Understanding our Tradition
The Declaration of Independence famously opens with the ringing proclamation “that all men are created equal, that all are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” For almost two hundred and fifty years, Americans have considered themselves “exceptional” because of these beliefs and the political institutions and social practices that have emerged from them.
Yet the idea of political equality today is often disparaged and sneered at—and rightly so, because it has long suffered abuse, distortion, and misapplication at the hands of wicked men and women. Must we, in rejecting the absurdities of modern liberalism and democracy—that there are no differences between men and women, that sex and gender are chosen and malleable, that “equality” means the right to murder one’s own unborn child, etc.—also reject human equality outright? Did the founders’ understanding of equality really lead to all these troubling developments we grapple with today? Or did they mean something else by equality altogether?
The Founders on Equality
The Declaration of Independence is not a manual on political philosophy, but a brief statement that, Jefferson believed, was an accurate “expression of the American mind.” But to understand that mind, we must turn to the other writings of the founders and the official documents of the period. First, however, the Americans were not thinking or writing in a vacuum. Many others before them had made statements on the fact of human equality.
Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, had claimed that men were equal in their faculties and passions: “Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he” (ch. 13.1). For Hobbes, equality was a problem; the parity between men meant that there were no natural superiors and any person could dominate another. This, in turn, incentivized a contest of wills and conquest—the “war of all against all.” To prevent equality from descending into anarchy, conquest, and violence, the people must elect a powerful sovereign to rule over them for the sake of peace.
John Locke did not disagree with Hobbes that the state of nature would eventually become violent and necessitate the establishment of political society and human judges, but his account of natural equality was more positive—both in itself and in its relationship to civil society. In The Second Treatise, Locke argued that the “state all men are naturally in” is “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions, and persons as they think fit.” Locke quickly added that such freedom must be “within the bounds of the Law of Nature,” but having met this condition, men have the natural right to order their own lives “without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.” What Locke meant by this was not defiance against one’s father, but that no adult man could claim a “right to dominion and sovereignty” over another man. Why? Because, in the view of the English philosopher, “all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another.” The implication of this reciprocity was government by consent, namely, majority consent in a common legislative body.
In the American founding period (1763-1789), both the Hobbesian and Lockean ideas of equality can be discerned. For example, in 1776, “Democraticus,” in Loose Thoughts on Government, articulated a similar view to Hobbes’:
We shall everywhere find him [man] the same complex being, a slave to his passions, and tossed and agitated by a thousand disagreeing virtues and discordant vices. To correct this freedom and versatility of his nature, to put a stop to the violences which must take place from this disordered state of his reign, and to separate his virtues from his vices …men find it necessary either to submit to the casual rule of superior abilities, or, by arranging themselves into societies, to establish forms and regulations for the good of the whole.
Most of the founders, however, favored Locke in their assessment of human equality. For example, in his Lectures on Law (1791), James Wilson argued that “those, who unite in society, lived, before their union, in a state of nature: a state of nature is a state of equality and liberty. That liberty and that equality belonging to the individuals before the union, belong, after the union, to the society, which those individuals compose. …Every state, therefore, composed of individuals, free and equal, is a state sovereign and independent.” Wilson’s pairing of equality and freedom was frequent throughout the period, as the founders believed that one way all men were equal is that they were all, by nature, free.
If one turns to the state constitutions in the late eighteenth century, this pairing is found everywhere: “All men are born free and equal” (MA, 1780), “All men are by nature equally free and independent” (PA, 1776; VA, 1776; VT, 1777; NH, 1784), “All men are born equally free and independent” (OH, 1803), “all men when they form a social compact, are equal” (KY, 1792; CT, 1818), and “All men are created equal” (NY, 1777). What did they mean by “freedom” or “liberty” here? In what way were men all equally free? Primarily, they meant that no man has a right to politically rule over another man without his consent. What the founders meant by “natural freedom” was freedom from political dominion.
This idea was common in the eighteenth century, and was predicated upon two truths: first, the history of being ruled by Stuart kings in the seventeenth century who became both political and ecclesiastical tyrants (e.g., Charles I and James II, both of whom were sympathetic to Roman Catholicism), and the fear that this might return to Britain and America in the future; and second, the tradition in America, going back to Jamestown and the Mayflower Compact, of local self-governing communities that had significant freedom from British oversight and regulation. Losing one’s political freedom to an absolute and tyrannical monarchy was often equated with slavery. Listen to the thundering denunciation of Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, in his famous 1750 sermon, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers:
If we calmly consider the nature of the thing itself, nothing can well be imagined more directly contrary to common sense, than to suppose that millions of people should be subjected to the arbitrary, precarious pleasure of one single man; (who has naturally no superiority over them in point of authority) so that their estates, and every thing that is valuable in life, and even their lives also, shall be absolutely at his disposal, if he happens to be wanton and capricious enough to demand them. What unprejudiced man can think, that God made ALL to be thus subservient to the lawless pleasure and phrenzy of ONE, so that it shall always be a sin to resist him! Nothing but the most plain and express revelation from heaven could make a sober impartial man believe such a monstrous, unaccountable doctrine, and indeed, the thing itself, appears so shocking—so out of proportion, that it may be questioned, whether all the miracles that ever were wrought, could make it credible, that this doctrine really came from God. At present, there is not the least syllable in scripture which gives any countenance to it.
The converse of being ruled by an absolute monarch was natural freedom, and the implication that a person must consent to the government, laws, and persons under which they live. Thus, the “consent of the governed,” was generally acknowledged as a necessary corollary to the idea that all men are naturally free and independent of absolute, political dominion. What “consent” meant or looked like, its extent and implications, was certainly debated by the founders; but in general, they believed the franchise was to be restricted (or really, expanded) to landowning adult males of a given community who represented families, productive industry, and responsible citizenship.
In addition to freedom from political dominion, the founders believed that all men were equal in the possession of their natural rights. The 1780 Massachusetts Constitution describes it this way:
All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.
Virginia’s Declaration of Rights (1776) says, “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Similarly, Connecticut’s 1818 Constitution declares that “all men when they form a social compact, are equal in rights; and that no man, or set of men are entitled to exclusive public emoluments or privileges from the community.”
The opposition to titles of nobility and artificial political emoluments and privileges was common at the founding, and it was connected to the belief that there were no men born natural kings. The first draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (authored by George Mason) stated that “No man, or set of men, are entitled to exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the community … the idea of a man born a magistrate, a legislator, or a judge is unnatural and absurd.” Since civil magistrates were neither born nor directly appointed by God, they must be chosen from among the people and approved by the people (i.e., by popular consent). If no man were born a king, then none were born natural slaves either (although some might make themselves into slaves by habit). We see this idea reflected as far back as Algernon Sidney, who, in his Discourses Concerning Government (1680s), stated that “God [had not] caused some to be born with crowns upon their heads, and all others with saddles upon their backs” (3.33). Men, as Thomas Jefferson proclaimed, are not made to be ridden like beasts.
Returning to Democraticus, we see him extolling the salutary effects of protecting men’s natural rights and their political participation by consent:
It is this principle of equality, this right, which is inherent in every member of the community, to give this own consent to the laws by which he is to be bound, which alone can inspire and preserve the virtue of its members, by placing them in a relation to the publick and to their fellow-citizens, which has a tendency to engage the heart and affections of both. Men love the community in which they are treated with justice … They love those with whom they live on terms of equality, and under a sense of common interests. It engages them in the exercise of their best talents and happiest dispositions, for the Government and defense of their country are the best and noblest occupations of men.
The exercise of men’s natural rights by millions of citizens could, of course, come into conflict. This is why the founders sought to codify natural rights in political society as civil rights: those natural rights that have been made possible with the common good of all. While this necessitated delegating the exercise of certain rights to political leaders and also accepting necessary constraints or limitations upon other rights, the outcome was greater than the sum of its parts: the law and order of a just political society actually expanded and substantively protected the enjoyment of one’s natural rights over and against both anarchy and tyranny.
Human Inequality and Natural Aristocracy
While all men were equally free from absolute political dominion and possessed and enjoyed their natural equal rights, this did not mean that all men were equal in physical or mental capabilities. In fact, the founders understood that all men were unequal in almost every way; and that the idea of human equality was, historically, the exceptional position that had to be defended. The fact of human inequality, and the belief that government ought to treat unequal men equally (cf. James Madison in Federalist no. 10, who argued that protecting the exercise of men’s unequal faculties would lead to property distinctions), ensured that men’s inequalities would be extenuated in civil society. In other words, equal treatment leads to unequal results. The founders had no vision of a society void of ‘disparate impact.’
On the other hand, the stark inequalities among men raised a question: why should we treat unequal men equally? Why shouldn’t the strongest rule, or the most virtuous, or wisest, or most noble among us rightfully take their place, by nature, as leaders endowed with authority? To this the founders gave three answers. First, we face a knowledge problem, namely, how do we determine who is strongest, smartest, and most virtuous? The fact that most men (as Hobbes knew) have a vain-glorious and inflated opinion about themselves means that each is going to claim to have a right to naturally rule (or at least be a candidate to rule). Without a common standard that all agree on by which to measure these human characteristics, there is no way to determine. Without a common arbiter, the variety of human opinions over who is mightiest, smartest, or most noble will surely end in violent conflict. Yet, consensus on standards of knowledge and human arbitration are artifacts of political societies. Thus, one must establish political societies and an order of governance before one can obtain the consensus and arbitration necessary to determine who is best and most worthy to rule. Political society precedes the determination of an aristocracy and therefore cannot be based upon it.
This led to further considerations. The second answer the founders gave as to why natural inequalities are not sufficient for political rule is that there will always be someone stronger, wiser, and more virtuous than yourself. To claim that the most intelligent should rule in an absolute way, without the consent of the people or any kind of limitations or constraints, is to consign oneself and everyone else—except one—to a kind of serfdom, if not slavery. Again, returning to Hobbes, everyone likes to think of themselves as being the strongest or smartest, but there is always someone faster, quicker, and better. Few persons who truly believe in an absolute natural aristocracy stop to consider the fact that they will not be the one ruling. When they realize this, they will resort to violence to prevent the true Übermensch from gaining the throne; and thus, once again, men will descend into a violent war of all against all.
The founders’ solution (and third answer) to the problem (but also the promise) of natural inequality was to pair it with natural equality: no one has the absolute right by nature to rule another politically without their consent, but once a consent (i.e., republican) based system of governance is agreed to, there must be mechanisms to weed out the stupid from the intelligent, the vicious from the virtuous, and the foolish from the wise. Thus, for the founders, a natural aristocracy of the best excellencies found in men must grow up and within a republican constitution. This was the purpose of the state legislatures that elected the Senate, of the Electoral College, and the election of the President, and of the independent and lifetime appointment of Supreme Court justices by the nomination of the President and consent of the Senate.
Thus, the American system as found in the U.S. Constitution represents the embrace of both human equality and inequality in a recognition that both are genuine and undeniable aspects of human life. Our political system is truly a mixed government: a republican foundation, an aristocratic spirit, and a kingly head in the President. Given these truths, there is no need to reject the Declaration or Constitution in their assertion or assumption of human equality. There is, at the same time, a belief in human inequality, and a noble attempt to balance both of these in order to truly represent the nature of man and his ability to govern himself.
Image Credit; Unsplash
