Man1
All theories rest on underlying assumptions about the nature of Man2 that lie along an “intellectual spectrum” traditionally portrayed from right to left as conservative, liberal, and radical.
The three divide into an almost infinite number of specific schools of thought, like a color wheel progressing almost imperceptibly from one shade to the next, with borrowings among them that makes it hard to keep things straight.3 To complicate matters further, the terms have changed meaning across time and place, so that they do not always translate well into modern American political usage. The following discussion describes the main assumptions of conservatives, liberals, and radicals, a seminal or famous thinker for each, and the explanation each gives for the existence of war.Conservatives assume Man is fallible. Passion, materialism, and vanity can overwhelm common sense, decency, and morality. Thomas Hobbes is the seminal conservative thinker. His Leviathan, one of the most impressive arguments ever made for strong central government, popularized a hypothetical "state of nature" as a starting point for analyzing society. Hobbes, formed intellectually by the English Civil War, famously saw the state of nature as one in which “life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In these circumstances, Hobbes imagined that people would surrender some freedom to attain security. The sole task of government is to maintain order, which, Hobbes argues, will make it possible for private individuals to identify and provide all needed goods and services. Hobbes was among the earliest thinkers to incorporate individual equality and natural rights into his system. If government fails to maintain order, Hobbes permits rebellion to install one that will.
Conservatives favor economic freedom and private property but frequently support laws restricting personal behavior.
Conservatives oppose high taxes, favor a free-market, and endorse strong law enforcement. Conservatives usually support a strong military and tend to see war as natural and peace as best ensured by patriotism, good government, and military preparedness. While acknowledging the costs, conservatives see war as protecting freedom. Conservatives tend to support war that advances the interests of the state and tend to oppose war fought for idealistic reasons. The more pessimistic among them believe war is so rooted in human nature that it is ineradicable. Optimistic conservatives see war as rooted in government error, and thus preventable. The ideas of the right wing of contemporary American Republicans have conservative roots.Liberals assume that Man is good and capable of continuous improvement. Enlightenment thinkers drew this conclusion, somewhat dubiously, from the incredible growth of knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the expectation that progress would continually expand in all realms of human behavior, knowledge, and society.
The seminal liberal thinker for Americans is John Locke, author of The Second Treatise on Civil Government. In many respects, Locke was Hobbes’s student, although tempering most of his ideas. Among them were ideas about rights, limited government, and the legitimacy of resisting tyranny. In Locke’s view, government should be limited to making "natural rights" more secure than they were in the hypothetical "state of nature,” which Locke saw as imperfect because it lacked a way to settle disputes.
John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle,” forbidding someone harming others but not himself is the most common definition of the limit on government’s authority over the individual (now associated with libertarianism). As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “Your rights end where my nose begins.” Complementing the harm principle is the economic doctrine of " laissez faire,” minimum interference by the state in the marketplace.
These ideas, largely traceable to the Scottish Enlightenment, largely inspire the ideas of centrist American Republicans.France, influenced by both radicalism (see below) and liberalism, took a different path. The result, reliance on government to protect the individual from an oppressive nobility, inspires centrist American Democrats. They almost precisely reverse conservative principles, embracing freedom of choice in personal matters but intervention to promote goals such as equality and prevent people injuring themselves, and progressive taxation to pay for it all. Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression combined to shift the focus of liberals from the individual to the collective, redefining the word itself in the process (Shlaes 2007), becoming increasingly radical from the late 1960s on. American liberal views as to the cause of war are diverse (Chapter 12). Liberals of the 1930s through the 1960s, such as Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson viewed it as an unavoidable evil
Radicals assume Man was not merely good but perfect while living in a state of nature, then was corrupted by civilization. Radicals tend to ignore what is good in and to focus on what is bad about their own civilization while romanticizing primitive ones. The myth of the Noble Savage goes back even before Tacitus at least to Homer, who mentions “noble mare-milkers and mild-drinking Abieo, the most righteous of men.” Primitivism is based on the apparent simplicity of aboriginal life that overlooks its rigid taboos and superstitions and poor medical care. Primitivists cherish an impossible dream: their wish for a simple life comes from an appreciation that only civilization makes possible.
The seminal radical thinker is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of Discourses and Emile. His state of nature was paradise on earth inspired by early reports from sailors reaching the South Pacific islands after eight to twelve months on 100-foot sailing ships.
Comparing the reports with actual conditions in the France of the ancien regime led to his declaration that, “Man was born free and everywhere is in chains.” Radicalism is reflected in the story of the Garden of Eden, in Tacitus’ comparison of Roman immorality and corruption with German barbarians whom he saw as models of rectitude, and in Jefferson’s notion that the farmer is nobler than the city slicker. It underlies many anthropological descriptions of primitive cultures, the views of hippies and flower children in the 1960s, and in people such as Thoreau who want to return to what they see as a simpler, more “natural” life.In The Plebian Manifesto, Rousseau’s contemporary Gracchus Babeur predicted that the French Revolution was the precursor of a revolution that would “reach for something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of goods. No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.” Here are the optimistic and well-intentioned themes of early socialism: prosperity for all through common ownership and equating the common good with the elimination of private property.
This contrasts with Rousseau’s analysis that led him to advocate totalitarian government in which a supreme leader alone determines the "general will." His ideal state reflected in his proposed constitution for Corsica required complete loyalty and allowed no factions, no political parties, no religious groups, and no freedom of speech. It inspired the murderous ways of Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, and lesser murderers in the name of socialism collectively responsible for an estimated 100,000,000 deaths in the twentieth century, twice the toll of World War II.
Radicals, including the extreme left among contemporary American Democrats, advocate government control of business, speech, and the environment. They distrust the free market and support confiscatory taxes (except for themselves) and central planning of the economy and extensive social engineering.
Radicalism is associated with two contradictory traditions about war. The first is pacifism (Chapter 16). The other, Marxism, sees history moving inexorably from religious and ethnic to class conflict and finally to international conflict that develops after capitalism reaches its monopoly stage. In practice, it has always resulted in a totalitarian police state that is distinct from the other main radical movement, anarchy, which now is associated among other ideas with anti-globalism and never has been the basis for a successful state. Radicalized by the Vietnam War, contemporary American liberals now oppose almost any war that might result in economic gain, protect national interests, be misconstrued as “imperialist,” as “racist,” or offend “world opinion,” while approving war only for purely humanitarian purposes (Chapter 15).