This is the second of a three-part series originally delivered as a lecture May 15 at a conference, “The Declaration of Independence at 250: What New Can Be Said?” hosted by the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. The first part is here.
Humanities and social sciences professors tend to regard “critical thinking” as the highest part of thinking or even equate criticism with thinking itself. The apotheosis of critical thinking spawns a rage to debunk and excommunicate. Social media multiplies the incentives for flamboyant and extravagant denunciation. The more venerable the idea or institution, the more enticing the target and the more vehement the rhetoric.
In the spirit of the times, the postmodern-progressive left and postliberal right have unleashed multiple broadsides against America’s founding principles. As the United States celebrates its Declaration of Independence’s 250th birthday, the defense of the nation’s founding principles involves exposing the one-sidedness of the fashionable tendency to take critical thinking to an extreme. It also requires countering the extreme criticisms of the nation’s founding principles emanating from seemingly diverse precincts of the professoriate.
All worthy thinking about ethics and politics involves a critical component. The conviction that critical thinking represents the essence or epitome of thinking, however, induces professors to concentrate exclusively on the defects of inherited beliefs, customary practices, and established institutions. It is one thing, though, to recognize that human beings are self-interested and fallible; that language is imprecise, ambiguous, and always open to interpretation and contestation; and that laws, institutions, and policies routinely fall short and rarely work as planned. It is quite another to insist that thinking’s principal task is to pinpoint people’s and institutions’ shortcomings, or, as the postmodern-progressive left and postliberal right sometimes seem to converge in supposing, that the supreme intellectual accomplishment is to expose the wickedness of the civilization of which one is a part.
Critical thinking must be combined with generous thinking. Grasping the needs met and purposes served by inherited beliefs, customary practices, and established institutions is also essential to understanding ethics and politics. Plato and John Stuart Mill, great pioneers of liberal education spanning the divide between classical and modern thought, well understood that comprehending the merits of ideas and institutions is no less important than assessing their deficiencies.
In Book I of “The Republic,” Plato’s Socrates clarifies the limitations of three familiar opinions about justice: that it consists in telling the truth and discharging debts, that it revolves around benefitting friends and harming enemies, and that in practice it consists of nothing other than the advantage of the stronger. Socrates does not, as is commonly supposed, refute these opinions. Rather, he shows that each is inadequate, capturing an aspect of, but misleading by purporting to state the whole truth about, justice.
To understand justice in its complexity and fullness, Plato’s “Republic” teaches, one must grasp why the most common opinions about it are partly true and partly false. For example, it is usually just to keep promises, but sometimes returning what is owed would harm the recipient. Especially in war, justice requires benefitting friends and harming enemies, but we make errors about who, and what kind of people, our friends and enemies are; and harming people, whether friends or enemies, is the work of injustice. And although some of what goes by the name of justice in any given society serves the selfish interests of the powerful, the very notion of selfishness reflects a conception of fairness and appropriateness that transcends short-term gain and love of dominion.
John Stuart Mill showed a similar appreciation of the combined roles of the spirit of criticism and the spirit of generosity in thinking about ethics and politics. In his tributes to the progressive rationalist Jeremy Bentham (1838) and the conservative poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840), Mill argues that both provided lessons crucial to understanding human affairs.
Mill observes in his tribute to Bentham that to him “it was given to discern more particularly those truths with which existing doctrines and institutions were at variance; to Coleridge, the neglected truths which lay in them.”
In his tribute to Coleridge, Mill adds that both deserve the title “great questioner of things established,” but for questioning different aspects of established things. “By Bentham, beyond all others, men have been led to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, Is it true? and by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it?” wrote Mill. “The one took his stand outside the received opinion, and surveyed it as an entire stranger to it: the other looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with the eyes of a believer in it; to discover by what apparent facts it was at first suggested, and by what appearances it has ever since been rendered continually credible – has seemed, to a succession of persons, to be a faithful interpretation of their experience.”
Leading postmodern-progressive and postliberal critics of America’s founding principles know how to think critically like Bentham and generously like Coleridge – but not as applied to the same set of beliefs, practices, and institutions. When it comes to America’s founding principles, they discern little beyond intellectual fraud and political iniquity. Concerning their preferred blueprints for fashioning novel institutional arrangements or restoring past glories, however, they see hardly anything but faithful expressions of human emancipation and flourishing. To restore balance it is necessary to think also generously where they condemn ardently and to think also critically where they praise enthusiastically.
The postmodern-progressive critique of America’s founding principles derives in large measure from Karl Marx and his 20th-century Frankfurt School acolytes. This is not to say that the postmodern progressives critics have read Marx or heard of the Frankfurt School, nor is it to deny the often-subterranean influence of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt, along with Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault. But with its characteristic conviction that ideological blinders hide the nation’s systemic injustices, its telltale terminology of oppressor and oppressed, and its utopian vision of fundamental moral and political transformation that overcomes injustice and ends oppression, postmodern progressivism betrays its debt to Marx’s enormously influential critique of individual rights, free markets, and democratic self-government. Also like Marx, postmodern progressives overlook the self-correcting powers of rights-protecting democracies, the benefits of limited government, and the disadvantages of concentrated state power. And consistent with generations of Marxists in power, they exaggerate the abilities of managers, bureaucrats, and intellectuals to deliver services, allocate goods, and direct the people’s choices.
The postmodern-progressive critique comes in several versions. For example, Critical Legal Studies argues that, far from serving freedom and equality, the American system of equal rights under law rationalizes and insulates from scrutiny an unjust status quo in which the wealthy oppress the poor. Radical feminism as elaborated in the influential writings of law professor Catharine MacKinnon maintains that the fundamental divide in America stems not from class but from sex, enforcing a “male supremacist” society that afflicts women physically and psychologically, leaving it doubtful whether they can meaningfully consent to sex. And Critical Race Theory contends that the American political tradition sustains and is sustained by a systemic racism that so thoroughly permeates the nation’s norms and is so deeply inscribed in its laws and institutions that only measures that discriminate based on race can overcome it.
These criticisms of America’s founding principles and constitutional system qualify as progressive because they are based on class, sex, and race. And they count as postmodern because they assert that oppression goes all the way down, operating not contrary to the principles and the system but rather as their clearest and most complete expression. Consequently, the postmodern-progressive critique necessitates a comprehensive remaking of society and politics.
The structure of the postmodern-progressive critique resembles that of the postliberal-right critique. Substitute freedom and duty for postmodern progressivism’s class, sex, and race, and moral and spiritual degradation for postmodern progressivism’s systemic oppression and, strangely enough, one approximates the structure undergirding the postliberal right’s criticism of America’s founding principles and constitutional system.
Instead of drawing from hypermodern ideas, however, the postliberal critique of America’s founding principles takes its bearings from pre-modern thinking, particularly Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. It embraces the conviction that the highest aim of politics is to care for souls by fostering the virtues and directing people toward salvation. At the same time, it overlooks the warnings advanced by both classical political philosophy and Christian thinking: While the best regime should serve as a standard, it is for all practical purposes unattainable; therefore, politics ought to consist for the most part in preserving and improving imperfect regimes in light of the best regime.
The postliberal critique of America’s founding principles also comes in several versions. The two most influential have been developed by University of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen and Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule.
In “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018), Deneen argues that the fatal flaws of the principles of freedom that undergird American constitutional government should now be visible to reasonable people. Foremost among those principles is the Lockean contention, central to the American Declaration of Independence, that human beings are by nature free and equally endowed with fundamental rights. In Deneen’s view – notwithstanding, among other considerations, Locke’s distinction between liberty and license, dedication to limited government, and elaboration of a lengthy catalog of virtues that enable free persons to flourish – equality in basic rights and fundamental freedoms entails a pure or total freedom that is impossible to achieve and dehumanizing to pursue. To escape contemporary society’s corruption and decadence, Deneen counsels a retreat into small, tight-knit, self-governing communities. He does not notice that his counsel embodies the founding American idea of a nation of small, tight-knit, self-governing communities protected from despotism by a limited constitutional government that secures basic rights and fundamental freedoms. He performs an unexplained about-face in “Regime Change: Toward A Postliberal Future” (2023). There he advances as the proper response to the ostensible breakdown of the American constitutional order the creation of a new regime that marries aristocracy and populism in order to promote virtue and care for the soul. Deneen evinces scant curiosity concerning what might be lost and what could go wrong in fundamentally transforming the American constitutional order.
In “Common Good Constitutionalism” (2022), Vermeule agrees with Deneen that classical liberal principles deform our politics and damage our humanity. In contrast to Deneen, though, Vermeule argues that America was not truly founded on them but rather owes more to classical legal principles deriving from Aristotle, Cicero, and Thomas Aquinas. America’s debt to classical and medieval political philosophy, Vermeule maintains, obliges the legislative branch to make laws, the executive branch to execute the laws, and the judicial branch to decide cases and controversies that arise under the law not with a view to the principles of individual freedom and human equality but rather based on the highest truths about moral excellence and salvation.
Vermeule is right insofar as he contends that the wisdom of Aristotle, Cicero, and Thomas Aquinas illuminate the American experiment in ordered liberty. But the permanent contribution of Aristotle, Cicero, and Thomas Aquinas is no reason to deny, contrary to the stark evidence of the Declaration, that Lockean ideas about individual rights and limited government played a decisive role in the thinking of America’s founding generation. That permanent contribution gives no grounds for ignoring or dismissing the common good as conceived by the American constitutional order, which consists in a system that protects individual rights while trusting individuals, within limits settled by law, to pursue happiness as they understand it. And it furnishes no justification for expecting contrary to experience – and the teachings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Thomas Aquinas – that those who govern will be well endowed with the wisdom to discern, the prudence to fashion and enact, and the piety to implement laws that minister to the needs of citizens’ souls.
For the postliberal right as for the postmodern-progressive left, the principles animating the Declaration of Independence deserve exceedingly severe scrutiny while their own ideals warrant surpassingly indulgent treatment. Both fail to consider conscientiously the neglected truths within America’s founding principles and the reasons why so many Americans – and lovers of freedom around the world – have found them not merely credible but choice-worthy. And both overlook the disadvantages specific to their preferred schemes for radically transforming America and the dangers endemic to regime change, be it by the left or by the right.
One-sided thinking blinds the postmodern-progressive left and the postliberal right to the dependence of improving America on conserving the principles the nation’s Declaration of Independence bracingly set forth 250 years ago.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter. His new book is “Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America.”
