George Will and Robert Bork aren’t Plato and Aristotle, but they write for a literate laity. Will argued in “Statecraft As Soulcraft” (1983)that our country was “ill-founded”; Bork wrote in “Slouching Towards Gommorah” that our combination of affluence and Enlightenment liberties might make a fatal form of social decadence inevitable.

You rightly say that the “highest community … must be able to insist that men die for it.” Is the “freedom” which empowers Hefner and Flynt an adequate reason to make that ultimate sacrifice?

About 30 years ago, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote and narrated a series of TV shows on a group of Xtian thinkers (“Third Testiment”). The final program was devoted to Bonhoeffer, who suffered a martyr’s death at the hands of the Nazis in the last days of WW II. In the final minutes Muggeridge rhetorically asked whether the Lutheran theologian died for “Freedom, or Democracy, or a Higher Standard of Living”? His point, I think, was that these weren’t reason enough.

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To Mr. Kalb’s remark that the American founding contains no principle higher than contract and consent, neocons and some liberals would reply that the self-evident truths of the Declaration embody a principle higher than any human desire. This was also Lincoln’s argument against Douglas in their debate over Popular Sovereignty. Lincoln insisted that some truths, such as the right of men not to be slaves, are higher than human will and cannot be subject to popular vote.

The problem with the neocon view of the founding is that the “truths higher than human will,” on which the American system is based, only pertain to universal equal individual rights. A society in which “all men are created equal” is the highest defining idea, unmediated by any substantive moral truths or cultural traditions, must ultimately end up in the “naked public square,” with the relativism, the suicidal tolerance, and all the other ills from which we current suffer. Ultimately, such a society must abolish politics itself, since politics, as Aristotle put it, means free men discussing how they should order their common existence, which requires making assertions about moral truth, but tolerance (as embodied in pure form the Dutch constitution) means that any statement about moral truth is discriminatory and so cannot be allowed.

In my view “freedom and equality” isn’t a separate higher standard but just a consequence of making human will the standard.

All wills are equally wills. If will is the standard then each will is equally the standard. The best that can be done, therefore, is to arrange a system that allows each will equal free play to the greatest extent possible. That’s liberal freedom and equality.

So then the question is whether a purely formal standard like freedom and equality can take the place of a higher standard. I don’t think so. You can’t define freedom as a practical matter without knowing what it is freedom for. Otherwise you won’t be able to resolve disputes between my freedom to bring about X and your freedom to bring about not-X. So a substantive conception of the good life always has to come first. Denying that it comes first (as liberalism does) makes political discussion impossible, as Mr. Auster points out.

Mr. Kalb suggests that the originating principle of liberalism was not the belief in freedom and equality per se, but rather the belief in making the human will the standard; the belief in freedom and equality was secondary, resulting from the belief in the will. This is very provocative but I don’t quite know what to make of it. Can he give any examples of this idea, perhaps from the classic writings of liberalism?

It’s said - by modern academic liberals among others - that liberalism begins in reaction to the Wars of Religion. The problem then was how you settle conflicts when men disagree fundamentally about what things are good or bad, true or false, right or wrong. So liberalism starts with the reality of human wills in conflict and no way to say one is better than the other. Since none can be treated as better, any solution to conflict other than brute force must be based on common acceptance that pursuing one’s goals, whatever they are, is presumptively legitimate, equally so for all parties.

That line of reasoning comes through quite clearly in Hobbes. Locke makes it seem somewhat less brutal - instead of men fighting to the death for survival and glory he has them mostly trying to raise their standard of living. I think though the basic outline is still there - he starts with human desires that fall into conflict, and is concerned with the conventions that if accepted will keep things peaceful.

It sounds as though the ur-impulse of liberalism was not the idea of treating all wills equally, but the idea of treating all religious beliefs equally, so as to avoid religious war. The idea of creating all individual wills equally seems to have been a secondary step. But I take Mr. Kalb’s point that the idea of the equality of wills, or rather of making the will the standard, is in Hobbes and Locke.

But as philosophers they tried to do more than declare that it would be a good idea to treat religious beliefs equally. They tried to describe man and the world in a way that made it irrational to do otherwise - in a way that made it seem there can be no goods transcending the human will.

Hobbes starts off his Leviathan with a whole materialistic anthropology that puts appetite first and makes the natural state of man a constant struggle for power ending in death. So whatever ur-extrinsic motives he may have had for philosophizing, his ur-conception is men in conflict and subject to no standard other than their own desires.