Two essays by Russell Kirk, well worth reading

• The first deals with Edmund Burke's influence on the Constitution and its interpretation:  Edmund Burke and the Constitution. Burke's influence on the Framers and on the generation after them is difficult to overstate -- he influenced not only northern Federalists but also southern Democratic Republicans who eschewed the radicalism of Jeffersonianism.  

• The second deals with the definition of conservatism itself:  The Essence of Conservatism. "What is conservatism?" Kirk writes quoting the great American conservative Abraham Lincoln. "Is it not preference for the old and tried, over the new and untried?" This essay includes a restatement of Kirk's formulation of the basic principles of conservatism as well.  

Two observations about Thomas Jefferson's Bible

I have just finished reading, for the first time, the edited harmony of the Gospels produced by Thomas Jefferson. The edition I purchased, published by Beacon Press in 1989 as The Jefferson Bible:  The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, has been delightful to read.  I was particularly struck by two things:

• While Jefferson removed all the miraculous components from Jesus Christ's earthly ministry (no virgin birth, no resurrection, no miracles or signs), he did keep in the passages that deal with Christ's eventual return to judge the living and the dead. So, Jefferson wasn't quite opposed to supernaturalism in principle. Of course, if Jesus didn't resurrect and ascend to the Father, it might be somewhat questionable about how he might be characterized as "returning," but Jefferson nonetheless kept the passages about the Second Coming in his Gospel harmony.  

• Jefferson also affirmed the power of prayer, and of God's care for those who petition Him in prayer. This is particularly evident in Jefferson's version of Jesus' teaching on the Lord's Prayer. Most surprisingly, in this section Jefferson did not remove or edit the explicit references to both the Father and the Holy Spirit in Jesus' teaching. And as far as I can tell, this is the only passage in the Jefferson Bible that refers to the Holy Spirit, let alone to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father. As Jefferson renders that critical passage:

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children:  how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?   

[Cross-posted over at American Creation.] 

Why the manned space program is over

Three reasons:  1)  we're broke; 2)  we are plagued with politically correct bureaucrats who discourage the kind of innovative thinking necessary for a bold space program; and 3) we have lost the cultural imagination necessary to sustain such projects.  In short, our civilization is exhausted.

John Derbyshire (somebody who I rarely agree with except when it comes to immigration and space policy) expresses similar thoughts over at Taki's Magazine:  The End of Manned Space Flight.  Of course, Derbyshire doesn't ask the deeper question about why Western civilization is in a state of decay; he simply attributes it to the inexorable forces of history.

Well, that's bunk.  Western civilization is in the state it's in largely due to the revolt against faith & reason undertaken during the late Enlightenment and proceeding apace through the 19th and 20th centuries.  And, ironically enough, Derbyshire is a proponent of that revolt -- characterized at its core by the scientific materialism that Derbyshire celebrates in his more recent writings of the past few years.  That puts Derbyshire in the uncomfortable position of lamenting the collapse of our civilization, while celebrating the philosophy that cause the collapse to occur.

The conservative mind of Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton was one of our nation's most important Founding Fathers -- he is probably the most important member of the founding generation who did not attain the presidency.  He was not only instrumental in establishing the ratification of the current Constitution (thanks to his role in writing the majority of The Federalist Papers), he was a critical force during the Washington Administration.  Hamilton's views on the scope of executive and federal power made it possible for the United States to grow and thrive in a world filed with hostile empires waiting to fall upon the then-infant republic. And Hamilton was one of the founders of America's first major political party, the Federalist Party, even if he oftentimes clashed with fellow-Federalists like John Adams and Fisher Ames.

In more recent days, on the libertarian edges of the political Right, a number of books have been published attacking Hamilton.  For some, Hamilton is a malevolent figure, a malign force working to corrupt the American experiment in republican government by creating a federal Leviathan.  For others, Hamilton is a military adventurer, someone who sought war as a means to glorify himself and the country.  For still others, Hamilton is an example of a political hack who sought to fuse big business interests together with those of the federal government to create a system of crony capitalism.  For many, Hamilton is all of these things -- and more!

It is beyond the scope of this one blog post to refute these points -- and it is unnecessary since of one of the premiere historians of the early American republic, the venerable Forrest McDonald, has already done so in a monumental and insightful biography of Hamilton.  The more recent biography of Hamilton by Ron Chernow also does much to refute the slanders thrown Hamilton's way.  So, for further study, I would point you to the work of those scholars.  The point of this blog post is to argue that Hamilton was a conservative -- in fact -- one of the key conservatives of American history. He was not, by today's standards, a libertarian, but then again, as Russell Kirk has pointed out so well, conservatism has little if anything to do with libertarianism.

The conservative nature of Hamilton's work is made evident by the study made of his life and influence by the late Princeton historian Clinton Rossiter. Rossiter's book Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution (Harcourt, Brace & World:  1964) remains one of the best in-depth study's of Hamilton's approach to political and constitutional theory.  While Hamilton's politics were often unique (as Rossiter puts it, "if Hamilton was a conservative, he was the only one of his kind"), within Hamilton's work a genuinely conservative approach to politics and questions of ordered liberty are present.   As Rossiter points out.

He subscribed to a secular version of the doctrine of Original Sin, put a high value on law, order, and obedience, assumed the existence of classes and put his measured trust in the class at the top, spoke with feeling of the role of religious sentiment in man and organized religion in society, and voiced the standard conservative approval of prudence.  He despised ideologues, condemned the "rage for innovation," and declared himself more willing to "incur the negative inconveniences of delay than the positive mischiefs of injudicious expedients."  Always on his guard against he preachers of an "ideal perfection," certain that he would never see "a perfect work form imperfect man," he was prepared to leave much to chanced, and thus presumably to the works of prescription, in the social process.  He was never so eloquent as when he declaimed on the favorite conservative theme of the mixed character of all man's blessings.  "The truth is," he wrote to Robert Morris in 1781, "in human affairs, there is no good, pure and unmixed."  "'T is the lot of every thing human," he lectured Rufus King in 1791, "to mingle a portion of evil with the good."  

Unlike Jefferson, who swooned in the face of the French Revolution like a school-girl with a crush, Hamilton understood immediately that the French Revolution was nothing but a blood-drenched attack on the very idea of civilized order.  As Rossiter notes, "[h]e reads exactly like Burke or Adams in his attacks on 'The Great MONSTER' for its impiety, cruelty, and licentiousness, for its spawning of an anarchy that lead straight to despotism, for its zeal for change and assaults on property for its imposition of 'the tyranny of Jacobism, which confounds and levels every thing.'"

While there is little doubt that Hamilton would be uncomfortable with portions of the ideological rhetoric employed on the modern Right, conservatism (again to rely on an observation by Russell Kirk) is not at its core an ideological commitment.  It is a commitment to tradition, prescription, custom and prudence, along with an abiding conviction in the principles of religion and natural justice.  Compare Hamilton's views, as explained by Rossiter above, with Kirk's own enunciation of the fundamental conservative approach to questions of political and legal order.  There is little, if any daylight, between Hamilton and Kirk.

Again, this is not to say that Hamilton would be entirely at home with the modern Republican Party -- Rossiter points out in his study of Hamilton (printed in 1964 during the rise of the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the GOP) that "Hamilton was not a model for the average conservative to imitate." Hamilton believed strongly in an active government, constrained by constitutional limits but free to aid in the development of the country through internal improvements and the support of American industry, as Rossiter points out.  On a host of issues -- his refusal to defer to the privileged place in the young republic held by the Southern planter-slaveholder aristocracy, and his commitment to the industrialization of the American economy, to name two -- Hamilton could embrace a radical position as well.  Like Burke or Lincoln, Hamilton is difficult to place in terms of our ideological categories -- to quote Rossiter here, Hamilton has the "ability to defy classification."    But like Burke and Lincoln, Hamilton's fundamental political principles, his instincts, were conservative.

And at a time when our country faces increasing political polarization and a deepening economic crisis, a greater appreciation of the elements of conservatism that transcend the ideological tenor of the moment should lead those on the Right to inspect Hamilton's views and insights with a careful eye.

Quote of the day: on the republican (with a small "r") principle in government

"The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they entrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests."

- Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), American Founding Father, first secretary of the Treasury, and one of the founders of the Federalist Party, Federalist No. 71 (1788).

Two essays in praise of Alexander Hamilton...

...and a new documentary about Hamilton by Richard Brookheiser:  A Festival of Hamilton.  There's also an interview by Brookhiser posted over at National Review Online about his documentary.

Brookhiser's biography of Hamilton is well worth reading, as is the more recent biography by Ron Chernow.  In my view the best biography of Hamilton, and the one that shows Hamilton's inherent conservatism, is by Forest MacDonald.

The importance of reactionaries ...

... as pointed out by The Western Confucian blog, quoting a recent article by Kenneth Minogue:

Loyalty is the emotion that sustains reactionaries. They reject the universals that generate such political enthusiasm among radicals. It is the dream of perfect abstractions such as the nation, or internationalism, democracy, rights, and social justice that fires radicals’ blood and dismays reactionaries. These abstractions refer rather remotely to things that may be valuable in national practice, but separated from the history and traditions in which they are embedded, they often become dangerous sources of fanatical allegiance.

An effective if unintentional observation of the key difference that separates conservatives and libertarians.  Libertarianism, as Russell Kirk pointed out so well in his classic article Libertarians:  the Chirping Sectaries, is the apotheosis of abstract ideology, divorced from the customs, traditions and prudential politics that shape a given political order.  Liberalism is not the only ideology that parades about the public square -- libertarianism is every bit as prone to fanaticism and utopian thinking as liberalism is; perhaps moreso.  As Kirk explains,

The ruinous failing of the ideologues who call themselves libertarians is their fanatic attachment to a simply solitary principle -- that is, to the notion of personal freedom as the whole end of the civil social order, and indeed of human existence.  

In its aversion to necessary governmental authority, in its tendency to embrace imprudent policies of making the perfect the enemy of the good, in its embrace of an abstract liberty divorced from historic conceptions of civic virtue, libertarianism displays all of the underlying tendencies of political fanaticism that both Kirk and Minogue condemn.  Libertarianism, with its ahistorical and anti-traditional stance, is a battery acid for those very things that preserve liberty in a society:  tradition, received custom & usage, rights embedded not in abstract reason but in the culture and customs of a society, in the poetry of its history.

Not on license separated from the ways of a society can liberty be built.  It must be built on the instincts and way of life of a people, on that people's experience over time, on an order that both reflects and supports that people's culture.  Otherwise, ideology beckons, substituting itself for custom, for tradition, for religious faith, for everything that give context and color and vibrancy to a society.  The grey misery of indulgence, of moral ignorance, of apathy is all that awaits down that road.  Ideology is nothing more than the pale and limp imitation of meaning.

On constitutional interpretation

From one of the most influential justices in the history of the Supreme Court:

In construing the constitution of the United States, we are, in the first instance, to consider, what are its nature and objects, its scope and design, as apparent from the structure of the instrument, viewed as a whole, and also viewed in its component parts. Where its words are plain, clear, and determinate, they require no interpretation; and it should, therefore, be admitted, if at all, with great caution, and only from necessity, either to escape some absurd consequence, or to guard against some fatal evil. Where the words admit of two senses, each of which is conformable to common usage, that sense is to be adopted, which, without departing from the literal import of the words, best harmonizes with the nature and objects, the scope and design of the instrument. Where the words are unambiguous, but the provision may cover more or less ground according to the intention, which is yet subject to conjecture; or where it may include in its general terms more or less, than might seem dictated by the general design, as that may be gathered from other parts of the instrument, there is much more room for controversy; and the argument from inconvenience will probably have different influences upon different minds. Whenever such questions arise, they will probably be settled, each upon its own peculiar grounds; and whenever it is a question of power, it should be approached with infinite caution, and affirmed only upon the most persuasive reasons. In examining the constitution, the antecedent situation of the country, and its institutions, the existence and operations of the state governments, the powers and operations of the confederation, in short all the circumstances, which had a tendency to produce, or to obstruct its formation and ratification, deserve a careful attention. Much, also, may be gathered from contemporary history, and contemporary interpretation, to aid us in just conclusions

- Jospeh Story (1799-1845), Commentaries on the Constitution, Chapter V,  § 405. II (1833).

Cross-posted over at Culby's Daily Quotebook.

Wise words from a wise president on protecting our democratic republic

We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, the Government may be the choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good. If that solitary suffrage can be obtained by foreign nations by flattery or menaces, by fraud or violence, by terror, intrigue, or venality, the Government may not be the choice of the American people, but of foreign nations. It may be foreign nations who govern us, and not we, the people, who govern ourselves; and candid men will acknowledge that in such cases choice would have little advantage to boast of over lot or chance.

- John Adams (1735-1826), second president of the United States, Inaugural Address (1797).

Cross-posted over at Culby's Daily Quotebook.

Roepke and the moral imagination at work in economics

"For Roepke, the most important things do, in fact, lie beyond supply and demand," as Patrick M. Boarman points out in this article on the great German-Swiss economist William Roepke:  William Roepke and the 'Third Road.'  As Boarman points out,

Whether in his economic writings or in his wide-ranging excursions into political and social theory, the pendulum of Roepke’s thought moves irresistibly toward the vital center and away from extremes. At the same time, he did not achieve his legendary status as a fighter for freedom by diluting his defense of principle or by yielding to compromise for the sake of harmony. The harmony he sought was not in the area of polemics. It was an organic phenomenon, the natural harmony in the affairs of both men and nations that results from a right order of things, not only in the economic sphere but in all the multitudinous and intersecting frameworks—historical, cultural, political, environmental, moral, even religious—that make up the totality of human life. Roepke, one of the clearest thinkers of the age, had an unusually clear and detailed conception of what would be found in the “center” he espoused. And he excoriated such contentless phrases as “the mixed economy” (the favorite incantation of exegetes of the Keynesian gospel) as drivel, implying that any old combination of government with the market economy is feasible or desirable. In fact, as he tirelessly argued, there are very clear limits to the quantitative and qualitative roles that government can play in the market economy and which, when transgressed, lead to the death of the market and the nightmare of collectivism.

That last sentence is something that is particularly applicable to our current circumstances.

Update:  the Western Confucian was kind enough to link to this post -- and provided a long list of links to his own posts on William Roepke.  Well worth reading.  Roepke was a prudential conservative who valued tradition and custom, yet with his defense of individual liberty and the need for a free economy, many libertarians find his work valuable.  Roepke's work serves, as a consequence, as a basis for conservatives and libertarians to be able to dialogue on economic issues.  And in the effort to combat the runaway efforts of modern liberalism to expand the arbitrary power of the central government, such a dialogue by libertarians and conservatives is a prudential necessity.

Alexander Hamilton on the nature of presidential war powers

Here's a quote from the past that is particularly relevant given President Obama's move to involve us in military strikes against Libya without congressional approval.  According to American founding father Alexander Hamiliton, the president's power over the military amounts

to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral of the confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war, and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies; all which by the constitution under consideration would appertain to the legislature.

- Federalist #69 (March 14, 1788).

As in many questions of constitutional construction, Alexander Hamilton here leads us towards a clearer and better understanding of the American notion of liberty under law.