Leaders in Search of a Vacuum

A discussion has arisen on the nature of liberalism.

While there are countless sources, a good starting point is Locke"s Two Treatises of Government (1690) in which he states that government serves the people and their community, its power limited by the natural rights of individuals and natural law. (Burke did not believe this. It was too metaphysical and/or religious. He thought that people's rights evolved and were stored in the genetic structure of the society's institutions and traditions.) In Locke, the rights of life, liberty and property are inherent to man and not granted by society or its government.

The revolutions this inspired--or that evolved--were quite individually distinctive. The British slowly eroded and replaced the power of the King, the French killed everyone they could possibly blame for their social and political oppression, and the Americans, with their landlords and oppressors far away, had a revolt of limits and precision.

Ingrained in this idea of "inherent" rights, is the notion of the individual value of rational man. Jefferson, until he went to France, was a savage opponent of man as a governor; he felt that all of the defects in man were magnified when he became a leader. (He soften a bit in France, amazingly, and one wonders if it was not fortuitous that he was not present for the making of the formal constitution. He did, however, believe in the value of periodic revolution to cleanse the new generation of the past.) This respect for man's ability emerged in the 20th Century (somewhat as a result of the advance of scientific achievement) as confidence in man and, consequently, government; liberalism progressed from protecting people from government to protecting them through the use of government.

So government, the individual's former enemy, has now become the agent acting on behalf of the individual. And the Progressives are even more confident in the experts that the society can advance to lead it.