Juliana Pilon, Senior Fellow The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), is writing a book on the paradox of liberalism. Dr. Pilon, as she often does, gets down to first principles: The natural right to private property should be kept uppermost in mind as a defense against the agglomeration of power. He that is without private property “is without the first element of freedom.”
Dr. Pilon admires Lord Acton, an English Catholic historian and one of the leading intellectuals of his generation. He is best remembered for his response to an Anglican bishop in 1887: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
If the world had followed Lord Acton’s insights, Dr. Pilon explains in her essay “The Primacy of Liberty,” in the November 16 issue of the online journal Law & Liberty, then the world would be a better place in which to live. Lord Acton warned against “three preeminent, nefarious abstractions,” she observes: an obsession for leveling equality, Communism, and an authoritarianism that was fed parasitically by nationalism. He proved prescient in his divination that the outcome of all these utopian ventures was “one vision, one race, one dictator/party.” Given the trajectory of history, Lord Acton would not have been startled by “Hitler’s Arian militarism, Stalin’s anti-‘cosmopolitan’ communism, Chinese hegemonism, and now neo-tsarist Putinism.”
Dr. Pilon contrasts the English unwritten constitution with the written revolutionary French ones. The British pragmatic, common-sense tradition counteracted the French rationalist utopian illusion. “Whereas the French were engaging in Platonic republic-building, the practical Brits were working with humans as they were, not as they might be.”
In defining liberty, Lord Acton provided this touchstone: “The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.” Yet, Dr. Pilon says the opposite has occurred. “[F]ar from resisting the slow encroachment of illiberalism, elites went woke. Egalitarianism has metastasized into a virtual secular religion, perhaps to compensate for the decline of traditional ethical principles that have long been predicated on human agency and responsibility.”
One of Thomas Jefferson’s closest friends and patrons from his time in Paris was the Countess Sophie d’Houdetot. She had carried on a torrid affair with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the so-called father of the French Revolution. In a letter to Jefferson, she left to posterity one of the most perceptive observations about the dissimilarities of the French and American revolutions and on the timeless tension between liberty and equality. Dr. Pilon has captured its essence: “A system that claims to substitute equality for liberty, will inevitably sacrifice both.”
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