Acknowledgments
Readers and listeners have noticed that my late dear friend Daniel Robinson has made a series of cameo appearances in my lectures and essays, as he does in this book. He will not appear as often as James Wilson, John Marshall, and Abraham Lincoln; but the brief mentions hardly catch the depth of what I learned from him—or what we managed to teach each other—over fifty years, in late nights in Amherst and long walks through Georgetown.
But many other friends have affected my understanding in ways that will surely be reflected in these pages, even though this book is not meant to be thick in citations and endnotes. It becomes harder, in this season of my own life, to recall every strand I’ve drawn from dear friends, but I’m sure that these friends, living and gone, have made their influence in these chapters even when they were not named: Michael Uhlmann, Harry Jaffa, Michael Novak, Ralph McInerney, Gerard Bradley, Robert George, J. Budziszewski, John Noonan, John Finnis, David Forte, Michael Pakaluk, James Stoner, Paul DeHart, Father James Schall, and Russell Hittinger.I have not sought to mark off the space for this book by showing where it may stand within the vineyard containing different strands of teaching in Natural Law. That exercise contains its own importance and fascination, and I’ve done a bit of it in other writings. But I’ve decided to forgo it here for the sake of getting more quickly to the point. I will not be dealing with “theories” of Natural Law. I will be moving rather to those primary truths that any ordinary man needs to grasp before he starts dealing with that array of theories, sure to come at him, as he tries to get on with the business of life.
I am grateful to R. R. (Rusty) Reno, the editor of that remarkable journal First Things, for the permission to draw upon three lengthy essays I published in that journal, as I wove them into the arguments in this book: “Recasting Religious Freedom” (June/July 2014), “The Moral Turn,” (May 2017), and “On Overruling Roe” (March 2022).
First Things not only remains the premier journal on religion and politics but also bears the echo of another work on first principles that will always claim a special place in my heart (and my royalties).This book might not have been written if I had not been encouraged by Thomas Klingenstein to launch a new center that would continue and extend my own teaching on Natural Law. With that offer of backing, I phased out of the Ney Chair at Amherst College, calling a gentle end after fifty years. The sponsorship and support of the project would later shift to my dear former student, Doug Neff, joined by others among my favorite students, most notably Kevin Conway and Michael Petrino. The project was then renamed the James Wilson Institute in honor of one of the premier minds among the American Founders, a man who has not drawn the appreciation and celebration he deserves. His writings have long threaded through my own work, as they do in these pages. It was Doug Neff’s genius to discover another one of my former students, Garrett Snedeker, to act as my deputy. Garrett, with his unremitting energy and imagination—and with his outreach to prospective allies of all ages—is the one who has really shaped this institute as a thriving entity. Thanks in large part to his exertions, we are told now that the institute has come to mark a distinct place in the landscape, with a distinct perspective on the law. The project has drawn the interest of judges and lawyers, along with businessmen and citizens who have not been burdened with a legal education. Garrett’s late father, William, had also been my student at Amherst, and so the connections to Amherst run deep. No one could have shown more devotion than Garrett or accomplished so much in these ten years. And he has helped sustain the momentum of writing that would bring forth… one more book.
I’ve been blessed over the years with editors who have been content to leave me, as they say, with “light” and diffident editing. But I’ve been blessed now to have, in Elizabeth Kantor, an editor who was willing to keep me busy and nearly dazed, shifting from one screen to another as I tried to respond to her many suggestions and track down every missing note, as she would have it, in the most exacting way, including the best translation we could find for Cicero.
She was tempted of course to suggest at times changes, in a prose not exactly mine. And at times too rare, perhaps, I gave in. But she was with me at every step, seasoned in her vocation, savvy and sound in her judgments—and enduring in her devotion. And so, not the least point of satisfaction in completing this book was to complete it with Liz.The last word is for Judy. This is the first book I’ve written since my beloved wife, Judy, died eight years ago. I dedicated my first book to her exactly fifty years ago, and it has become clearer to me ever since that everything we have done, in our work as well as with our family, has sprung from the marriage. Ours was a story become rarer these days: We married early, in our senior year in college. And so there were two young people wrapping their lives around each other, finishing their schooling, taking the first steps into the world of professional work together. In a way, we were growing up together, finding our footing in the world, and then beginning a family by bringing forth our own two sons, Peter and Jeremy. Our lives were so wound around each other that I remembered scenes and people in Judy’s life whom she had forgotten, and she could snatch back in turn the memories that had fled from me. We became the custodians, then, of each other’s biographies. And so a large part of one of us would be lost when the other one of us died. She worked for three years in publishing in Chicago, our native ground. She joined the University of Chicago in furnishing support for us while I was doing graduate work in the greatest department of political science in the world. She later gave up a scholarship at the University of Chicago to do a master’s degree in teaching (MAT) for the sake of following me to Washington for a fellowship at the Brookings Institution. But a committee came together quickly to give her the same scholarship at George Washington University. We later went on to Amherst, Massachusetts, where we launched the new phase in our lives. Judy would come to nurse two sons and a husband working through his first stumbling days as a professor.
Ten years later we were back in Washington. I was at the Woodrow Wilson Center working on a book, and Judy was returning to George Washington University for the job most beautifully suited to her, the director of academic publications. Everything printed under the auspices of the university had to come under her hand. That would encompass the courses offered in the catalogue and the abstracts written for doctoral dissertations. It was said that some Ph.D. candidates could not give a clear account of what their dissertation was about until Judy helped them rewrite their abstracts. And in reviewing the courses proposed for the catalogue, she became a force for the coherence of the offerings. She would raise questions about the cloudy substance of what certain professors were affecting to teach. In one notable case she raised a challenge as to whether there was a sufficient body of writing on the subject to justify a new Ph.D. program. And so, in one of many notes I saved, she decided to take a reluctant leap into the “curricular wars.” “Would we not be suggesting,” she remarked, “that the somewhat thin body of work in Asian-American lit is analogous to the several centuries and endeavor that span Beowulf and the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, Webster, Jonson, Milton, Donne, Dryden et al.?” These were all writers she had studied intensively herself. But if the university were open to grand new fields so narrow, she had another suggestion: “Let’s open it up really wide and add a field in the works of Viennese expatriates who lived within a mile of the University of Chicago, 1945–55.”One afternoon she stopped in to the office of an academic department and noticed on the shelf a photo of Winston Churchill. She remarked that it was an especially fine photo. The young woman behind the desk, a very recent graduate, reported that other visitors had expressed the same appreciation for the photo, but confessed that she did not know who the figure in the photo was.
Judy explained who Winston Churchill was. But then she told the young woman that she, Judy, had been in the Battle of Britain “in utero.” Her parents were being interned in England after her father had been interrogated by the Gestapo and they had fled from a Vienna occupied by the Nazis. The young woman, still candid on her innocence of these things, acknowledged that she had never heard of the Battle of Britain. Judy then explained that it had been the moment of high danger when Germany was bombing England. To which the young woman said, “Why were they [the Germans] doing that?!”In a time when people were keenly aware of why they were doing that, Judy’s parents made a perilous trip by boat across the Atlantic (with Judy “in utero”). They landed in New York early in 1941, and Judy was born in the Bronx on March 4. The date was particularly interesting because that was the date on which presidential inaugurations were held until 1937. I remarked to Judy that we knew many people in their eighties (and I am eighty-two as I set down these words now). Did she realize that anyone who shared her birthday and turned eighty on the day she was born was born on the day of Lincoln’s first inaugural? I found that charming; she did not.
But it was a reminder: we were both born at the beginning of this massive war, when civilization truly hung in the balance. Had it not been for Churchill—and then for FDR, projecting American power into the world—neither one of us would probably be alive. We had both come into the world when everything was at stake—everything touching the terms of principle on which a people lived, the way we governed ourselves, and the moral codes by which we would try to live our lives together. Judy recalled Lincoln’s saying that we were involved in a real “experiment” on whether a free people could govern itself. With no trace of fluffy sentiment, she thought that the answer was now coming in, and that the “experiment” was failing. With the wave of moral relativism flowing on, few people in the circles of the urbane wished to be seen as gauche enough to take seriously that “truth” of the Declaration on the rightful and wrongful governance of human beings.
Among the “educated,” that “truth” has come to be regarded as no more than a grand sentiment, popular at the time—as Barack Obama observed, the “rejection of absolute truth” is “implicit in the very idea of ordered liberty.”1 And yet that is precisely, and literally, what James Madison and Abraham Lincoln understood the principles asserted by the Declaration of Independence to be: an “absolute” truth about the way human beings deserve to be governed. But if it has become conventional to doubt in this way the moral ground of the American regime—its goodness or rightness—why should it be a surprise that in our own time reverence for the Founders and the regime they made would recede? Nay, more than that: we find a new passion to tear down monuments even to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and to regard the government they shaped as irredeemably racist. It is not hyperbole, but a sober report on the real state of things, to say that students in schools public and private are now being taught to hate their country.Judy and her family found refuge in this country only because those institutions put in place by the Founders were still standing. For people like them, and for those of us who still remember why the English stood fast in the bombing of their cities, this new turn of affairs in our country is not only scary but incomprehensible. And so here we are, trying to find a way of explaining again to a new generation—or even to remind an older generation—of the moral ground on which the American regime was founded. Judy had no beamish optimism, but she knew well the remarkable powers of creation and conversion that spring from our natures. And so, whether the odds were good or bad, she was tenacious enough never to give in—never to stop making the argument.
I am dedicating this book to the memory of my dearest Judy and to the future of our beloved granddaughter, Elena.
Hadley Arkes
August 2022