How did we get here? Americans appear at a crossroads between the demand for individual rights and the demand for the common good, pushing their coexistence to the breaking point. F.H. Buckley, the foundation professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law, suggests their coexistence relies on the idea of liberalism. This term is not being used in the political sense—at least not in the modern chaotic politics of liberal versus conservative. This form of liberalism—indeed, its true form—is rooted in the virtuous ideas and actions of the past.
Buckley’s new work, “The Roots of Liberalism: What Faithful Knights and the Little Match Girl Taught Us About Civic Virtue,” asks and tries to answer two primary questions: Where did liberalism originate from and is it a good in and of itself?
Discovering the Origins
So how did these roots (or fathers)—let alone the fruit of liberalism—come to be in the first place? Among these many roots, there is religion, civic virtue, benevolence, chivalry, morality, and the long-settled (at least they were once settled) ideas of virtues and vices. Buckley intimates that it is the origin—or, rather, origins—that escape us, which makes it difficult to explain why liberalism is itself a good.
As Buckley notes, there is no single father or root of liberalism—and his book references an extensive list of roots, such as the idea of equality. But even with this, he acknowledges that what proves unanswerable is “why equality is a good.”
Losing Liberalism
The crux of Buckley’s book is that we could very easily lose what got us here—that which has taken thousands of years of intermittent steps via religion, revolution, compromise, and sacrifice. By demanding human rights in the absolute sense or the common good in the absolute sense—absolute as in always and for everyone, no matter what—could result in the loss of both and the rise of a tyrannical government (history is full of examples). Buckley claims that while “the common good is fundamental,” both “rights and the common good exist in tension.”In his chapter “Civic Virtue,” he explains this tension: “To promote the common good, it doesn’t suffice to uphold a thick set of individual rights, since these might be asserted in an illiberal manner. Without virtues such as moderation, a selfish person might demand his rights be respected when the benefits to him are greatly exceeded by the costs he’d impose on everyone else. And without a sense of benevolence, a person wouldn’t care if his rights trenched on the common good. A liberal society will defend individual rights, but rights shorn of virtuous rights-bearers can be a menace.”
This paragraph, while explaining the tension, also illustrates how those societal pillars—or fathers, or roots—are needed to uphold liberalism. As strong as those pillars are, however, they are not indestructible. The French Revolution, which Buckley references, is proof that the blind and erratic pursuit of liberalism can result in simply blind and erratic behavior (that is, chaos). Buckley illustrates this point well, when he cites Sir George-Etienne Cartier, known as Canada’s Father of Confederation, who suggested that “had Quebec gone through the convulsions of the French Revolution, we would have been improved out of existence.”
For the French revolutionaries, the method of improvement was based on the ends justifying the means combined with ignoring that both rights and the common good must exist in tension. What resulted from this illiberal pursuit of liberalism was tyranny.
Buckley’s work is a siren for Americans to return to those many roots of true liberalism and abandon our “selfish state” and “heartless woke republic.”
“A state that has fallen into illiberalism is not made liberal through a thicker set of rights or a better set of economic incentives,” he writes. “Liberalism arose from the virtues, and when weakened only they can revive it.”
Although it is often difficult to determine the origin of the roots, such as the idea of equality, it is not difficult to identify the fruits thereof. “Liberalism is not an abstract theory, but a tradition of virtues and customs embedded in our culture,” Buckley writes.
Indeed, the stabilizing factors of a liberal society are the actions of the individual and the community as a whole—even when they “exist in tension.” As Buckley claims, America’s and the West’s return to liberalism must come from “the bottom up.” It is up to us to return and continue those things that made us great and free. Those very things we know exist, even if we can’t explain precisely how they got there.
