Adams, Wilson, and the American Res Publica

2021 ◽  
pp. 187-220
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Final Stage ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Self ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
American Founding ◽  
John Adams ◽  
American Experiment ◽  
Res Publica

This chapter considers the final stage of the Ciceronian tradition: the American founding. Insofar as the American founding is influenced by John Locke, it is indirectly indebted to Cicero. However, John Adams and James Wilson recognize the profoundly Ciceronian character of American liberal republicanism. Both argue that the prevailing understandings of natural law, justice, liberty, and what it means to be a republic derive from Cicero’s formulation. Moreover, Adams and Wilson see the American experiment as proving Cicero right, that a republic tethered to natural law could be realized. They also see the American Founding as contributing its own innovation to this tradition: written constitutionalism. The self-conscious writing of a regime’s constitution enables the principles of a natural law republic to be fixed and formalized in a way that Cicero’s original formulation did not provide for.

Natural Law Republicanism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The People ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

By any metric, Cicero’s works are some of the most widely read in the history of Western thought. This book suggests that perhaps Cicero’s most lasting and significant contribution to philosophy lies in helping to inspire the development of liberalism. Individual rights, the protection of private property, and political legitimacy based on the consent of the governed are often taken to be among early modern liberalism’s unique innovations and part of its rebellion against classical thought. However, this book demonstrates that Cicero’s thought played a central role in shaping and inspiring the liberal republican project. Cicero argued that liberty for individuals could arise only in a res publica in which the claims of the people to be sovereign were somehow united with a commitment to universal moral law, which limits what the people can rightfully do. Figures such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and John Adams sought to work through the tensions in Cicero’s vision, laying the groundwork for a theory of politics in which the freedom of the individual and the people’s collective right to rule were mediated by natural law. This book traces the development of this intellectual tradition from Cicero’s original articulation through the American founding. It concludes by exploring how modern political ideas remain dependent on the conception of just politics first elaborated by Rome’s great philosopher-statesman.

The Verdict on the Founding

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Kenneth L. Grasso ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Public Order ◽  
American Founding ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
American Experiment ◽  
Christian Understanding ◽  
Historical Trajectory

Robert R. Reilly’s America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding argues that the intellectual roots of the founders’ political theory are found in the Christian understanding of man, society and the world, and in the tradition of natural law thinking that emerged under its aegis. The American founding, he concludes, must be understood as an attempted “re-establishment” of “the principles and practices” of medieval constitutionalism. While finding the broad outlines of Reilly’s argument persuasive, the author worries that Reilly does not adequately take into account the eclectic character of the founders’ thought, the influence of the Enlightenment and Reformation on it, and the long-term implications of the latter influences for the historical trajectory of public order they created. The contrast between Reilly’s understanding of the founding and John Courtney Murray’s more nuanced account (which recognizes the predominant influence of Christian natural law tradition on the American experiment, while acknowledging the presence of less wholesome influences as well), the article argues, underscores both the strengths and weaknesses of this book. While both Reilly and Murray would agree that the founding was “good,” Murray, unlike Reilly, recognizes that “the seeds of dissolution” were present from the beginning and worries whether it is ultimately “good enough” to sustain the American experiment in self-government and ordered liberty.

Locke’s Ciceronian Liberalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-186
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
Law Of Nature

This chapter considers how John Locke reunites the two strands of Ciceronian thought from the seventeenth century. Locke returns to Cicero’s original formulation of natural law republicanism and innovates on it. He derives from Cicero’s natural law a set of natural rights, corresponding to the duties Cicero claimed were imposed by natural law. Locke’s law of nature is a barely modified version of Ciceronian natural law, but his conception of natural rights allows him to solve a number of theoretical problems posed by Cicero’s construal of the issue. Locke also offers a solution to the puzzle of how a doctrine of natural law could meet the standard of skeptical epistemology.

Locke

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-59
Author(s):  
Roger Crisp
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Self Interest

This chapter discusses the views on self-interest and morality of the great English empiricist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). Locke’s responses to Thomas Hobbes’s view that there is a natural law of self-interest are described, in particular his view that there are moral reasons independent of those grounded in the self-interest of the agent. Locke’s own account of natural law is set out, and the role of God as the source of morality explained. The question of whether Locke was a utilitarian is discussed, and an explanation is offered for Locke’s failure explicitly to allow for ultimate moral reasons.

John Stuart Mill

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-129
Author(s):  
W. J. Mander
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
The Self ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Failed Attempt

This chapter begins with a discussion of Mill’s empiricism and his attitude towards the unknowable which considers in detail the nature of his disagreement with Hamilton and which discusses the various senses in which his position might be described as one of ‘radical empiricism’. Moving on to more specific points, the chapter then discusses Mill’s views regarding space and time, his phenomenalism, his failed attempt to explain our idea of the self, his centre-staging the puzzle of other minds, and his positions respecting causation, free will, and natural law. The chapter concludes with a discussion of his posthumously published views about religion.

Work, philosophy of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Arneson
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Development ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Social Contact ◽  
The Self ◽  
Good Work ◽  
Property Ownership ◽  
Market Economies ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Occupational Life

Unlike play, work is activity that has to involve significant expenditure of effort and be directed toward some goal beyond enjoyment. The term ‘work’ is also used to signify an individual’s occupation, the means whereby they gain their livelihood. In modern market economies individuals contract to work for other individuals on specified terms. Beyond noting this formal freedom to choose how one shall work, critics of market economies have maintained that one’s occupation should be a realm of substantive freedom, in which work is freely chosen self-expression. Against this unalienated labour norm, others have held that the freedom of self-expression is one good among others that work can provide, such as lucrative pay, friendly social contact and the satisfaction of the self-support norm, and that none of these various work-related goods necessarily should have priority over others. Some philosophers place responsibility on society for providing opportunities for good work for all members of society; others hold that the responsibility for the quality of one’s occupational life appropriately falls on each individual alone. Finally, some theorists of work emphasize that performance of hard work renders one deserving of property ownership (John Locke) or enhances one’s spiritual development (Mahatma Gandhi).

“A Trespass against the Whole Species”: Universal Crime and Sovereign Founding in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 560-585
Author(s):  
Sinja Graf
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation

This essay theorizes how the enforcement of universal norms contributes to the solidification of sovereign rule. It does so by analyzing John Locke’s argument for the founding of the commonwealth as it emerges from his notion of universal crime in the Second Treatise of Government. Previous studies of punishment in the state of nature have not accounted for Locke’s notion of universal crime which pivots on the role of mankind as the subject of natural law. I argue that the dilemmas specific to enforcing the natural law against “trespasses against the whole species” drive the founding of sovereign government. Reconstructing Locke’s argument on private property in light of universal criminality, the essay shows how the introduction of money in the state of nature destabilizes the normative relationship between the self and humanity. Accordingly, the failures of enforcing the natural law require the partitioning of mankind into separate peoples under distinct sovereign governments. This analysis theorizes the creation of sovereign rule as part of the political productivity of Locke’s notion of universal crime and reflects on an explicitly political, rather than normative, theory of “humanity.”

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