Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
of the social and economic order focused on inner, spiritual life and questions of meaning and value.
By the end of the fifteenth century, however, the corruption of the Catholic Church was undermining its spiritual authority, while a rapidly increasing population and growing need for new sources of raw materials made an expanding mercantile economy essential. The pressure to expand ocean trade intensified after 1453 with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire and the closing of Europe’s land route to the East. Eastern spices were essential for preserving meat during Europe’s long winter, when fields froze and farm animals were slaughtered. At the same time innovations in naval and military technology opened the world’s oceans to European shipping. The compass, the brass cannon, and the three-masted, full-rigged ship, which could tack against the wind, opened the stormy Atlantic for transoceanic navigation. This made it possible for Columbus to reach the Americas in 1492, for Vasco da Gama to round the Cape of South Africa a few years later, and for Cortez to arrive in Mexico in 1519. The expansion of long-distance trade and the opening of foreign markets stimulated the shift from guild production to a new class of merchant-manufacturer-entrepreneurs that was able to invest in such risky but lucrative ventures. Overseas trade then provided the capital needed for further technological and scientific innovation, which in turn helped inform, arm, equip, and motivate further expansion. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a growing cash economy put pressure on the landed aristocracy to enclose and farm previously uncultivated common land. Peasants whose survival had depended for centuries on grazing their animals on the commons were forced off the land. They joined the ranks of the destitute in the growing towns and cities, helping to provide a workforce for an emerging class of property owners. These were neither serfs nor lords, neither peasants nor aristocrats, but a new “middle” class that would provide the base of support for the Liberal revolutions.
In the context of an expanding market society, Protestant notions of “doing God’s work” became connected over time to worldly success through thrift and hard work — what Max Weber famously identified as the “Protestant work ethic.”8 When this was combined with notions of religious freedom and the separation of church and state, it reinforced a political culture of growing individualism and materialism. Protestant nations soon led the commercial revolution; first the Netherlands, then England, followed by the United States. The scientific revolution reinforced both tendencies by appealing to the authority of the senses guided by the laws of logic and reason. At the heart of science was a single revolutionary insight — mathematics was the secret language of the world. Whatever could be quantified could be dealt with by mathematics; it could be known with precision and manipulated for our own ends. In practice this meant science focused exclusively on the outer measurable aspects of material reality. Since the method could be replicated by anyone with the right equipment anywhere in the world, results could be verified independently. The objectivity and universality of science undermined arbitrary ecclesiastical and political authority and helped remove traditional fetters on commerce. It also resulted in the rapid development of near-miraculous machinery, which was applied with accelerating effectiveness to the scientific investigation of nature, to the market production of goods, to exploration and navigation, and of course to warfare.
In 1543, King Henry VIII of England broke away from the authority of the Pope and the Catholic Church and established the Church of England with himself as its head. The religious and political conflict that followed ultimately ended in the turmoil of the English Civil War (1642–49) and a tenuously renegotiated relationship between the king and Parliament. The Liberal philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke wrote against the memory of the dark ages of feudalism and its chaotic breakdown into civil war. Generalizing and extrapolating from their experience, they asserted that human nature was fundamentally aggressive, competitive, and selfish. Hobbes put this pungently in the most often quoted lines in modern political philosophy, from his masterwork Leviathan, published in 1651. He saw human beings in “a state of nature” without strong central government as naturally free but also selfish and aggressive, caught up in an endless struggle for advantage, in “a war of all against all.” In a condition devoid of justice and order, they were condemned to live a life that was “nasty, brutish and short.” He concluded that individuals needed to give up some freedom to establish a strong central authority — a “Leviathan” —in order to ensure the common good.
A few decades later, John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government softened this bleak understanding by recognizing that human beings also had a natural urge to be productive: to work rationally with hands and tools, crafting wilderness — which he considered simply wasteland — into useful, and thus valuable, products. Value accrued through labor. “Thus the Grass my Horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I have digge’d in any place where I have right to them in common with others, becomes my Property, without the assignation or consent of anybody.”9 Inspired by the physics of Isaac Newton and Enlightenment ideas of rationality, Locke provided the philosophical foundation for government based primarily on protecting individual rights and freedoms, most especially the right to hold and dispose of property and to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor in security. Individual rights increasingly meant property rights, and as we shall see, property rights became the organizing value for the writers of the Constitution of the United States.
From this baseline the Liberal philosophers constructed a theory of society, economics, and government providing for maximum individual liberty. Rebelling against the oppressiveness of aristocratic privilege and the divine right of kings, they sought a political order in which the individual would be neither beholden to nor responsible for others. Government was simplified into a social contract among such rationally calculating, independent, self-interested individuals, who came together to create society by giving up some of their freedom. In so doing, they gained the security necessary to hold and enjoy their wealth. This system made no appeal to altruism or generosity; it had little faith that self-interested individuals would take responsibility for the good of the whole. An impersonal mechanism — the invisible hand of the free market — was assumed to operate according to a semiscientific law of supply and demand, converting individual selfishness into growth in collective wealth. Since corporations barely existed, the threats to individual liberty were seen to come from social chaos on the one hand and big government on the other. It was a minimal vision of government giving maximum rein to self-interest.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the North American continent offered Liberal revolutionaries a clean slate — a “state of nature” that from the European perspective was also a political vacuum. Settlers arrived in what appeared to be a vast game-filled wilderness, blessed with an incredible wealth of natural resources and peopled by “savages” who could be easily defeated or “civilized.”10 Under these idealized conditions, without a counterrevolutionary feudal aristocracy, the American Revolution produced the paradigmatic Liberal polity.
A potential counterrevolutionary force existed in the form of spiritually developed, but technologically undeveloped, Native American societies. Within a few centuries this living contradiction to the founding assumptions of Liberalism was crushed by mass immigration and industrial technology. When European settlers first arrived, North America contained about five hundred different indigenous tribes with a total population of perhaps five million. Vast herds of buffalo — some thirty million — covered the continent from east to west, from the current Canadian border to Mexico. As the United States transformed and expanded into an industrialized society, it saw both the native populations and the buffalo as obstacles to progress. By the 1860s, as the final Indian wars approached, the great herds had been destroyed and the survivors were confined to the Great Plains, where they provided subsistence for about three hundred thousand free Native Americans who still resisted the Europeans surrounding them.
Resistance ended with the final slaughter of the herds. Between 1872 and 1874, 3.5 million buffalo were killed. Of these only 150,000 were taken by Indians for subsistence.11 The rest were shot by Europeans for meat, hide, tongues, and sport and as a matter of military tactics. General Sheridan exhorted the US Congress to pass a bill to exterminate the herds, saying that “every buffalo killed is an Indian less.” By the 1880s, the buffalo were virtually