Liberty, Republicanism, and New England

Here I stand, by the shores of the Gulf of Maine, having attained a very limited Liberty, and a very delightful peace, a tranquil bay after long storms, after long voyages.

And though here, cultivating my own garden on the clement shore of the bay, I enjoy a great degree of liberty in my own life -- it is also true that in our larger lives, in the life of the world, liberty breathes air both dirty and unsafe; grows mangy under the fetters of those veritable Hungry Ghosts of Capital; grows cruel and despotic under the aegis of a culture that values cruelty and despotism, and says so….

Now, what do I mean by liberty? I mean first of all a republican liberty, based on a community of egalitarian freeholders, answerable to no other than one another through structures of direct democracy, particularly the Town Meeting, which has served these Towns well for near four hundred years now. I emphatically do not intend the kind of savage and lawless war of all against all that the mavens of modern Mammon tell us is the Best of All Possible Worlds. the vaunted “liberty” of moneyed oligarchs to ignore their neighbor dying in the street -- and to charge him a ha'pence for the privilege of dying on his gilded doorstep!

Indeed, I believe that liberty under un-republican forms, under forms either oligarchical or monarchical, or under conditions of mere rule by mob (which rarely occurs compared with the other kinds of tyranny; but does appear nonetheless),  is no liberty at all. Republicanism gives form and frame to the reality of liberty, the reality of a liberty to something rather than just liberty from something. This is the territory of what J.G.A. Pocock has called Atlantic Republicanism: of Machiavelli in The Discourses, and the Commonwealth Men of 17th century England; of Mr. Jefferson's “the Pursuit of Happiness” as well – the right to make some positive good in the world for yourself and your own, and your community of which you are part (and which is part of you). In short, the goal, as per Aristotle, is eudaemonia -- a sense of thorough-going human flourishing.

This is because I believe the merely metaphysical (and I mean this in the worst sense) understanding of individuals and communities of the libertarians – those Jacobins of propertied Reaction – is prima facie absurd. Indeed, such a notion of who we are, of what we are, is so foreign both to the New England experience, and the New England mind, on the small scale; and to the human experience writ large, that only a studied recalcitrance to the dictates of facts and experience, of common humanity and inherited wisdom, could impel one to accept such an insensate, selfish, and small-minded idea of liberty. Again, just as under the Jacobins, the spirit of 1789 became the Spirit of the Terror, so too does the spirit of 1689 become a spirit of propertied terror in the hands of the libertarians. Shorn of historical context, adrift from historical moorings, in them the principles which once marked the birth of British liberalism become warped – to monstrous and maleficent proportions. No man is an island, and any political philosophy which forgets this maxim is bound for cruelty and absurdity -- often both at once.

Thus, this blog is started in the spirit of one who defends the republicanism of his homeland, these wooded coves and stormy capes, mountains who rocky crowns touch the sky, this New England. As William Billings, the hog reeve of Boston and America’s first secular composer put it, during our Revolution: “Let tyrants shake their iron rod,/ And slav’ry clank its galling chains;/ We fear them not – We trust in God --/ New England’s God forever reigns!”

                  So, come, my friends! 'Tis not too late to preserve republicanism this side of the Atlantic!