Racism in American History: The Case of Thomas Jefferson

My last post discussed the 1619 Project which places race and racism at the center of all American history, but in the process commits serious factual errors. One reader remarked that debunking bad history isn't enough; that there is an overdue reckoning with racism in US history even if the 1619 Project misses the mark on many important points of fact. I agree. And I agree that debunking ideologically driven history is no substitute for thoughtful engagement with the poison of racism -- past and present. As statues of such founders as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are being toppled and/or vandalized, it's important to ask whether or not, as 1619 Project would have it, our country was founded in the service of white supremacy. Was all the  talk of universal, "inalienable" rights in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents empty rhetoric? If not, how can we square racist words and policies on the part of many founders with the lofty ideals we find in Jefferson, Thomas Paine or Benjamin Rush, among others?

There was a time when our history was taught in a way that left no room for an honest discussion of the moral transgressions (or "sins" ) of many founders. Jefferson, for example, was only discussed as a liberty-loving hero in text books. But as Joseph Ellis (author of Founding Brothers) says, he  was a "dedicated racist."Ellis suggests (in a book called American Dialogue) that we try to understand this "American Sphinx" rather than reflexively praise or condemn him depending on personal feelings.  He was not simply a "dedicated racist" but also-- esp in his younger years-- a vocal anti-slavery advocate.

He argued several times against slavery. As a young lawyer he also defended a slave who sued for freedom pro bono  and made an eloquent speech. He went beyond legal technicalities, and argued from his natural rights perspective saying: "We assert that under the law of nature all men are born free, and every one comes into this world with a right to his own person."


Again, in 1774, in a pamphlet entitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson-- in a section that listed grievances against King George III's mistreatment of the colonists-- wrote these astonishing words:


"[H]is Majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in these colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But prervious to the infranchisement of the slaves we already have, it is ncessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibition and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative: thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states *and to the rights of human nature* deeply wounded by this infamous practice." (The Portable Thomas  Jefferson: pp. 14-15)

It is worth noting that this indignant passage is predicated on the fiction that American colonists in Virginia were prepared to end slavery. Nobody took issue with Jefferson for making the claim, but it is clear in retrospect that Jefferson was a) leveling not a legal but distinctly MORAL charge against the King, and that b) in doing so he falsely spoke for the population of Virginia. Perhaps because it was inconsequential (nobody was about to act on it), nobody took Jefferson to task for being presumptive.  But equally conspicuous is the high and abstract, universal idealism to which Jefferson gives expression. He did so again when writing his unedited draft of the Declaration of Independence where the original list of grievances includes this:

"[The King has] waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating the sacred rights of life and  liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither....Determined to keep open a market where MEN [sic] should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce." (ibid)

Again, Jefferson (knowingly or not) is playing fast and loose with the facts by suggesting that the King foisted the institution of slavery on an unwilling and morally resistant group of colonists.  Jefferson's relationship to the truth was sometimes strangely deficient. Some historians note that he wrote these and other passages with a kind of philosophical passion and moral urgency that seems to have been sincere. But at the next moment he would command his slaves, or sell them to pay debts off. Worst of all, of course, was his long affair with Sally Hemmings. 

So while he was our most compelling and eloquent spokesperson for natural rights,  he also recorded feelings of fear and guilt.

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever....The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us." (Ellis: p.25)

Yet he also wrote:

Nothing is more firmly written in the book of fate than that these people [African Americans] are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races -- equally free-- cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn *indelible* distinctions between them"  (ibid)

He went on to explain that if slaves were to be freed without being expatriated, the effects on whites would be heaviest of all, since by virtue of having "negro blood" they would "contaminate" whites and generate "an inferior American race" (p. 26 Ellis) He concludes:

"When freed they must be removed beyond the reach of mixture."

Various scholars wrote Jefferson agreeing that slaves should be freed, but parting ways with him on what they saw-- even then -- as crackpot race science.  David Ramsay wrote:

"I think you have depresssed the negroes too low. I believe all mankind to be originally the same and diversified by accidental circumstances." (Ellis: 26)

Jefferson's friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, wrote:

"The unhappy sons of Africa, in spite of the degrading influence of slavery, are in no wise inferior to the more fortunate inhabitants of Europe and America."

But  Jefferson was adamant about the inherent inferiority of any person with"African blood." Any racial "mixture" would, he thought,  result in biological degradation of whites, or as he put it, "mongrelization."

What makes all of this truly surreal is the fact that Jefferson had been fathering children with Sally Hemmings all the while. Did he really look at these children and see "mongrels" and "inferior beings?" If so, how could he bear the cognitive dissonance? Was his relationship to these children (whom he agreed to free as adults in an agreement with Sally Hemmings) bereft of love or affection? If he was so scared of mixed race children, why was he fathering them?

     Portraits of Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson

So, this appears to be an example of our most moralistic egalitarian defender of all human rights including those of African slaves. Yet he was one of the more severe racists. How does that work? How can one compartmentalize to that degree?

Similarly, Enlightenment philosophers who espoused universal rights including Kant, Hume and later figures like Hegel held that Africans were a separate and inferior race. Such beliefs were common. But they didn't father "mulattoes" as far as I know.  Even prototypical civil rights architect, socialist and feminist, John Stuart Mill couldn't bring himself to believe that Britain's Indian subjects were capable of ruling themselves. All his work on liberty in politics simply didn't apply!

But again, Jefferson offers a rare glimpse into a living contradiction, an instantiation of the "American Paradox" of a nation of slaves conceived in liberty. I agree with Ellis who suggests that it is not by attacking Jefferson, but meditating deeply on these staggering contradictions and trying to understand them, that only in that attempt will we possibly be able to move beyond these historic and social scars. Tearing down statues of our most idealistic founding fathers-- Confederates is a different issue--  only deprives us of the opportunity to try to see beyond the "all good or all bad" theory of  flawed, but brilliant patriots of the 18th century. We may not be able to ever make rational sense of it; but a different kind of understanding which can accommodate the contradictions and moral ambiguity of some of the founders like Jefferson is, I hope, possible. It's also important to remember that many others (like Benjamin Rush, Rufus King et al.) were unambiguously against slavery and did not hold to theories of race-based hierarchies and crackpot science. 

Too many of us expect history to "make sense," or to reveal a rational trajectory. But history is not  inherently rational or moral. It certainly isn't a narrative ending in a moral to the story from which we elide any inconvenient facts that do not support our desired outcome, but rather an intricate interplay across human experiences and contradictions. Like great literature, we learn most from history when we can find ourselves mirrored in the struggles, successes and failures of those who came before. Should we expect "heroes" and "villains" in earlier times when we are acutely aware of the inconsistencies, contradictions and failings of not only ourselves but those who are the "leading lights" of politics and culture in our own era?

Then let's return to the "American Sphinx," as Ellis calls Thomas Jefferson. It has become common to see him as being not only a racist but a proponent  of white supremacy-- essentially no different from the likes of John Calhoun or Jefferson Davis and the other leaders of the Confederacy. I don't think this gets things right.

Rather, I agree with Sean Wilentz who argues in his book, The Politicians and the Egalitarians,  that Jefferson played a decisive role in setting up our egalitarian national tradition as seen in The Declaration of Independence and other important texts of the era. Yet, as we've seen, Jefferson's actions do not consistently conform to his lofty ideals, to say the least. What can we say? He pressed for abolition in several proposals such  as the Northwest Ordinance (which could have prevented the Westward spread of slavery with just one more vote!) In later years, he spoke less and less about the issue. As the years pass, we get from his voluminous writings mostly vague hopes about slavery evaporating away somehow.  Eventually, for the most part, he avoided the topic.

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Jefferson's character may have been enigmatic, but what about his legacy? In what way did he influence later politicians -- e.g. Confederates vs. Republicans in the lead-up to the Civil War? Or pro-slavery and anti-slavery activists and organizations?  Well, in 1850s, the pro-Slavery Southern Democrats de-emphasized the Declaration of Independence as a foundational text in order to read the Constitution as a"pro-Slavery" document. Though slaves aren't mentioned explicitly, Southern Democrats cited the 3/5th compromise and the 10th Amendment to argue that the slave system was protected as a right left to the individual states. All men, they insisted, are NOT "created equal," in Jefferson's pivotal egalitarian phrase. Whites were meant to govern blacks. Slavery was not something about which one should "tremble before God" in fear of Divine Justice, as Jefferson had said. Instead, slavery was itself God-sanctioned, and as American as apple pie. If later Southerners tried to hide these beliefs and motives for secession, the truth of the matter is easy to locate in all the secession documents and statements of the Confederate states  https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/csapage.asp. In 1860 and1861 there was no attempt to hide the fact that they argued that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document, and in order to support this reading conveniently ignored the most famous section of the Declaration of 1776 which reads:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

However, the very first Declaration of Secession (South Carolina, 1860)  quoted selectively from the  Declaration of 1776 in support of the right of individual states to decide the issue of slavery, the government of the United States notwithstanding. They wrote that due to a struggle with the British Empire for independence:

[S]elf-government ensued, which resulted, on the 4th of July, 1776, in a Declaration, by the Colonies, "that they are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do."(sic) https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

The other state declarations of secession (which came in 1861) similarly omit the foundational 2nd paragraph which establishes the equality and natural rights of all persons. They had to explicitly reject  Jeffersonian egalitarianism to perpetuate the "peculiar institution" of slavery, which is inherently anti-egalitarian.  So  Jefferson's legacy is NOT similar to that of Calhoun, for whom slavery is a "positive good." It is not the same as the legacies of Jefferson Davis, Robert E Lee and other notable Confederates who advanced a pro-slavery reading of our founding texts. His words and (some of the deeds that matched them) have been, and continue to be indispensable to egalitarians in the US, and Human Rights activists elsewhere. Those who  struggle for human rights always return to the natural rights framework, and the Jeffersonian language that so passionately expresses it. This is his most important legacy, despite his personal issues with racism. The second paragraph of the Declaration of 1776 has so influenced subsequent human rights documents and instruments as to be called "The Immortal Declaration." (see Jack Greene's 1976 book, All Men Are Created Equal https://books.google.com/books/about/All_Men_are_Created_Equal.html?id=LiAJAQAAIAAJ )

At the time of its writing, nobody could have anticipated the significance Jefferson's words in the Declaration would assume subsequently.  There were other documents and pamphlets that invoked natural rights and equality. Only in the 1890s did Jefferson's Republican Party begin to cite it as authoritative text. For as it turned out, the Constitution and Bill of Rights failed to specifically mention universal natural rights. As Pauline Maier, writes:

[I]n the 1790s -- when neither the original Constitution nor the Constitution as amended acknowledged the existence of the people's "inherent natural rights"-- the Declaration of Independence was first rescued from the obscurity into which it had so quickly sunk.... Members of the Jeffersonian Republican Party of the 1790s were the first to describe the Declaration of Independence as a "deathless instrument" and attribute its timeless elegance to their leader "the immortal Jefferson."...It was above all the second paragraph, with its declaration of human equality and rights, that they emphasized. Those words [were] reminiscent of the French Delcaration of theRights of Man, [which] fit the Republicans' affection for revolutionary France."  (The Strange History of "All Men Are Created Equal"p. 881-2 https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1547&context=wlulr )

Actually, Jefferson often consulted with Gen. Lafayette, who wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Man in July 1789. Jefferson was living in Paris as the US Minister to France at the time of the French Revolution, and he influenced Republican leaders during this early phase of the Revolution. Indeed Lafayette asked for Jefferson's "observations" on the the document before submitting it to the National Assembly. It is the Declaration of Independence and The Declaration of  Rights of Man that serve as the basis for later instruments of human rights, especially the UN Charter of Human Rights which has been invoked by oppressed peoples of many nations. In the 1780s, reflecting on the Declaration of Independence and ongoing revolutions in Holland and France, Jefferson predicted: "this ball of liberty...will roll around the globe." Despite his racism, he was the most eloquent and influential of early American egalitarians.

Abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, wrote The Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Convention in 1833. He cites the "immortal declaration" while insisting that to make the principle of equality true in practice, all slaves in the US must be freed immediately. 

 "More than fifty-seven years have elapsed, since a band of patriots convened in this place, to devise measures for the deliverance of this country from a foreign yoke. The corner-stone upon which they founded the Temple of Freedom was broadly this—'that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness.' At the sound of their trumpet-call, three millions of people rose up as from the sleep of death, and rushed to the strife of blood; deeming it more glorious to die instantly as freemen, than desirable to live one hour as slaves. They were few in number—poor in resources; but the honest conviction that Truth, Justice and Right were on their side, made them invincible.   We have met together for the achievement of an enterprise, without which that of our fathers is incomplete....  Their grievances, great as they were, were trifling in comparison with the wrongs  and sufferings of those for whom we plead. Our fathers were never slaves—never bought and sold like cattle —never shut out from the light of knowledge and religion—never subjected to the lash of brutal taskmaster." (Selections from the Writings of W.L Garrison: pp. 67-8: http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abeswlgct.html )

 

Frederick Douglass also invoked the principle in stirring words, while holding it up to Americans as an unrealized ideal-- indeed a measure of hypocrisy and moral failure. In his famous speech on Independence Day of 1852, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" Douglas said:

"The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too-- great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them [i.e. as a slave] is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory....Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!"

He then indicts the nation for its failure to apply their principles to the millions of slaves in whose name he is speaking:

 "Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us?....[S]uch is not the state of the case...I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us...The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice; I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?....The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers you Union."

He then answers disdainfully the titular question of the speech:

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery... a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages!"  (Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S Foner, available online here: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/coretexts/_files/resources/texts/c/1852%20Douglass%20July%204.pdf )

I quote from this speech extensively in order to point to the nature of the American paradox of liberty and slavery. Douglass affirms the greatness of of the signers of the Declaration, and the "eternal principles"  which they "seized" setting a "glorious example" for all posterity. Simultaneously, he reviles the nation 75 years later, for violating the true meaning of the very Declaration he has been asked to praise in speech. This, I think, has long been the pattern of those who effectively protest for human and civil rights. They don't say, "your tradition and morality is rotten" but rather "your understanding and practice of your own tradition and morality is rotten, and can only be rectified by recognizing my humanity and civil rights." America's ideal culture is the most valuable resource for those who would improve its real one.

Contrast that with those slavers and southerners who ultimately seceded from the union. In order to justify their secession they went out of their way to ridicule the "immortal declaration." John Randolph said that the idea that all are "created equal" was a "pernicious falsehood," citing obvious inequalities like the different mental and physical abilities of children and adults. John Calhoun (in)famously said that "there was not a word of truth" in the idea that all men are created equal." He held that the "natural state of  Man" and the state into which "he is born, lives and dies" is one of "subjection to authority," and therefore a state of inequality.

It fell to Lincoln, the "Great Emancipator," to convert Jeffersonian egalitarianism, and the "immortal declaration" into a moral and political tool that would justify not just emancipation, but the Civil Rights Amendments (13th,14th and 15th) which, though he didn't live to see them,  redeemed it  legally thus changing the US Constitution. While Southerners scorned the idea of equality and universal rights, and Stephen Douglas argued that the Declaration was meant only for whites, Lincoln referred to Jeffersonian principles and quotations regularly, and insisted that they be taken at face value. He said:

"They [the founders] did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity...They defined...in what respects they did consider all men created equal... Men are equal in having certain inalienable rights, among which are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this [they] meant.  (Maier: p. 885)

Lincoln claimed in an 1861 Address,  that he "never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." He stated that the assertion that "All Men Are Created Equal"  was "the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest." It was, he said, "the father of all moral principle."(ibid) During the War, Lincoln  invited  Frederick Douglass to the White House on 3 occasions (the first time an African American entered that building not as a worker or slave, but as a sought after advisor and guest). By  the third and last meeting, Douglass had come to appreciate the importance of the egalitarian tradition as appropriated by Lincoln and the Radical Republicans (see Wilentz: 2016)  For under Lincoln these moral and political principles bore fruit for enslaved Americans rather than mocking them. Freed blacks after the Emancipation Proclamation were eager to become part of America, to enjoy liberty and pursue happiness.  The Civil War amendments had woven these ideals into the fabric of the US Constitution; and for a time, during Reconstruction, some 2,000 black Americans held public office, from the local level all the way up to the U.S. Senate.  They set up black colleges, small businesses, and tried to obtain promised land on which to put down viable roots. Tragically, all of this was met with the furious backlash that was Jim Crow and  Lynch Law, and so justice was deferred until the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 60s. And much remains to be done now.

Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1865 eulogy for Lincoln that he “was emphatically the black man’s President: the first to show any respect to their rights as men.” In a later speech toward the end of reconstruction, he honored Lincoln as the great emancipator, but added that he was ultimately the white man's president.  Referring to Lincoln's Jeffersonian egalitarianism and its limits for blacks, he explained 

“While Abraham Lincoln saved for you [i.e. whites] a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose." (fr. Speech at Freedman's Monument, 1876 https://edan.si.edu/transcription/pdf_files/12955.pdf

So while understanding that Lincoln's first priority was to save the country, and only secondarily to "deliver [slaves] from bondage," he came to see this not as a flaw or failing on Lincoln's part, but a recognition of his responsibility to the preservation of the Union as a president, and his partial understanding of the plight of blacks in America given his circumstances and background. He continued:

"When, therefore, it shall be asked what we [African Americans] have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the answer is ready, full, and complete. Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country; under his rule, and in due time, about as soon, after all, as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States...[W]e saw the internal slave trade which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw...the first slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer...we saw the Confederate States, based upon the idea that our race must be slaves, and slaves forever, battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds; under his rule, and in the fullness of time, we saw Abraham Lincoln, after giving the slaveholders three months' grace in which to save their hateful slave system, penning the immortal paper...making slavery forever impossible in the United States. Though we waited long, we saw all this and more." (ibid)

Of course Douglass knew that as important as all of this was, the Klu Klux Klan and "Judge Lynch" were by this time (1876) already well on the rise. In later years he would see the full scale of the terror, reading Ida B. Wells' harrowing reports on the systematic slaughter of innocent blacks, as the Northern politicians lost interest in Reconstruction, or worse, became complicit once more in a country mired in White Supremacy. But he never lost faith in the moral and political principles that he had seen converted into living truths for a time. These were the principles that largely go back to egalitarians like Thomas Jefferson, despite Jefferson's sickening racism as detailed above. Justice in an ideal world comes in a neat, rational package, implemented by pure beings free of taint or confusion. The real world is one in which the basest and noblest traits and social forces become intertwined in strange and often tragic ways. We have a good, if imperfect, legacy to build on; and a lot more building remains to be done. But those who would search for a pure legacy or future may come up empty handed.

Some activists and groups (like the 1619 Program, which I discussed in the last post) replace a complex and harrowing legacy with clear-cut and self-righteous myths that are, at times,  no less distorted than the older white supremacist ideologies that used to pass muster for history in the early to mid 20th century in some quarters.  I hope we can transcend the pious self-certainties of both extremes, and learn to accept the complexity, moral ambiguity and irrationality of the actual record of slavery and race-based oppression that thr historian, Edmund S. Morgan, aptly called "An American Paradox" https://www.jstor.org/stable/1888384?seq=1 

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References/Related Readings:

-Joseph Ellis: 

American Sphinx: The Character of  Thomas Jefferson -- Vintage Edition: 1998

                                American Dialogue: The Founders and Us: Alfred A.  Knopf, NY; 2018

-Thomas Jefferson  (ed. Merrill D. Peterson): The Portable Thomas Jefferson: Penguin Books; 1975

-Pauline Maier:  The Strange History of "All Men Are Created Equal"  https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1547&context=wlulr

-Sean Wilentz: The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics:  W.W.

Norton& Company, NY; 2016

The 1619 Project Rewrites American History:

(Note: This was originally posted on the History Community Website, and can be read along with the discussion it generated there: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/thehistorycommunity/the-1619-project-responsible-revisionism-or-factua-t367.html   Btw, it was written prior to the companion piece on Thomas Jefferson and the history of American racism, though it appears the other way round on Disqus. Should work either way, though)

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On August 14, 2019, New York Times journalist and Op-Ed columnist,  Nicole Hannah-Jones launched a large scale and ongoing project called The 1619 Project in the New York Times Magazine. The stated aim was to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” The project began with a 100-page spread of essays, photos, poetry, and fiction marking what the magazine called the “400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.” 

The first essay--written by Hannah-Jones-- and others that followed it contain both interpretive and factual claims. At the interpretive level  strong overarching claims are made. The central interpretive claim is expressed by Hannah-Jones in opening essay of the initiative entitled America Wasn't  A Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One.  She writes:

"Black Americans have...been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all." -- source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html


I am not sure how such a sweeping causal claim can be established, nor am I sure just what kind of empirical evidence might be marshaled to support it. As Hannah-Jones says, it is an interpretive claim about which reasonable people can disagree. 

But interpretations must be interpretations OF putative facts or else the theorist is merely interpreting other interpretations of other interpretations of others, and so on ad infinitum. Philosopher, Robert Solomon,  made the point well when responding to Nietzsche's famous maxim, "There are no facts, only interpretations." Solomon remarked, "This leaves Nietzsche with the rather embarrassing question, "Interpretations of WHAT?" Those (including some postmodernists) who succumb to such an excessive form of relativism implicitly reject empiricism which leaves us with no clear standards to evaluate the strength or weakness, truth or falsity of any statements, hypotheses or theories.  And, by the way, even the often-misread Foucault, the greatest influence on what has become of postmodernism, considered himself an empirical historian whose researches were supported with evidence. (see Colin Koopman's essay: Foucault's Critical Empiricism Today: pp. 107-8 https://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/pub/2014fouc-now-vol_biopower_infopower-final.pdf


What, then,  are some of the alleged FACTS marshaled by the 1619 project to make the grand claims they advance  appear plausible? There are a few, and some of them disturbed major historians of American History enough to cause them to write a letter to the Times requesting several  corrections of what they regard as mistakes and untruths.  The historians include such heavyweights  as James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz and James Oakes. Several African American historians and other scholars outside of the field of history, and positioned across the political spectrum,  also critiqued the 1619 Project. Yale Marxist Political Scientist, Adolph Reed (who studies race relations in the US),  Columbia University's moderate center-left John McWhorter,  and the brilliant maverick historian Nell Irvin Painter (Histroy of White People, et al.) ,among others, have also criticized the project as one that distorts history.  Leaving aside the broad claim regarding blacks as the ultimate cause of modern US democracy, these scholars focused on more discrete and manageable issues amenable to empirical inquiry. Some of the factual claims that the historians called into question include the following:

A) Chattel Slavery based on a firm racial hierarchy  began in 1619, according to Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project

The problem is  it's well known that  the first 2 or 3 generations of Africans in North America were indentured and were able to  gain their freedom and pursue wealth and liberty like other groups that were not subject to a legal racial hierarchy (see Nell's article linked below and Ira Berlin's classic, Generations of Captivity: 2004).  Laws that spelled out the racial basis for  permanent and hereditary slavery  emerged only towards the end of the 17th century. They did not exist for most of the 17th century in the North American colonies.  Professor Nell Irvin Painter wrote an article on the subject in the Guardian which discusses the matter in some depth. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/14/slavery-in-america-1619-first-ships-jamestown 

The reason this factual error matters so much to the historians  here is that the 1619 Project infers from the arrival of slaves in 1619 that this was the "true founding" of our country rather than 1776. For it is "slavery and its consequences" that are "central" determinants of US history, culture and political structure. So despite the usual date given for the founding of the US ( 1776  because of the  Declaration of Independence  or 1787 when the Constitution was written) Hannah-Jones and her colleagues at the Times  claim that the "true founding" occurred as soon as the first slaves set foot on North American soil. (This thoughtful article published in The Atlantic Magazine discusses some of problems and implications of changing the date of the founding in this way: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/inclusive-case-1776-not-1619/604435/   This reframing of the date of the "true founding" of America is part of a larger argument and factual claim about the nature of the American Revolution and the celebrated documents of the Revolutionary period, including the Declaration of Independence,  The Constitution and books and pamphlets like Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Namely,


B) Hannah-Jones and the  1619 Project  claim that the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence were not really motivated by the high ideals discussed in the writings of the founders, but rather the war and the founding documents themselves were actually responses to  colonists' fears that Britain was going to abolish slavery in the 1770s and 80s. It is for this reason that the founding fathers produced the idealistic  but "false" (phony) documents we revere in the US (the Declaration, Constitution etc.). Basically, all of that is just a pretext, say the 1619 team, for the real reason which was to thwart the alleged British plan to end slavery in the 1770s and repel the Brits

This  was a major point of contention for all of the scholars who asked the Times to retract all such claims.  Regarding Hannah-Jones’ claim that, “In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade,”  Prof. Wilentz said, “The Americans were the ones who were trying to close the slave trade. They had tried throughout the 1760s and 1770s repeatedly,” adding that for Britain, abolition would have been “economic suicide.”  (see: https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/02/u-professors-send-letter-requesting-corrections-to-1619-project Indeed the British did not abolish the slave trade until 1807, and slavery itself in the West Indies was not abolished until the 1833, as Prof. McPherson pointed out.  At the time of the Revolution, they were as dependent on the slave trade and slavery itself as were American planters in the south. 

In response to these points made in a letter to the Times, the NYT Magazine Editor-in-Chief, Jake Silverstein cited an obscure legal decision,  the 1772 Somerset decision, in which the British high court ruled, “chattel slavery was not supported by English common law." Wilentz  correctly stated that the case made no difference because it applied only in England, not the colonies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart

McPherson concurred, saying, “And from there, the author of the introductory article [in the 1619 Project] extrapolates that the British represented a threat to the survival of slavery in the American colonies.” He was also careful to tread gently saying that he "applaud(s) the larger work of the 1619 Project in bringing attention to the centrality of slavery in American history," and that the requested corrections are “matters of verifiable fact.” 

"I think the purpose is a good one, which is to alert people who are interested in American history to the importance of slavery, of race and racism, in shaping important aspects of American history,” McPherson said. ( Source: Daily Princetonian https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/02/u-professors-send-letter-requesting-corrections-to-1619-project  However, he added that the NY Times has a reputation to protect, and advised that making the suggested corrections would help the paper to maintain a reputation for accuracy on the historical facts.


Silverstein (the Editor-in-Chief at NYT Magazine) also referred to the Dunmore Proclamation of 1775,  
which offered freedom to slaves who fled to the British army. McPherson responded by explaining that the revolution had already been fought for eight months when the proclamation was made. He stated that:

“It applied only to the slaves of those who had already committed themselves to the war against the British,” McPherson explained. “If you stayed on the British side you could keep your slaves, so in fact the opposite was true. Those people who supported the revolution were doing so in spite of the threat that their support for the revolution posed to slavery, exactly the opposite of the argument that the motive was to preserve slavery.”  (ibid)


In response to the NYT's  claim that Britain was moving toward abolition at the time, McPherson pointed out that the situation was nearly the reverse. While there was almost no interest in abolishing slavery in the 1770s in Britain, many northerners had already been trying to end the institution of slavery. He states:

“One of the impulses that grew out of the revolution was the abolition of slavery by more than half of the states that became part of the United States, starting with Massachusetts and Vermont."

Prof. Wilentz adds:

"The Americans were the ones who were trying to close the slave trade. They had tried throughout the 1760s and 1770s repeatedly,"...and for the British to close the slave trade at that time would have amounted to economic suicide.”

He continues:

"There was not a rising clamor around slavery, that’s for sure, and the English government showed absolutely no interest in getting rid of slavery at all, as of 1776. So the idea that American slaveholders were shaking in their boots because of an abolitionist or anti-slavery British government is ludicrous.”



There were several other issues of factual accuracy taken up by the historians. I won't cover all of them here, but rather mention them briefly so that the scale of the debate can be appreciated.  The 1619 Project claims that the Constitution  "was a pro-slavery document" while the historians pointed to heated debates involving passionate positions for and against slavery, which resulted in the unfortunate 3/5th compromise. Wilentz and McPherson point out that the constitution tolerated but did not sanction slavery, and that the notes of Madison at the Constitutional Convention and other germane documents from the period paint a very different picture from that of Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project.

There were also disagreements about the sincerity of Abraham Lincoln's emancipation proclamation.  Here we're on less solid ground, as "sincerity" is not empirically observable directly, but inferred by behaviors and words. The historians  pointed out that Frederick Douglas acknowledged Lincoln's definitive role in emancipating the slaves during a war. Douglas said that this was, in his view, the only way emancipation could have happened. (see: https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/frederick-douglass-and-abraham-lincoln/sources/104 )   This doesn't deny the centrality of resistance on the part of enslaved blacks. Rather the emancipation proclamation and later Amendments, backed by a military defeat of the South helped blacks to resist their former masters and begin to redefine their place in US history during Radical Reconstruction (1865-1877) before the rise of the Klan and the ominous Black Codes that led the way to Jim Crow.

The last issue I'll mention involves the rather odd claim made by Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project that slavery is the cause of modern capitalism as we have it today. I'll leave the reader to chew on that one. I don't find it very convincing, and indeed would tend to trace US modern capitalism back to northern interests as articulated by Alexander Hamilton and not southern slaveocracy. Indeed there is a virtual consensus on that view, and little evidence of the revisionist claim regarding slaveocracy as the germ of what would become US (and ultimately global) capitalism. So these are some  of the factual issues under contention.


THEORETICAL CONCERNS: INTERPRETATIONS WITHOUT FACTS?


 While almost all the issues above center around empirical matters,  Hannah-Jones and 1619 Project dismisses the whole matter as a not-uncommon difference of "historical interpretation." She writes:


"Historians disagree all the time, but to go to this depth of demanding a correction, is taking this disagreement of interpretations to a realm outside of what I would consider normative historiography." (Daily Princetonian)


But while interpretations can't be directly refuted or confirmed, the question in historiography arises... WHAT are these interpretations interpreting if not the facts, the historical data as best we can establish it? And if we are interpreting events not in evidence (e.g. the taking up of arms against the British just to perpetuate slavery which they supposedly threatened) then are the interpretations therefore invalidated? Sticking with this example, it's either true or not true that Americans fought the British to perpetuate  slavery or it's false. There is no good evidence for such a shared motive underlying the Revolution. Thus the interpretation is one operating on a bad hypothesis rather than a factual premise.  This is rather like interpreting a decree or law that never existed. How can one "interpret" a casus belli that never existed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli
How can we build a theory of blacks as purveyors of democracy, and whites as faux  liberal advocates for liberty and equality,  if it turns out that the   revolutionaries were not fighting to maintain a slave society? The  interpretive schema of black exceptionalism in a world of whites who were not *really* committed to freedom and equality requires that whites were mostly interested in keeping black slaves down and depriving them of all meaningful life-chances.  It requires that the descriptor, "white men,"  refers to a monolithic set of beliefs and commitments; that those founders who  despised slave society (e.g. Rufus King who bought slaves in order to set them free)  were merely exceptions that proved the rule  of a toxic and all-pervading racism in the US. But we know that a genuine desire to end slavery was  found in several Northern States, and that these men argued vehemently with those advocating for an American future based largely on the racist slave system. We know that the anti-slavery politicians came to believe that if slavery could be contained, confined to the south, and if westward expansion could  proceed  without the extension of  slavery (like the Northwest Territory which did not permit slaves), then slavery would most likely fizzle out. ( This was a bit too rosy, and nobody foresaw,  Eli Whitney's cotton gin and the enormous profits his invention brought with the help of  slave labor for which demand increased dramatically). But right at the time of the American Revolution and immediately after it the first abolition societies emerged, and states/polities including Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont passed anti-slavery laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition ... he_country  Many founders in the North such as Benjamin Rush, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Moses Brown, Rufus King  and others began to work  to put an end to the the "peculiar institution." However, unforeseen  historical contingencies  (esp. the rise of "King Cotton" following Eli Whitney's invention of the Cotton Gin) made  slave labor more valuable to Southern plantation owners. But contrary to the position of the 1619 Project there was no monolithic "consensus position"  shared by a supposedly monolithic, white supremacist population that cut across states and regions in  the US and its nascent territories which began to inch westward at the time.  

Without getting into the fine details of historiography, it is at least worth pointing out that the 1619 Project's interpretation of the US as a total society bent on perpetuating slavery indefinitely depends on assertions of fact that are taken to be true by the proponents, even though the evidence contradicts the premise of a unitary and trans-regional  society  intent on  not only maintaining but spreading slavery as the country expanded to the west. While  historical evidence is often partial and subject to revision, the evidence cited by the professors that signed the letter to the NY Times, is extremely well supported.  Objectivity is at best an ideal, and we need not be naive about that and claim that  historical  interpretation can be based on rock solid and incontrovertible evidence. It isn't.  BUT this is not to say that historians should  countenance ad hoc hypotheses about such things as the motives of revolutionaries, or the meaning of documents like the constitution in the absence of ANY clear evidence. One may advance interpretations of historical data that is  at least supported by some degree of probable evidence. But shooting from the hip, as it were, is something else altogether.

Perhaps I am being unfair here. Do you think that's what is happening in the 1619 Project amounts to evidence-free interpretation and unsupported hypotheses? Is it largely based on assumptions of a political and moral kind, or is there legitimate historical methodology being used to argue their case ? Is the  exceptionalist claim that  black Americans led the way to US Democracy, and that they fought their battles with almost no help from whites including Lincoln, the Union Army, the Reconstruction era Amendments,  Abolitionists and Radical Republicans plausible?  Should such history become part of secondary school curriculum as  is now happening?


References/Related Reading:

James McPherson: Battle Cry of Freedom 

Sean Wilentz:  No Property In Man   https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php ... 0674972223

Ira Berlin: Generations of Captivity  https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php ... 0674016248

Nell Irvin Painter:  Creating Black Americans: African American History and its Meanings to the Present
https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/cre ... us&lang=en&

The Daily Princetonian: U. Professors send letter requesting corrections to 1619 Project:  https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/artic ... 19-project

The Concept of Liberal Democracy

Today it is customary to talk about Liberal Democracy as if the component concepts-- liberalism and democracy-- have some kind of natural affinity or fit.  But both concepts are ambiguous in themselves,  and their historical convergence in the form of the unit-concept, "Liberal Democracy," is, at the very least, problematic if not somewhat incoherent. The history of the terms "democracy" and "liberalism" reveals separate strands that only later appear to hang together, but originally were quite distinct. Democracy now seems to go together  with liberalism, but liberalism (based around toleration and freedom to live the kind of life one wants without interference) had nothing to do with Athenian Democracy or Civic Republicanism in Rome (which influenced the American founders greatly). 

Athenian (direct) democracy had nothing to do with protecting "individual rights" or allowing people to live and express themselves as they wished. Far from it. Every year the people (demos) would vote to ostracize any one citizen they most disdained without regard for that citizen's "rights." In other words, any citizen might be thrown out of the Polis,  or even put to death, for no reason at all except for  their unpopularity. Further, the liberal conception of a private sphere in which we may choose to participate in government or choose to abstain from political life didn't exist. While slaves, who far out-numbered citizens,  kept the silver mines running, citizens were forced to participate based on choice by lot. The lots revolved on a yearly basis, but as with conscription there were few exemptions. Thus rule by the people  (demos = people; kratia = rule) was literally the order of the day for those adult males defined as citizens-- a minority of the total population. Many who lived in Athens but came from other Poleis (known as "metics" or foreigners) lacked citizenship. As for the citizens,  not all  were equally well-educated, wealthy and so forth. As a result the system was vulnerable to tyrants*  and demagogues who came to exercise outsized power on often poorly informed and impressionable citizens. So, individual rights, privacy, autonomy, the inherent dignity of the person-- all these familiar (to us) concepts associated with democracy were not in play. 

During the Enlightenment and, in the American era of the founders, democracy was, for the most part,  a dirty word that signaled the danger of "mob rule" or the "tyranny of the majority," consistent with Plato's critique. Though there were elements of democracy in the constitution, these were understood as being much closer to the tradition of Civic Republicanism, a mixed form of government that is based a) on citizen virtues and b) institutional guardrails to prevent "factionalism" and rule by majority (checks and balances, appointed officials, indirect elections et al.) It wasn't until the 20th century, for example, that American citizens were able to vote directly for Senators-- and this was before universal suffrage. The word democracy started to be used in a non-pejorative sense only in the mid 19th century. The radicals of the  French Revolution promoted Rousseauian democracy (more on which below), but this ended with Napoleon, and after his defeat,  memories of the Terror that resulted in reactionary movements that led to the restoration of  the monarchy. Democracy in France was not embraced during most of the long 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_long_nineteenth_century

What about "Liberalism?" It too is a cluster-concept in which various historical strands eventually converged in the 19th century-- some more closely interrelated than others. But the assemblage of these strands as a unitary concept, "liberalism," was historical, political and thus contingent. Some of these historical strands include a) religious toleration (esp. vis a vis Protestantism) b) subsequent and gradual generalization of the principle of toleration to secular sphere  c) fear of excessive power concentrated in the central state d) the idea of voluntary power having priority over coercion/force c) the centrality of the individual over the group e) laissez-faire economics, et al. As JS Mill discussed, these core elements sit uneasily with democracy. If the "will of the people"is taken to mean what most enfranchised citizens want, as expressed in electoral outcomes and public opinion, then it would seem to leave little room for individual dissenters and minorities. Further, Mill, like many others in the 19th century, was concerned to make sure that the demos (people) was not simply reduced to a numbers game, with majority being identified with right. His proposed solution was to argue for an "educated democracy" in which all men and (yes) women would get the vote, but only after receiving mandated secondary education was achieved,  so that their input would be based on knowledge and reason rather than passions and popular opinion. This resembles current discussions of "epistocracy" in the sense that the outcome of elections is only a solid basis for governance if citizens are well informed, and have mastered some critical thinking skills.  Mill, in many ways the father of modern liberalism, wants to protect minority rights, minority opinions, as eloquently laid out in On Liberty. But in the end he is also concerned that free expression be "educated" and not vulgar ("It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" he writes).  This notion of the  "better" state of being is a moral judgment irreducible to the calculus of elections and opinion polls per se. The identification of "better" arguments and opinions will become a hallmark of later attempts to preserve individual liberty and mass participation without ending up with the long feared form of democracy the founders called "tyranny of the majority." Even Justice Oliver Wendell Homes, a champion of free expression, once half-joked that "democracy is what the mob wants."    

Aside from the tension between majoritarian calculus and qualitative standards of rationality and morality (as expressed by Tocqueville and Mill who fear mass conformity to  public opinion and a corresponding "dumbing down" of culture ), there also exists a tension  between the heterogeneity of liberalism (encouraging diverse and potentially incompatible ideas, beliefs and forms of self-expression) and the homogeneity implied by concepts like "popular sovereignty," "The will of 'The People" etc. Such concepts suppose the homogeneity of agreement, of a unitary sovereign                    will and not heterogeneity at its core. This comes out forcefully when we look at  Rousseau's vision of a direct democracy of free and rational beings. The insistence on unanimity and universal principles and the related idea that majoritarian processes result in good and fair outcomes, seems to clash with the claim that all citizens qua individuals are genuinely autonomous and thus free. Rousseau's notion of freedom is obviously not one that protects minority opinions, as dissenters may be, in his (in)famous phrase,  "forced to be free" if their views depart from what is allegedly the rational, moral and universal set of guiding principles expressed by the "General Will"--the unitary and sovereign will of "the people". (Bertrand Russell once quipped that on Rousseau's terms, in which we can be forced to be free, we all enjoy "the right to obey the police.")

During the 19th and 20th centuries,  liberalism and democracy were gradually combined in an attempt to balance individual rights and the rule of "the people" (popular sovereignty)-- in truth a problematic category that assumes overarching agreement when in reality we have a multitude of competing interest groups duking it out (what the founders feared as "factionalism;" see Federalist 10). The idea of "we the people" or popular sovereignty (akin to Rousseau's "General Will") has long since been problematized by political scientists who instead discuss concepts of pluralism, cross-cutting cleavages, and more recently "agonistics" and other markers of conflict and competition which does not add up to an identifiable "general will." 

We have seen that Mill recommended competition of discrepant views in what we now call "the free market of ideas" (Supreme Ct. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas   ).  Mill had great faith in the process of such discourse only after mandatory education at the secondary level had time to "refine" public opinion. (Crick: p. 10) Just why we should suppose that a system of education will overlap with "refined" views of the moral and political, views that are more like Socrates than a "fool" in his words, is far from clear. We know that many of the best educated citizens in England also had views on topics like colonialism and race we now frown upon.  Mill himself did not think Indians were qualified for self-rule or participation in politics in the Empire at any significant level. So the concern with popular opinion converging on morally and rationally defensible outcomes is not solved by the mediation of mandatory public education in and of itself.

In later theories, this merger of democracy and liberalism in which we have freedom of expression, but accept the ideas that win out in the "free market" morphed into an idea that moves back towards the homogeneity we see in Roussseau's vision. (Note the tension between individuality and unanimity or at least majority opinion through all these attempts to reconcile liberalism and democracy). What emerges more and more in liberal democratic theory is the valorization of a) neutrality and b) consensus. Rather than hoping that the ideas that win out in the free speech market are good and true, theorists begin to move toward a procedural view of rational deliberation in which the process of dialogue or conversation is both  fair and free, and in which the outcome is a consensus that converges on some notion of the public good. Now it is not education alone, but "free and fair discussion" or deliberation that is hoped to bridge disparate and free individuals and defensible outcomes that reveal the will of the people.

An example of the neutrality/fairness claim can be found in Rawls notion of policy makers drawing up their plans under the "veil of ignorance." Put simply, the idea is that these deliberators can and should bracket their actual empirical interests, and imagine that they don't know where they will end up in terms of socio-economic position, prestige, power etc. This "neutral" perspective (one not tied to any actual or empirical self-interests since you could end up at the bottom of the barrel in principle) is thought to insure an unbiased,  hence neutral  decision-making procedure aimed at rational consensus and the public good.  

In Europe, Jurgen Habermas, has long been developing a theory of deliberation occurring under optimal conditions he has called "the ideal speech situation," one in which all participants operate in a free and unconstrained set of interactions he calls "communicative rationality" or "discourse." He has tried at once to defend universal values while denying any commitment to absolute foundations. "Ideal Speech" is supposed to be  enough to generate substantive universal values for a democracy which are rationally defensible. I cannot go into detail here, but rather I mention it (like Rawls) to show how theorists deal with the problem of mixing individual rights, individual differences autonomy and other liberal values with democratic governance which involves a tendency towards the unitary "will of the people"/"We The People" etc.  Consensus and neutrality are two pivots on which the fusion of liberal values and democratic practices and commitments often turns. Consensus has a long history of being treated as a basis for legitimacy in the proto-liberal tradition of contract theory (e.g. the "consent of the governed" and "tacit vs. express consent" et al.)


It is often assumed that consensus is the best basis for legitimacy rather than arbitrary power/authority. Tied to consent and also fairness/justice in modern liberal theory is the idea that consensus is the product of the "force of the better argument" in rational deliberation. While I don't mean to suggest that coercion is better than agreement or cooperation, the reification of "consensus" as binding universal principle needs to be examined. If you claim that, for example, all legitimate societies rest on the "consent of the governed," you will run into societies that are legitimate in the eyes of those inhabiting it, but which are not based on anything like a rational consensus. Right now, for example, Putin's authoritarianism is legitimate, even popular in Russia. But Putinism did not emerge as a product of rational deliberation and consensus, and it makes no universal claims, but rather nationalistic ones. Putin's regime is widely accepted by Russians,  and only in that sense it has (to a large degree) the "consent of the governed." So consensus there is not what generates the values and policies as in liberal democracy, but is just a contingent sign of public approval after the fact. The people themselves have little input in generating consensus; it is entirely passive.

So does consensus, of itself, insure "rightness" or the public good? Well, if we mean concrete consensus where people agree on X or Y, then no. People agree on all kinds of things, be they helpful, harmful, true, false etc.  Elevating the idea of consensus to a transcendental status  where it is taken as a "necessary condition of the good society" (e.g. Habermas) seems to be an instance of overreach. Various theorists take a concept (consensus)  that may work well in some cases and not in others, and then generalize until we lose sight of the granularity of politics.  One result is that conflicts can be glossed over by overemphasizing consensus. For example, Manifest Destiny represented a consensus on the part of most American citizens in the 19th century, but not on the part of Amerindians. Why should the "consensus" on the 'rightness" of the Monroe Doctrine (US hegemony over all other populations in the Americas) override "rationally"  the various responses to this consensus-based policy on the part of American Indians, Central and South Americans? How and when can we say that a "consensus" represents an alleged "Universal Moral Principle?" When can we even say it represents "the best practical outcome" in a particular political context? Just where do we find the conceptual link that ties consensus to that which is deemed to be "good" and "right?" Liberals and theorists of liberal democracy have often fetishized consensus formation as an intrinsic good. It needn't be jettisoned; only put into a more empirical and  historical perspective that lacks the transcendental pretense of the theories I've mentioned and others like them.


I believe, in light of the above,  that there is no getting around  value-conflicts that are not resolvable in terms of a 'universal principle' of an ethical/political nature as promised by Liberal Democracy with its talk of universal rights, freedoms and truths. As rhetoric it has been valuable for various groups at various times (e.g. natural rights and dignity claims on the part of various minorities in the past, and more recently appeal to abstract universal "human rights" by any number of identity-based groups). But as much as I agree with the goals of many people invoking human rights, the concept doesn't rest on anything that is "universal" or "self-evident." The concept is a residual one which rests on theology and natural law metaphysics. In fact, it is now customary to refer not simply  to "Human Rights"as universal entities,  but to  "Human Rights Discourse." https://www.e-ir.info/pdf/43822 This at least leaves open the question of whether or not the concept refers to anything beyond the goals and struggles of various  populations (people of color, various ethnic and religious groups,  the impoverished, LGBT, etc.)  The idea of such rights traces back to the liberal, not democratic lineage of ideas. 

In reality the "rights" of these minorities has been anything but "self-evident." Long and often bloody struggles (not rational deliberations) were the main catalysts of change. Documents enumerating alleged human rights (like that of the UN charter) certainly allowed the various groups seeking change to utilize the discourse as a potent rhetorical appeal. But the rhetoric alone neither demonstrates the existence of said rights nor does it insure that they will be recognized in any given context. People within and between different societies continue to disagree on whether or not X or Y is in fact a human right, and even whether human rights exist outside of socially defined discourse (i.e. Human Rigihts Discourse or HRD).  So liberal ideas of "neutrality" and the rational generation of consensus (in this case the alleged consensus manifest in the Declaration of Universal Human Rights at the UN)  block from view the social and historical contingencies, struggles, conflicts and coercive agencies that have been used to advance or suppress the projects of various contesting groups  (e.g. Palestinians, Transgender activists, advocates of same-sex marriage in Russia and other societies that claim allegiance to "traditional values" to say nothing of those East Asian societies that claim human rights is incompatible with Confucianism-- see The East Asian Challenge For Human Rights https://books.google.com/books/about/The_East_Asian_Challenge_for_Human_Right.html?id=p5wt8hUagc8C . 

****
   
I may personally value many of the products of liberalism and democracy. But none of these things, in my view,  are etched in the ether as "good and true." These are forms of life among many others in the run of human events. The quest for certainty and "foundations" in liberal democratic theory and rhetoric has, I think, led to a smug sense that we in the modern west know best and enjoy the epistemic advantages of something called "progress." I think we can function without these conceits, admitting that ultimately our values are based on personal, interpersonal and socially established ideas about how we might best organize society and live. Political theory is more continuous with creativity, imagination and praxis than air-tight logical arguments. Of course logical rigor has an important place in all theorizing, but there are always loose ends and lacunae when theory and actual conditions are juxtaposed.. This may not be a failure so much as an index of the untidy and incomplete nature of individual and social life.  It's not that there's no rationality or logic involved, but the insistence on knowing what is good universally is a case of overreach and hubris. 

______________________________________________________________

References and Related Readings: 

-Bernard Crick: Democracy: A Very Short Introduction: Oxford U Press:  2006

-John Dewey: The Public and its Problems: Ohio U Press 1988 (orig. 1927) (reasonably good wikipedia summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Public_and_its_Problems

-Michael Freedon: 
1)  Rights, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 1991
2) Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction; OxfordL 2015

-Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson: Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns: Cambridge U Press: 2008

-Christopher Lasch: The True and Only Heaven:  Progress and its Critics: WW Norton: 1991

- Edmund S. Morgan: Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America: WW Norton: 1988

- Michael Sandel (ed.): Liberalism and its Critics: NYU Press: 1984

-David Stockton: The Classical Athenian Democracy: Oxford:  1989

Positive and Negative Conceptions of Freedom

Isaiah Berlin famously distinguishes 2 conceptions of freedom that he thinks have been the main variants found in socio-political theories-- viz., negative and positive liberty respectively.  Here I will, following some of Berlin's critics (1), try to show that this distinction is a) not exhaustive and b) his conclusion in favor of negative liberty is not satisfying for those who would see freedom as including powers, capacities and capabilities to achieve personally valued ends in view.

Negative Liberty is simply the absence of coercion and/or external restraint applied to an individual human being. If I am hand-cuffed and detained at the county jail I am unfree. Once my cuffs are unlocked and I am released I have negative freedom; I'm left alone to do as I will. This is the kind of freedom Berlin, like most liberals in the traditional sense, is interested in as the basis for an "Open Society." Traditional liberals consider negative freedom as usually resulting from being uncoerced by the state. Thus, for example, the Bill of Rights and Amendments specify that the state cannot force me to worship in this or that denomination, that I am left alone (within some parameters) to speak unimpeded by the state, and that I shall not be reduced to chattel slavery ( the Civil War Amendments). The idea is that, for example, the more I am left alone to pursue what I want without being coerced, the more I have the right kind of freedom for a liberal society. Berlin has thinkers like JS Mill in mind here, and all of this accords with Liberalism as it evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries with an expanding realm of rights.

Positive Freedom, on the other hand, combines 2 different conceptions of freedom which Berlin claims collapse into one another in a way that threatens liberal and open societies. The first of these is self-legislating action where I am able to give myself a rule to follow, a maxim to follow so as to direct my own life. Note that negative liberty does not entail such autonomy. I can be tied to a chair for a month and then released without knowing what to do once I have my "liberty." A prisoner can be released after years of incarceration and yet have no positive conception of how to act upon being released. In other words, negative liberty is not synonymous with the notion of *autonomy*-- something about which Berlin is fully aware. So why not endorse a positive conception of freedom which includes the autonomy of the agent? This seems reasonable enough.

Berlin claims, however, that the problem with this positive conception of self-governing individuals tends to collapse into a third type of freedom which he calls the freedom to "realize your true self" or "authentic nature" or "true interests." This more value-laden conception of freedom as self-realization is, says Berlin, one which tends to merge with a form of collectivism that anticipates Totalitarianism-- and thus must be avoided at all costs no matter how seductive it may look at first. What does he have in mind?

His own examples include that of Rousseau for whom freedom means conformity to the Universal or General Will of the self-governing people. Being free is knowing what will allow for the self-realization of the well being of each and every member of the demos-- the people. If someone, even one person, does not conform his or her will to the Universal or General will, Rousseau famously says in the Social Contract, "He must be forced to be free." The freedom of each, in theories that feature positive freedom prominently, tend to depend on "the freedom of all." Another example can be found in Kant's theory of freedom as autonomy. Being free is not doing what I WANT or WISH to do, but conforming my will to a universalizable maxim-- The Categorical Imperative-- which is, in principle, morally binding on each and every rational being. This is not "do your own thing" but "obey the law that makes you free." In Kant, the law is embodied in each individual qua locus of the autonomous application of reason to action. In the end, all these freely made decisions turn out to be 'duties.' Hence the label "Deontology" for Kant's theoretical framework (*deon* means duty or obligation).

Berlin is concerned that the content of positive freedom can thus be supplied by third parties who tell us what we ought to do in order to be free, authentic, to realize our true nature, to be maximally rational, etc.
The axiological or value-laden dimension can, thinks Berlin, easily lead to a loss of individual liberty in the name of some "higher good" or set of "true interests"-- sometimes interests  that the agents themselves do not see or understand; thus they must be "forced'" to do what's "really" good for themselves and other members of society.

In this regard,  Hegel is another example Berlin gives. True freedom evolves rationally only in the context of socio-political and historical developments which have much more importance than the "arbitrary will" of individuals (Wilkur) which may reflect the desires of individuals, but may deviate from their own true interests and purposes. For Hegel,  it is within the confines of a strong central state that we may come to realize or appropriate our freedom in modern Weswtern civilization ; NOT within civil society (for Hegel this realm means mostly the economic or market-situated realm in modern terms and not what we mean today by civil society as all informal institutions that fall somewhere between individuals and the state).

Note that Berlin is looking at the perils of positive freedom through the prism of modern Totalitarianism. He views Bolshevism, for example, as a perfectly logical outgrowth of positive freedom as discussed above. Now it is not the General Will or abstract rationality ala Kant, or the State which provides us with the knowledge of what is "really" in our best interests to flourish authentically, but rather it is a small and coercive elite or vanguard of "professional revolutionaries." Marx dreamed of workers becoming aware of their own interests; Bolsheviks said they required direction from those who know better than they, blinkered as they are by "false consciousness."

The Third Reich, though different ideologically, also claimed that the realization of the authentic self of the Aryan European required obedience  to a coercive entity and dictator who can better discern the  interests of individuals than the individuals themselves. Berlin, thus generalizes from these and other examples, concluding that despite seductive aspects of freedom as self-realization, it too often collapses into coercive statism, groupthink, and tyranny that snuffs out the negative liberty (being left alone by the state chiefly) so fundamental to the liberal project.

So we've seen Berlin's main argument: the most valuable and reliable form of freedom is negative freedom, and that positive freedom tends to collapse into ideas about self-realization that in turn collapse into authoritarian mechanisms. One can argue with all of this, of course, but I want to draw attention to another form of freedom which I think most people have in mind when using the term and which is submerged or lost in the discussion here. Let's call it freedom as empowerment/capability.


On this common sense view, being released from handcuffs does not leave me "free" if what is meant here is my being  capable of achieving some specific end/s that have importance to me. Let's say I'm released, but  lack money to eat or secure lodging. Am I "free" in the sense of having powers and capacities to get the things I want? The whole appeal of negative liberty is that when left alone by the state I have the means to live my life as I wish. If I want to become an astronaut, I'm free to pursue that goal as part of the pursuit of happiness. But absent stable living conditions, resources, access to education, the right connections etc., it's a pipe-dream. Still, formally speaking, I am free to try. Nobody can stop me from having my dream and pursuing it. I may be reminded, in liberal ideology, that "where there's a will there's the way" and read lots of Horatio Alger stories (from rags to riches) though structural realities make these very improbable on average. The ideology of can-do individualism tends to eclipse the necessity of powers and capacities that one must have to truly pursue one's personal goals with a good chance of achieving them.  The emancipation of serfs in Russia and slaves in the US did not empower these  long-oppressed groups so that they could realistically fulfill their needs and wants at the most basic levels (i.e. their life-chances, as sociologists say).

Berlin says that whether or not one *gets* what one wants/desires in a state of negative liberty is a contingency --  i.e. not part of the formal analysis of freedom. Just because I'm free to pursue X doesn't mean I have a good chance of getting X. These are not to be confused in his framework.

I think this makes his theory of liberty too weak to capture what many (if not most of us)  mean when thinking about freedom in everyday life. In  real circumstances, the reason people want liberty is because they want to actually achieve their goals in a meaningful way. The mere absence of constraint (everyone is free to go to Harvard in principle) is meaningless absent the capacities and powers to do so (e.g. good public education, relevant skills, a roof over one's head, money or subsidies,  etc.). If freedom (as is the case with, for example, Marx, Dewey and others) involves increasing the ability to get what one wants or needs, then negative liberty alone would seem inadequate. One can arbitrarily  define freedom as "negative liberty" but it turns out to be only one among several other ways, and not very consistent with what most people implicitly tend to include-- the ability to fulfill given needs and desires that have quite specific content.

In the end then, it's not that Berlin is "right" or "wrong" but that his conception of freedom is too thin to suit those of us who believe that the abstract possibility of getting X (make X food, education, a specific career etc.) is hollow if divorced from the MEANS to getting these. The means are personal powers and capacities often dependent on mediating social structures (family, education, the economy, etc.) which are instrumental in assuring access to life chances.

If one sees things that way, then the State has much more reason to intervene  than the limited government mantra of liberals and now neoliberals.  Government should be viewed with caution by citizens. But so should, say, corporate interests and many other non-governmental social constellations. We might look to the government, as Social Democracy tends to do, as one important means for trying to insure that those who have been marginalized and disempowered can find meaningful assistance in the interests of the public good (i.e. where a healthy society is thought to require that most people have reasonable life-chances, opportunities to not just pursue but achieve ends that make for a meaningful and viable existence). The exact contours of social justice can be debated and contested, but at least the idea that in principle the government has some reason to help individuals acquire powers and abilities (e.g. cognitive and linguistic skills, labor skills, access to computers and knowledge of how to use them) is compatible with any notion of freedom that includes the an account of freedom as a means to exercising one's powers and abilities. We don't just want freedom in order to be left alone by a potentially overweening state, but to achieve specific ends by exercising abilities and powers that satisfy needs and wants associated with a reasonably good life.

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(Note: An earlier post on  Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach to ethics has some relevance to this topic. Happily, he is also focused on applying his theory in policy through such institutions as the UNDP. For overview see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach).

References: 

-Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays On Liberty: Oxford; 1969  (see esp. the chapter/essay, Two Concepts of Liberty)

Notes:

(1) One of the best recent critiques of Berlin's work on Freedom, in my view, can be found in Raymond Geuss's  essay, Freedom as an Ideal, in his book Outside Ethics,Princeton: 2005 (pp.67-78).  I would also argue that earlier work by Marx, TH Green, John Dewey et al. contains many of the insights found in Geuss' piece. Other criticisms of note written *after* Berlin's 1958 essay include those of MacCullum, GA Cohen and others. Some of these are discussed in this Stanford Ency. article on Negative and Positive Freedom here:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/