OPINION:
Liberty, the Declaration of Independence proclaims, is a divine gift. Freedom is not the privilege of the educated or the well-born. It belongs to every person by nature, carrying with it the capacity to know right from wrong. Important insights follow from this that are as true today as they were in 1776.
If liberty is a gift of God, then a person’s liberty transcends the State. The State can only recognize and protect it. This is why the right to liberty is “unalienable.”
As we celebrate the birth of American freedom, however, we need to remember that freedom requires virtue. Forget this, and we risk losing the very freedom the founders defended.
For Thomas Jefferson, every human person possessed what he called a “moral sense” that was “as much a part of man as his leg or arm.” This moral sense can be strengthened or weakened. While its strengthening takes centuries, Jefferson recognized that its weakening can occur rapidly. Importantly, Jefferson understood freedom as the right to do what one ought to do, not merely what one wishes.
Jefferson trusted most Americans to use their “moral sense” in their decision-making. He was confident that there were matters of right and wrong that all people could know regardless of their education. “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor,” he wrote, and “the former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.” William F. Buckley Jr. expressed a similar sentiment when he said that he “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.”
And yet while Jefferson recognized that each of us is capable of great good, he knew from personal experience and history that we are also corruptible.
It is precisely because the human person is corruptible that government is at once necessary and dangerous. Necessary, because freedom without order decays into license. Dangerous, because every government is staffed by fallible men tempted by power. Jefferson warned in 1787,
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”
There is a similarity here to Lord Acton’s famous dictum that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
For Jefferson, government was not a necessary evil but an irreplaceable good. It is “necessary,” he said as president, “to close the circle of our felicities.” In other words, good government has a role to play in our pursuit of human happiness.
But how much government do we really need?
The central insight of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson included, is that freedom requires limited government. Government must be limited not just so that we can do whatever we want, but because it suits our very nature. Jefferson’s prescription, offered in his first inaugural, was “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another” and otherwise leave them free, never taking “from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” In our own parlance: low taxes and small government.
“Ay, there’s the rub,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet said. Government stays small only when citizens are virtuous. Limited government presupposes a people who not only can but also want to do things for themselves.
A people that cannot govern its appetites will not long govern itself, for disordered souls are an invitation to the Leviathan that devours liberty. Russell Kirk put it plainly: If you would have order in the commonwealth, you must first have order in the soul. Freedom, virtue and limited government are not three separate goods to be enjoyed la carte. They are links in a single chain, and the chain breaks at its weakest point.
A republic that remembers only that we are endowed with liberty but forgets the hidden premise of the Declaration that self-government presupposes a virtuous people will discover that it has celebrated Independence Day but lost the holiday’s meaning.
At 250, the question is not whether we Americans still cherish freedom. It is whether we are still the sort of people who can keep it.
• John C. Pinheiro, Ph.D., is an historian of the American Founding, and director of research at Acton Institute. The author or editor of five books, his newest is “The Christian Roots of American Liberty.” His Substack is Liberty & Order.
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