Samuel Gregg has written a powerful assessment of the challenges facing the free society today—clearly the “true friends of liberty” have many causes to be worried. Triumphant illiberal forces on the left and right alike have little use for constitutions, free government, or even the American tradition itself. The growing strength of these forces is evidence, as Gregg rightly warns, that “the habit of free association is weak in America, and so are the institutions of civil society to which this habit gives rise.” It certainly seems like Alexis de Tocqueville’s darkest prophecies are coming true. 

But why are American institutions so weak in the face of illiberalism? In no small measure, it is because of our inability to connect the case for liberty to a larger, transcendent vision of life’s ultimate purpose. The liberal spirit of toleration the West cultivated for 250 years or more has degenerated into a kind of public relativism that cheapens freedom itself. If Americans are to rise to the challenges Gregg outlines, we must instead embrace a public philosophy that identifies liberty and virtue both as spiritual goods worth preserving. Society only flourishes when the institutions that make it up are free to embody a coherent account of the Good Life and shape their members according to it. How to preserve liberty, then, is not simply an economic or political concern, but first and foremost a moral one.

Daniel Klein shows in a recent Law & Liberty essay that the word “liberal” became endowed with a distinctly political meaning first by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in the mid-eighteenth century. But before the term took on an association with limited government or free markets, Klein writes, it “had a long, rich history as a non-political word in moral discourse.” In the West, this ancient sense of liberality undergirds our tradition of self-government as both political independence and the pursuit of personal moral excellence.

Returning to those ancient sources, we find in the Nicomachean Ethics that Aristotle identified liberality or generosity as a key human virtue. “Actions in accord with virtue are beautiful and are for the sake of the beautiful, the generous person, then, will give for the sake of the beautiful, and in the right way,” the philosopher wrote. Indeed, this liberality is one of the distinguishing standards of what he calls “greatness of soul,” that is to say, the human being who is “worthy of the highest honors.” The ancients held that a slave acts from fear whereas a free person acts out of good habit or, better yet, choice. The truly liberal soul possesses a kind of openness because it knows what is most choice-worthy and understands that moral beauty is the ultimate aim of human life—on both an individual and collective level. The freedom of self-government is the freedom to pursue that moral beauty.

Later thinkers in the classical republican tradition would build on Aristotle’s virtue ethics, including the notion of liberality, to provide an account of citizenship. From great Roman minds such as Cicero and Seneca to later Renaissance humanists, it was widely held that only a virtuous life was fit for free men. They understood the common good republics exist to secure for all citizens in the light of the highest good: moral beauty. A true republic is a realm of shared moral responsibility, in which liberty is ordered according to our sense of virtue as human flourishing.

The American Founders also inherited an understanding of this indivisible link between virtue and liberty. It can be traced in the Declaration of Independence’s famous entreaties to “happiness” and “sacred honor” or John Adams’s oft-cited musings on morality and the Constitution. But it was perhaps George Washington who did the most to impress upon the American mind the notion that a liberal society must also be a virtuous society. In a 1790 address to the Roman Catholics of the United States, for example, he explicitly framed the case for religious toleration in good, old-fashioned republican virtue ethics: 

As mankind become more liberal they will be more apt to allow, that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the Community are equally entitled to the protection of civil Government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality. And I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution, and the establishment of their Government … may the members of your Society in America, animated alone by the pure spirit of Christianity, and still conducting themselves as the faithful subjects of our free Government, enjoy every temporal and spiritual felicity.

True republican liberality has little to do with the dispassionate neutrality later ideologues of liberalism would adopt as their chief value. For the Founders, rather, it was a product of ardent patriotism. Washington’s love of country was a principle akin to Aristotle’s love of wisdom; patriotism and philosophy alike order human action according to the highest good. 

Of course, none of the republican thinkers of the West, from Aristotle to Washington, believed an omnicompetent state could simply force citizens to become virtuous. Only love can inspire human beings to strive for the good in the highest sense. They did, however, believe republican government could serve as a moral guardian for a community of love. Through law and (more importantly) public deliberation, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people can maintain the standards of self-government. The above-quoted address from Washington provides a concrete example of a statesman relying on a moral tradition to shape the affections and character of his people. He understood that power certainly has a role to play in preserving the order necessary for self-government, but the ultimate act of self-governing requires affection rather than force.

Sadly, though, most liberals of both the modern and classical types today are unwilling to make the case for freedom in the terms of this republican tradition. Instead of a robust public philosophy and a full account of the Good Life, they would prefer to conduct politics on what they suppose to be the low-but-solid ground of secular ideology. They would relegate questions about virtue, natural law, and the summum bonum to the private sphere alone, in the hope that society can avoid controversy and maintain freedom as a kind of truce among its members.

To make matters worse, the ideology of liberalism even tends to shrink the private sphere over time. As liberalism becomes more and more radical, it broadens its definition of “coercive authority” to include not simply the state but also intermediary institutions and, even more fundamentally, the family. The ideology promises liberation not merely by freeing people from the state, but also by emancipating them from any obligations to the chosen or unchosen associations to which we belong.

Take the recent example of Massachusetts, where the state is being sued for discriminating against religious families and blocking them from adopting foster children. When it should embrace the loving parents that could help address a growing foster care crisis, the government instead condemns them for ordering their family’s life around a transcendent sense of meaning. The agents of the state ostensibly seek to use the liberal concept of neutrality to justify this bigotry before the law, but they are in fact demonstrating the very way ideology uproots the virtue of liberality itself. 

Edmund Burke—a contemporary of Washington and an influence on Tocqueville—was one of the West’s most eloquent critics of this kind of liberalism. “But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint,” the Irishman thundered in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, going on to write, “Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.” Burke had no patience for ideological sophisms about social progress, universal equality, or natural rights untethered from a more rooted tradition. He understood, rather, that a truly free society is only one in which institutions are free to shape the souls of citizens.

As conservatives such as Burke and Tocqueville foresaw, many of the threats to liberty Gregg identifies in his essay are the direct result of liberal efforts to banish republican philosophy from the public square and institutional life. The progressives who built the administrative state he justly criticizes sought to redefine the basis of American government, moving away from high republican philosophy to something far lower and more individualistic. The agencies they established and the welfare programs they implemented crowd out the kinds of civil society institutions the Founders believed communicate indispensable moral traditions. Furthermore, their radical ideology has evolved into ever more aggressive variants that pose new dangers to the human person. 

For the true friends of liberty, then, deconstructing the apparatus of the leviathan state is the most important task ahead of us. Tyranny is always the worst threat to self-government. Gregg’s recommendations here, from a deregulatory policy agenda and a renewed federalism to promoting economic freedom and advancing constitutionalism, should be heartily endorsed by all conservatives. At the same time, the way we persuade the American public to adopt a program of political renewal must be guided by the republican tradition. More than merely making the case for freedom on the grounds of materialism or efficiency, we must be bold to make it in explicitly ethical and moral terms.

Still, Gregg rightly points out that preserving liberty is immensely difficult. For decades, Americans have been losing the ability to speak the language of our republican tradition. Even a great statesman could not reintroduce the habits of self-government alone. But there is another set of liberal institutions that are key allies in social regeneration: our schools. 

Schools are one of the most important places where a public philosophy can be conveyed to American citizens. As Russell Kirk once put it, “A principal achievement of liberal education in America has been the imparting of a sense of moral worth among the more intelligent of the rising generation.” This kind of teaching is certainly on the decline, but a host of opportunities—from the classical education movement to the renaissance of schools of civic thought—lie before conservatives if we aim to recover America’s tradition of liberty.

While it is true that all kinds of schooling can impart this liberal moral worth, it is especially true of higher education. Although Europe has its great universities, it has nothing like the proliferation of liberal arts colleges that dot the American landscape; we have a passion for education. These institutions are places where we learn to think together in the light of the highest goods not just as citizens, but as human beings. As Kirk wrote in a different essay: 

The university is meant to assist in life’s struggle for survival, by extracting order from disorder. Studies in seventeenth-century literature and ancient history and quantum mechanics all are paths to order. And also, they are paths to freedom: for the unexamined life is a servile existence, not worth living. The university is not intended to be a staging-ground for the destruction of order in personality and order in society; on the contrary, the university’s mission (to paraphrase John Henry Newman) is to impart a philosophical habit of mind.

Channeling his hero Burke, Kirk sometimes also used the phrase “moral imagination” to describe this “philosophical habit of mind.” It is a way of thinking that takes us up out of ourselves, beyond narrow self-interest, and into a genuine concern for others. Schools and similar institutions can educate this truly liberal spirit in us by commanding our loyalties and shaping the way we think about the world. By striving for personal moral excellence, we also secure the common good. Through education, the citizen rises to self-government.

But this work simply cannot be done at a mass scale. There is no central plan that can possibly make the people live well, no authoritarian mechanic who can turn society into an engine to produce virtue. Indeed, an ever-expanding state can oftentimes redirect moral sentiments toward collective causes by means that undermine our attempts to pursue the Good Life in our particular ways. Self-government requires freedom; citizens are not cogs in a deterministic machine.

Tocqueville admired America’s constitution in part because our Founders understood exactly this. In Democracy in America, he wrote that federalism “can only suit a people accustomed, for a long time, to running their own affairs, a people among whom political knowledge has penetrated to the lowest levels of society,” that is to say a liberally educated people. The sheer complexity of this system of overlapping sovereignties requires the people to exercise virtues like prudence and liberality to maintain the ideal of Union. If we cannot practice them, freedom itself will slip away. 

The future of liberty, then, depends on her true friends’ ability to restore not only the securities of genuine political independence, but also a wider sense of self-government. We must rededicate ourselves to the institutions that actually shape our souls towards a common moral life: the family, the school, the church. This order is certainly threatened by an hostile and growing state, but above all it is imperiled by our growing apathy towards society, virtue, and even freedom itself. Perhaps the only way to rescue it is to remember that a republic must be a community of love.