Olson and the Meaning of Liberty, Take 2

Mark Olson has written a response to my reply to his post on the meaning of the word 'liberty' in the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, I don't think he has mitigated any of the logical difficulties with the original post. He begins:

First, I didn't look at the corpus of writings of those particular men because it was a blog essay and not a term paper or thesis. I had just finished a fine book which had some striking things to say about these "folkways" and in particular the section about Liberty was striking as it did have different meanings, now mostly lost, in those different communities.

Writing a blog post rather than a term paper or thesis diminishes the expectations in some ways. Obviously, one need not concern themselves with AP formatting for the body of the article, nor with MLA or APA formatting for citations. It does not, however, eliminate the need for sound reasoning. One should be as concerned about the truth and accuracy of a blog post as they are a dissertation. And simply as a matter of accuracy, it remains quite at odds with the requirements of sound reasoning to write a post intending to discover what a specific person, or specific few people, meant by a given term without bothering to inquire as to whether they actually provided a definition for that word themselves.

We must also bear in mind Olson's thesis, which is that the word 'liberty' meant something quite different in 1776 to those who wrote the Declaration than it means today. He also says that it may have meant something different to each of the men responsible for writing it. In the second conclusion, he is certainly safe. There were undoubtedly disagreements among the founders as to the proper limits of liberty; many of those disagreements are a matter of public record. But as I will show, most of the various definitions that he offers are merely matters of context, not inherent meaning. Indeed, we still use the word 'liberty' and its synonyms in different contexts today in the same manner as he suggests they were used then. But the issue of how to interpret the word as it is used in that famous phrase from the Declaration is how the word is defined in the context of political liberty and the limited legitimate ends of government, for that is the context that the Declaration is addressing.

The phrase in question - "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" - was written by a small group of people. They were called the Committee of Five, appointed by the Continental Congress to write the Declaration of Independence. That committee was made up of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman. The latter two are often overlooked. Livingston was from New York, while Roger Sherman was from Connecticut.

The reason the latter two are generally overlooked is that they seemed to have played little role in the writing of the document. The committee passed on the task of writing it to Jefferson, who then wrote a rough draft and sent it along to Franklin and Adams for suggestions. They only changed a few things in the draft, which then went to the whole committee and was passed on without any additional changes at all (intrestingly, one of the passages that Franklin and Adams removed from Jefferson's original draft was a section against the slave trade in which he firmly declared slaves to be men who deserved their liberties, and where he specifically referred to King George as "the Christian King of Great Britain").

Anyway, the point of this is so say that it simply makes no sense to find the meaning of the word 'liberty' as used by those specific people in that specific context by going first to the way it was used by other people who happened to be from the same area they were, but who were using the word in entirely different contexts. This is doubly true when one has clear explanations from the very men who framed the document, partcularly from the one who actually wrote the words, as to what they meant by it. The cultural milieu in which a document is written is surely useful when asking questions of meaning, but who would seriously argue that it trumps the clear definitions offered by the actual person who wrote the words? To argue that would clearly be absurd. To ignore their own definitions is essentially to announce that one simply doesn't care about truth or accuracy in answering the question at hand.

It still might be the case, against your intimation, that Jefferson had something of an idea of hegemonic liberty when he wrote about liberty as he was a slaveholder and was in a society that found it ok to regularly beat their (white) servants as well.

Here he is arguing that because Jefferson owned slaves, he could not mean what he said he meant by the word 'liberty'. But that is illogical. All he has uncovered here is hypocrisy, not a change in meaning. It's a bit like saying that if someone defines monogamy as faithfulness within marriage but then has an affair, the meaning of monogamy changes. But of course it doesn't; the meaning of monogamy remains the same, only his actions are now at odds with that meaning.

It should also be noted that Jefferson and slavery is a far more complicated subject. Yes, he owned slaves but he was also opposed to slavery and wrote at great length of that opposition. He tried repeatedly to pass laws that would phase out slavery in the US, and as I noted above he originally complained of the King's support for slavery in the first draft of the Declaration, but in the climate of the times it was necessary to keep the north and south together against England, so that was removed.

Our modern ideas of Liberty are more in line with the Delaware Valley Quakers than New England or the Virginia plantation culture/folkway.

But this is purely coincidental. Our modern ideas on liberty are also in line with Jefferson's definition (at least for some of us, of course; there are still far too many people who still think that they should have the authority to use coercion to crush the freedom of others to take actions that do not harm anyone else or deprive them of their equal rights). They are in line with Jefferson's ideas on liberty, quite clearly, and his ideas on liberty were influenced enormously by John Locke (and he said so many times). It is simply incredible to even discuss what Jefferson meant by liberty in the Declaration without referring to Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers.

At the same time, Mr Fischer asserts there was a second, internal, meaning to the word liberty, which was the idea "that a truly free man must be master of his acts and thoughts. At the same time, a gentleman was expected to be the servant of his duty". This contradiction of freedom as master of self and servant of duty was described as building a character "severely bent against himself". This ideal of freedom in master of self produced the character of a George Washington and a Robert E. Lee. Mr Fischer asserts their character is not a historical myth and that it was the product of the Virginian culture. That is the one closer to what Jefferson (or his peers in Virginia) might have read into the phrase in the Declaration.

But this doesn't add anything at all to the argument. The phrase "servant of his duty", by itself, is absolutely meaningless. Duty to what? Jefferson would likely argue that the only duty one must be servant to is to truth and to preserving the liberty of others. And again, remember the context: we're talking about political liberty, which means a lack of legal constraints on one's actions. We have all sorts of duties in a moral sense that have nothing at all to do with questions of legality. I have a duty to be honest with those I love, but that does not alter any question of political liberty.

Again, Jefferson made extremely clear what he meant by liberty in the context of the legitimate aims of government; he meant that every man should be free to do as they choose unless his actions either harmed another against their will or deprived them of their equal rights. We cannot simply ignore that incredibly clear definition from Jefferson in favor of how other Virginians might have used the same word in an entirely different context.

Adams himself might have been more likely to have been holding to his regional definition of Liberty as evidenced by the restrictive laws he emplaced and pushed through in his Presidency, which were in tune with the idea of Community Liberty and what went hand in hand with that in New England of community restraints. The point is those assaults on our modern conceptions of personal liberties might not have been seen as assaults on Liberty by his New England constituents or himself.

I assume that he refers here to Adams' support of the Sedition act. But here again, he has merely highlighted hypocrisy on Adams' part, hypocrisy born of short term political expedience. His support for that legislation was clearly in conflict with his own stated principles. Indeed, the Sedition act was not only clearly unconstitutional on the Federal level, it would also have been unconstitutional under the Massachusetts state constitution that Adams wrote. There is no question that Adams contradicted his own principles and his own definition of liberty; but that fact doesn't change the definition of liberty one whit.

Nor is it true that the Sedition act was "in tune with the idea of community liberty". Prohibiting criticism of political leaders does nothing at all to preserve the "liberty of the community" against a foreign power (which, at any rate, is a definition of liberty in a totally different context than the one at issue in the Declaration). Crushing individual liberty does not aid the 'liberty' of the group; indeed, it only imperils it.

At note I missed on the first pass, Mr Brayton objects to the definition of "Soul Liberty" which was in usage in New England. I tried to summarize the four definitions New Englanders had of Liberty, not with the intention that all were meant to be implied for the Declaration, but included them all for completeness and pedagogy. But Mr Brayton is, I think, incorrect if he thinks "Liberty" as freedom of religion was part of the Declaration. That's in the Constitution (Amendments), a different document. Liberty as freedom to practice religion was part of the Quaker folkway. And was, for the Constitutional convention, probably required to patch the peace between the very different (and for the most part very strong) religious beliefs of these four folkways.

This is simply nonsense. Again, the fact that Quakers also supported freedom of religion does not mean that Jefferson, as a non-quaker, couldn't mean the same thing. Jefferson absolutely had freedom of religion in mind when he wrote the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Freedom of religion was part and parcel of the unalienable rights that underlie the entire idea. You simply cannot even begin to have an accurate picture of what liberty means in the context of the Declaration without reference to the natural rights philosophy from which it sprang. Jefferson was extraordinarily clear in his position that freedom of religion is one of the most important liberties that we are endowed with, and he was equally clear in tracing those ideas not to the Quakers, but to John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers.

Again, I repeat: it is absolute folly to attempt to even discuss the question of what liberty means in the Declaration of Independence without reference to A) Jefferson's actual definition of liberty, which he expressed very clearly, and B) the natural rights philosophy of the Enlightenment thinkers whose work so influenced not only Jefferson, but the entire group.