There is obviously a Western tradition. The Westerner is Promethean, he acts as though he had free will even when he is a Calvinist, he considers that he has rights that inhere in his nature, he thinks the state should be limited in its power to tell him what to do. He believes in variety, in pluralism, yet he knows there are objective standards in ethics and esthetics.
How did the Westerner evolve? Where did he get his ideas? The Greeks taught him to trust his mind, to pursue virtue, to try to find the pure form, the basic idea, behind the flux of events. The Romans gave him the concept of Natural Law, and disclosed to him some of the secrets of limited government before the burdens of empire brought the Caesars on the scene. The ancient Hebrews promised Western man (indeed, all men who would listen) a Messiah, and when the Messiah came He was careful to distinguish between the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s, thus putting the force of Christianity behind the Aristotelian and Stoic view that our governors must themselves bow to the moral law.
In the Middle Ages the church, as the great civilizer, enabled Western man to endure the feudal order; the bishops kept the rude barons humble, and the serf, though bound to the soil, was never quite reduced to slavery. When Western man finally escaped from his millennia-long isolationist trap in the peninsulas of maritime Europe by reopening the roads to the East, and by discovering the new lands of the Americas, he found new philosophers to build on what the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, and the medieval Christian doctors had bequeathed him. It’s been a great story, and despite its complexity, it can be caught and held in a few hundred pages, as George Charles Roche III ably demonstrates in his Legacy of Freedom (Arlington House, $6.00). In a preamble to his historical account of the philosophies that have made the Western mind, Dr. Roche talks about the “modern malady,” identifying it as “hybris,” or man’s “sin of pride.” Western man, worshiping the scientists who tell him that there is nothing he cannot know, has made a quantum jump in his assumptions, and now believes that there is nothing that he cannot have. As Richard Weaver has said, we Westerners have become spoiled children; our very successes have led us to believe that we can create Heaven on earth if only we change a few laws, or give a little more power to planners. We are forgetting that there is a relationship between effort and reward, and that individual effort will not be made if the coercive state steps in to rob a man of the fruits of his endeavors.
Coercion the Villain
The villain, throughout the span of Dr. Roche’s story, has always been this idea of coercion, of power unchecked by the philosophy of freedom which insists that the rights of the individual are anterior to government. Much of the time the villain is off stage, muttering in lands to the east and south of Europe. But the West has had its own coercive heretics, such as some of the progenitors of the terroristic phases of the French Revolution, and there have been heretical strains in some of the thinkers who have done much to establish the basic traditions of freedom.
Dr. Roche is especially good in dealing with the discordant elements in people he admires for their over-all contribution to the freedom philosophy. I had not been enough of a student to realize that Plato, whose original obeisance to the Philosopher-King is pure Orientalism, began to revise his theory of politics in middle life. In his Politicus, written some time after The Republic, Plato suggests that his Philosopher-King has obligations to those he governs, and in The Laws, a product of Plato’s old age, the idea of limiting the ruler by a constitution makes its appearance.
Aristotle, who came to Plato as a young student, always believed in the idea of limited government. Dr. Roche says it is an “interesting question, which must remain forever only a question, as to whether Plato’s gradual departure from the idea of a planned society was the product of his own growth in understanding, or whether it came from the prodding of the young Aristotle. As is often the case, we are unable to distinguish the influence of the master on the pupil from the influence of the pupil on the master.”
Contracts and Capitalism
Dr. Roche believes in capitalism because he believes in freedom, and he notes more than once that Christianity is far more compatible with the contractual relations of capitalism than it is with any of the varieties of socialism. The medieval Christians believed in the binding force of contracts, which were at the heart of feudal society. The Magna Carta of 1215, as Rousas Rushdoony says, “strongly affirmed” the principle of contract, specifying “no forcible seizure without due process of law” and insisting that there be “no taxation without representation of property owners.” And the greatest thinker of the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas, said that “no government has a right to levy taxes beyond the limit determined by the people.”
Dr. Roche follows Murray Roth-bard in arguing that capitalism had already started to “rise” in the Middle Ages long before John Calvin proclaimed the discipline of hard work in Geneva. St. Thomas taught that there was nothing wrong in making a profit on loaned capital as long as the contract bound two parties to a mutual risk. And the “just price,” with the medievals, was the free market price.
Amusingly, the medieval philosophers whom Dr. Roche quotes often sound more modern than the moderns. It was St. Thomas Aquinas, not Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: “A king who is unfaithful to his duty forfeits his claim to obedience. It is not rebellion to depose him, for he is himself a rebel whom the nation has a right to put down… the Constitution ought to combine a limited and elected monarchy, with an aristocracy of merit, and such an admixture of democracy as shall admit all classes to office by popular election.”
The Present Age of Retreat
Dr. Roche attacks twentieth century collectivism as a descent into a morass. By tampering with our traditions we have tampered with our freedoms. Reading Dr. Roche’s story, one wonders if modern Western man is going to do as well as his medieval forebears in living through a dark period. The monasteries kept the classical tradition alive along with the principles of Christianity when western Europe was surrounded by the barbarians. But who is going to sustain our will in the present Age of Retreat? The young, in many instances, seem to have given up thinking save in terms of the crudest sort of sloganeering. Socrates, the asker of questions, is no longer the model; the modern “seeker” wants to feel, not think, and to “experience,” not read. The big democracies of the West seem unable to come to the aid of those in the outer world who are most like themselves. In Nigeria, the Christian Ibos, who are the enterprisers of their part of West Africa, are beaten down by a less able majority which had the good fortune to command artillery and planes sent by the Marxists of Moscow. The West deserted Moishe Tshombe, a believer in the value of competitive capitalism, in the Congo. These are happenings “on the fringe.” But “the fringe” comes right into our midst when Fidel Castro helps promote campus uprisings in the United States.
Dr. Roche’s book should have the widest possible reading. There isn’t much time to spare.
