Locke-box
In a reply to fellow New Republic editors Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber’s recent piece on Obama’s theory of government (which we mentioned earlier this week), John Judis argues that Obama will change American capitalism—whether he wants to or not. On the way to his point, he makes the following assertion:
Americans have been notoriously loath to undertake reforms that increase the role of government. That goes back partly to our Lockean liberal heritage of minimal government that marks us off from Europe with its absolutist past.
A few questions follow:
(a) Is that our heritage?
(b) Is that Lockean?
(c) Is this what delineates American liberalism from European absolutism?
(d) What on earth does this mean?
A few things are striking about this assertion. First, it claims Lockean liberalism and American libertarianism together, a suggestion that is at least historically – if not intellectually – suspect. It’s not at all clear that Locke is necessarily an advocate (or particularly influential one) for minimal conceptions of government, even if Robert Nozick wants it that way.
Second, whatever marks us off from Europe and it’s absolutist past, it’s probably not liberalism. The liberal tradition, which originates in European thought, was well on its way to transforming western European governments around the same time our Framers were designing the republic. Absolutism undoubtedly had a major influence on the development and evolution of European governing bureaucracies, but that’s a separate question from how the liberal theory of the state influenced the two continental approaches to government.
Americans may be hesitant to increase the role of government and that may well go back to our heritage. But it’s not our Lockean or liberal heritage. It’s something else altogether.
-Sam
Related posts:
- State skepticism
- Reciprocal obligations in Europe
- Ideological birth certificates
- Linker redux
- The fragile limits of regional integration
ShareComments
Leave a Reply
