Order from Chaos

Well, finally, here it is folks. The long awaited long-form essay that I’ve been promising for weeks. My apologies for the delay in getting this essay to you, but I think you’ll understand, and, hopefully, appreciate my tardiness. I also hope you’ll consider trading value for value and become a paid subscriber.

Pre-revolutionary, eighteenth-century American society was governed from the top down by a semi-aristocratic ruling elite based on hierarchical values such as inequality, authority, faith, obedience, privilege, deference, dependency, virtue, and reverence. Much of colonial American culture (particularly in the South) imitated the manners and mores of the English gentry, and local leaders modeled their behavior after their counterparts in England. Colonial American society was held together by an aristocracy of virtue (or so they thought of themselves) that claimed to rule in the name of the “common good.”

By contrast, post-revolutionary American society (both ante- and post-bellum) was unlike anything the world had ever seen before or since. No society in world history had been or would be as free as nineteenth-century America (at least in the non-slaveholding North). Ordinary Americans rarely felt the long arm of government power reach down to their lives. The sphere of freedom experienced by individuals in the United States bore an inverse relationship to the size, scope, and power of government. American freedom was expansive precisely because the government’s role in the lives of individuals was weak and strictly limited. Individuals in this new society were regarded by the law as separate, autonomous beings whose rights trumped notions of the common good.

These competing eighteenth-century visions on the role of government in a free society came to a head in the early 1790s when Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson engaged in a very public debate on the degree to which the national government should control and regulate the economy.

Hamilton versus Jefferson

In his “Opinion on the Constitutionality of the Bank” (1791) and his “Report on Manufactures” (1791), Hamilton laid out a view of government which assumed that bright fellows like himself could manage the economy from the top down. In his “Opinion on the Constitutionality of the Bank,” Hamilton interpreted the Constitution broadly and liberally such that “every power vested in the government is in its nature sovereign, and includes, by force of the term, a right to employ all the means requisite and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power.” Hamilton viewed the “end” of government as interpreted via the Constitution’s “General Welfare” clause in the broadest terms possible, which then also gave him the license to interpret the “means” of government via the “necessary and proper” clause (Article I, section 8) as liberally as possible.

So too with his “Report on Manufactures,” which proposed a national economic policy that would control, manipulate, promote, subsidize, and jump start new manufacturing in the United States. Along the way, Hamilton’s plan sought to direct the division of labor, the use of machinery in manufacturing, the labor force, emigration from foreign countries, entrepreneurial talent, the “spirit of enterprise,” and agricultural produce. He rejected the idea that the economy could or should follow the “natural course of things” for a policy that would use, in his words, “force and art, to transfer the natural current of industry” from one sector to another.

Hamilton was the inheritor of a kind of modernized mercantilism that rejected the Smithian idea that commerce might regulate itself as a “wild speculative paradox.” In the seventh essay of The Federalist, Hamilton cautioned against what he called the “unbridled” spirit of enterprise, which he feared would not “pay much respect to those regulations of trade by which particular States might endeavor to secure exclusive benefits to their own citizens.” Americans, Hamilton wrote in his “Report on Manufactures,” had a “certain fermentation of mind, a certain activity of speculation and enterprise which if properly directed may be made subservient to useful purposes; but which if left entirely to itself, may be attended with pernicious effects.” Note that Hamilton did not trust the American people to direct their own economic affairs, and he clearly believed that the economy should be controlled and directed by those who knew what the “common good” was.

Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the role of government in American society was radically different from Hamilton’s. Jefferson feared that Hamilton’s economic nationalism would produce a new, artificial aristocracy in America that would mimic the aristocracy of the Old World. Jefferson, in contrast to Hamilton, offered Americans a strict or minimalist interpretation of the Constitution and its powers. He interpreted the “General Welfare” to be the sum of ends stated in the Preamble to the Constitution (i.e., “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense . . . and to secure the Blessings of Liberty”), and he interpreted the “necessary and proper” clause to mean that the national government had the power to promote only those powers clearly listed in Article I, section 8. Beyond that, it shall not go.

Jefferson, in other words, interpreted the Constitution to be a laissez-faire constitution, i.e., one strictly limited to promoting justice, peace, and defense. Jefferson’s clearest statement about the role of government in a free society was stated most eloquently in his “First Inaugural Address” delivered in 1801. Jefferson there laid bare his vision of the relationship between the individual and government as follows:

a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.

Jefferson then enunciated fourteen political principles that he described as the “creed” of America’s “political faith” and the “text of civic instruction.” The principles included:

1.     “Equal and exact justice to all men”;

2.     “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none”;

3.     “support of the State governments in all their rights”;

4.     “preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor”;

5.     “jealous care of the right of election by the people”;

6.     “absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority”;

7.     “a well disciplined militia”;

8.     “supremacy of the civil over the military authority”;

9.     “economy in the public expense”;

10.  ‘honest payment of our debts, and sacred preservation of the public faith”;

11.  “encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaiden”;

12.  “diffusion of information and arrangement of all abuses at the bar of the public reason”;

13.  “freedom of religion”;

14.  Freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.

For the next fifty years or so, Jefferson’s political philosophy gained the upper hand in the United States, and, for the most part, set the tone for how Americans typically viewed and experienced government in their lives day to day. (Hamilton’s political philosophy was reborn with the Progressives in the early twentieth century and has clearly dominated American political life for the last 120 years.) The Jeffersonians celebrated the idea of a free society, where the individual would be largely left alone to build and live his or her life as they wanted. As a result, Jefferson’s administration cut the cost and size of government, the national debt was retired, direct taxes on American citizens were eliminated, free trade was pursued, and the revenues from trade duties were applied to internal improvements such as roads and canals.

Government in this rapidly expanding society was, for the most part, limited to its proper function of protecting the rights of individuals (as determined by the principles of the Declaration of Independence), which meant that American citizens barely felt the existence of the federal government in their lives day-to-day. In fact, the government in Washington, DC, was mostly Lillipution in size and scope. Between 1789 and 1840, the national government barely grew at all. In 1790, there were only four executive departments (i.e., War, Navy, State, and Treasury), and by 1840 that number remained unchanged. There were of course serious exceptions to the Americans’ rule of freedom (e.g., slavery), but certainly the non-slaveholding parts of America were unprecedently free and even in those places where slavery existed most ordinary, non-slaveholding people (i.e., the vast majority of the population) experienced hitherto unknown levels of freedom.

Chaos and Social Disequilibrium

The large spheres of freedom fostered by America’s laissez-faire constitution encouraged new levels of production, trade, and competition in the United States. The new commercial republic that was developing in the United States on the basis of economic freedom was fast dissolving the traditional dependencies that had formerly existed between the different social orders of men in colonial America. More fundamentally, post-revolutionary America’s market economy was driven by a new motive power drawn from within each person: the self-propelling power of self-interest combined with free choice and freedom of action. Men would now associate and deal with each other based not on serving the common good but on recognizing that each person had a moral right to purse his or her individual self-interest. No society in world history hitherto was grounded in the power of individual self-interest.

This modern conception of self-interest assumed that all men had the capacity for not only for rational decision-making but also for virtue and community building. Rational men pursuing their self-interest rightly understood realized the importance of living a life of strict moral rectitude, particularly via the virtues of frugality and industry. Liberated from the restrictions of old-world forms and formalities, post-revolutionary Americans were now free to seek self-improvement and self-fulfillment. The result was the breakdown and falling away of traditional ways of life and social organization.

Not surprisingly, the hustle and bustle of America’s newly emerging liberal society in the early nineteenth century was disorienting to some Americans and to many newcomers to the United States. This new country seemed to have no organizing principle to hold it all together. There was no Church, no Pope, no aristocracy, no king, and no State; nor was there a thousand years of inherited customs and folkways to hold society together. Freedom, individualism, and self-interest seemed to produce centrifugal forces in American society that, to some at least, seemed to tear at the traditional social fabric.

Take Charles Nisbet, for instance, a recent immigrant from Scotland, who observed a few months before the meeting of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that a “new world”—what he derisively characterized as an Epicurean world—had emerged out of the Revolution, which, he complained, “is unfortunately composed . . . of discordant atoms, jumbled together by chance, and tossed by inconstancy in an immense vacuum” that “greatly wants a principle of attraction and cohesion.” Nisbet, and many others like him, could only see fragmentation without cohesion and chaos without order. They simply could not make sense of a world that was no longer held together by the traditional forms and formalities of the Puritan-monarchical State or the republic of classical virtue.

America’s post-founding experiment with a free society was therefore confronted by one simple question: what would hold it all together?

How, asked The United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1837, could the “collision of sentiments and particular interests” common to a free society be “adjusted as to secure a mutual respect of rights, to preserve harmony and good will, and save society from the malum extremum Discordia [the worst of the discord], from being as a house divided against itself.”

The Americans were heading into completely unchartered territory morally, socially, economically, and politically and it worried some people. If kings, aristocrats, and a government-sponsored religious orthodoxy were out, what was to prevent this free, diverse, rootless, restless, driving, ambitious, self-regarding, and profit-seeking society from imploding or becoming a Hobbesian state of nature? Put differently, if there were no top-down mastermind or corps of social engineers guiding or controlling individual human actions, what would prevent society from flying off its axis and spinning out of its orbit?

The New American Society

America’s best post-founding and nineteenth-century thinkers knew that no single human mind or brain trust of several “philosophic” minds could master all the parts of society and therefore control the whole of society. They took the proposition that a complex society is capable of rational control as the ultimate intellectual conceit—a hubristic conceit that had plagued philosophical, theological, and political thinking for centuries. They rejected the assumption that it was possible, necessary, and good to master the totality of all social and economic processes.

This new generation of American thinkers rejected entirely the traditional presumption that an “intellectual” or political aristocracy could know how to rule society and direct it toward a particular end. They did not think it possible for government officials to foresee all the effects of an infinite variety of human actions, which is why they thought government officials should never attempt to control and regulate the overall design and order of society. Early nineteenth-century American liberals believed that it was neither possible nor desirable for the ruling class to deliberately control the complex workings of society.

This new generation of American thinkers knew that society and culture are complex phenomena that cannot be fully known or mastered. Society represents the people who live in a shared geographical district, and culture represents the inherited manners and mores of a particular society or of various subgroups within society. Society and culture are too complex and have too many moving parts to master. The best that could be done was to establish general rules of justice (i.e., the application of man’s natural rights to a myriad of concrete situations) that would in turn aid and abet the formation of natural, free, and spontaneous socio-cultural orders.

To that end, America’s most enlightened revolutionary and post-revolutionary thinkers searched for, discovered, and then employed previously unknown or underdeveloped natural forces that would, like Sir Isaac Newton’s unseen gravitational forces and Adam Smith’s invisible hand, order and hold together millions of freely thinking and acting individuals without flying off into moral chaos and social disorder.

This new social order was most clearly seen in the Americans’ economic actions and relations. The free enterprise system that developed in the years of the early republic defied the traditional understanding of the relationship between government and society. America’s post-revolutionary economy was largely left alone by meddling politicians and did not require government direction or coercion, and yet natural and orderly patterns of association seemed to develop therefrom.

This natural system of coordinated economic association seemed to resemble the operation of the physical universe in that it followed lawlike regularities. The idea of the economy working as a natural and orderly system invisibly producing social harmony cut against the grain of two-thousand years of moral, social, and political thought.

But what was the ordering mechanism of this natural system of autonomous individuals acting to promote their own interests? How could the pursuit of individual self-interest lead to social order and harmony?

E Pluribus Unum

In 1825, Charles Stewart Daveis, a lawyer and politician from Maine, delivered an address on “Popular Government” in which he noted that America’s constitutional founders had developed a revolutionary political and socio-economic system grounded in and connected to the “order of nature” that was held together by a “gravitating principle to bind and preserve its members in their spheres,” and which “serves to remedy any irregularity of their planetary motions.” This natural social-political system could only exist and follow the “order of nature” if the “machine of government” were not encumbered “with new contrivances to obviate partial and accidental inconveniences.” The proper role of government in a free society was, Daveis contended, to remove “gradually and silently” (as though by a Night Watchman) “the obstacles which disturb” the natural system of liberty.

The general operating structure of social life in a free society is determined by the discovery and implementation of certain moral laws and rules of conduct, the purpose of which is to leave men free to pursue a panoply of sometimes competing and sometimes complementary interests. Such a state of freedom allows all men to use their particular knowledge in particular situations for their own particular ends such that, in the words of Adam Smith, “every man, so long as he does not violate the laws of justice” may be “left perfectly free to pursue his own interests in his own way.” The result of free men acting within the rules of justice is the formation of a spontaneous social order that is self-organizing and self-maintaining.

The gravitational principle that held society together was the doctrine of individual or natural rights, which gave maximal freedom to all individuals but nevertheless kept the social system ordered. America’s laissez-faire political, social, and economic system—a system that seemed disordered and chaotic to some—had built into it various self-organizing, self-generating, and “self-repairing resources” if only left alone (e.g., the social equivalent of the price system in the economy), according to Daveis. He understood that the self-interested, free action of individuals is the necessary condition that makes possible the self-ordering and self-correcting forces of society. Natural society will develop a complex network of practices and rules of conduct that bind people together over time, but which will fall away if they are not salutary. Daveis saw this endogenous social order as finding its own level of natural equilibrium without the need for exogenous controls. Private property, contracts, the rule of law, and social trust served core functions in developing and maintaining the spontaneously ordering forces of civil society.

The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (under the editorship of John O’Sullivan) announced that from a new kind of “‘golden rule’”—what it called the “voluntary principle” or “the principle of freedom”—would issue a kind of spontaneous order and “human society” that would work out the “best possible general result of order and happiness from the chaos of characters, ideas, motives, and interests.” Just as the natural scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had discovered the universal laws of physical nature, so now a generation of moral and social scientists in the nineteenth century were discovering new moral and social laws by which to organize and govern society naturally (i.e., without unjust State coercion). The aim of these moral-legal laws and rights of nature (i.e., the rules of just conduct) was to ascertain and draw boundaries around and between the actions of different individuals so that they could not interfere with each other but still have the freedom and incentive to associate with others for common ends.

In 1837, O’Sullivan summed up rather quite brilliantly how these newly discovered social laws of nature operate in practice. The extraordinary thing about these new moral and social laws of nature is just how simple they were, and yet they invisibly organized millions of people into a complex but harmonious system of association. According to O’Sullivan, these newly discovered social laws of nature “[a]fford but the single nucleus of a system of administration of justice between man and man, and, under the sure operation of this principle, the floating atoms will distribute and combine themselves, as we see in the beautiful natural process of crystallization, into a far more perfect and harmonious result than if government, with its ‘fostering hand,’ undertake to disturb, under the plea of directing, the process.”

As applied to society, O’Sullivan’s “process of crystallization” meant that the separate and free actions of diverse individuals would, rather than colliding, invariably result in the interaction and coming together of innumerable people based on self-interest, thereby forming an overall social order. The natural social order would arise spontaneously when each element (i.e., individual) of society joined with others to combine and balance their actions. This natural process was, in the words of the Scottish philosopher and historian, Adam Ferguson, “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

What O’Sullivan was describing here via analogy (i.e., the process of crystallization) was that in a free society governed only by an operating structure of general laws of justice (i.e., laws that protect the equal rights of all), regular patterns of social order would form naturally as separate individuals voluntarily obeyed common rules and combined with others to achieve common ends. The spontaneously coordinating, adapting, and ordering forces described by O’Sullivan utilized the separate and distinct knowledge of large numbers of discrete individuals who were brought together by virtue of their self-interest, commonly shared values, and collaboration. The socio-legal rules that people followed need not be studied as much as observed and imitated.

O’Sullivan further described and evaluated how these social laws of nature worked in practice:

The natural laws which establish themselves find their own level are the best laws. The same hand was the Author of the moral, as of the physical world; and we feel clear and strong in the assurance that we cannot err in trusting, in the former, to the same fundamental principles of spontaneous action and self-regulation which produce the beautiful order of the latter.

The best thinkers of the post-revolutionary generation did not believe that cultural institutions are, or should be, the product of meddling or deliberate design. In fact, quite the opposite. They thought that government intervention into man’s moral, social, and economic affairs had the unintended consequence of disordering their moral, social, and economic relations, whereas the natural system of association was governed by unseen laws that brought order and symmetry out of seeming chaos. Culture is a spontaneous order that can’t be created or fixed from the top down other than by getting out of the way.

By creating a legal system, the simple purpose of which was to administer justice, the government of a free society should otherwise “leave all the business and interest of society to themselves, to free competition and association; in a word, to the voluntary principle.” Thus, the great insight of the sons and grandsons of the generation of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison was to discover that there were self-regulating moral and social laws of nature that could be, like the laws of the physical universe, discovered in the “great bible of Nature” and harnessed to benevolent ends. And just as the founding generation developed a new science of politics, so their progeny developed a new science of society.

When the founders created America’s constitutional republic, they adopted “Nature as the best guide,” not only in creating a laissez-faire constitution and government, but also in organizing the kind of society and economy that emanated from this system. The American way of life developed out of the “silent and slow operation of great principles [e.g., the ‘voluntary principle’ and the precept ‘Festina lente’—i.e., ‘to make haste slowly’], without the convulsions of too rapid action.” Out of the laissez-faire principle emerged a spontaneous social order that was governed by its own laws of action and association. These simple social laws of nature, like Newton’s laws of physical nature, took several millennia for the best minds of Western civilization to discover, understand, and implement.

From seeming chaos came symmetry, and out of freedom came harmony. But how? How could a society based on individual self-interest and freedom cohere as a peaceful, just, and productive society? What was the gravitational force that held a society of self-interested individuals together? The simple truth of the matter is that nothing like this had ever been seen before. Such an idea cut against the grain of two-thousand years of human civilization. So, what were the deeper and unseen principles, laws, and moral-social-legal mechanisms that tied America’s free and individualistic society together?

Individual Rights as a Social Ordering Mechanism

The founding generation’s first-level solution to the order, cohesion, cooperation, and coordination problem was to institute a new kind of republican society built on the moral principle of individual rights. (I shall soon produce another essay on another critically important foundational principle that was necessary to the well-functioning of America’s nineteenth-century free society, namely, the principle of trust.)

For America’s best revolutionary and post-revolutionary thinkers, the “rights of nature” were moral-legal rules or principles that served three primary social functions:  first, they defined the social conditions necessary for man’s well-being (i.e., freedom, peace, and order); second, they sanctioned and protected spheres of freedom for individuals interacting with one another in society (i.e., by creating moral-legal metes and bounds); and, third, they served as a moral-social ordering mechanism (i.e., by an invisible hand that channels human action in individually and socially useful ways).

As a legal principle, rights serve as a kind of social lubricant that greases the wheels of human interaction. In this sense, you might say of rights that they establish moral-legal buffer zones between individuals in their relations with each other and between individuals in their relations with the government. This understanding of rights was particularly true for the right to property. The legal recognition, implementation, and enforcement of “rights” provided a mechanism by which civil society could distinguish mine from thine and thus diminish a primary source of social conflict.

When the legislators and judges of a free society translate the abstract doctrine of the moral laws and rights of nature into practice, they are in effect producing non-teleological rules (i.e., rules that point society toward a collective end) that shall govern the general conduct of individuals toward each other. These general rules will create protected spheres of freedom around innumerable individuals that apply to innumerable instances of social action and relations. One important result of such rules is that they make the social actions of the various members of society predictable. If the separate individuals of a society can observe and live by common manners and mores, the groundwork will have been laid for orderly social relations.

Seeing the Unseen

Let us return to our beginning. Not surprisingly, not all immigrants to post-revolutionary America saw the same chaos and social disorder that Charles Nisbet feared and claimed to see in 1787 (see above). Indeed, quite the opposite.

When Frances “Fanny” Wright arrived in America from Scotland a generation after Charles Nisbet, she saw a different world than her older Scottish compatriot. In her 1821 travelogue Views of Society and Manners in America, Wright noted that only philosophic statesmen such as those who designed the American Constitution could have foreseen how “order might grow out of chaos, and a people guide themselves, evenly and calmly, without the check of any controlling power, other than that administered by the collision of their own interests balanced against each other.” Nisbet’s warnings about the instability of American society were proven false by reality.

A new society emerged in America unlike anything known before or since.

Over against all the moral huffing and puffing, the liberation of individual self-interest and the pursuit of happiness did not lead to civilizational Sodom and Gomorrah. It turns out that ordinary folk did not need their social superiors, priests, or government officials to tell them anymore how to live productive, peaceful, and virtuous lives. Shockingly, to some at least, they could figure that out for themselves. The moral laws of nature would punish them when they got it wrong and reward them when they got it right. Because eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans respected reason and were given the freedom to think, they quickly figured out how to live good, prosperous, and morally virtuous lives.

In 1793, Samuel Latham Mitchell exuberantly exclaimed that ordinary men and women were forging a new nation out of the wilderness. In his “Oration before the Society of Black Friars,” Mitchell described what was happening in America: “Large tracts of land which two or three years past were nothing more than an uncultivated wilderness now teem with vegetation, nurtured by the industrious hand of agriculture. The axe of the husbandman has made bare the forest, and fields of grain supply the place of lofty trees. In short the face of nature throughout every part of that district has a much more pleasant appearance, and gives us an idea of the future greatness of this young but rising empire.”

Twenty-two years after Mitchell’s tribute to life in the new America, Hezekiah Niles summed up quite nicely the existential consequences of the American Revolution. The new “NATIONAL CHARACTER,” he observed, was now defined by the self-made man. “Everywhere,” Niles reported, “the sound of the axe is heard opening the forest to the sun. . . . Our cities grow and towns rise up by magic. . . . The busy hum of ten thousand wheels fills our seaports, and the sound of the spindle and loom succeeds the yell of the savage or screech of the night owl in the late wilderness of the interior.” In America, Niles concluded, “industry is rewarded, and enterprise walks forth unrestrained—and the people are free.”

In conclusion, allow me to return to the idea of America as a “regime,” which I have written about in several previous essays (see here, here, here, here, and here). To the extent that the concept “regime” can be applied to the United States of America, what I have described above is what the American regime looked like. Its laissez-faire constitution created, in effect, an anti-regime, regime! Without government coercion and with freedom, the American people developed a way of life that was unique to them—a way of life that promoted a new kind of moral man—a self-governing moral man superior to the best of ancient Greece and Rome!

Have a great week!