We recently explored how many specific components of the United States Constitution are distinctively liberal, most of them having to do with rights that restrict the powers of the police. One often heard defenders of “classical liberalism” assert that post New Deal liberalism is a gross corruption of the ideals of liberalism, with the forced savings of Social Security and various other “big government” programs. One can make this argument out plausibly about some things that have happened in the United States since the New Deal, but not with the expansion of the rights of criminal defendants, which are perfectly consistent with the “classical liberalism” of the Constitution.
But the distinctive liberalism of the Constitution runs much deeper than specific provisions. The mere existence of the United States Constitution reflects a fundamentally and distinctly liberal conception of what government is supposed to do and how to create it. Our modern ideas of “liberalism” originated in England in the seventeenth century, a tumultuous century in English history that saw both the English civil war and the Glorious Revolution, all of which revolved primarily around the question of whether England would be officially Protestant or officially Catholic. Throughout much of Europe Christians spent much time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fighting, and killing, each other over this issue.
Into this fray came two political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who articulated in very different ways the idea that government rests on a social contract among the governed. This is an inherently liberal idea, in contrast to the conservative belief that government reflects the deeply held beliefs and customs of an identifiable people, an ethnic group to use modern parlance, the origins of which lie embedded in the culture after centuries of accumulation.
A social contract, by contrast, suggests a group of competent adults assembling and deciding ex nihilo what sort of government to have and choosing to accept it after rational calculation that doing so is in their best interest.
There were very important differences between Hobbes’ and Locke’s versions of the social contract that need not detain us here. Suffice to note that the English colonists in North America grew up imbibing Locke’s ideas about government and philosophy in general in their school books from the moment they started their educations. Thus, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, asserting the right of English colonists in America to separate from the government of England and establish their own government, Locke’s ideas came naturally to him, and to his fellow revolutionaries.
Those ideas included the ones Jefferson stated explicitly in the Declaration, that all men (and women) are created equal, and that they have the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property/the pursuit of happiness. Left unstated was the ideal of a social contract as the basis for government. That ideal emerged in the Constitution, which begins in a quasi-contractual manner, “We the people,” by stating who would be the parties to the contract.
Further, at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, every state had property qualifications for voting. But they relaxed those qualifications when the time came to vote on delegates to the conventions to choose whether to ratify the new Constitution, in recognition of the plebiscitary character of the vote. Of course, they still allowed only white men to vote, but the relaxed property qualifications was an important concession.
So it is that the United States Constitution is distinctively liberal, not just in its specific provisions, but in its very conceptualization.
