The History of Migration With Interbreeding: The Evolutionary Strategy That Made Us Human

I have argued for an "open borders" policy that would respect the natural human propensities to migration and interbreeding as shaped by the evolutionary history that has made us human.  In support of that argument, I now offer a brief genetic and cultural history of migration as a "melting pot of ideas, technology, and DNA" (Garcia-Bertrand and Herrera, 2018, p. 113; Goldin, 2024; Reich, 2018).

330,000-50,000 years ago.  Our earliest human ancestors emerged for the first time in Africa.  The oldest fossils with features shared with anatomically modern humans have been found in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, dating to around 330,000-300,000 years ago.  Since other hominid fossils are scattered across most of Africa except for the Sahara Desert region, that suggests that the first human beings migrated long distances within Africa as they adapted to diverse ecological and climatic conditions.  As I have indicated previously, there is also evidence for extensive long-distance trade in Africa as early as 300,000 years ago.  So human evolution in Africa was shaped by both migration and trade.

Many Biblical believers--Jews, Christians, and Muslims--doubt this Darwinian account of the evolutionary origin of human beings because they believe it contradicts the Biblical teaching that God created Adam and Eve as the first human beings.  But the theistic evolutionists argue that there is no contradiction if one sees that God could have employed the natural evolutionary process to carry out His plan for the creation of human beings.

After all, even Darwin himself recognized that the religious appeal to God as the uncaused cause of nature cannot be refuted by reason.  All natural explanations of the world--including Darwinian science--must assume that ultimately the order of nature is the unexplained ground of all explanation. But there is no way by rational proof to deny the possibility that nature itself is the contingent product of nature's God.  Darwin recognized this in adopting the principle of dual causality, which originated in medieval Islamic and Christian theology.  He spoke of the laws of nature as manifested in evolution as "secondary causes," which left open the possibility of God's creative power acting through "primary causes" to create the original order of nature itself.  Darwin thus allowed for theistic evolution, which has been adopted by a long line of Christian thinkers, including C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Alvin Plantinga. 

After the Genesis Flood, Noah and his family were the only human survivors left to populate the Earth.  Noah had three sons--Shem, Ham, and Japheth--"and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth" (Genesis 9:19).  The Bible then gives an elaborate genealogical history of how the nations arose from the migration of the descendants of Noah's sons over the earth.  For two thousand years, Christian writers have tried to trace the origins of all nations back to Noah's sons.  The dominant tendency was to attribute the paternity of Europeans to the children of Japheth, that of Asians to Shem, and that of the Africans to Ham.  Since the descendants of Ham were mysteriously cursed to serve their cousins as slaves (Genesis 9:27), this was interpreted as God's justifying the enslavement of Africans and condemning interracial marriage (Goldenberg, 2003).  Thus, this divinely ordained story of origins explained both the genealogical unity of all human beings through ancestry traced back to Noah and their genealogical diversity through ancestry traced back to one of Noah's sons.

130,000-95,000 years ago.  During this period, some anatomically modern humans began to migrate out of Africa into the Near East, where they could have met Neanderthals who were migrating out of Europe.  Genetic analysis indicates that Neanderthals had separated from the human lineage 770,000-550,000 years ago.  Neanderthal skeletons and DNA show that the Neanderthal lineage was evolving in Europe around 430,000 years ago.

80,000-35,000 years ago.  There was another wave of human migration out of Africa, and humans reached Europe, Asia, and Australasia.  During this time, humans interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans.  The best evidence for this comes from studies of "ancient DNA."  In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists discovered that it was possible to recover DNA from mummified human specimens and ancient bones.  In 1997, Svante Paabo and his colleagues reported that they had sequenced Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA.  In 2010, Paabo and his colleagues published a draft of the entire Neanderthal genome; and they suggested that there was interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans.  They also published a genetic analysis of another archaic human population--the Denisovans.  Later, it was shown that humans had interbred with Denisovans.

Since it was humans who had migrated out of Africa who interbred with Neanderthals, scientists have long assumed that while all present day non-African individuals carry some Neanderthal ancestry in their DNA, there would be no Neanderthal ancestry in African populations.  But in 2020, a new genetic study showed that African individuals do indeed show some Neanderthal ancestry (Chen et al., 2020).  This can be explained by ancient Europeans with Neanderthal genes migrating back to Africa.  So we now know that remnants of Neanderthal genomes are found in every human population.

Proportions of Neanderthal DNA in human populations today range as high as 2 percent.  Proportions of Denisovan DNA range as high as 5 percent--mostly in Asian and Australasian populations (Reich, 2018, 58-59).  This evolution by hybridization has benefitted human beings.  For example, modern humans in parts of Europe and East Asia have Neanderthal keratin protein genes that help them grow skin and hair suitable for the colder regions originally occupied by Neanderthals.  And many Tibetans today have a Denisovan gene active in red blood cells that help them breath the thin air of the Tibetan high altitudes (Reich, 2018, 65).

Thus, the scientific study of ancient DNA allows us to trace the entire history of human migration and interbreeding across time and space.  This research supports two general conclusions.  First, the evolution of human nature is about the mixture of populations, so that there is no such thing as a pure population or race.  Second, the people who live in a particular place today almost never descend exclusively from the people who lived in the same place in the distant past.  These two conclusions refute racism (by denying the "purity" of racial differences) and ethnic nationalism (by denying that national identity can be based on ancestral descent from a single founding population).

65,000-50,000 years ago.  The ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians arrived from Southeast Asia.  They remained foragers (living by hunting, gathering, and fishing), with little or no farming, until the British arrived in 1788.

20,000-13,00 years ago.  There is genetic evidence for at least four prehistoric migrations of Eurasians migrating to the Americas (Reich, 2018, 155-60).  By about 14,000 years ago, these human migrants had reached the southern tip of South America.  When sea levels were low enough for a land bridge to emerge in what is now the Bering Strait region, these people could walk across to Alaska.  In 1590, the Jesuit naturalist Jose de Acosta was the first person to speculate that human hunter-gatherers first crossed from Asia to an America without humans.  John Locke learned this from his reading of Acosta, which supported his conclusion that the American Indian hunter-gatherers were "still a Pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe" (ST, 108).

13,000-9,000 years ago.  Agriculture developed for the first time in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East.  The first European farmers were genetic mixtures of local hunter-gatherers and Anatolian farmers. Farming was then spread by migrants throughout Eurasia over the next few thousand years.

6,000-4,000 years ago.  Early wheel technologies and writing systems emerged and were spread by migrants.

9,000-4,500 years ago.  During this period--the Early Bronze Age--the Yamnaya culture emerged in the center of the Great Steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas.  The Yamnaya population arose from a genetic mixture of Iranian farmers and local hunter-gatherers.  They were pastoralists whose economy was based on sheep and cattle herding.  They were innovative in their use of the newly domesticated horse and the hitching of animals to wagons and chariots with wheels.  They eventually spread over a vast expanse of the steppe--5,000 miles from Hungary in Europe to the Altai Mountains in central Asia and south into India where they conquered the Indus Valley Civilization.  They developed the first form of Indo-European Language, and their expansion created the family of Indo-European languages that stretches across Europe, India, and parts of East Asia.  By sometime after 4,500 years ago, the Yamnaya had migrated all the way to the British Isles.  90 percent of the people who built Stonehenge--people with no Yamnaya ancestry--were replaced by Yamnaya people (Reich, 2018, 99-121).

The Yamnaya were a stratified male-dominated society in which a few elite males ruled.  The ancient DNA data show that.  The Y chromosomes of the Yamnaya were mostly of only a few types, which shows that a few males succeeded in spreading their genes.  Moreover, these few Y-chromosome types of the Yamnaya are predominant today in Europe and India, which shows that the Yamnaya expansion allowed the most powerful Yamnaya male descendants to be more successful in mating than men from the local groups (Reich, 2018, 237-41).

This reminds us that because of the biological differences between the sexes, a single male can have far more children than a single female, and consequently powerful men can potentially have a far greater imprint on the human genome than powerful women.

As we will see, this ancient history of an Indo-European culture was transformed--beginning in the 19th century--into the myth of the "Aryan race" that has supported the ideologies of Nazism, Hindutva (Hinduism), and the Alt-Right Nietzscheanism of Trumpists like "Bronze Age Pervert."

117 AD.  The Roman Empire reaches its greatest extent under Trajan.

500.  Silk Roads link the Mediterranean region and China.

700s-1000s.  Viking ships cross the Atlantic.

1206-1368.  The Mongols formed the largest contiguous empire in history.  Genghis Khan (1162-1227) was the founder and the first khan of the Mongol Empire.  Genetic evidence indicates that 8 percent of the males living in East Eurasia today share a characteristic Y-chromosome sequence that was probably Genghis Khan's Y chromosome, which shows his millions of direct male-line descendants across the territory occupied by the Mongols (Zerjal et al., 2003).

1320-1350.  New Zealand was discovered and settled by Polynesians, who developed the distinctive Maori ethnic cultural group, which is today the second largest ethnic group in New Zealand, behind the European New Zealanders.

1492.  Columbus landed in the Bahamas, although he thought it was India.  He encountered the Taino people--the indigenous people of the Caribbean islands. Thus began the first global network of immigration, interbreeding, and trade encompassing most of the Earth.

1519.  Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec capital--Tenochtitlan--present-day Mexico City.  Within four years of the 1519 campaign, Martin Cortes, "el Mestizo," was born: his father was Hernan Cortes, his mother was Cortes's Aztec mistress.  Thus began the Darwinian evolution of Indigenous Americans through genetic and cultural hybridization.  Today, in Mexico (with a population of 127 million), 70% of the people are mestizos, 14% Amerindians, and 15% whites.  As I have argued previously, this refutes the idea of "American genocide": there are more people in the Americas today with Indigenous American genes than there were when Columbus landed in 1492.

1526.  This was the year of the first transatlantic slave voyage from West Africa to Brazil.  Thus began one of the most massive, forced migrations in human history.  By the 1780s, over 75,000 African slaves were arriving every year in the Americas.

1693.  John Locke wrote an essay "For a General Naturalization" that was probably written in support of the General Naturalization Bill of 1693.  "Naturalization is the shortest and easiest way of increasing your people," Locke declared at the beginning of the essay. Increasing population is important, he explained, because "people are the strength of any country or government," and it's "the number of people that make the riches of any country."  What we see here is what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.   We see that today because the people in the less free countries want to migrate to the freer countries (as measured by the Human Freedom Index).

1718.  Great Britain's Transportation Act formalized the forced migration of convicts.  From 1718 to 1775, as many as 50,000 convicts were sent to the British colonies in America.  After the British lost the Revolutionary War in 1783, they decided to look elsewhere for penal colonies.  In 1788, they established their penal colony at Botany Bay (Sydney) in Australia.

1776.  Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained two grievances against King George III concerning immigration.  On the one hand, the King was accused of obstructing the passage of laws that would encourage the free migration of foreigners to America and then facilitate their naturalization.  On the other hand, the King was denounced for promoting the forced migration of African slaves through the slave trade, which was said to be a "cruel war against human nature itself."  The passage condemning the slave trade was excised from the final draft, however, because some of the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia wanted to continue the foreign importation of slaves, and because some people in the northern colonies had engaged in the commercial shipping of slaves.

I have written about Jefferson's disturbing behavior in adopting his slave Sally Hemmings as his concubine, who bore at least six of his children.  That the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, who affirmed natural human equality and who denounced slavery as a violation of human nature, could not only own black slaves but also exploit them for his sexual gratification forces us to think about the human nature of slavery, its corrupting effect on slaveowners, and the evolution of racial mixing.  Moreover, interracial sexual mating undermines the claims of the racist that the races can and should remain "pure" in their separation. 

1850.  The U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to make it easier for Southern slaveowners to recapture slaves who had run away to the Northern free states.  The law made it a federal crime for anyone to help fugitive slaves avoid capture.  This denied the freedom of internal migration within the nation--the freedom to vote with one's feet by running away from enslavement in the American South.  Many Americans resisted this law as an unjust law that violated natural human rights.  A black abolitionist like Frederick Douglass, who had himself run away from his slave master, were especially eloquent in defending the natural human right to run away--to migrate--to some place where one could be free.  

Some years later, Douglass defended a general "right of migration" for all human beings.  And he argued for the greatness of America as a "composite nation" open to all races, creeds, and religions and to all foreigners who would come to America searching for freedom.   He compared the "repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners" to the "prejudice of race and color" that had supported chattel slavery:  both express the natural human propensity to tribalism or xenophobia that favors us against them.  Even if all other nations manifest this natural tribalism in limiting migratory rights and other human rights to themselves, America is unique in being the nation dedicated to human rights for all--"the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds."  And therefore, America must recognize the right of locomotion or migration as a right for all of humanity, so that America must have open borders.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

REFERENCES

Garcia-Bertrand, Ralph, and Rene J. Herrera. 2018. Ancestral DNA, Human Origins, and Migrations. Elsevier.

Goldenberg, David M. 2003. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Goldin, Ian. 2024. The Shortest History of Migration.  New York: The Experiment.

Reich, David. 2018. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. New York: Pantheon Books.

Zerjal, T., et al. 2003. "The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols."  American Journal of Human Genetics 72: 717-21.

How Leo Strauss Predicted the Nietzschean Nihilism of Trump's Intellectuals

                                                                          Leo Strauss

Francis Fukuyama has published an essay for Persuasion on "A Chilling Prediction by Leo Strauss."  He reproduces an excerpt from a lecture on "German Nihilism" that Strauss gave in 1941 at the New School for Social Research.  In his prefatory remarks, Fukuyama says that we should find this text "chilling" because Strauss's intellectual analysis of the young German nihilists supporting Hitler's Nazism describes perfectly the thinking of those far-right intellectuals who today are supporting Trump.

Just like the German nihilists described by Strauss, Fukuyama observes, American far-right thinkers today--like Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, and Costin Alamariu ("Bronze Age Pervert")--want to destroy liberalism because it is morally degrading in promoting the soft hedonism of the open society rather than the hard heroism of the closed society. 

This points to Strauss's primary claim in his lecture:  "German nihilism desires the destruction of modern civilization as far as modern civilization has a moral meaning." He explained: 

It is a moral protest.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modern civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.

Strauss saw that the intellectual godfather of this German nihilism is Friedrich Nietzsche--the Nietzsche who scorned the ignoble pleasure-seeking life of the "Last Man" based on the slave morality dictated by the Christian principle of the equal dignity of all human beings, which denied the master morality of the few noble masters fit to rule over the multitude of inferior human beings.  In foreseeing the future emergence of a new nobility of those few superhuman higher men entitled to enslave the many subhuman lower men, Nietzsche has had a seductive appeal to those young nihilists who imagine themselves becoming the masters at the top of the natural order of rank in a new hierarchical closed society at war with its liberal enemies.

As Strauss indicated, what made this intellectual attitude "nihilistic" was that while it was clear about what it denied--liberalism--it was not clear about what it affirmed because its preferred alternative to liberalism was vague.  Since its No was more emphatic than its Yes, it was nihilistic in its passion for destruction--for Nothing--without offering any vision of what exactly would replace liberalism.

Similarly, Fukuyama suggests, today's "post-liberals" have no coherent conception of what should replace liberalism.  On the one hand, Deneen and Vermeule seem to want something like Catholic integralism--a Catholic theocracy enforcing a religious morality.  On the other hand, Yarvin and Alamariu are atheists who want to return to some kind of pagan hierarchy enforced by a strong, even tyrannical, government.  All that the two sides have in common is their hatred of liberalism.

This hatred of liberalism is also what moved the German nihilists to support Nazism.  And, as Fukuyama indicates, Strauss seemed to clearly reject Nazism in his 1941 lecture when he identified it as the "lowest, most provincial, most unenlightened and most dishonorable form" of German nihilism.  But still, Strauss argued, liberals needed to understand the nihilistic roots of illiberal politics in order to see the power of the Nietzschean nihilistic critique of liberalism.  Fukuyama thinks the same is true today in America: liberals need to understand why the American far-right intellectuals hate liberalism and why that hatred of liberalism as rooted in Nietzschean nihilism has such an appeal for many people today--particularly, the young men supporting Trump.  

Actually, Fukuyama does not explicitly mention Trump in his remarks, but the implicit reference to Trump is clear.  It should be noted, however, that while Fukuyama explains the far-right intellectuals supporting Trump as illiberal nihilists, he has explained Trump himself as motivated not by any ideology but by what Nietzsche called ressentiment--"acute resentment of others based on wounded pride, perceived disregard, fears of inadequacy, and a desire to exact revenge on those who had earlier failed to pay adequate respect."  I have explained this resentment as an expression of Trump's chimpanzee grandiose narcissism.  Moreover, Fukuyama has suggested, the core of the MAGA movement is mostly moved not by any ideology--like the illiberal nihilism of the far-right intellectuals--but by the shared resentment of people who think they have not been respected by those who belong to the elites and look down on them with disdain.  This explains why Trump's staunchest supporters will remain loyal to him even when they suffer economically from his policies--such as high tariffs that will harm many of Trump's voters.

I agree with everything Fukuyama says here.  By the way, I also agree with Fukuyama's defense of liberalism as first announced in his 1989 "End of History?" article.  

But I do think Fukuyama misses three crucial flaws in Strauss's reasoning that should come out of a careful reading of his "German Nihilism" lecture that are pertinent to our understanding of, and our response to, both German and American nihilism.  

First, Fukuyama does not notice Strauss's quiet endorsement of the "young nihilists" that Will Altman and others have identified as evidence that Strauss was attracted to the nihilism of the Nazis.  

Second, Fukuyama also does not notice that in naming Nietzsche as the godfather of illiberal nihilism, Strauss failed to recognize Nietzsche's support for liberalism in the writings of his middle period (particularly, Human, All Too Human).  

Third, Strauss had also failed to see how philosophic proponents of liberalism like John Locke and Adam Smith had shown that liberalism cultivates the moral and intellectual virtues, which refutes the charge of the illiberal nihilists that liberalism must be ignoble and degrading.

Since I have previously elaborated each of these points, I will only briefly summarize them here with links to previous posts and references to the 4th edition of Political Questions (PQ4).

STRAUSS'S NAZISM?

Fukuyama's excerpt from "German Nihilism" does not include this passage:

I have tried to circumscribe the intellectual and moral situation in which a nihilism emerged which was not in all cases base in its origin.  Moreover, I take it for granted that not everything to which the young nihilists objected was unobjectionable, and that not every writer or speaker whom they despised, was respectable. . . . Let us then not hesitate to look for one moment at the phenomenon which I called nihilism, from the point of view of the nihilists. . . . A new reality is in the making; it is transforming the whole world; in the meantime there is: nothing, but--a fertile nothing.

Notice that in taking "the point of view of the nihilists," Strauss actually goes a long way towards endorsing their position: some (most?) of that to which the nihilists objected really was objectionable, and some (most?) of the writers and speakers whom they despised really were despicable.  This is one piece of evidence cited by Will Altman for his provocative claim that Strauss supported Nazi nihilism in its attack on liberalism (PQ4, 491-99).

In "German Nihilism," Strauss took "the point of view of the nihilists" in explaining their argument that an illiberal "closed society" was ennobling, while a liberal "open society" was degrading.  Any reader of Strauss will know that he often embraced this idea that every healthy society--and particularly, the premodern societies like Athens and Sparta--was a closed society as opposed to the modern open societies of liberalism that inevitably became corrupt.  Actually, as I have argued, Athens was a much more open and liberal society than Strauss was willing to admit--that's why the philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle could flourish in Athens but not in Sparta.

Strauss did not allow "German Nihilism" to be published while he was alive.  It was not published until 1999 (in Interpretation), which was 26 years after his death in 1973.  Was this because he feared that it was too open in suggesting his sympathy for German nihilism?

Similarly, Strauss's praise of Martin Heidegger in "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism" was not published until 1989 (in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism), 16 years after his death.  Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933.  He offered vigorous philosophic defenses of Hitler and the Nazi Party.  And he never apologized for his support of the Nazis--right up to his death in 1976.

Strauss had been a student of Heidegger, and he praised Heidegger as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century.  In "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," he left his reader doubting whether there was any good refutation of Heidegger's Nazi attack on liberalism:

All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.

Notice how emphatic Strauss is in using the word "I" here.  He once explained that one form of esoteric writing was to use the word "we" to seemingly endorse a common opinion, rather than saying "I," which suggested that one was truly endorsing that opinion. 

This is part of the evidence supporting Altman's argument that Strauss saw himself as the culmination of the "Third Wave of Modernity" that overthrew liberalism--first Nietzsche, then Heidegger, and finally Strauss.

Although I am not fully persuaded by Altman, I am persuaded that he has proven that Strauss often implied some endorsement of the Nazi attack on liberalism, and he never publicly and emphatically rejected Nazi nihilism and affirmed liberalism--as did some of his friends like Hans Jonas.  That was a moral and intellectual failure on the part of Strauss. 

NIETZSCHE'S DARWINIAN LIBERALISM

Another of Strauss's failures was in saying that Nietzsche initiated the Third Wave of Modernity that would lead to the illiberal nihilism of Nazism.  Although this might be true for the early and late writings of Nietzsche that were so often praised by the Nazis, it is not true for the writings of the middle period, and particularly Human, All Too Human.

In this book, Nietzsche defended a Darwinian liberalism that rejected many of the main ideas of his later writing--such as the celebration of the Ubermensch (the Superman or Overman), which became a theme for the Nazis.  

One can make a good case (as Bruce Detwiler does) for "Dionysian aristocratic radicalism" as the political teaching of Nietzsche in his early and late writings.  But one also needs to recognize that Nietzsche's endorsement of liberal democracy rooted in Darwinian evolution in the writings of his middle period contradicts what he says in his other writings.  Then, if one compares those two teachings, one can make a good argument that Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is morally and intellectually superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism (PQ4, 457-60).  This is Nietzsche's defense of liberalism against the attack of the German nihilists.

Strauss failed to see this.

LOCKE AND SMITH ON LIBERAL VIRTUES

Strauss also failed to see how Locke and Smith had made powerful arguments for liberalism's moral and intellectual virtues.  One of Strauss's most influential pieces of writing--particularly among the far-right intellectual critics of liberalism--is his interpretation of Locke in Natural Right and History, which presents Lockean liberalism as promoting a vulgar and soul-deadening soft hedonism, which Strauss famously called "a joyless quest for joy."  This is the Locke that "post-liberals" like Patrick Deneen have scorned.

But as I have argued, this ignores much of what Locke wrote about how a free society secures the liberty that allows for the cultivation of moral and intellectual excellence--including the freedom to live the philosophic life (for people like Strauss!) (PQ4, 489-91).  So, while critics of liberalism like Deneen insist that Lockean liberalism teaches "pursuit of immediate gratification" and the "absence of restraints upon one's desires," he says nothing about how Locke contradicts this claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  In that book, Locke stresses the importance of parents educating their children so that they have a sense of shame in caring about their good reputation (secs. 56, 61, 78).  Locke says that "the great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is placed in this, that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way" (sec. 33). "It seems plain to me that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires where reason does not authorize them" (sec. 38). Children must be taught that "covetousness and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of" is "the root of all evil" (sec. 110). 

Above all, Locke insists, children must be taught and habituated to show "civility"--respect and good will to all people (secs. 66-67, 70, 109, 117, 143-44). Here Locke's emphasis on the need for "civility" is part of what Norbert Elias identified as the "civilizing process" promoted by early modern liberalism to overcome the incivility, violence, and corrupt manners of medieval pre-modern Europe.  Deneen and Strauss are silent about all of this.

They are also silent about Smith's argument about how a liberal society--"allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice"--promotes the moral and intellectual virtues.  Strauss said almost nothing about Smith, but Strauss's thinking about liberal political philosophy shaped the interpretation of Smith developed by Joseph Cropsey, Strauss's student and colleague.  Cropsey claimed that in Smith's "commercial society," commerce takes the place of virtue.  But as I have indicated, Cropsey ignored or played down everything Smith said--particularly, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments--about how the moral and intellectual virtues are cultivated in a free society (PQ4, 340-48).

Moreover, Cropsey was completely silent about how Charles Darwin saw that Smith's moral philosophy was confirmed by his scientific theory of moral evolution, and how this has been deepened by the evolutionary studies of morality over the 150 years since Darwin's Descent of Man (PQ4, 316-28).

Strauss and the Straussians have failed to see how a careful reading of Nietzsche, Locke, and Smith can reveal the nobility of liberalism in securing the liberty that makes virtue possible, thus refuting the moral critique of liberalism by the illiberal nihilists, including those today who try to provide the intellectual justification for Trump's illiberalism.

Are the Straussian Fascists Showing that Will Altman Was Right About Leo Strauss?

I have written about Bronze Age Pervert's Bronze Age Mindset (here and here).  So I was interested in the recent essay by Blake Smith identifying Bronze Age Pervert as Costin Alamariu, who wrote a doctoral dissertation--The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in Plato and Nietzsche--under the supervision of Steven Smith, a Straussian political theorist at Yale University.  Blake Smith shows how Alamariu's dissertation explains the Straussian philosophic grounding for Bronze Age Mindset.

This connection of Alamariu's Nietzschean fascism to Strauss fits a remarkable pattern of Straussian influence with other contemporary exponents of Nietzschean fascism that I have considered on this blog.  Richard Spencer studied under Michael Gillespie at Duke University.  Michael Millerman studied under Clifford Orwin at the University of Toronto, although Orwin resigned from his dissertation committee after some newspaper stories publicized Millerman's fascist political philosophy.  Alamariu, Spencer, and Millerman were all shaped in their thinking by Leo Strauss's interpretation of Nietzsche's fascism as the best illiberal alternative to liberal democracy.

This seems to confirm what William Altman was arguing ten years ago--in a series of three books on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss--that Strauss was the secret theoretician of National Socialism.  Altman presented his "German trilogy" of books as following a tripartite structure suggested by Strauss in his "Three Waves of Modernity."  According to Strauss, the First Wave of modernity came with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the Second Wave came with Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel; and the Third Wave came with Nietzsche and Heidegger.  If each wave comes through a sequence of three thinkers, who is the third thinker of the Third Wave?  Surely, Altman suggested, it must be Strauss himself.  And if the Third Wave leads to fascism, as Strauss indicated, then this would point to Strauss as the thinker who most fully worked out the theory of fascism or Nazism as the anti-liberal solution to the crisis of liberal democracy.

As I have indicated in my posts on Altman, I have found him to be an insightful commentator on Strauss.  But I do disagree with him on two points.  First, I think he overstates his Strauss-as-a-Jewish-Nazi thesis.  In fact, he implicitly concedes some of the weaknesses in this thesis.  He recognizes that Strauss regarded Hitler as a fool.  He also recognizes that there is no evidence that Strauss ever developed any positive program for moving towards a National Socialist society.

Still, I am persuaded that Altman has shown that Strauss is open to the criticism that he was not emphatic enough in defending liberal democracy against the ideas of Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger.  Strauss never really offered a thorough refutation of these ideas, and instead he showed some attraction to them--most clearly in his lectures on "German Nihilism" and the "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism."  Significantly, these lectures were not published until after Strauss's death.

My second point of disagreement is that unlike Altman and Strauss, I see Nietzsche in his middle period (Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of The Gay Science) as providing an alternative--based on his Darwinian liberalism--to the positions he took in his early and late writings.  Nietzsche's Darwinian writings do not suffer from the contradictions that Altman rightly sees in his other writings.  Nor do the Darwinian writings provide any encouragement to the Nazis who appropriated ideas from the other writings.  Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is intellectually, morally, and politically superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism.  Strauss and the Straussians fail to see this as the Nietzschean way to defend liberalism against its illiberal critics.

How John Eastman's Five Big Lies Failed to Solve the Problem of Trump's Unpopular Populism

John Eastman Speaking at the "Save America" Rally on the White House Ellipse, January 6, 2021

The populist demagogue must distract his audience from seeing the incoherence in all populist rhetoric. The fundamental claim of populist rhetoric is that a society is divided into two groups--the Elites and the People--and the populist demagogue speaks for the People against the Elites, who are the Enemy of the People.  This is deceptive because in fact the populist demagogue speaks only for some faction of the People, and often it's a minority faction, although it can be a large minority.

That has always been Donald Trump's problem:  he's an unpopular populist.  He has been popular with a large number of American voters.  And in some states and congressional districts, Trump and Trump-endorsed candidates can win the majority of votes.  But Trump and Trump candidates can never win the popular vote in national elections.  That has been true in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020 and in the mid-term elections of 2018 and 2022.  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by nearly three million votes.  Joe Biden's popular vote in 2020 exceeded Trump's by over seven million.  In the mid-term elections, the Trump-endorsed candidates either lost or they underperformed as compared with other Republican candidates.

The populist demagogue has two ways to evade this problem of unpopular populism.  He can argue that those who oppose him do not belong to the body of the People, either because they belong to the Elites, or because they are aliens who do not belong to the community of the People.  Or he can argue that whenever he loses a popular election, the election has been fraudulently stolen from him by the Elites.  He can then use these arguments to justify a military coup to overturn an election and keep himself in power.

As I have indicated in some previous posts (here, here, and here), the people at the Claremont Institute who have been the leading academic intellectuals supporting Trump have employed both arguments.  Amazingly, they acknowledge the problem of Trump's unpopular populism, as when Michael Anton admits: "a national popular vote guarantees a Democratic win in every presidential election."  But then they try to say that those Americans voting against Trump are not real Americans, as when Glenn Ellmers said that the majority of American voters--those who voted for Joe Biden--are not "authentic Americans," because they are more like gerbils, zombies, or rodents.  Also, many of those at the Claremont Institute have supported Trump's claim that the presidential election of 2020 was stolen, although some have admitted that this is a lie.  And some of them (like Anton) have suggested agreement with alt-Right thinkers like Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin who have said that what America needs is for someone like Trump to become a military dictator.

The one person at the Claremont Institute who was most influential in planning Trump's attempt to overturn the election of 2020 is John Eastman.  And now that we have the final report of the Congressional Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, we can see that Eastman was the linchpin to Trump's plan for the insurrection and the attempted coup, a plan that failed only because Trump did not have the guts or the guns for becoming a military dictator.

FIVE BIG LIES

The Report of the Select Committee provides demonstrative evidence that Eastman promoted five lies that were crucial to Trump's plan for overturning the election of 2020.  Moreover, the Report also shows that Eastman knew that these were lies.  This evidence would justify convicting Eastman of federal crimes, such as obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make a false statement, inciting or assisting an insurrection, and seditious conspiracy.  In fact, one federal judge (Judge David Carter) has already ruled that "more likely than not" Eastman has violated federal criminal law.

Eastman's first lie was his claim that the presidential election of Joe Biden in 2020 was fraudulent.  When Eastman was asked under oath by the Select Committee what evidence he had uncovered that the election was stolen, he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination!  Eastman was part of the Trump legal team that brought over 60 lawsuits in state and federal courts claiming that the election was stolen.  They lost all of those lawsuits.  And in many of them, they admitted they had no proof of election fraud.

The Select Committee also provides massive evidence that many of Trump's closest advisers told him that there was no evidence for election fraud.  This included Attorney General Bill Barr, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Trump Campaign Senior Advisor Jason Miller, and many others.  Eastman and Trump continued to repeat their charges of election fraud despite these many warnings from their own people that these charges were false.

Why did Eastman and Trump continue this lie even while knowing that it was a lie?  Some people in the White House heard Trump explain: "I don't want people to know we lost."

Eastman's second lie was that Vice-President Pence had the constitutional power, as the presiding officer of the Senate, to declare at the January 6th joint session of Congress that some of the electoral votes for Joe Biden from some of the states would not be counted.  Actually, when one of Eastman's colleagues proposed this theory to him before the election, Eastman rejected it:

"I don't agree with this.  The 12th Amendment only says that the President of the Senate opens the ballots in the joint session then, in the passive voice, that the votes shall then be counted. 3 USC sec. 12 [of the Electoral Count Act] says merely that he is the presiding officer, and then it spells out specific procedures, presumptions, and default rules for which slates will be counted.  Nowhere does it suggest that the president of the Senate gets to make the determination on his own.  Sec. 15 [of the Electoral Count Act] doesn't either" (23).

But then, after Biden won the election, Eastman adopted this theory that Pence could refuse to count the Biden electors certified by the states.  Pence and his legal counsel Greg Jacob denied that the Vice-President had this kind of power.  When they argued about this, Eastman admitted that his theory would lose unanimously at the Supreme Court.  Eastman also admitted that he did not think Vice President Al Gore had this power in 2001, nor would Vice President Kamala Harris have this power in 2025.

Oddly, when Jacob wrote to Eastman on January 6th to ask whether he had informed Trump that the Vice President did not have authority to decide the election unilaterally, Eastman responded: "He's been so advised, but you know him--once he gets something in his head, it is hard to get him to change course."  So once again, we see the Eastman knew that his theory was a lie.

Eastman's third lie was a plan devised a few days before the meeting of the Electoral College on December 14th, when the Electors for the winning candidate meet in each state capitol to cast their electoral votes, to have some Trump voters meet and prepare a series of false Trump electoral slates for seven states where Biden had actually won.  They were told to submit their fake electoral slates to Pence, so that Pence on January 6th could declare that he was counting the Trump slates rather than the Biden slates.  Trump's lawyers in the White House testified to the Select Committee that they had told Trump and Eastman that that this was not legal, because the Biden slates of electors had been certified by the seven state governments.

Eastman's fourth lie was his plan to convince some Republican-controlled state legislatures to certify a Trump slate of electors, even though Biden had won the popular vote in their states, and even though the Biden slates had been certified in these states on December 14th.  Not a single state legislature agreed to do this.

Amazingly, in a memo written before the election, Eastman had actually rejected this plan:

"Article II [of the Constitution] says the electors are appointed 'in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,' but I don't think that entitles the Legislature to change the rules after the election and appoint a different slate of electors in a manner different than what was in place on election day.  And 3 U.S.C. sec. 15 [of the Electoral Count Act] gives dispositive weight to the slate of electors that was certified by the Governor in accord with 3 U.S.C. sec. 5" (23).

So, once again, Eastman admits that his theory that state legislatures had the constitutional power to overturn the results of a presidential election was a lie. It is especially shocking that writing in the pages of The Claremont Review of Books, Eastman repeated this lie that he knew to be a lie.

Eastman's fifth lie was his plan to persuade the Justice Department to draft letters to the state legislatures of Georgia and other states.  This letter would say: "The Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States," and "we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia."  This was a lie, because under Attorney General Bill Barr, the Department had conducted many investigations of election fraud allegations that found that all of these allegations were unfounded; and therefore the Department of Justice did not have "significant concerns" that fraud "may have impacted the outcome of the election" in any State.

When the top leadership of the Department of Justice refused to send out this letter, Trump found someone in the Department--Jeffrey Clark--who would be willing to send out the letter if Trump appointed him Attorney General.  When Trump suggested he might do this, all of the leaders of the Department of Justice, including all of the Assistant Attorneys General, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone all agreed that they would resign in masse if Trump did this.  This forced Trump to back down.

Eastman's five lies motivated the insurrectionists of January 6th in their attempt to stop the Congress from certifying Biden's victory in the Electoral College.

THE INSURRECTION

In the early morning hours of December 19th, 2020, Donald Trump sent out this tweet: "Peter Navarro releases 36-page report alleging election fraud 'more than sufficient' to swing victory to Trump.  A great report by Peter.  Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election.  Big protest in D.C. on January 6th.  Be there, will be wild!"

Most of us who saw this tweet at the time didn't think much about it.  But the Select Committee's Report provides massive evidence that this tweet--and over a dozen other tweets urging his supporters to gather for the protest in Washington on January 6th--were interpreted by many far-right groups (such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and others) as a call for them to organize for a violent attack on Congress on that day.  As of today, nearly 500 people have been convicted or pleaded guilty for their violence on January 6th; and most of them have testified that they did this because they thought they were following orders from Trump to use violence in stopping the Congress from certifying Biden's election and thus securing the continuance of Trump's power as president.  After all, isn't this what Trump meant by "Be there, will be wild"?

And isn't this what Trump meant, at the protest rally on the Ellipse on January 6th, when he told his audience to march to the Capitol and "fight like hell" if Pence did not do his duty and overturn the election?  Before this speech by Trump, Eastman made his own short speech at the Ellipse repeating his lies about fraudulent elections and Pence's duty to refuse to certify the election of Biden.

Jeremy Bertino is a Proud Boy who pled guilty to seditious conspiracy as one of the organizers of the January 6th insurrection.  In his plea agreement, he explained that he "believed that storming the Capitol would achieve the group's goal of stopping Congress from certifying the Electoral College Vote," and that "storming the Capitol or its grounds would be illegal and would require using force against police or other government officials" (41).  Many of the insurrectionists have said the same thing.

During the insurrection, at around 3:15 p.m., cameras captured Cale Clayton as he taunted police officers: "Your fucking president told us to be here.  You should be on this side, right here, going with us.  You are an American citizen.  Your fucking President told you to do that.  You too. You too.  All of you guys.  That Tweet was for you guys.  For us.  For you."

Some of the people at the Claremont Institute have argued that this is a misinterpretation of what Trump said in his tweets and in his speech on January 6th, because Trump surely did not intend to incite these people to violence.  But this ignores the evidence of the context of the speech--both before and after the speech--that shows that this is exactly what Trump intended to do.

As the Select Committee's Report indicates, many of Trump's people inside and outside the White House were worried that the protest rally on January 6th would turn violent, and they begged Trump to issue a public statement warning people before January 6th that this rally must be peaceful.  Trump refused to do this.

Moreover, after Trump finished his speech at the Ellipse, at 1:10 p.m., the violence at the Capitol raged for over three hours; and Trump sat watching TV coverage of the violence, without ever making a public statement to tell his supporters to stop the violence, leave the Capitol, and go home.  He refused to do this although dozens of his political advisers and supporters were begging him to do this.  When Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows received many emails and phone calls asking him to persuade Trump to stop the insurrection, Meadows told people that Trump did not want to stop it.

And over the entire day, Trump was never in contact with Pence or others on Capitol Hill to see what he could do to help.  Moreover, he never contacted anyone in the Department of Defense, the National Guard, or local police departments to see they could do to stop the rioters.  Pence was forced to act on his own in calling for military and police reinforcements to stop the insurrection.

At 2:24 p.m., knowing that the riot was underway, Trump sent this tweet:  "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify.  USA demands the truth!"

This tweet immediately provoked more intense violence at the Capitol, and many of the rioters started chanting "Hang Mike Pence."

Counselor to the President Hope Hicks texted a colleague that evening: "Attacking the VP?  Wtf is wrong with him?"

At 4:17 p.m., Trump finally broadcast a video message asking those attacking the Capitol to leave.  He said: "I know your pain.  I know you're hurt.  We had an election that was stolen from us.  It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now.  We have to have peace."  As the words of this message spread through the rioters, they started to leave.

At 6:01 p.m., Trump sent his last tweet of the day, in which he tried to justify and even glorify the violence: "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred election landslide victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.  Go home with love & in peace.  Remember this day forever."

"Great patriots"?  "Remember this day forever"?

The day after the attack on the Capitol, Eastman called Eric Herschmann (a senior adviser to Trump) to talk about litigation for the Trump campaign in Georgia.  In response to questions from the Select Committee, Herschmann described his response to this: "And I said to him, are you out of your fucking mind?  Right?  I said, because I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth from now on: Orderly transition.  I said, I don't want to hear any other fucking words coming out of your mouth, no matter what, other than orderly transition.  Repeat those words to me."  

Before hanging up the phone, Herschmann offered one last remark: "Now I'm going to give you the best free legal advice you're ever getting in your life.  Get a great fucking criminal defense lawyer, you're going to need it."

Later, Eastman asked to be put on Trump's list of people to be pardoned.  But Trump did not pardon him.

FOR THE LACK OF GUTS AND GUNS

Trump's attempt to overturn the election and keep himself in power failed.  Why?

As I have argued previously, the answer is that Trump did not have the guts or the guns necessary for becoming a military dictator.  He didn't have the guns because military leaders like General Mark Milley told him and stated publicly that the American military would not obey unlawful orders from the President demanding military intervention in domestic politics.

In response to this, Trump could have declared martial law and then try to force the military to obey him.  But he didn't have the courage to do this.  Commentators who have identified Trump as a "strongman" are wrong.  He is a "weak man."  He doesn't have the martial virtues of a Caesar.

And it's good for America that he lacks these Machiavellian virtues. 

The Lockean Liberal Tradition in America: An Assessment of Arcenas's Intellectual History

In America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life, Claire Rydell Arcenas gives us a meticulous and comprehensive intellectual history of Locke's reception in America, from the early colonial period to the end of the twentieth century.  For that reason, anyone who wants to understand that history will have to study her book.  There are, however, some flaws in her reasoning.

Arcenas tries to prove that Locke's Second Treatise of Government did not create "the Lockean liberal tradition in America," as Louis Hartz famously called it.  To prove this, she makes three arguments.  First, she says the term "Lockean liberalism" is so vague as to be meaningless, and thus open to endless conflicting interpretations.  "By merging the adjective Lockean and liberalism," she claims, "Hartz exemplified the murkiness--and malleability--of the concept of Lockean liberalism, which he was among the first to put into words" (138).

Her second argument is that throughout most of American history prior to the middle of the twentieth century, Locke's Second Treatise was not very influential in America.  Even in those cases where we might assume the influence of the Second Treatise is clear--as in Thomas Jefferson's writing of the Declaration of Independence--Arcenas insists that we are mistaken.

Her third argument is that for most periods of American history, Locke's reception in America came not through Americans reading the Second Treatise, but through his other books that were more popular--particularly, The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, The Letter Concerning Toleration, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and The Reasonableness of Christianity.  Consequently, the political teaching of the Second Treatise was not very influential in America, at least prior to the middle of the twentieth century, because only then did Americans begin to identify Locke as primarily the author of the Second Treatise. 

I find all three of these arguments unpersuasive.

LOCKEAN LIBERALISM

First, does "Lockean liberalism" have any discernible meaning?  Of course, Locke himself did not use the term "liberalism," because this English word as a label for a moral and political idea did not come into use until sometime around 1820.  But if the word has any meaning, we can ask whether it applies to Locke's teaching.  And as Arcenas indicates, since the middle of the twentieth century, many scholars have defined liberalism in a way that seems to capture the core of Locke's teaching.

For example, in her book John Locke's Liberalism (1987), Ruth Grant identifies the "liberal premise" as the idea that "men are naturally free and equal" (66).  She explains liberal political theory as founded on this premise: "It takes its bearings from the thought that all men have an equal right to govern their actions as they see fit.  No man has an intrinsic or natural right to govern another.  In other words, men are equal in the sense that they are by nature free" (1).  Starting from this premise of the natural freedom and equality of all adult human beings, a liberal political theorist infers that no man can rightly rule over another man without that other man's consent.

Grant can then point to passages in the Two Treatises where Locke affirms this liberal premise.  Locke says that the natural condition of man is a "State of perfect Freedom" (FT, 67; ST, 4).  There is an "equal right that every Man hath, to his Natural Freedom, without being subjected to the Will or Authority of any other Man" (ST, 7, 54).  We can identify this as "Lockean liberalism," and we can then argue about whether Locke was right about this, and whether much of American political thought rests upon this Lockean idea.

Arcenas cites in an endnote of her book the work of Grant and other scholars who see Lockean liberalism as shaping the American political tradition (174n9).  But Arcenas never replies to their arguments.  She does this a lot--citing in her endnotes the work of scholars who would criticize her position but then never answering the criticisms.

THE SECOND TREATISE IN AMERICA

Arcenas begins her argument for minimizing the influence of Locke's Second Treatise in America by claiming that in early colonial America (from 1700 to 1760), there is almost no evidence that anyone read the Second Treatise, although they did read some of Locke's other books.  She sees only two pieces of evidence for the Second Treatise reaching colonial America during this time.  The first is a pamphlet by Elisha Williams published in 1744.  She summarizes this long pamphlet (over 60 pages) in one sentence: "Angry about the new limitations being placed on itinerant preachers in Connecticut, he paired the Letter Concerning Toleration with the Second Treatise and used them to demonstrate the 'essential rights and liberties of Protestants'" (27-28).  In one of her endnotes, she mentions a second reference to the Second Treatise by "Americano-Britannus" in the Maryland Gazette in 1748 (176n9).

There are many more cases of published references to the Second Treatise before 1760 about which Arcenas is totally silent.  For example, in 1701, John Montague quoted two long passages from the Second Treatise about "the Fundamental Principles and Ends of Government," and particularly about how the people established government by their consent to secure their property.  This may be the earliest appeal to Locke's ideas in British America--only twelve years after the publication of the Second Treatise in 1689.

Another example is in a pamphlet published in 1725, in which John Bulkley devoted about fifteen pages to quoting and paraphrasing "the Words of that Great Man Mr. Lock" in the Second Treatise about how "all Men are . . . Equal, Free & Independent & remain so till by Contracts" they establish a government to secure their natural rights.  So he affirmed the liberal premise.  Bulkley gave special attention to how Locke quoted from Josephus Acosta's anthropological report about the native Americans in the New World as evidence that the state of nature was a historical reality among the hunter-gatherers of America.  This explains Locke's famous claim that "in the beginning, all the world was America."  

This denies Arcenas's claim that the state of nature is an ahistorical fiction.  Americans had learned from Locke that his argument for natural rights in the state of nature is rooted in what he called "the history of mankind" (ST, 49, 100-112, 175; Essay, I.3.10; II.28.12).  In an endnote, Arcenas expresses her surprise that "observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not shy away from taking [the state of nature] literally, i.e., historically" (186n14).

In 1728, three years after Bulkley's pamphlet, Daniel Dulany wrote a pamphlet published in Maryland in which he quoted and paraphrased the Second Treatise, including Locke's declaration that the state of nature is "a State of Equality, wherein all Power and jurisdiction, is reciprocal; no one having more than another" (ST, 4).  Here's the liberal premise again.

In 1741, an article in the American Magazine--"Remarks on the Maryland Government and Constitution"--provides another example of someone quoting and paraphrasing the Second Treatise.  This author explained Locke's radical interpretation of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 as a reversion to the state of nature, in which the British People could establish a new government by their consent to secure their natural rights.

Although Arcenas mentions Elisha Williams's political sermon of 1744, she passes over it in one sentence; and thus she does not allow her reader to notice that Williams devoted about eight long pages to a detailed summary of the Second Treatise that began: "First, as to the origin--Reason teaches us that all men are naturally equal in respect of jurisdiction or dominion one over another.  Altho' true it is that children are not born in this full state of equality, yet they are born to it."  Once again, there's Locke's liberal premise.

Oddly, in her one sentence on Williams's sermon, Arcenas says that "he paired the Letter Concerning Toleration with the Second Treatise."  In fact, Williams never cites the Letter Concerning Toleration.  All of his citations are to the Second Treatise.

Once we move into the early American revolutionary period (1760-1776), the references to Locke's Second Treatise become so great that Arcenas has to concede that the authority of Locke's political teaching increased during this time, although it decreased dramatically following American independence.  Still, however, she tries to minimize this evidence of Locke's political influence in the revolutionary debates either by ignoring much of it, or by arguing that many of the references to the Second Treatise were actually distortions of Locke's teaching.

One example of her ignoring the evidence is that she is silent about James Otis's courtroom speech in Boston in 1761 in "Paxton's Case," even though John Adams identified this as the true beginning of the American Revolution.  Although Arcenas might justify her silence about this speech by noting that, as reported by Adams, there is no explicit reference to Locke, the speech does nevertheless echo the language of Locke's Second Treatise.

According to Adams's report, Otis began his speech with "a dissertation on the Rights of Man in a State of Nature."  What he said sounded like Locke's state of nature.  He began with the liberal premise: "He asserted that every Man, merely natural, was an independent Sovereign; Subject to no Law but the Law written on his heart, and revealed to him by his Maker in the Constitution of his Nature and the Inspiration of his Understanding and his Conscience.  His Right to his Life, his Liberty no created being could rightfully contest.  Nor was his Right to his Property less incontestable."

Notably, Otis applied this liberal principle of natural equality and liberty to include black Americans.  Adams reported: "Nor were the poor Negroes forgotten.  Not a Quaker in Philadelphia or Mr Jefferson of Virginia ever asserted the Rights of Negroes in Stronger Terms; Young as I was and ignorant as I was, I shuddered at the doctrine he taught.  And I have all my lifetime Shuddered, and Still Shudder at the Consequences that may be drawn from Such Premises.  Shall We Say that the Rights of Masters and Servants clash?  and can be decided only by Force?  I adore the Idea of Gradual Abolitions!  But who Shall decide how fast or how Slowly these Abolitions Shall be made? (Letter to William Tudor, June 1, 1818).  Of course, these questions have reverberated throughout American history as Americans have struggled to apply Lockean liberal principles of equal liberty to the problems of chattel slavery and racial inequality.

Otis made clear his reliance on Locke's Two Treatises in the pamphlets he wrote in the early 1760s.  In A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay (1762), Otis quoted extensively from the Two Treatises, including Locke's affirmation of the liberal premise: "The Natural Liberty of Man is to be free from any Superior Power on Earth, and not to be under the Will or Legislative Authority of Man, but to have only the Law of Nature for his Rule.  The Liberty of man, in Society, is to be under no other Legislative Power, but that established, by consent, in the Common-wealth" (ST, 22).  In The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), Otis once again cited Locke's Second Treatise extensively to support his argument for the rights of the American colonists.  He also suggested that the Lockean liberal premise of equal natural liberty must be extended to all human beings, including women and slaves.  He asked a radical question: "What man is or ever was born free, if every man is not?"

Arcenas recognizes Otis's references to Locke's Two Treatises in these two pamphlets.  But she argues that rather than showing the influence of Locke's political teaching on Otis, this actually shows how Otis had to distort and depart from Locke's teaching, because Otis actually rejected two fundamental principles of Locke's teaching.  He rejected Locke's idea that all government was originally created by a social compact.  And he rejected Locke's idea that in that social compact the people gave up or transferred their natural rights to the government.  I suggest, however, that Arcenas has not read Locke as carefully as Otis did, and that in fact Otis agreed with Locke on both of these points.

Arcenas correctly quotes Otis as saying in The Rights of the British Colonies that "government is . . . most evidently founded on the necessities of our nature," and therefore it is "by no means an arbitrary thing, depending merely on compact or human will for its existence."  If government is natural for human beings, it is not an artificial creation of human will.

But if Arcenas had compared everything Otis said about this with what Locke said in the Two Treatises, she would have seen that Otis agreed with what Locke said about human beings as naturally social animals who have a kind of "natural government" in the state of nature.

In his speech in "Paxton's Case," Otis said that in the state of nature, human beings would be "Social Animals by Nature," because their natural sexual desires would bring them together into families and their wider social desires would bring them into larger communities.  Similarly, in The Rights of the British Colonies, Otis spoke of how "the different sexes should sweetly attract each other, form societies of single families, of which larger bodies and communities are as naturally, mechanically, and necessarily combined," which would constitute a kind of "government . . . founded on the necessities of our nature."

Here Otis was echoing the language of Locke in the Two Treatises.  Like Otis, Locke identified human beings as social animals by nature because in the state of nature by the necessities of their nature, they live in families, which constitute "the first society," and within families, parents exercise a "natural Government," which is a "temporary government," over their minor children (ST, 67, 74-77, 105, 170).  In the state of nature, there are social networks of cooperation and exchange extending beyond the family that create communities.  This extended order of community is based on "promises and compacts" and on informal customary social norms that Locke identifies as the "law of nature."  These customary social norms are enforced through violent punishment (including capital punishment), reputational costs for those who violate the norms, and third-party mediation of disputes.  In the state of nature, every adult individual has the "executive power of the law of nature" to punish those who transgress the law of nature, where there is a "law of reputation" to enforce the law of nature through social praise and blame, and where disputes are often settled by those recognized as good mediators (ST, 6-14, 108; Essay, II.28.5-14).  

I have written previously about how Locke saw this in the state of nature in America from his reading of Jose de Acosta's report in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies.  We have seen that colonial Americans like Bulkley saw the importance of this.  In the Second Treatise (102), Locke quoted Acosta's claim that in America there were many societies with "no government at all" and "no kings," but with "captains" or "chiefs" that people chose to lead them when they needed leadership in war or peace.

It might seem confusing or even self-contradictory to say that while there was "no government at all," the people chose those who governed them.  But there's no contradiction if we understand "no government" to mean no centralized bureaucratic state in a hunter-gatherer society that does have some governance by leaders chosen by the people and a system of customary laws enforced by public approval and disapproval.

There is, therefore, a kind of government in the state of nature, although it's a government through informal social institutions and customs enforced by the social consensus of all the adult individuals, where there are no formal political institutions of law and governance.  As I have argued previously, the modern evolutionary anthropology of hunter-gatherer bands in "stateless societies" largely confirms Locke's account of the state of nature as the life of hunter-gatherers in societies governed by informal social institutions but without a centralized state apparatus.

Thus, Locke distinguished the "society" of individuals in the state of nature, where every adult individual has the power to enforce the law of nature, and "political society," where the community has consented to give the power of natural punishment to the officers in a formal legal and political structure (ST, 77, 87).  The first step towards establishing a "political society," Locke suggests, might have been when individual adults expressly or tacitly consented to delegate their natural power of punishment to their fathers: "since without some Government it would be hard for them to live together, it was likeliest it should, by the express or tacit Consent of the Children, when they were grown up, be in the Father, where it seemed without any change barely to continue; when indeed nothing more was required to it, than the permitting the Father to exercise alone in his Family that executive Power of the Law of Nature, which every Free-man naturally hath, and by that permission resigning up to him a Monarchical Power, whilst they remained in it" (74).

Thus, Locke would have agreed with Otis "that government is founded on the necessity of our natures," but Locke would distinguish between two kinds of government.  On the one hand, there is government in natural societies in the state of nature with informal institutions enforced by individuals exercising their natural right of punishment.  On the other hand, there is government in political societies where individuals have consented to give up their natural right of punishment to the formal institutions of law and politics, so long as that power to punish is exercised to secure their natural rights for the public good.

But here Arcenas sees another contradiction between Locke and Otis:  "Otis was interested in the preservation of natural rights in political society, while Locke stressed that rights had to be given up--that is relinquished or transferred" (35).  To support this claim, she correctly quotes Locke as explaining that those leaving "a state of Nature unite into a Community, must be understood to give up all the power, necessary to the ends for which they unite into Society, to the majority of the Community" (ST, 99).

In saying this, however, Arcenas ignores Otis's quotations from the Second Treatise that show that Locke understood that people "give up" their natural power to punish to government with the "trust" that government will use this power to "preserve" or "secure" their natural rights.  "The Reason why Men enter into Society, is the preservation of their Property."  Consequently, if the government acts "contrary to that trust reposed in them" in trying to destroy the natural rights of the people, "by this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty, and by the Establishment of a new Legislature (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own Safety and Security, which is the end for which they are in Society" (ST, 222).  Thus, Locke argued that people give up their natural power of punishing to government only to the extent that, and only so long as, this serves to preserve their natural rights.

Elisha Williams saw this in Locke--that, as Williams said, "no more natural liberty or power is given up than is necessary for the preservation of person and property," and therefore, "the members of a civil state or society do retain their natural liberty in all such cases as have no relation to the ends of such a society in a state of nature."  And so, for example, as Williams argued, "the members of a civil society do retain their natural liberty or right of judging for themselves in matters of religion."  That's Locke's argument in his Letter Concerning Toleration.  (I have written a post on the evolution of religious liberty in the state of nature.)

We should also notice that there are three circumstances in which Locke believed that people "have a Right to resume their original Liberty."  Two of them arise inside a society.  One arises outside a society.  If individuals leave their society and renounce their loyalty to it, then they are free to consent to join another society (ST, 118-22). And even as they live within their society, in those cases where they might be threatened by an attack on their life, liberty, or property, and there is no chance to call for protection by the officers of government, then they revert momentarily to a state of nature, and they have the right to protect themselves by punishing those threatening them.  So, for example, this would include the right of killing in self-defense (ST, 19).

Finally, when the people see a design for their government to assume an arbitrary power to tyrannize over the people, they have a right to resist and to rebel against the government, and to institute a new government that will secure their natural rights (ST, 214-43).  This sounds so much like the American Declaration of Independence that many Americans have seen echoes of Locke's Second Treatise in the Declaration.  

But Arcenas insists this is not true.  She rejects what she calls "the central myth of the American Revolution"--that the Declaration shows the influence of Locke's political teaching in the Second Treatise.  A few weeks ago, I wrote a post noting that Arcenas is silent about the many verbal echoes of the language of the Second Treatise, which illustrates how she uses deceptive silence throughout her book.

She is correct, however, when she says that public references to Locke decreased after 1776 and during the constitutional founding, because in the debates over the forming of constitutions in America, authors like Montesquieu and Blackstone seemed more helpful than Locke, who was better at stating the principles of good government than he was in stating the constitutional design of government.

Even though there were few direct references to Locke in the constitutional founding debates, Lockean principles can be seen both in the Constitution of 1787 as ratified in 1789 and in the Constitution of 1791 with the first ten amendments.  The structure of the new national government as organized around three separate branches--legislative, executive, judicial--conforms to Locke's account of these three separate powers, with the legislative power being supreme (ST, 124-26, 132-42).  The amended Constitution with its Bill of Rights manifested the Lockean principle that the end of government is to secure individual rights, and it implicitly incorporated the Lockean political philosophy of the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution.  I have written about this in a previous post.

After 1800, when Jefferson was first elected President, there was a lot of discussion of Locke's influence on Jefferson, particularly in his writing of the Declaration of Independence, which continued over the last 25 years of Jefferson's life (1801-1826).  Some of Jefferson's critics in the Federalist Party said that he should not be praised as the primary author of the Declaration because he had copied much of it from Locke's Second Treatise.  Some of his defenders in the Republican Party responded by saying that there was nothing wrong in borrowing some words and principles from a great political philosopher like Locke.  Notice that both sides in this debate agreed that Locke's influence on Jefferson's writing of the Declaration was clear.

Perhaps to settle this debate, Jefferson near the end of his life tried to explain his writing of the Declaration: "Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.  All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c" (Letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825).

As Roger Weightman, the mayor of Washington, D.C., was planning the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1826, he wrote a letter to Jefferson inviting him to attend.  In what became his last letter, Jefferson wrote that his bad health would prevent him from attending.  He then wrote about the promise to all mankind opened by the Declaration:

"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.  That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.  All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.  The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God" (Letter to Weightman, June 24, 1826).

Amazingly, while the people in Washington and across America were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, on July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two of the leading drafters of the Declaration, died on that same day.  (I must say I have often wondered whether Jefferson and Adams secretly planned this, because it's just too good.)

So Jefferson saw the Declaration of Independence as "an expression of the American mind," particularly in the idea of "the rights of man" as founded on equal natural liberty; and he saw Locke as one of those influential authors who wrote about this idea.  Brad Thompson sums up all of this in a syllogism:

Major premise:  The Declaration of Independence is an expression of the American mind.

Minor premise:  America's revolutionary mind was an expression of Locke's political philosophy.

Conclusion:  The Declaration of Independence was an expression of Locke's mind.

(C. Bradley Thompson, "John Locke and the American Mind," American Political Thought [Fall 2019]: 575-93.)

Looking at Jefferson's letters, we can see one problem with Thompson's syllogism: according to Jefferson, Locke's mind was not the only mind that influenced the writing of the Declaration.  The American mind was shaped "in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.," all of which led to the liberal idea of "the rights of man."  If Jefferson was right, then Locke was important in the formation of the American mind, but only in combination with other philosophic writers and with many American speakers and writers.

This confirms what Michael Zuckert and a few other scholars have said about Locke as contributing to an "American Amalgam":  Locke's mind is a prominent influence, but only in combination with other minds, in forming the American mind as founded on the political philosophy of natural rights. 

As I indicated in my previous post, Arcenas is silent about all of this discussion among Jefferson's contemporaries of Locke's influence on Jefferson, particularly as manifested in the Declaration of Independence.  This is important for her argument.  Because denying the Lockean character of the Declaration of Independence then allows her to assume that whatever power the Declaration had over American political thought was not in any way a vehicle for advancing Locke's political principles in America.  So when she comes to the nineteenth century, she can say that there were few direct references to Locke's political teaching; and she can ignore the possibility that a lot of Lockean political thinking was introduced indirectly through the debates over the Declaration of Independence as a statement of American political principles.

So, for example, she can deny that Locke's thinking had any influence in the American debates over abolitionism and slavery, even though the opponents of slavery commonly appealed to the principles of the Declaration.  She does have to admit, however, that many of the proslavery apologists recognized that "Locke threatened to undermine efforts to develop intellectual justifications for slavery because his most famous thought experiments--the state of nature and social contract, articulated in the Second Treatise--emphasized the idea (catastrophic to their pro-slavery arguments) that men were born equal" (81).  But she does not allow her reader to see any of the evidence that the proslavery Southerners recognized that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were rooted in Locke's political philosophy, and therefore their attack on the Declaration had to be an attack on Locke.

For example, George Fitzhugh, in his Sociology for the South, or The Failure of Free Society (1854), says that the "abstract principles" of the Declaration of Independence are "wholly at war with slavery," and they are rooted in the "false philosophy" of Locke (175).  Fitzhugh scorns the principles of equal liberty in the Declaration as contrary to the natural fact that human beings are born unequal, and some are born to be natural slaves.  He explains:

"Men are not 'born entitled to equal rights!'  It would be far nearer the truth to say, 'that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,' and the riding does them good.  They need the reins, the bit and the spur.  No two men are exactly equal or exactly alike" (179)

In 1866, he said that the conflict in the United States between the North and the South was a continuation of the debate in seventeenth-century England between John Locke and Sir Robert Filmer.  The radical North was on the side of the Whigs and Locke.  The conservative South was on the side of the Tories and Filmer ("The Impending Fate of the Country," De Bow's Review 2 [1866]: 561-70).

In her three sentences on Fitzhugh (81, 204n130), Arcenas is silent about this, because she wants to play down the importance of Locke's political thought in the Second Treatise as expressed in the Declaration of Independence as being part of the debate over slavery and abolition.

Arcenas does finally recognize the influence of Locke's Second Treatise in America when she comes to the twentieth century.  She sees here four transformations in Locke's role in American intellectual life.  First, from 1900 to 1930, scholars began to identify Locke as primarily a political thinker and the author of the Second Treatise.  Second, Locke's Second Treatise began to be seen as relevant to present-day problems that people were trying to solve.  Third, scholars began to emphasize Locke's apparent influence on the American founding.  Fourth, as a consequence of these three transformations, Locke's Second Treatise and his "Lockean liberalism" were seen as the pervasive political teaching of the  continuous stream of the American political tradition from the eighteenth century to the present.

Arcenas fills in this story with accounts of how scholars, journalists, politicians, and popular culture have contributed to this twentieth-century story of Locke as America's political philosopher.  Charles Beard, Carl Becker, Merle Curti, the Great Books Program at St. John's College, Life magazine, Louis Hartz, Hubert Humphrey, Leo Strauss, Willmoore Kendall, Allan Bloom, Gordon Wood, J. G. A. Pocock and many more contributors to the story come into play.  She concludes her book with a comparison of John Rawls's Theory of Justice (1971) and Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) as showing two sides of Locke's Second Treatise, with Rawls arguing for a version of the social contract, and Nozick arguing for natural rights in the state of nature.

It's disappointing that she ends her story in the 1970s.  It would have been instructive for her to carry her story into twenty-first century America.  For example, she could have considered the debate over Locke launched by "post-liberal" and "Integralist" critics of Lockean liberalism in America--people like Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, and D. C. Schindler--and by those on the new reactionary Right--people like Curtis Yarvin and "Bronze Age Pervert."  This is all part of the renewed debate today between Lockean liberalism and anti-Lockean illiberalism.

In any case, most of what she says about the various ways in which interpretations of Locke's Second Treatise deeply shaped American intellectual life in the twentieth century is persuasive.  But, for the reasons I have indicated, I am still not persuaded that she has shown that Locke's political philosophy had very little influence in most periods of American history prior to the middle of the twentieth century.

BEYOND THE SECOND TREATISE?

I am persuaded, however, that Arcenas has shown that for most of American history prior to the twentieth century, Locke's greatest influence came through books other than the Second Treatise--particularly, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the Letter Concerning Toleration, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, The Reasonableness of Christianity, and A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul.  For me, this is the most instructive feature of her book.

But I don't see how this proves her primary claim that Locke's political teaching had little influence in America prior to the twentieth century.  Her argument here depends on the false assumption that Locke's books other than the Second Treatise do not convey anything about his political teaching.

Many of the scholars that Arcenas relies on have pointed out that all of Locke's books convey some facets of his political thought, so that readers of Locke's books other than the Second Treatise would learn a lot about his political philosophy.  For example, she has drawn a lot from Merle Curti's "The Great Mr. Locke, America's Philosopher, 1783-1861" (1937).  But she says nothing about the fact that Curti indicates that Locke's "liberal" ideas appear in all of the books that Americans read (see Curti, 111, 115, 119-21, 131, 134-35, 151).  If she thinks Curti is wrong about this, she should explain why.

Similarly, Arcenas gives an account of Leo Strauss's interpretation of Locke's political teaching.  But she does not notice that Strauss's study of Locke's political thought in Natural Right and History cites not only the Two Treatises, but also the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and The Reasonableness of Christianity.

Consider the case of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration.  Arcenas emphasizes the importance of this book as one of the most widely read of Locke's books.  But she doesn't notice that much of this book summarizes the political teaching of the Second Treatise.  One of many possible examples is the passage of Toleration where Locke speaks of how men must leave the state of nature and enter into a society and establish a legislative power that will secure their life, liberty, and properties (see Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Mark Goldie [Liberty Fund, 2010], 46-47).

My conclusion from all of this is that Arcenas's book is an indispensable history of America's reception of Locke, but her attempt to minimize the influence in America of Locke's political thought fails.