Positive Liberty

The past is indeed a foreign country: In quaint old times, people of good sense always distinguished between the rulers and the ruled, and this gave to their speech and writing a clarity that is often lacking today. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the confusion between “power” and “right:” In proper English, states have only the former, while individuals have only the latter. It would be better if we could go back to this usage.

Similar is the strange metamorphosis of the word “patriot,” a change I have been thinking about a lot lately.

Enlightenment thinkers distinguished between the rulers and the ruled for several reasons, all of which helped color their “patriotism,” a sense of life that few today would appreciate. Today, the word “patriot” can scarcely be distinguished from the word “nationalist;” a patriot is above all one who is loyal to his government, his country, and his fellow citizens.

But back then — well, government was one thing. Country and citizens were quite another.

For most Enlightenment thinkers, to be a patriot was to favor the people of the country rather than the country’s rulers. It meant limits on the power of the central government, limits on taxation, limits on warfare, and limits on the power to meddle in religious affairs. It meant local, traditional restrictions on the power of distant, modernizing, bureaucratizing elites. If, in the year 1770, all others paid an onerous tax on salt, and if your own region had been free of the salt tax since 1549, then there was no question where the patriot would side; he would not for a moment believe he had any “patriotic” duty to pay in to the central government.

He would oppose the tax and all other new impositions, not because he opposed taxes in general, but because of his patriotism — which meant his sympathies for the people. He would oppose a new tax even if it hampered the king’s power to make war or otherwise endangered the royal fisc, exactly as the Parlement of Paris did on several occasions during the eighteenth century. Le parti patriote they called themselves.

When Thomas Paine wrote of patriotism, this is precisely what he meant, as a quotation from The Crisis demonstrates:

I close this paper with a short address to General Howe. You, sir, are only lingering out the period that shall bring with it your defeat. You have yet scarce began upon the war, and the further you enter, the faster will your troubles thicken. What you now enjoy is only a respite from ruin; an invitation to destruction; something that will lead on to our deliverance at your expense. We know the cause which we are engaged in, and though a passionate fondness for it may make us grieve at every injury which threatens it, yet, when the moment of concern is over, the determination to duty returns. We are not moved by the gloomy smile of a worthless king, but by the ardent glow of generous patriotism. We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in. In such a case we are sure that we are right; and we leave to you the despairing reflection of being the tool of a miserable tyrant.

Not “the gloomy smile of a worthless king” — but the freedom of the country, of the people within it. And not “my country right or wrong” — but my country, set free without condition.

Patriotism of this sort predates the strutting nationalism of the modern era. Today, however, patriotism has been vulgarly confused with just this ideology: the belief that the nation possesses a unitary will, that its instrument is the state, and that the state’s interests coincide with those of the people. It is hard to find a sharper definitional change than this one, from the old patriotism to the new.

Admittedly, though, many factors in 18th-century Europe worked to support the former reading of the word.

First, nearly all of the rulers were outright despots, none of whom could plausibly claim — and very few of whom actually claimed — to rule for or in the name of the people. No, these rulers held their power “by the grace of God,” a phrase devoid of meaning now but which in the old days meant, more or less, “answerable to no one under the sun.”

Second, the international dynastic pretensions of the ruling houses of Europe helped ensure that the major monarchies of the time would nearly always be occupied by people who were demonstrably foreign. George I of England preferred to speak German or even French over the language of his subjects; Philip V of Spain was a Frenchman who only began learning Spanish on the day that his reign was proclaimed. Even the Bourbons of France were hardly real Frenchmen, what with an Italian marriage, an Austrian marriage, a Spanish marriage, a Polish marriage, and a German marriage corrupting the line. They’d no doubt have married English as well, if the English had not been Protestant (a fact which did not stop the Stuarts from attempting, with various degrees of success, to marry Bourbon women). Although many more examples could be found, these are the most prominent, as I figure them, as each concerned either the mother or grandmother of a king.

When the Revolution intervened, Louis XVI’s queen, Marie-Antoinette, was likewise Austrian. L’autrichienne, the Revolution called her: “the Austrian bitch.” Yet for the last two centuries, the monarchy’s blood had already been only half-French at best.

While these are some pretty vile prejudices by modern lights, they certainly made for a bright line between the rulers and the ruled when such a line became necessary. And then, of course, there were the great social contract theories of the time, which reconceived the job that all these strange, ill-accented people were supposedly doing:

And that all men may be restrained from invading others rights, and from doing hurt to one another, and the law of nature be observed, which willeth the peace and preservation of all mankind, the execution of the law of nature is, in that state, put into every man’s hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree, as may hinder its violation: for the law of nature would, as all other laws that concern men in this world be in vain, if there were no body that in the state of nature had a power to execute that law, and thereby preserve the innocent and restrain offenders. And if any one in the state of nature may punish another for any evil he has done, every one may do so: for in that state of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another, what any may do in prosecution of that law, every one must needs have a right to do.

And thus, in the state of nature, one man comes by a power over another; but yet no absolute or arbitrary power, to use a criminal, when he has got him in his hands, according to the passionate heats, or boundless extravagancy of his own will; but only to retribute to him, so far as calm reason and conscience dictate, what is proportionate to his transgression, which is so much as may serve for reparation and restraint.

It might be too much to suggest that this new understanding of government was a result of the dynastic foreignness of early modern monarchs. But then again, maybe not: Locke very likely wrote his Second Treatise during the Exclusion Crisis, when James, Duke of York — nominally British but thoroughly Catholic and widely held to have been corrupted by his Italian wife — was heir to the throne, and when Locke’s associates (at the very least) may well have been plotting to kill both James and the sitting king, Charles II, in what later became known as the Rye House Plot. When the treatise went to print, it came only just after the Glorious Revolution, which threw out James and put on the throne a queen, Mary, who was English-French-Italian-Danish, and a king, William, who was, making this as simple as one ever can make it, English-French-Italian-Danish-German-Dutch. (They were also first cousins.)

It is tempting to say that we might be better off with rulers like these: When the ruling power is palpably different from the subjects, it’s easier to question the propriety of his actions; this is particularly the case when there is a Parliament or a States General thatdoes look like us. Since governments have been of, by, and for the people for so long, however, the old safeguard doesn’t work the way it used to, and neither for that matter does the word patriotism.

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