In reflecting on my most recent post I have realized the need for clarification and further elucidation.
In rejecting the Hobbesian conception of man in a state of nature as the origin of the social contract, what I was not saying is that life was one big, happy family or that life was not nasty, brutish and short for the people. Pre-modern, especially pre-industrial, life was so burdensome on individuals that the great majority of humanity suffered under toilsome conditions, were reduced to begging, or simply perished. It was Capitalism, Ludwig von Mises observes, that enabled the great masses of men to rise above abject poverty through selling their labor to owners of productive capital. However, none of those men in poverty entered into a social contract in order to create civil society.
What I am arguing is that the abstraction, "man in the state of nature" is not an adequate understanding of the modern state, or of legitimizing governmental authority at all. Ultimately, governing authority originates in the natural condition of the human family with its own naturally ordained hierarchy.
Perpetual Tyranny
The turn to contractarian conceptions of the state is precisely the turn towards habitual tyranny, for the state is defined in its origins as that entity which exists as arbiter and enforcer over and against individual persons. In this contractarian worldview, the state can only be that which embodies the monopoly on violence.
If the state is granted, at its very origin, a monopoly on violent coercion, than how can we expect to restrain it? With a piece of paper called a constitution? Thomas E. Woods correctly asks if the government is the one who writes, enforces and interprets this constitution, what is ever going to stop it from assuming more and new powers? "Will the constitution grow fangs?!" (from his podcast lecture, Who Killed the Constitution?)
Moral Confusion and the State
What furthers the drive of the modern nation-state toward tyranny is the shipwreck of morality, the breakdown of moral understanding between competing ideologies. Alasdair MacIntyre sees in the Enlightenment Project a rejection of the teleological framework of morality (explicitly Aristotelianism) and the adoption of diverse systems of practical rationality, with their own justifications and first principles. Then these opposing systems of morality inevitably conflict in the public sphere, but holding to precise first principles that radically differ from one another, the conversation becomes argument becomes a yelling match, becomes an issue for the courts to ultimately decide moral issues.
That is why MacIntyre brilliantly observes that the lawyers are today's clergy, today's magisterium. In a society that has multiple conceptions of the Good, of rules, goods, evils, virtues and vices, there can be no rational argumentation where 2 parties can come to agreement. The disputes never resolve, save that by state intervention. The state becomes the arbiter of moral disputation through legislation.
Even holding that our contract-originated state is just meant to preserve life, liberty, and property I think that if we yield to such a justification, we have already lost the war for liberty in the long run. We loose from the beginning individual sovereignty over our lives, our liberty and our property. Why? Because once we conceive of the state as being the only thing that can guarantee those things, then we grant it the ability to take all of it away from us.
Personalism
If your first step is in the wrong direction, then you will never reach your destination. We cannot base a program of liberty on a thesis, even a moderated one (that is, Locke and not Hobbes), on a social contract that, a) is based on a fictional accounting of anthropology, b) conceives the state as super-arbiter over individuals, and c) is the only one with enforcement power.
I find it interesting to note that Catholic theological anthropology is both communitarian and individualist. This is, in a large way, the Church's evolving understanding of personalism- the identity, destiny, and dignity of the human person. In Vatican II, it was this personalism that characterizes much of Gaudium et Spes. I think that the Church's personalism is more than just a mitigated individualism or mitigated collectivism. Clearly, the person is not to be regarded as merely instrumental to the ends of the state. The state cannot violate the dignity of the human person, which is an expression of natural rights. The person is greater than the state, not just a part in a whole. However, the person ought to serve the common good, and acts of justice and charity are not option works for Christian living.
There is a lot more to be said, but I should wrap it up here.
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