[The great weakness of liberalism is its moral ambivalence about the accumulation of wealth. Liberal thinkers such as John Locke defend the accumulation of great wealth under the principles of individual liberty. But as should be abundantly clear by the events of the past few decades, great wealth corrupts a society. While liberalism prefers to ignore this problem, the general socio-economic dynamic of this corruption is a central theme of civic republicanism.
In The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evanston, Northwestern University , 1945), Zera S. Fink, quotes from English republican political theorist Algernon Sidney, who was executed for “treason” against the crown in 1683: “Man” he wrote, “is of an aspiring nature, and apt to put too high a value on himself. They who are raised above their brethren, though but a little, desire to go farther; and if they gain the name of king, they think themselves wronged and degraded, when they are not suffered to do what they please. In these things they never want masters; and the nearer they come to a power that is not easily restrained by law, the more passionately they desire to abolish all that opposes it.” Even when a prince was virtuous and began by desiring nothing more than the power allowed him by law, he was subject to greater temptations to invade the liberty of his subjects than human nature could be expected to withstand. “The strength of his own affections,” Sydney declared, “will ever be against him. Wives, children, and servants will always join with those enemies that arise in his own breast to pervert him; if he has any weak side, any lust unsubdued, they will gain the victory. He has not searched into the nature of man, who thinks that anyone can resist when he is thus on all sides assaulted.” Monarchy, in short, by the very constitution of human nature, tended always to degenerate into tyranny. It was a defective form of government because in the most important place of all it was lacking in those adequate restraints on the defects of human nature which all the classical republicans saw as an essential of any well-contrived government.
[In The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America (New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2007), Michael J. Thompson writes, “Any political community that suffers from severe imbalances between rich and poor is in danger of losing its democratic character…” And he explicitly states that “the contemporary tolerance of economic inequality is actually the result of liberalism and liberal thought itself.” Thompson explains that the political philosophy of civic republicanism recognizes the great danger posed by concentrations of wealth and economic power.
In “The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765-1900,” James L. Huston argued that the founders developed a political economy of aristocracy which identified the avaricious rich as a primary threat to the republic.
The revolutionaries’ concern over the distribution of wealth was prompted by a tenet in the broad and vague political philosophy of republicanism. In contrast to nations in which monarchs and aristocrats dominate the state, republics embodied the ideal of equality among citizens in political affairs, the equality taking the form of citizen participation in the election of officials who formulated the laws. Drawing largely on the work of seventeenth-century republican theorist James Harrington, Americans believed that if property were concentrated in the hands of a few in a republic, those few would use their wealth to control other citizens, seize political power, and warp the republic into an oligarchy. Thus to avoid descent into despotism or oligarchy, republics had to possess an equitable distribution of wealth….
[In The Laws, his last and longest dialogue, Plato wrote that “there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.” We should not be surprised The Laws is the least studied, least known, and least quoted of Plato’s books.
[The Roman historian Plutarch traced the degeneration of the Roman republic into an oligarchic empire to the growing imbalance between rich and poor. Another Roman, the lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator, and writer, Cicero, discussed the dangers of economic inequality, but also included a warning of the peculiar psychological condition of the rich:
“When one person or a few stand out from the crowd as richer and more prosperous, then, as a result of their haughty and arrogant behavior, there arises [a government of one or a few], the cowardly and weak giving way and bowing down to the pride of wealth.”
[The work of another historian of ancient Rome, Livy, was the basis of Machiavelli’s description of how the rich of Rome corrupted the Senate. In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli described how the Romans tried to restore political balance by creating tribunes to represent the plebians to counterbalance the control of the Senate by the rich, but the unceasing resistance and plotting against the tribunes by the rich of Rome eventually brought about the end of the Roman republic.
[The lesson for Machiavelli was “Let, then, a republic be constituted where there exists, or can be brought into being, notable equality.”
[In The Spirit of Laws, Book 5. Chapter 5, ”In what Manner the Laws establish Equality in a Democracy,” Montesquieu wrote,
“Though real equality be the very soul of a democracy, it is so difficult to establish, that an extreme exactness in this respect would not be always convenient. Sufficient is it to establish a census, which shall reduce or fix the differences to a certain point: it is afterwards the business of particular laws to level, as it were, the inequalities, by the duties laid upon the rich, and by the ease afforded to the poor. It is moderate riches alone that can give or suffer this sort of compensation; for as to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury.…”
[Montesquieu thus echoed Cicero by identifying the peculiar psycho-pathology of the rich by noting “to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury.” Does this not precisely define Trump and his vindictiveness?
[In the Christian Bible we find Matthew 6:24:
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
[And, more pointedly, James 5:1-6:
Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence.
[And there is the famous warning in that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” This famous biblical quotation is repeated three times in the New Testament, in Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25.
[The problem of the rich dominating society and destroying it by their aggressive greed and ambition is not confined to the West. The view that the rich posed a danger to good government was also enunciated by the Chinese philosopher Confucius:
“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
[According to Confucius, in a well governed society there should be a rough level of economic equality — there should be no poverty. But when a society is no longer well governed, economic inequality arises and there are the impoverished many and the rich few, who abuse and ignore the law and social norms, resulting in misrule. The existence of the wealthy therefore are a marker of a badly governed society.
[And in his Analects, Confucius wrote
If there were an honorable way to get rich, I’d do it, even if it meant being a stooge standing around with a whip. But there isn’t an honorable way, so I just do what I like.
[Oligarchy is the mortal enemy of a republic. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is a well-known saying, but it is just as important to understand that wealth corrupts and concentrated wealth corrupts absolutely. What Gray and Webb discuss is the general corruption that has arisen by our society’s toleration of great wealth, and the social damage it has caused, including the escalating problem of elite impunity.
[The Transcendentalists — among whom were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman — were particularly hostile to liberal philosopher John Locke. The Transcendentalist view of Locke was summarized by Orestes Brownson, in The Boston Quarterly Review, in January 1839:
…Locke reduces man to the capacity of receiving sensations, and the faculty of reflecting on what passes within us. According to him we have no ideas which do not enter through the senses, or which are not formed by the operations of the mind on ideas received by means of sensation.
[Locke’s] system of philosophy… is no less fatal to political liberty than to religion and morality… This philosophy necessarily disinherits the mass. It denies to man all inherent power of attaining to truth. In religion, if religion it admits, it refers us not to what we feel and know in ourselves [such a sense of fairness and justice], but was said and done in some remote age, by some special messenger from God; it refers us to some authorized teacher, and commands us to receive our faith on his word, and to adhere to it on peril of damnation. It therefore destroys all free action of the mind, all independent thought, all progress, and all living faith. In politics it must do the same. It cannot found the state on the inherent rights of man; the most it can do, is to organize the state for the preservation of such conditions, privileges, and prescriptions, as it can historically verify….
The doctrine, that truth comes to us from abroad, cannot coexist with true liberty… The democrat is not he who believes in the people’s capacity of being taught, and therefore graciously condescends to be their instructor; but he who believes that Reason, the light which shines out from God’s throne, shines into the heart of every man, and that truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man’s souk, whether patrician or plebian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus or a beggar. It is only on the reality of that inner light, and on the fact that it is universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can found a democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able to survive that storms of human passions.
[Zohran Mamdani has been repeatedly attacked for saying we shouldn’t have billionaires. But he badly flubs his explanation of this view. The simple fact is that a republic cannot survive the rise of oligarchy. A republic must have very high taxes on wealth and income, to disrupt the concentration of wealth and prevent the inherent despotism of the rich from ever emerging in the first place.
[Our problem now is that a plutocratic oligarchy has already parasitically fastened itself on our society and polity, and we need to dislodge it, and restore the governing principles of civic republicanism.]
