Medieval Roots of Classical Liberalism
A reader with the alphanumeric name of dgg3536 writes the following. I repost the whole as a guest column, with no further comment from me, save for a silent ovation of agreement:
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Arianism nearly swallowed the Church, then it disappeared. Heresies burn themselves out with time. Protestantism is certainly sputtering at this point, but at the same time, more and more Protestants are becoming Catholic, where they aren’t apostatizing. One often finds green shoots among the ashes.
But on the issues of Classical Liberalism and Marxism, I think the situation is a bit more of a tangle than it first appears. As someone mentioned, the nominalism of the Late Middle Ages certainly contributed to the genetic makeup of the Left, but if we’re looking for concrete precedents, then Machiavelli’s The Prince is a prime example.
There you have utility as virtue, the will to power, stability as government’s first end, and the all-powerful secular state. And it circulated in manuscript form before Luther nailed up his Ninety-Five Theses.
More’s Utopia is both a witness to the intellectual culture of the period and eerily anticipates future pathologies. Later in the 16th century, you see skepticism in full flower in Montaigne’s Essays and witness Shakespeare wrestling with skepticism and functional postmodernism in his plays.
By the middle of the 17th century, Louis XIV, the Sun King, had dissolved the medieval representative institution of the Estates General and moved to centralize more power in the crown. It was later conflicts over reconstituting the Estates that led to the French Revolution.
When the Reformation really kicked off, it didn’t create those forces, but the fracturing of the Church did unleash them, and some of the intellectual currents within Protestantism were taken in directions that contributed to Leftism. After more than a century of upheaval and bloodletting, the Treaty of Westphalia, even as it established the nation-state system in 1648, marked the end of the Wars of Religion and the functional end of Christendom as a political framework.
Classical Liberalism does have flaws, but any version of it may have been doomed from the very beginning with weakened foundations. At the outset, Liberalism was simply an ad hoc policy of toleration, adopted as a pragmatic measure to the intractable problems of the Reformation, such as the Wars of Religion. The drain of blood and treasure couldn’t continue forever. It was only given some kind of intellectual coherence later on.
If Rousseau inaugurated the birth of the intellectual Left, the Revolution in France might mark the inauguration of the ideological Left, the broad social and political program of Revolution, Utopia, and Radical Autonomy. If we contrast the American Revolution, we see the difference. Their aims were not to remake their society, but retain their customary way of life, with its institutions and laws, and they appealed to their political tradition as Englishman as precedent. Even through the Reformation, England retained her medieval institutions to a surprising degree, and when Englishman settled North America, they brought their customs with them, and then modified them to suit local conditions. When it came time to revise our Constitution at the Second Convention, the Founders had roughly a century and a half of colonial experience to draw upon, along European and Greco-Roman traditions. And while the Enlightenment had its influence, the Ancients and Medievals had theirs. Classical thought (especially Cicero) left its impression and the then-contemporary neo-Aristotelian Thomas Reid (who was anti-Humean and anti-Cartesian) had a wide and significant impact on Founders like Jefferson.
I don’t think we appreciate just how much of what the Enlightenment credited to itself was actually born in the Middle Ages. Individual rights emerged not from political debates, but religious controversies. Representative institutions like the “[French] Estates General…the States General of the Netherlands, the Parliament of England, the Estates of Parliament of Scotland, the Cortes of Portugal or Spain, the Imperial Diet (“Reichstag”) of the Holy Roman Empire…and the Swedish Riksdag of the Estates,” were all born in the Middle Ages. In the English Parliament, the House of Commons held the purse strings as a kind of de facto veto over the King, and the House of Lords and Commons together deposed Richard II in 1399. Legal protections like the presumption of innocence, the reliance upon evidence and eyewitness testimony, and proportionality in punishment came from medieval legal reforms. The invention of the universities created the international culture of discourse and inquiry. And so on.
It occurs to me that the early American Republic may give us a window on what a non-Leftist Liberalism might’ve looked like, if Christendom had followed a path of reform closer to what Erasmus envisioned, rather than Luther. And while I don’t fully sign on to a “Post-Liberal Conservatism,” I would like to put our political tradition on more robust philosophical foundations (which I believe were partly there to begin with).
There’s much to the Middle Ages that was good and wise, but I’m often frustrated with some traditionalist Catholics who uncritically romanticize medieval life and monarchical institutions without first distinguishing what kind of monarchy they’re talking about (feudal, absolutist, constitutional, etc.) and without realizing just how historically contingent much of the Medieval system was, or the downsides of some of their institutions. More frustrating still is that some of those traditionalists are rather selective in what traditions they pay attention to–they would cheerfully impose a monarchy which is alien to the history and traditions of our culture, ignoring Aristotle’s guidance that a system of government must be balanced with the character of a people. Still further, some of them would embrace quasi-Leftist systems, such as Distributism, in the name of reestablishing “tradition.”
Medieval political institutions were essentially a Christian amelioration of pagan Germanic tribal government, filtered through Roman civic law. Traditions emerged as working solutions to problems as they arose, and then evolved with time. Some medieval institutions mercifully died, such the manorial system giving way in the 12th and 13th centuries to smaller privately-held farms, which led to higher crop yields and coincided with the economic rise of the commons. Other institutions were a mixed bag, such as the guilds. Whatever they contributed in terms of collegiality, community, mutual assistance, and the dignity of their trade, they were also a source of corruption and entitlement, having a stranglehold on trades and crafts. And medieval law had price controls and regulations that would warm the cockles of any modern bureaucrat’s heart. On the flip side, they were freer in some very real ways. It was “one of the most loosely organized societies in human history” and “quasi-libertarian.” You could go places and do things that you need written permission for nowadays.
So, if I had to sum things up, I would say we need to borrow more of the wisdom of the past, but translate it into our present and balance it with the good things we do have. Or to quote Jaroslav Pelikan, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
