Peace, Order and Good Government

The ninety-first section of the British North America Act (1) begins with the words:

It shall be lawful for the Queen, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate and House of Commons, to make Laws for the Peace, Order, and good Government of Canada, in relation to all Matters not coming within the Classes of Subjects by this Act assigned exclusively to the Legislatures of the Provinces;

The phrase “Peace, Order, and good Government”, identified here as the end to which the law-making authority of the Queen-in-Parliament is established, has been similarly used in the constitutional documents of other Commonwealth countries and, in Canada, has often been considered to be our equivalent of the United States’ “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Both expressions identify a triad of goods and make that triad out to be the purpose for which government is constituted. The differences, however, not only in content but also in context and use, may outweigh these similarities. Contextually, the American expression does not appear in the document that legally established their republic, the Constitution of the United States of America, but rather in the document by which the Thirteen Colonies rationalized and justified their decision to secede from the British Empire. For the obvious reason that Canada’s Fathers did not secede from the Empire but deliberately choose to maintain the connection to Britain and the Commonwealth and to build the Dominion on a foundation of loyalty and continuity, Canada has no parallel document. With regards to usage, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” served a revolutionary purpose, “Peace, Order, and good Government” a constructive one.

When we turn to the content of the triads the contrast that is most striking is that the goods in the American triad pertain primarily to the individual, whereas the goods in the Canadian/Commonwealth triad belong to the country as a whole. The different sources from which the two are drawn can be seen in this. In the case of the American triad, its origin in classical liberalism, and specifically the social contract theory of John Locke, is quite obvious. The triad is borrowed, with a slight adjustment by Thomas Jefferson, directly from Locke. In the second of his Two Treatises on Government, (2) Locke argues that life, liberty, and property are the basic natural rights that belong to the individual in a pre-societal state of nature, and that the state was created by individuals voluntarily forming a compact to live under laws that would make these rights more secure. The preamble to the Declaration of Independence is a restatement of this theory.

The liberals who formulated this theory sincerely believed that they were devising a rational and effective safeguard against tyranny – the ancient term for usurped and oppressive power. Their Puritan forerunners believed that by removing Charles I from his throne, beheading him, and making Oliver Cromwell into the Lord Protector they were striking a blow for liberty. Cromwell, however, went down in history as the dictator who established a grim and gloomy, Calvinist, theocracy in which Christmas, the theatre, and harmless amusements were all banned and today it has become quite evident how the idea that government exists to protect the rights of individual can be the basis of tyranny as much as a protection against it. (3) Until very recently, the suggestion that the government might pass laws requiring us to use a plethora of newly-coined pronouns to refer to individuals who have chosen a gender identity for themselves other than male and female would have been confined to the literary genres of totalitarian dystopic fiction and conspiracy theory. Yet today many liberals are promoting such legislation, trying to suppress the views of anyone who would be opposed to such legislation, and doing all of this in the sincere belief that it is necessary to protect individual rights.

Liberals were not the first to assert that the law must protect people’s lives and property. Indeed, this assertion is contained within the ancient definition of justice as each person getting what he deserves. Nor were liberals the first to connect this protection with liberty. It was King Charles I who declared that the “liberty and freedom” of his people “consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their goods may be most their own.” In the older tradition, however, the security of life and property, and the freedom that comes from that security, were the products of a stable and orderly civil society and such a society could only exist under a government that legislates and administers justice for the good of the society as a whole. Life outside of such a society was not regarded as man’s natural state. Such an existence, in pre-modern thought, more closely resembled Thomas Hobbes’ idea of a state of nature than that of John Locke, and in this absence of civilization, no rights could exist.

When liberalism rejected the pre-modern tradition in which each person derives his rights and freedom from belonging to a society that is an integrated whole, liberals believed that they were emancipating mankind but, as we see in our present day, triumphant liberalism forges its own chains and fetters with which to bind man. Liberalism is the offspring of rationalism, the epistemological error of reducing the knowable to the technical, i.e., utilitarian knowledge capable of formulation (4) and was born out of the fragmentation of the older tradition. (5) By obsessively fixating on the individual, at the expense of the whole society, liberalism pushed Western civilization so far away from the pre-modern ideal of balance and harmony between the individual and the whole of society in one direction, that in time it produced a pendulum swing in the opposite direction and so in the twentieth century, totalitarianism, which saw only the collective and crushed the individual, came into existence. Liberalism clashed with totalitarianism and triumphed over it, but only by taking on some of its own characteristics. (6)

“Peace, Order, and good Government” was not a conscious attempt to produce a summary of the goods which the pre-liberal tradition regarded as the purpose of the state but it nevertheless serves fairly well as such a summary. “Good Government”, which means the competent and just administration of public affairs, is a fairly adequate equivalent of πολιτεία, as the term was used by Plato and Aristotle to describe their ideal of government. (7) It is certainly more accurate than “republic” which, through its Roman, Italian, and American usage, has ceased to convey the sense of the Latin res publica, “public affairs”, and has taken on the meaning of “kingless government.” The ancients believed that any government, whether it be one ruler, a small elite group, or a majority of enfranchised, corporate, citizens, could be good or bad. A good government was one that exercised its authority in the interests of the whole of the society, a bad government was one that used its power only to serve its own private interests. (8) Actual real-world governments, of course, exist on a spectrum between the absolutely good and the absolutely bad. A common idea among the ancient Athenians, which as adopted by Aristotle, spread through the ancient world by Polybius, and later incorporated into medieval Christendom’s ideal of the Christian commonwealth, (9) was that the best way to ensure a stable government, that would be more good than bad, was to combine monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (10) into a single government.

America’s Founding Fathers were at their best, not when they were writing rabble-rousing, revolutionary, agitprop like the Declaration of Independence, but when they were putting together the Constitution of their new republic. Despite the fact that a president is a poor substitute for a king or queen, the American Constitution is widely esteemed for its system of checks and balances, a concept America’s Fathers borrowed, indirectly through Montesquieu, from the ancient-medieval ideal of mixed government. That Montesquieu himself had pointed to the British system of King/Queen-in-Parliament as the very embodiment of that ideal, America’s founders for obvious reasons opted to ignore. Canada’s Fathers of Confederation, the heirs of the Loyalist tradition rather than that of the Revolution, had no need either to ignore this fact, or to re-invent the wheel, and directly adapted the British system for the new Dominion. This system began its evolution centuries before the dawn of the Modern Age and it is very fitting and appropriate, therefore, that the Canadian Fathers chose to identify it with the public goods of “Peace, Order, and good Government.”

Today, after a century of assault upon our Loyalist heritage and traditions, our monarchical and parliamentary institutions, and our Common Law rights and freedoms by the Liberal Party of Canada, aided and abetted by her allies in the mainstream Canadian media, it is more important than ever that we remember the principles upon which our country was founded. For it is only by so remembering that we can hope to recover what we have lost and find our way back from the abyss into which the Liberals have been leading us.


(1) This Act, which was passed by the British Parliament in 1867 and which came into effect on July 1st of that year, established the confederation of several of the North American provinces of the British Empire into a new country, which it designated a “Dominion” and gave the name “Canada” which had previously belonged to two of those provinces. Many Canadians, especially supporters of the Liberal Party, are under the impression that the BNAA was replaced as our constitution by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. This is a gross distortion of the truth. What happened that year is that the legislative authority to amend the BNAA, which remains our constitution, was transferred from the British Parliament to the Canadian Parliament, the BNAA was renamed “The Constitution Act, 1867”, and the Charter was added to it as an amendment (or set of amendments). The Charter did not replace our constitution, although, as I have argued many times in the past, it subverted to a great degree, both our constitution of Queen-in-Parliament and the Common Law. Indeed, most of the substantial changes made by the Liberal Party between 1926 and 1982 have had this effect, which is one reason why I, in protest, continue to use the old name of the Act.

(2) The first of the treatises argued against Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarchia. It has been liberal orthodoxy since the nineteenth century that Locke successfully rebutted Filmer, although in the eighteenth century a few honest liberals could be found willing to admit that of the two, Filmer had the better arguments. The second treatise is an attempt at an alternate explanation of the origin and legitimacy of the state.

(3) This has been explored at length by James Kalb in The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command, Wilmington, Delaware, ISI Books, 2008. See also Patrick J. Deneen Why Liberalism Failed, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 2018.

(4) Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, London, Metheun & Co. Ltd., 1962, pp. 1-36.

(5) See Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1948, pp. 52-69.

(6) “In this sense national socialism survived Hitler. Every state in the world has become a welfare state. Whether they call themselves socialist or not does not matter much. Of course the proportions of the compound of nationalism and socialism vary from country to country; but the compound is there…We are all national socialists now.” – John Lukacs, “American History: The Terminological Problem,” The American Scholar, Vol 61., No. 1, (Winter 1992), p. 23. “Some European authors observed that communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West.” Tomislav Sunic, Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, Book Surge Publishing, 2007, p. 34.

(7) In ordinary Greek usage, πολιτεία could refer either to the rights of citizenship in a city-state or the constitution of the city-state. In other words it had the same range of meaning as the Latin civitas. Plato and Aristotle used it in its ordinary sense, but also made it the designation of the best possible government. It is the title of the Platonic dialogue that addresses this concept. Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, entitled his own work written which was inspired by Plato’s, De Re Publica, and it is from this that the misleading custom of rendering this word as “Republic” in English arises. The common alternative “Commonwealth” is much more accurate.

(8) Note how liberalism, by replacing the good of the commonwealth with the protection of individual rights as the purpose of government, reverses this judgement.

(9) See the Respondeo in St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part, Q. 105.

(10) Today, the terms democracy and ochlocracy (the rule of the mob) are used for the good and bad versions of “the rule of the many” respectively. Plato and Aristotle, however, used democracy for the bad version.

The Authority of Fathers

Authority has been in decline in Western civilization for centuries. The liberal dogma of individualism is widely accepted as received truth, despite the many ways in which it conflicts with observable reality. The authority of kings as God’s ministers of justice, the Apostolic authority of the Church, and the authority of all other traditional, social institutions, has been badly eroded. This is true even in the case of the most basic social institution of them all, the family. Parental authority in the family has come under severe attack, an attack which has intensified over the last century. This is especially true of patriarchal authority – the authority of fathers.

God said “Honour thy father and thy mother”. We have dedicated one day of the year each to our parents with which to honour them with our lips. We honour our mothers in May. Now, on the third Sunday of June, it is our fathers turn to have a day of their own. Having “honoured” our parents, we consider our duty to be done, and promptly ignore them for the rest of the year. For some reason I think this is not what God had in mind when He issued the first commandment with a promise.

Much of the blame for the recent decline in respect for fathers and their authority must be laid at the feet of television. The invention of television was a tremendous step in the development of propaganda techniques. It made it possible for moving pictures and accompanying sound to be broadcast throughout a region and viewed by people in their own homes. Television's potential as an instrument of social change was immediately apparent to social engineers and political radicals.

How are fathers usually depicted on television? Does television support the traditional role of the father as an authority figure in the family?

No. If a television program is about a traditional, middle-class, nuclear family, the father figure is typically portrayed as a boorish buffoon, the least intelligent person in the family, who only asserts his fatherly authority when he is obviously in the wrong. If, by chance, television portrays a father differently, that father is usually a sensitive “new male” and a political liberal or the family as a whole is an “alternative family” of some sort.

Can there be any doubt that this is done on purpose to undermine patriarchal authority?

This raises the question of why anyone would want to undermine the authority of fathers, creating instability in the family, leading to social chaos. The fact that someone does is indisputable. The question is why.

The answer to that question ultimately lies in the reason why the authority of the father in the family is important to society. Before we look at that, however, we should note that there is a prominent left-wing movement in society which has historically defined itself in opposition to father-authority. This same movement attacks motherhood as being an inferior choice for women to the pursuit of ambition and self-fulfillment in a professional career outside the home.

This movement is called feminism.

Feminism and Patriarchy


The technical term for the authority of fathers within the traditional family is patriarchy. This word comes from combining the Greek word for father with the Greek word for “rule”. Patriarchy, is the nominal enemy of the feminist movement.

I threw the qualifier “nominal” in for two reasons. The first reason is that what feminists mean when they use the word “patriarchy” is not what the word actually means. We will return to that momentarily. The second reason is that a good argument can be made that the real enemy of feminism is not patriarchy at all but rather femininity.

If that statement sounds outrageous to you then please bear me out as I attempt to explain what I mean by it. While the feminist movement cloaks its goals in the language of “rights”, “equality”, “dignity” and other such vapid totem expressions (1) its true goal, if we can judge from the positions it takes, the actions it calls for, and the policies it supports, is to eliminate femininity and masculinize women. Feminists accuse their opponents of believing that men are superior to women. This, however, is a classic case of what Dr. Freud called projection. The belief that men are superior to women is in fact the core belief of feminism.

Look, for example, at the absurdly titled “Women’s Liberation Movement” of the 1960’s. This movement demanded a number of things, such as universal government-provided daycare and the full legalization of abortion.

What did feminism hope to gain from such things?

It is the nature of things, that the consequences of sexual intercourse are not divided equally between men and women. A man can walk away from it with no lasting consequences other than moral and spiritual ones. This is not true of a woman. Pregnancy occurs within the female body and if a woman becomes pregnant that means nine months of bearing the growing child within her womb, and then, because the child is born dependent, a much longer period of nursing and raising the child.

The traditional way in which society addressed this situation was through moral and civil regulations that demanded that men shoulder their fair share of the burden of raising the next generation. Society demanded that men marry the women who bore their children and that they provide for their wives and children.

Feminism, however, took the radically opposite position that the situation should be alleviated by having government daycare freely available to all mothers and by allowing women to terminate their pregnancies at whim. Thus, a woman would be able to walk away from sexual intercourse with no lasting consequences other than moral and spiritual ones, just like a man.

What clearly lies behind the feminist position here is the idea that it is far better to be a man – to be able to walk away from sex with no baggage – than to be a woman. Therefore in the name of equality, the government must artificially make it possible for a woman to be like a man.

Feminism, which purports to be a serious movement seeking the redress of injustices against women, is in reality little more than a feminine equivalent of the mindset of a poorly raised, hormone-driven, adolescent boy.

There was, of course, another motivation that lay behind feminism’s demand for tax-funded daycare and abortion. If women were allowed to terminate unwanted pregnancies whenever they so desired and to have government institutions raise their children for them, then women could pursue careers outside the home and not be hindered, in competition with men in the workplace, by the burden of raising children.

This, however, just further illustrates my point. Feminism’s idea that finding self-fulfillment in careers outside of the home would be better for women than staying home and being wives and mothers is a manifestation of the idea that men are superior to women. For what was feminism saying here if not that the work men did outside the home in order to support their families, was more meaningful and important, than what women did in bearing and raising children?

In all of this feminism displayed an immature mindset that is only explicable as a counterpart to the irresponsible attitudes that were becoming popular among the male population at the time, brought upon in part by the naïve progressive notion that advances in the development of technology had rendered the maturity and responsibility society demanded of both sexes in the past to be obsolete.

Wisdom is something that people gradually gain as they mature and get older. This is as true of societies as it is of individual persons, and for this reason it is the uttermost foolishness to disregard the accumulated wisdom of the past. Society’s traditional response to the difference between the sexes in natural consequences to sexual intercourse was not based upon the idea that men had gotten the better end of the deal than women. For that idea would itself have to include the idea that it is more desirable to live entirely for yourself and to sleep around with no commitments to anyone than to settle down and raise a family. That is an idea which reflects immaturity and selfishness rather than wisdom. Traditional societies were wisely, more concerned with making men behave maturely, responsibly, and wisely, than making it easier for women to behave immaturely, irresponsibly, and foolishly.

Traditional societies also displayed wisdom in assigning roles to men and women. These roles differed from society to society and at different stages in the development of a particular society in accordance with economic, political, and social circumstances. Whatever the circumstances, however, the difference between the role assigned to men and that assigned to women was centred around the basic fact that women get pregnant and bear children which they give birth to and nourish, and men do not. Societies guided by ancient tradition are too wise to treat this difference as trivial. Whatever else women might do can never be more important to a society than the bearing and raising of the next generation. Therefore, whatever role a society assigns to women, it will be one that does not hinder or interfere with motherhood.

Thus, in a society which survives by hunting and gathering, the role of gathering is assigned to women because it allows them to stay near the camp with the children and the role of hunting is assigned to men. When agriculture becomes the dominant means of survival the roles change to accommodate the new economy as they do again when mercantile trading and industrial manufacturing are developed. These changes affect the kind of labour required of both men and women. What does not change is that the labour required of women is that which least conflicts with motherhood.

Feminists refuse to see the wisdom in this. Instead, they see traditional gender roles, including the roles of father and mother, as a system of societal organization designed to benefit all males by oppressing all women. This is what feminists mean when they use the word “patriarchy”. (2)

Patriarchal authority is essential to Western Civilization

The term patriarchy, however, more accurately refers to the authority of fathers than to a supposed millennia-long conspiracy on the part of all men to oppress all women. The authority of fathers has come under attack, not only from feminists, but from revolutionaries of all stripes. Painter, novelist, and social critic Wyndham Lewis, wrote in the 1930s that the father is the enemy of all revolutionary movements because he “has been cast to represent authority”. (3)

A father’s authority exists and is exercised within the family. The family is the basic building block from which all societies are built. It is the smallest, most organic, form of social organization that exists. Other offices of authority within Western societies tend to be patterned after a father’s authority. Sir Robert Filmer, in his Patriarchia, argued from the authority of fathers to the natural authority of kings.

Wyndham Lewis was therefore correct. The father, as the traditional authority figure in the traditional family, is the embodiment of all traditional authority in Western society and therefore the primary target of those who see traditional Western civilization as standing in the way of progress.

The attack upon patriarchal authority has never been stronger than at the present moment. The current campaign to glorify the single mother is a blatant attempt to declare fathers to be superfluous and unwanted. After traditional motherhood was bashed for decades, as being an inferior, boring option to the glamour of an ambitious career now motherhood is presented to women as an empowering choice – especially if it is out of wedlock and by artificial insemination.

Fathers are not redundant and unnecessary however. Studies have shown what common sense has always told us – that children are happier and far more likely to develop into responsible, law-abiding, socially-integrated adults, if they grow up in a home with both a father and a mother. Sometimes circumstances are such that this cannot be the case but it is madness to encourage women to deliberately have children without a father and to consider a father “optional”. That the deception of the non-importance of fatherhood has been able to spread at all is due to the modern state’s having turned itself into a surrogate husband/father.

Unfortunately there is no strong movement of resistance to these attacks nor any indication that one is about to arise. The “conservative” response to feminism today consists largely of complaints that its original “good” intentions have been de-railed by anti-male radicals or worse, attempts to use feminist ideas to bolster support for military action against the Islamic world. The “men’s movement” is a masculine equivalent of feminism. It is devoted to the idol of equality and speaks only the language of “rights”. Some Christian men’s groups have shown an interest in promoting traditional fatherhood. Many however, seem to be little more than support groups.

It is here that we see the single largest reason for the decline of fatherhood and patriarchal authority in the family and in society. Other than individual voices, both male and female, the traditionalist side has largely given up.

Why has this happened?

Authority and Responsibility

Authority and responsibility always go together. The word “father” describes a position that comes with both authority and responsibility. Traditionally, fathers would raise their sons to follow after them, in both shouldering the burden and responsibility of fatherhood, and exercising its authority wisely.

Responsibility is less appealing than authority, however, and at some point the liberating effect of technological advancement combined with the accumulation of a couple of centuries worth of liberal individualism to undermine the willingness of a great many men to take up the duties and responsibilities and burdens of fatherhood. Many of these still wished to exercise the authority – but found that in abandoning their duties they had given up their authority as well.

John Lukacs wrote:

In the 1960s American women found the predominance of the male fettering not because it was real but because it was unreal. They could not stomach those prerogatives of the male—including not only professional or intellectual prerogatives but also the protection habitually offered by the latter—that dated back to earlier centuries, when men were indeed strong. Now they saw—or, rather felt—that the men were weak. Just as the “revolt” of youth in the 1960s was, in reality, often a reaction not against “authoritarian” but against permissive fathers whom they could no longer respect, women, too, despite all of the silly slogans of “male chauvinism,” reacted against the assumption of strength and power on the part of their male counterparts, who were often weak. To be queen of a house in the times of a constitutional (that is, bourgeois) monarchy was one thing; but who would want to keep up the formal duties and the manifold responsibilities of a queen when the man of the household was but a chairman of a committee? (4)

Fatherhood still represents both authority and responsibility, and it is for that reason that so many men who dislike feminism, do not wish to stand against it from the position of defending traditional fatherhood.

Any other position, however, has already capitulated completely to the enemy.

(1) By “vapid totem expressions” I mean essentially meaningless terms that we are expected to mindlessly genuflect before whenever they are invoked by the enforced, secular, orthodoxy of the day.

(2) The feminists are not the only ones to use the word “patriarchy” to refer to a general system of male dominance. Dr. Steven Goldberg, who was the Professor of Sociology at City College of New York, in his The Inevitability of Patriarchy: Why the Biological Difference Between Men and Women Always Produces Male Dominance (William Morrow: New York, 1973) later expanded into Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance (Open Court: Chicago, 1993) uses the term patriarchy in a specialized, and therefore carefully defined, sense. He used it to refer to when all or the majority of the upper hierarchical positions in a society are occupied by males – which he argues occurs in every society. He documented the latter point from the studies of anthropologists and provided a theory as to why this was the case. He argued that societies will vary in what roles and positions are awarded the highest status, but that whatever those roles and positions are, men will have a greater interest in obtaining them then women, because men are biologically more aggressive than women. Since women are attracted to men with status, power, and wealth the incentives to compete for the highest positions will always be greater for men than for women.

(3) The quotation comes from The Doom of Youth, published by Robert M. McBride & Company of New York in 1932. This is a polemical collection of essays directed against the cult of youth. It was reissued in 1982 by Haskell House Publishers of New York.

(4) John Lukacs, A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2004), p. 196.

Private Property: A Social Institution

Between the seventeenth century and the twenty-first liberalism has traveled a great distance on the subject of private property. It was in the late seventeenth century that the works of the Father of Liberalism, John Locke, were first published. In his treatises in which he argued for the contract theory of society, for natural rights, and individual liberty, Locke made private property the foundation of rights and civilization. Today, it is not uncommon to hear “liberals” repeat mindless slogans like “people before property” or “human rights before property rights”. These slogans, as Russell Kirk pointed out decades ago, express nothing more than the desire to have the government expropriate that which belongs to somebody else.

Socialism, from which contemporary liberalism has absorbed many ideas and values, is built upon a foundation of enmity towards property. In the 19th Century, when various different socialisms sprung up, often as or more hostile towards each other than to capitalism, the one thing which they had in common was their hatred of property. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the founder of 19th Century French socialist anarchism declared “La propriété, c'est le vol” (“Property is theft!”). Karl Marx, who attacked Proudhon in the third chapter of the Manifesto of the Communist Party declared in the second chapter: “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

When a movement exists with the express purpose of destroying an institution like property it is important that those who believe that institution to be beneficial and would prefer that it be retained oppose the movement seeking it’s destruction. From what stand point should the defenders of property launch their attack upon socialism?

To many the answer to that question is “liberalism”, that is liberalism in its original form, the liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill. Those who would defend property from the standpoint of liberalism refer to themselves as “classical liberals”, “libertarians”, or sometimes, although very inaccurately, “conservatives”.

In the course of this essay I will first make the case that such people have chosen the wrong standpoint, that they are building their edifice upon a foundation that will not support it. The seeds of contemporary, more socialist, liberalism can be found in classical liberalism. After having made this case, I will make the case for an alternative foundation for the institution of private property in traditional society – the society, the authority of which, classical liberalism was founded to attack.

The quotation from Karl Marx given above is a truncated quotation. The first three words “In this sense” were omitted. What sense is Marx referring to?

In the four preceding paragraphs Marx had argued that communism is not unique in its goal of the abolition of existing property relationships. “All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions” he wrote, and gave as an example the French Revolution, which “abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.” What was distinct about communism, Marx argued, was that it sought the abolition of bourgeois property and:

modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

This is the “sense” Marx is referring to. Marx saw history as an ongoing struggle in which classes of exploited “have nots” (people without property) would constantly overthrow their exploiters, the class of “haves” (people with property) becoming the new class of “haves”. The bourgeoisie, however, would be the last class of “haves” and their property would be the last form of “private property”. The proletarian, Marx argued, in overthrowing the bourgeoisie, would establish communism in which the distinction between “haves” and “have nots” would vanish, nobody would be exploited, all property would be owned in common and society would function according to the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.

While most of what Marx wrote was complete rubbish there is insight we can glean from him in the parallel he drew between the French Revolution and the Communist revolution he was advocating. If the bourgeoisie were to feudal society what communism was to bourgeois society then the ideology which the bourgeoisie devised to justify overthrowing feudal society can hardly be said to be a pro-property ideology. What was that ideology?

The French Revolution to which Marx refers was launched in the name of the “rights of man and of the citizen”, gathering its inspiration primarily from the writings of the romantic philosopher Jean- Jacques Rousseau. In the English-speaking world, however, the transition from feudal to bourgeois society was accomplished, in a much less violent manner. The ideology which inspired or explained the transition in the English-speaking world was the classical liberalism of John Locke and Adam Smith.

If English liberalism achieved the same end as the French Revolution through less overtly violent methods what does that say about liberalism as an appropriate ideological foundation for the institution of property?

Before returning to Lockean liberalism it is important that we define property. What is property? What concepts are essential to its nature? What is “private property” as opposed to other types of property?

The noun “property” simply means “that which is owned”. Specialized uses of the term in law, politics, and economics come back to this basic meaning. In law property can be either personal property (your clothes, books, and other such items), real property (land, buildings, etc.) or intellectual property (the legality of which is currently in debate, a debate which is beyond the scope of this essay). In economics “property” refers to “the means of production”, i.e. everything such as land, raw materials, a production plant and tools that is used in the production of useful goods.

In political arguments about “private property” the term “property” tends to encompass both the economic meaning of property and the legal concept of “real property”. The adjective “private” means “not open to the public but exclusive for the use of X”. When we modify property with the adjective “private” we express the idea of that property which is owned, not collectively by society, but privately by society’s members.

One last word needs to be defined and that is the verb “own”. To own something means more than just to possess the use of it. Human beings can use resources without owning them. We all breathe the air but non of us owns it. We all use the light of the sun but it is not our property. The basic difference between owning something and merely using it is that when you own a resource you have the right to determine how the resource is used, whether for your own benefit or the benefit of others. Inherent within this right is the right to exclude others from the use of the resource.

Now having the “right” to determine how something is used and to exclude others from its use is different from having the “ability” to do so. Lets say you go out and build a wall around a section of land, fortify the wall, and arm yourself to the teeth. You may very well possess the ability to determine the use of the land and prevent others from using it. That does not mean that you have the right to do so and if you do so in the middle of a public park that thousands of people frequent on a daily basis you are probably going to run into some difficulties as a result of your actions.

What makes the difference between the person whose control over resources he claims for himself rests solely on his ability to defend his claim by force and the person who actually owns resources?

The difference is that the latter’s claim to the property in question is recognized by society and protected by society’s laws.

What does this tell us about private property?

It tells us first, that society has a interest in recognizing and protecting the institution of private property. The private ownership of property, therefore, benefits not only those who own property themselves, but society as a collective whole.

Secondly it identifies for us the idea in supposedly pro-property Lockean liberalism that is the seed of the anti-property contemporary liberalism.

In the first of John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, Locke had argued against Robert Filmer’s defense of patriarchal authority.(1) His second treatise was devoted to suggesting an alternative theory of the origins of society, authority, and government. In his theory, men in their natural state, are “free, equal and independent”, and societies arise when men voluntarily contract with each other to form a society and government for their greater security. Men’s basic rights, according to Locke, go back to the pre-societal natural state. The fifth chapter of his second Treatise is devoted to the question of how property arose in this natural state. God had given the world, including the land and all lesser creatures, to man in common, Locke argued, but “every man has a ‘property’ in his own ‘person.’” He then goes on to argue:

This nobody has any right to but himself. The "labour" of his body and the "work" of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this "labour" being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.

Locke’s theory that property, like rights and the individual himself, predates society, requires him to come up with an explanation like this. There are a couple of problems with it however.

The first problem is that the entire theory of which Locke’s “labour theory of property” is a subcategory is manifestly false. It is the human state of nature to live together in societies, not to be “free, equal, and independent”. Society precedes the individual person – as can be seen every time a baby is born, for he is born into a pre-existing society, his family.

The second problem is that this theory is also the foundation of Marxism.

Think about it. How does Marx’s theory of history work again? First, all things are owned in common. Then some people appropriate to themselves that which was previously held in common and form the class of the “haves”. This leaves the rest without anything. They become the class of the “have nots”. Because the “haves” have all the property they are able to exploit the “have nots” who have only their labour. The exploitation takes this form: the “have nots” exchange their labour for wages from the “haves”, but because the “haves” have all the property the bargaining is one-sided and the “have nots” never receive the full value of their labour. This continues until the “have nots” overthrow the “haves” and become the new “haves” until the process ends with communism being established.

Marx’s theory is false, but apart from Locke’s theory of the origins of property it would be completely incoherent. It is nonsense to think that the workers in a factory are exploited just because the factory owner makes a large profit from selling the factory’s product. Nobody would ever have thought so, however, if Locke had not argued that property arises out of labour.

Locke is wrong. There is no state of nature for human beings that is prior to society. The man outside society is the most unnatural of men. Property is a product of society.

Traditionally, societies are bound together by a common set of beliefs, customs, and habits. These form the core of a society’s culture and they include basic concepts of what is right and what is wrong with regards to human behavior. The terms we use for a particular system of right and wrong (morality) or for the branch of philosophy devoted to the question of what is right and wrong are derived from the Latin and Greek terms for “custom” or “habit”, reflecting the fact that standards of right and wrong are primarily collective rather than personal. A society with a higher civilization than others will believe in moral standards that transcend itself, that are universal, written in a natural law flowing from a higher authority (God’s). In such a society, however, the higher, universal rules, must be expressed in particular customs and habits.

It is out of such customs and habits that the institution of private property arises. Societies recognize that their members have a right to that which they have legitimately acquired (through inheritance, purchase, gift, etc.), forbid others from trespassing on that (through theft, robbery, vandalism, trespass, etc.) and protect people’s rights to their own through their laws.

Does the institution of private property then serve the interests of society as a collective whole? If so what are those interests?

I can see three ways in which the institution of private property serves the collective interests of a society. These are a) it helps preserve the peace, b) it helps conserve the condition of material things in society, c) it contributes to the general prosperity of society.

Society consists of human beings, who live and work together for their common good as a society, the collective goods of the families, churches, and communities to which they belong, as well as their own personal goods. Such living and working together generates friction and at times disagreements arise. Sometimes one person’s good may conflict with another person’s, or the good of one or both of them might conflict with the good of society as a whole. One of the purposes of law to prevent these disagreements from tearing society apart in violent conflict.

Private property is a means to this end because when property is privately owned the difference between what belongs to one person and what belongs to another is also clearly defined and distinguished. This makes it easier for disputes to be settled peacefully.

The various socialisms, of course, dispute this. They argue that the very existence of a distinction between “mine” and “thine” is the cause of conflict. All one needs to do to prove them wrong is to point to a society which has tried to put socialism into practice. The elimination, at least nominally, of private ownership of factories and land and other productive property, makes people more jealous of their most minute personal effects. It eliminates trust, tears people apart, and generates more conflict over the pettiest of things.

This is because socialism has misdiagnosed the cause of evil in human society. It is not the existence of private property, the existence of “mine” and “thine” rather than a universal “ours”. It is the human heart, which is fallen, rebellious, and depraved. There is no political, social, or economic cure to the human condition. It is from that condition that human evil comes, and the laws of human societies are better able to deal with it when private property exists and property rights and protected under law.

The private ownership of property helps to conserve the condition of material things in society. What that simply means is that people are less likely to waste and abuse resources that they own than ones which are owned in common by society. This should be obvious to everybody. Where are you more likely to find garbage carelessly thrown about? In the backyards and front laws of privately owned houses or in ditches, back alleys, streets, and public parks? Who is more likely to keep their home in well repair? The person who owns the house he lives in or the person renting an apartment? What are the biggest pollution problems in the world today? The pollution of the atmosphere, the oceans, and other resources where private ownership is largely impractical.

Ecologists have long recognized this but they unfortunately are largely infected with the affinity for socialism that pervades much of the contemporary scientific and academic world. Instead of promoting responsible private property ownership they tend to support more government intervention and conservation laws.

Practically speaking, there are basically three options with regards to conserving resources. Either a) the resources are commonly owned, and available to all, with no limitations, b) they are commonly owned, and available to all with regulations and limitations that are strictly enforced, or c) you have resources that are privately owned and available to those their owners make them available to.

The first is the worst option from an ecological standpoint. This produces the famous “tragedy of the commons” of which Garrett Hardin wrote. (2) The second option is appropriate only in very specific situations where there is a practical reason for having the resource publicly owned. Applied on a large-scale throughout a society it eliminates human freedom and produces misery. The third option, is the best option, the option that has stood the test of time.

Finally, private property contributes to the general prosperity of society. This is true on a number of different levels. There is the basic fact, that in a society with private property, like Canada, the UK, or the United States, there is greater material abundance at every level in society than in a country like the old Soviet Union where misery was the only thing in abundance except in the higher echelons of the Communist Party.

We should not make the mistake of identifying material abundance with human happiness however. The two are not the same. Private property contributes to society’s prosperity in the sense of real happiness in that people are healthier psychologically and happier when they can say of something “this is mine” and have society recognize their claim. This is part of what is meant by the term “status”. “Status” is not a concept that is well-liked by levelers, egalitarians, revolutionaries, progressives, liberals and the like but it is vitally important to a person’s well-being and their integration into society. Private property helps convey status, and with it a sense of responsibility and achievement and helps ward off alienation.

It is therefore an institution that is vital to the interests of a civilized society.

(1) In my opinion, Locke’s thesis and arguments are inferior to Filmer’s.

(2) http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html

The Divine Right of Kings Versus the Tyranny of the People

“A Jacobite, Sir, believes in the divine right of Kings…That cannot be said of a Whig; for Whiggism is a negation of all principle.” – Dr. Samuel Johnson

In the minds of many, perhaps most people, today, the concepts of “democracy” and “freedom” are inseparable. This is undoubtedly the result of the United States becoming the pre-eminent power in the West. Democracy and liberty have been linked in the American psyche since the Declaration of Independence. In the famous preamble to that document, Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is to secure the “unalienable rights” of men, to “Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness”, that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”.

This is what Edmund Burke (who had defended the rights of the American colonists in King George’s parliament) would call an “armed doctrine”. Its only purpose is to stir up the masses and turn them into an instrument of destruction against the established authority. It is also palpable nonsense.

Human authority can be divided into two basic types, the natural and the usurped. While natural authority, being vested in fallen and imperfect men, can be abused, usurped authority is the gateway to tyranny. Indeed, the Greek term tyrannos originally referred to one who had seized power by force. It came to refer to rulers who abused their people because an abusive rule is what is usually to be expected from a usurper.

Natural authority is never derived from the “consent of the governed”. The most basic natural authority in society, is the authority of parents in the family. Parents are not elected by their children. Parents do not hold authority over their children because their children have voluntarily contracted, or otherwise consented, to being under their authority. Parental authority is natural, derived from the very nature of the institution of the family, and reinforced by millennia of prescription and precedent.

The liberal doctrine that government derives its legitimacy from consent, has gotten the cart before the horse. Whereas unnatural authority must always rely upon force to obtain obedience, natural authority, exercised justly, can inspire voluntary, consensual obedience.

Sir Robert Filmer, in Patriarcha: The Natural Right of Kings, a tract published in 1680, several years after its author’s death, argued for monarchy as the natural form of human government. The first kings, he reasoned, were fathers, whose households grew to become the first nations, and who passed their patriarchal authority down to their firstborn sons.

While liberals and progressives believe that Filmer’s arguments were overthrown by John Locke in his Two Treatises his understanding of the origin and nature of the authority of kings is closer to reality than the Social Contract theory of society that Locke had bought into.

According to the Social Contract theory, men originally existed in a “state of nature” as sovereign individuals. They then came together, and voluntarily formed a contract, whereby they relinquished a portion of their sovereignty to a new entity, the state, forming society. Thomas Hobbes, an earlier Social Contract theorist, argued that this was done out of necessity, because men in the state of nature were savages who needed the Leviathan of the state to keep them from destroying each other in the “war of all against all”. Hobbes, at least, understood human nature enough to know what a world of sovereign individuals would look like.

Both Hobbes and Locke were wrong, however, in believing individualism to be man’s natural state, and society to be the artificial creation of individuals contracting with one another. Society is man’s natural state because the family, which is the building block of society, society in miniature, is prior to the individual. It is the individual, isolated and alienated from society, who is unnatural.

Contemporary libertarians honor Locke as a hero. They believe his concept of the sovereign individual to be the foundation of personal liberty. His theories, however, led to the rise of modern democracy, which contrary to popular opinion, is no friend of personal liberty.

The next great Social Contract theorist after Locke was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau believed that the people, collectively, were sovereign, and that the democratically established State, would be the instrument through which the “General Will” of the people would be expressed. Dissent from the “General Will”, was not to be tolerated in Rousseau’s vision of the New Order. Rousseau’s ideas became the foundation, both of modern democracy, and of totalitarianism.

The first group of people to seriously attempt to put Rousseau’s ideas into action, were the French Revolutionaries, who overthrew their king and established a Republic, where power vacillated between rival groups of Revolutionaries, who treated their opponents brutally in what has come to be known as the “Reign of Terror”. Ultimately, the power fell into the hands of the usurper Napoleon, who sought to subject all of Europe to his will, before finally being stopped.

The next group would be the Communists.

Then, in 1933, a dictator arose in Germany who enjoyed tremendous popular support. If there was ever a man who represented the “General Will” of his people, it was Adolf Hitler. I say this, not to blame the Germans as a people for the crimes of Hitler and his party, but to illustrate a point. Democracy and dictatorship are not mutually exclusive. Historically, dictators have enjoyed and depended upon, the support of their people. Indeed, dictatorship, is the natural, logical, and ultimate manifestation of democracy.

There is a world of difference, however, between a dictator, and a king.

Lord Acton said that “power corrupts”, but it would be more accurate to say that it is the pursuit of power, rather than the possession of it, that corrupts. Kings inherit their authority. They do not seize it, the way military tyrants do, nor do they seek it through bribery and deception, the way democratically elected politicians do.

A king can be good or bad, depending upon how he exercises his authority. History is full of examples of both. Finding a good politician, however, is like finding a needle in a haystack. Politicians are by definition people who seek power – they are therefore the last people in the world that should be allowed to exercise it (as Douglas Adams pointed out, in one of his novels). A politician’s power is usurped. A king’s authority is natural.

Today, democracy is everywhere present in the Western world, even in countries like ours that are still presided over by a monarch. The British/Canadian system of parliamentary monarchy predates liberalism by centuries, and has naturally developed to be the closest thing in reality to the mixed constitution Aristotle wrote about in theory, the world has ever known. It is the best political tradition in the entire world. Since the rise of Enlightenment liberalism, however, the constitution has become unbalanced, the democratic element has become too strong, and the monarch is treated as a mere figurehead by most politicians.

This is unhealthy. It should also be noted that freedom has not been increased thereby. Indeed, as the Commons have become more and more powerful, in the UK and Canada, they have seen fit to extend legislation to cover areas of life that no medieval king would ever have intruded into. Further, they have created huge departments of government officials, whose job is to invade our private lives, and boss us around in our homes, our businesses, and our families.

Democracy and freedom are not the same thing.

God save our Queen.