Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
colored by pre-war views; the work of Burgess was the first-fruits of
the influence of German speculation on the nature of the leviathan
state.
1 • Theodore Woolsey
Theodore Dwight Woolsey, professor of Greek and president of Yale,
was an heir in direct succession of Connecticut Federalism. Nephew of
Timothy Dwight, a minister, and distinguished member of the social
oligarchy that in its decadence still held Connecticut opinion in a
strong grip, he could scarcely escape a predilection for the moralistic
authoritative dogmatisms that marked the old Connecticut _régime_. The
principle of coercive authority had lain at the heart of the political
theory of Timothy Dwight, and Theodore Woolsey was true to his Puritan
antecedents in asserting the supremacy of authority over liberty.
The only important element in his thinking that sets him apart from
his uncle was the influence of Francis Lieber, whose conception of
organic growth in social custom he made his own, and whose disciple
he professed to be. Naturally he retained the old Puritan dislike of
leveling--the traditional Connecticut distrust of democracy. He would
have no weakening of authority, no Jacobean license; and for anarchism,
socialism, communism, which he reckoned the nastiest spawn of
Jacobinism, his abhorrence was what one would expect of a Connecticut
Federalist. The two ponderous volumes that he issued in 1877 are
learned studies that bear on their dun pages many a telltale mark of
earlier times. In them Theodore Woolsey was renewing the fight against
an infidel philosophy that with its doctrine of natural rights denied
the authority of the godly to police society.
In harmony with Lieber and Calhoun he rejected the romantic doctrine
of natural rights, and substituted a composite social-moralistic
conception, that from John Winthrop and Roger Williams to Channing and
Emerson had colored the Puritan thought of New England. Natural rights,
he asserted, are those which belong to man by reason of the nature God
has endowed him with; and the state is a moral agent, arising out of
custom, to secure and guarantee such rights. It is “as truly natural as
rights are, and as society is”; for established in the social nature of
man it is the natural repository and guardian of his rights in a social
order. It is an expression of the teleological purpose that underlies
all things. The manner in which Woolsey elaborated his moralistic
theory will be evident from the following passages:
The considerations that men exist together in society, that they
have an irresistible impulse towards society, that their perfection
of soul and of outward condition can be secured only in a social
life, and, on the other hand, that recognition of rights and
obligation alone make a social life a tolerable or even a possible
thing, and that wherever men reflect on their own nature they
admit the existence of certain classes of rights and shield them
by public power, show a divine purpose which none who believe in
a Creator of the world can deny. The Creator of man, having made
him such that his temporal, moral, and spiritual perfection can be
found only in society, prepared his moral feelings for the life
for which he was destined. The destination for society; the means
within human nature by which it is fulfilled; the means by which
the individual and the community, when brought into society, are
able to secure the good and avoid the evils possible in a state
of coexistence--these form a complete, harmonious whole, which
manifest comprehension of view and forethought. It is provided
in our nature, when it is not perverted--that is, when it does
not swerve from the true idea of human nature--that we shall form
societies under law. A state of society is a state of nature, and
the only true one.
When therefore _natural_ rights are spoken of, we can accept the
term, if it be used to denote such rights as grow out of our
nature, and may be inferred from the destination to which it
points us. Another and a heathenish kind of sense was attached
to the words, when they were taken to mean the rights, or rather
uncontrolled liberties, which men possessed in a state of human
nature in which there was no organized society or government....
[Such a theory] contemplates men as enjoying certain powers of
free action in this state of nature, and these powers must serve
for a foundation of their state as members of society, or so many
of them as it cannot be shown that they gave up, in order to make
a state of law and order possible. In other words, the theory of
the derivation of these rights from a state of nature may take a
hypothetical shape, and deduce rights from what a man could do in a
state of things which exists only in a jural fiction....
We find no fault with the objects which the theories had in view,
but with the want of conformity to truth. It must be pronounced,
in _the first place_, contrary to fact, that such a state of
nature ever existed. Man has always been under law; he is a ζῷον
πολιτικόν....
_Secondly_, if it could be shown that he had such an origin, it
would prove nothing.[606]
Having thus established both society and the state in the nature of
man, and dismissed the romantic interpretation of natural rights as
heathenish, Woolsey turned to examine the true sphere and function of
the political state. He rejected in the main the _laissez-faire_ view
of Mill and Spencer, but he refused to go so far as Burgess. He will
have no omnicompetent state. A just mean must be laid down between
authority and liberty, and that mean he discovered in the dictum,
“The sphere of the state ... may reach as far as the nature of man
and needs of man and of men reach”;[607] that is to say, its control
runs far beyond mere police powers, and concerns itself not only with
material ends but with the “intellectual and aesthetic wants of the
individual, and the religious and moral nature of its citizens.” A
state swollen to great powers he regarded as likely to swallow up
liberty in paternalism, and a state immediately responsive to the
popular will is certain to run into “extreme democracy.” His ideal
government he discovered in the rule of the Connecticut oligarchy,
under which a homogeneous people, with simple agrarian habits,
disciplined by religion and responsive to moral leadership, enjoyed
a stable government administered by proved executives. Unfortunately
with the nineteenth century began a decline in American government,
resulting from economic changes, the growth of cities, lower-class
immigration, and the “gradual reception of doctrines of political
rights, which belong to extreme democracy.” Such pernicious doctrines,
in his judgment, were: the short term of office, popular election of
judges to hold for a fixed period instead of for life, the debasement
of the representative system by subjecting the representative to his
constituents, and the spoils system.[608] In a later study he added two
other evils: direct legislation through the initiative, and a popular
referendum on war and peace.[609]
In spite of an imposing display of classical learning these two
stout volumes reveal a childlike ignorance of _Realpolitik_, a
naïve inability to grasp the significance of economic groupings
that underlie all political alignments. Neither as minister nor as
college president did Theodore Woolsey learn anything about the robust
materialisms which any realistic political theory must take into great
account. His knowledge of ancient Greek institutions no doubt was
adequate, but his knowledge of American constitutional development
was singularly inadequate. He accepted without question the argument
of Story and Webster that the phrase, “We the people,” proves the
original, consolidating intention of the document; he discussed the
history of party government in the United States without touching on
the economic alignment of agrarianism and capitalism; and he could
discover only one thoroughly admirable political party--“the upright
federal party.” He extols the Supreme Court as the triumph of the
American Constitution, without considering the desirability of a
judicial veto on legislative enactments, or suggesting a potential
alignment of the judiciary with the master forces of a generation. The
moralistic bias of his thought is perhaps sufficiently revealed in a
comment on the functions of the judges. “In a higher sense, they are
not representatives of the community nor of its chief magistrates, but
of justice and of God.... They are in fact more immediately servants
of God than any other men who manage the affairs of a country, because
expediency, departure from law or from the constitution, is for them in
no circumstance a thing to be conceived of.”[610] Mark Twain, it would
seem, was not the only humorist of the Gilded Age.
In his later years Woolsey was much disturbed by the spread of
collectivist doctrine, and in the thick of the economic unrest of the
times he felt it to be his duty to assist in stemming the advance of
such doctrine. In his great work on political theory, he demolished
the communist-anarchist-socialist arguments in a few pages, and then
remarked with excellent candor, “There is an extensive literature,
relating to the subject ... with much of which I am not familiar.”
Fearful that he might not have delivered a death-blow, after further
reading he returned to the attack three years later, and in 1880
published a volume entitled _Communism and Socialism_. For so difficult
a business he was even then inadequately equipped. He did not realize
the magnitude of his task. Marx’s _Capital_ could not be undermined
in ten pages, even with the help of Cairnes, Mill, and Ricardo, and
a political scientist with a theological background was scarcely
competent to untie the close-knit threads of the Marxian economics.
His exposition in consequence is incomplete and faulty; it largely
overlooks the Marxian philosophy of history and ignores the doctrine of
economic determinism. What troubles him most is the lack of religious
faith amongst socialists. The validity of a theory he is satisfied
to test by the morality of the theorist. One can easily guess that
President Woolsey’s opinions had turned into dogmatic conviction before
a page of the literature to be examined had come under his eyes. Yet
that so shallow a book should have issued from an academic pen will
surprise no one who is aware of the incredible number of shallow books
that actually have issued from academic pens. Provocative social
thinking and the American university seem never to have got on well
together.
In the fact that Woolsey’s speculations on the nature of the state
were accounted significant contributions to political science by his
generation of Americans, the historian may find added confirmation
of the shallowness of the Gilded Age. A stale Connecticut Calvinism,
molding in the corner of the cupboard, is poor food to nourish
thinking, and a man who knows nothing about the deeper springs of
political struggle is singularly unqualified to elaborate a science of
the state. Theodore Woolsey’s weighty volumes were a dignified attempt
to rehabilitate the old Connecticut Federalism and suit it to the taste
of a new age. But what measure of political intelligence can one expect
of a people fed on pious fictions by their most authoritative expounder
of the noble art of government?
2 • John W. Burgess
Woolsey has little to say about sovereignty. The speculations of Austin
had not reached his quiet study, and the need for a coercive state in
harmony with a centralizing industrialism was not likely to be realized
by a man whose eyes were turned back fondly to a simple village