Kendall’s idea of government

Paul Cella has written an interesting article explicating the political philosophy of Wilmoore Kendall. I had remembered Kendall’s majoritarian philosophy from years ago, but the idea Mr. Cella develops here seems unfamiliar.

The key idea is that, in contrast to the usual understanding of the Declaration of Independence, people do not simply possess rights by the fact of being human; nor are rights held by individuals as against their government; rather, rights are the end of government, secured only by good and virtuous government. The legislature has the supreme power; but in order to exercise that power well and effectively it must be subordinated to virtue. The same subordination of the will to the promptings of virtue must also be practiced by the people if they are to enjoy their rights.

Even the Declaration of Independence contains this idea of good government before rights, says Mr. Cella. Thus the people have the right to institute “new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” What this means, he says, is that the people do not simply possess rights; those rights must be achieved—by means of good government. Further, such achievement is always uncertain. How different this seems from the grating propaganda of thoughtless columnists yapping about how we are effortlessly going to “democratize” Muslim countries and assist them in the “democratic transition,” as though all of this were as easy as turning on a toaster oven.

To quote Mr. Cella in a key passage:

The answer developed by this tradition, our tradition, is a system of government predicated decisively on legislative supremacy—a system of self-government articulated through the work of the people’s representatives, sitting in deliberative assemblies, duly elected and accountable, but not irretrievably tethered to public opinion. “A man’s legal rights are,” Kendall writes, “in general, the rights vouchsafed to him by the representative assembly—which, like the Lord of the Scriptures, giveth and taketh away.” There is a recourse to reality here unheard of in the philosophy of abstract “rights,” according to which reality rights cannot exist outside of someone—a government—securing them. There is no weapon or instrument with which a man in isolation can defend himself against the encroachment of tyranny—except the instrument of good and just government, which the American Framers, and their tradition, endeavor to work out as best as can be expected by honest men in a fallen world.

However, I’m not sure this is as new an insight as it may initially appear to be. After all, isn’t it part of the usual understanding of the Declaration of Independence that the purpose of government is to secure our (individual) rights? Of course, liberalism then takes that idea in a very different direction from Cella and Kendall—to the belief that the never-completed function of government is the ever-increasing realization of our rights, a.k.a. the modern liberal project. So it seems to me that what’s different in the Kendall thesis from the usual understanding is not the idea that our rights are the result of government, but that our rights are conditioned on virtue. And isn’t that a familiar, conservative idea?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 22, 2003 01:48 AM | Send