher's task is to play sheriff, deputize a posse of polemicists, and round up any stray rustlers who persist in using outmoded terms. As for the matter of why such disciplinary action remained necessary at all, Dewey explained that there is a lag time during which public thinking has not yet caught up to theoretical developments. This period has been prolonged in the case of natural rights, because the doctrine was widely “asserted to be absolute and eternal truth, good for all times and all places.”Footnote 39 A public teaching of this kind unfortunately encouraged its ability to hang on as a vestige or relic.
The barrier imposed by changing languages is not so great, however, that today's thinkers cannot look back to understand what past thinkers had in mind. Dewey found certain things in the Declaration of Independence of which he seemed to approve, and he suggested that these might be revived by engaging in a process of translation: “To put ourselves in touch with Jefferson's position we have to translate the word ‘natural’ into moral. . . [Jefferson's] fundamental beliefs remained unchanged in substance if we forget all special associations with the word Nature and speak instead of ideal aims and values to be realized.” These aims, of which a right to property is not mentioned, stem from “something deep and indestructible in the needs and demands of humankind.”Footnote 40 This formulation sounds suspiciously like talk of a fixed human nature, rather than an ideal people create or a value they prefer. But the main direction of Dewey's thought lay, of course, in opposition to the idea of nature.
A third, critique of the doctrine of natural rights goes to the question of the reasons for which thinkers develop their political ideas. Progressives by and large conceived that the main explanation comes from “class interests.” As Becker notes, “the middle-class man” in the eighteenth century “readily identified the laws of nature and nature's God with his class interests.”Footnote 41 Class interest could be conceived broadly as the general character of the political order and narrowly as a system of property relations. Dewey, for example, explains the doctrine of individualism as a way to conceive persons free from the control of preexisting associations like the Church or the Feudal order.Footnote 42 It was a central tenet in preparing the way for the revolt against the old order. Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), by contrast defined the Founders' class interest more narrowly as an effort to defend their property from the threats from the state legislatures. The class interest account of the character of ideas not only has the effect of deflating them—after all, they are not permanent truths—but also of explaining why they become obsolete. They serve a specific purpose for their time, after which they cease to be helpful.
This argument of historical relativity allowed for a shifting judgment of the worth of these ideas. The Progressives were often highly complimentary of natural rights doctrine for its time. It served in the eighteenth century to help push forward economic development. Its utility in some accounts even extended to a defense of the great captains of industry of the middle and late nineteenth century, who could be credited, albeit by using unscrupulous means, for building America's industrial infrastructure. (Franklin Roosevelt (1882–1945) echoed this position in his Commonwealth Club address during the 1932 campaign, when he noted that “the history of the last half century is accordingly in large measure a history of a group of financial Titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.”Footnote 43) But what was laudable or excusable in the past no longer could be justified. In the modern economy, as Dewey wrote, “We are in for some kind of socialism, call it whatever name we please.”Footnote 44
These last two critiques of the doctrine of natural rights raise a question analogous to the age-old query that asks why what is good for the goose is not also good for the gander. If Progressives assert that social thought is limited or partial and designed to promote “class interests” (this is the goose), then the same should apply to the Progressives (the gander). Yet one looks almost in vain among Progressive thinkers for a frank discussion of the class basis of their own thought. Indeed, for the most part they seem oblivious of the difficulty, criticizing without embarrassment the mythical ideas of past thinkers while proclaiming the objectivity of their own, and insisting on the class interests of previous philosophers while assuming their own disinterestedness.
There is, thankfully, one explanation for this “oversight,” which John Dewey has offered. Progressives have a sound reason to be exempt from treating themselves in the way they treat others. For the first time in history, there is a movement in possession of what amounts to a truth. This point, of course, must be formulated carefully, since past thinkers regularly used terms like “truth,” whereas the Progressives generally eschewed language of this kind. But setting all linguistic quibbles aside, the discovery of historical relativity itself is not something relative or something that will pass with time; it is absolute and eternal. Possessed of this new insight, the Progressives were in a privileged position and were able to view things as no others had viewed them before. They were able to free themselves from the partial and class interests of previous philosophers and think in a different way. This same idea also allowed certain Progressives to continue to embrace a view of progress, despite the fact that the older philosophy of history might now might be seen as merely the expression of thought of a certain period. The new basis of progress was found precisely in the idea that we have freed ourselves from the past and could now reconstruct society according to our own making.
Whether or not one is inclined to accept Dewey's last argument, it is perhaps still interesting to try to hold the Progressives to their own general standard. If they have a class interest, what is it? And how is it revealed in their ideas? The Progressives, of course, claimed to be acting on behalf of the many, not the few, and there is no reason not to take them at their word. They are self-described democrats, not aristocrats. But as democrats, they defined a special function in society for those who have developed “social intelligence,” or for those who might be call experts; policy experts do not claim to rule outright, but to be privileged counselors of the many. Those in this position, along with those who educate and influence them, might be thought of as kind of group or class, having a class interest. Progressive ideas would seem best suited to promoting the interests of this class. This interest can only be realized, however, if the many are inclined to accept the special function of this group and to acknowledge the primacy of this kind of expert knowledge as the best title to rule. If people cling stubbornly to their beliefs, they cannot be helped. It is for this reason that the interests of Progressivism require a wholesale reeducation of society.
Fourth, Progressives criticize natural rights doctrine because of its standard of human nature, which is seen as too low and unseemly. Its individualism serves to reinforce man's sense of isolation, and its materialism to pull man down to a life of crude consumption. This argument is a restatement of the Romantic and Idealistic critiques of the nineteenth century, which had a powerful variant among conservatives, who lamented that natural rights individualism undermined virtue or nobility or deep faith, and a variant on the culture left, which charged that the old individualism stifled man's artistic and creative talents. The Progressives, especially Dewey and Herbert Croly (1869–1930), adopted the latter variant, giving it the name of “individuality” (or sometimes the “new individualism”).
Although the description of individuality was often vague, sometimes painfully so, it offered an elevated ideal meant to transcend a preoccupation with the realm of the economic and the technical. Individuality presents a package that nicely combines cooperation, personal growth, and self-realization. According to Dewey, the old individualism with its emphasis on “private pecuniary profit” was “the chief obstacle to the creation of a type of individual whose pattern of thought and desire is enduringly marked by consensus with others, and in whom sociability is one with cooperation in all regular human associations.“Footnote 45 The “genuine individual,” according to Croly, is one “who possesses some special quality which distinguishes him from other people, which unifies the successive phases of his life and which results in personal moral freedom.”Footnote 46 This higher standard is not to be judged by any kind of general standard. Individuality is above all, individual. Each me is distinct, growing and developing in its various encounters with the world. Nearly all of the analogies invoked to explain individuality are to art, the artist, and to life as a series of artistic creations—except, that is, where communal participation is invoked, whereupon individuality becomes social.
Progressives are perhaps best known for their high praise of science and the scientific method and for their calls to expand the domain of scientific inquiry to the problems facing society. They are often praised (or blamed) for preparing the way for the rule, direct or indirect, of the technical expert. Yet science was not man's highest activity. Science is no more than the servant that helps bring into being the domain of individuality, which favors aesthetic sensibilities over more rationalist ones.Footnote 47 It has sometimes been asked, in the way of a witticism, whether it is possible to imagine the rather buttoned-up John Dewey at Woodstock, throbbing to the beat of rock music and the odor of cannabis. Although the parts of his thought may not cohere, there is little doubt that one strand of Progressive thought leads in this direction. At a minimum, it is fully consistent with the oft-quoted passage by Justice Anthony Kennedy that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life…. ”Footnote 48
Finally, John Dewey insisted that the concept of nature in any form was dangerous to democracy. Dewey had no trouble arguing this point in the case of the classical philosophers, whose view of nature he saw as upholding the interests of the few. But the argument is apt to sound strange in the case of modern natural rights, the core claim of which is that “all men are created equal.” It is hard to think of an idea that is more democratic or that has had a more democratizing influence on the world. Dewey nevertheless argues that this position is undemocratic, and not just because of its supposed connection with property rights and their defense. It is undemocratic because any position that asserts the existence of nature claims “insight into supreme reality or ultimate truth [and] shows how thoroughly philosophy has been committed to a notion that inherently some realities are superior to others, are better than others. Now any such philosophy inevitably works on behalf of a regime of authority, for it is only right that the superior should lord it over the inferior.”Footnote 49 Asserting a standard outside of our will or opinion, even if that standard is democratic, undermines full democracy.
Metaphysical positions are never politically neutral. If the character of a view of reality contains an idea of hierarchy, its effect will be to underwrite claims to hierarchy inside of the political world. To avoid this implication, the cosmos must be conceived in such a way that there can be no such principle. Only if the cosmos is understood such that everything in it is on the same plane of matter is democracy safe. Whether politics is father to cosmology or cosmology is father to politics is never said, although Dewey was doubtless in accord with the prevailing scientific view of the world as matter in motion. It is clear, in any case, that the pure case for democracy entails a theological position. The Progressives' move toward secularism is not just an incidental preference, but a fundamental article of their political philosophy.
V. Liberalism and Foundations
When it comes to the question of foundations, liberalism is under challenge today from the outside and is troubled and conflicted from the inside. The challenge from the outside has come in the form of a revival within political philosophy of the idea of nature and thus of the possibility of natural right. Progressives and liberals were convinced that thought of this kind was dying, needing at most the slightest of intellectual “nudges” to put it into its grave. The unexpected return of thinking in terms of natural right, especially in America, has discomfited liberals and forced them to share power, both political and intellectual, with forces they never imagined would still retain vitality and legitimacy.
From the inside, meanwhile, all of the foundations that Progressives proposed have been found to have no defensible theoretical basis, even by liberals' own standards. Philosophy no longer credits the reality of the idea of Progress; and however much liberals today echo the sentiments of progress under such substitute terms as “change” and “development,” they do not—they cannot—ascribe to it the status of a genuine foundation, for this would entail a concept of nature. What applies to philosophy of history applies also to Darwinism. While there are a few on the Left who would reintroduce the neo-Darwinian science as a new political foundation, most have recoiled from this idea with horror. What remains, and what some liberals occasionally claim, is the doctrine of political non-foundationalism (or “anti-essentialism”). This doctrine holds that democratic societies both do not need and function best when there is no political discussion of first principles or “metaphysical” or theological truths. There must be a wall of separation between politics and these realms of thought. And yet, liberal leaders have found that they cannot adhere to this doctrine consistently or even defend it publicly. The requirements of politics, at least the politics of a great power, demand every so often that a first principle be asserted. Liberals may cringe at the mention of natural rights, but they do not hesitate, when the situation demands, to invoke “universal values.” These values have no explicit foundation, but represent whatever is taken now to be the enlightened position of a self-proclaimed democratic and humanitarian elite. Where these values come from and what they may be tomorrow, no one can say. It is a philosophical case of the policy of don't ask, don't tell.
