Liberalism’s Logic and America’s Challenge: A Reply to Schlueter and Muñoz

by  Patrick J. Deneen

within American Founding, Philosophy

March 6th, 2013

The Founders’ vision of the “common good” was not the pre-modern natural law conception of an objective human good, but a conception of “mutual advantage” shaped by the social contract framework. This logic of liberalism has driven our country to its current political and cultural problems.

I am again gratified and grateful for this debate about the American experiment with my friends Nathan Schlueter and Phillip Muñoz. Of course, a subject of this importance deserves sustained attention, and I can only hope that this discussion will continue in many venues, as this, our last round atPublic Discourse, concludes. While I am given the last word here, clearly the last word on the matter hasn’t been spoken.

Today I challenge Schlueter’s view that the founders sustained the pre-modern natural law tradition. Even then-contemporary opponents of the founders’ handiwork recognized that they relied too much on social contract theory, thus presuming a false view of human nature that over time would encourage private interest over public weal, and undermine virtue and religious belief. I also respond to Muñoz’s charge that a recognition of liberalism’s internal logic constitutes a form of Marxist determinism. My analysis has a different pedigree, particularly Platonic and Tocquevillian analyses of democracy’s tendencies.

It’s tempting to point out that Schlueter and Muñoz seem to disagree more with each other than with me: Schlueter insists that “natural law liberalism” grounds the founding as the continuity of ancient and medieval political philosophy, while Muñoz stresses the revolutionary consent theory of political legitimacy—with its defense of “natural rights”—as the founding’s basis. Schlueter admires the founding for building on a centuries-old development of natural law theory; Muñoz admires it for introducing consent as a new and just way to legitimize governments.

While one must grant to Schlueter that many documents of the founding era use the pre-modern language of “common good,” these invocations are often still made in a contractual context, as Muñoz highlights. That is, the pre-modern language has been re-defined by a new philosophical frame.

Read more at Public Discourse.