Two Radically Different Social Contracts

Tomorrow night (10/27) we shall be comparing the relatively anemic protections for individuals and groups in our U.S. Constitution with the wide array of human rights endorsed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

The two documents echo and include the values of the two radically different revolutions, American and French, which, while they historically took place within a quarter decade of each other, 1776 and 1789, reflected the political theories of entirely different centuries and contrasting contract theorists -- John Locke whose 17th century Second Treatise of Civil Government took 25 years or more in composition and was published finally in 1690 and Jean Jacques Rousseau's 18th Century (Enlightenment) Discourse on Inequality and Social Contract:

http://www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtreat.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau

As Hannah Arendt points out in her now classic On Revolution:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/arendt.htm

Locke's contract and the U.S. revolution were really little more than a coup d'etat, i.e. revolution against political rule by the British sovereign which left intact American social and economic patterns of ownership and political control; whereas Rousseau inspired a far more radical revolution in social and economic as well as political structures of France and (through Napoleon's conquests) in much of the rest of Europe and our own Lousiana which we purchased from the French.

These differences endure until the present in which we find Britain only second among the developed nations to the U.S. in its divisions between poverty and wealth.

The contrast in values is captured by the respective slogans of the two revolutions: "life, liberty, and PROPERTY" (Jefferson's first version of the Declaration of Independence in which he substituted for Locke's "property" the proto Scottish utilitarian value of "happiness" in his final draft versus the French Revolution's battle cry against aristocratic rule, "liberty, EQUALITY, and fraternity."

Locke had been the great defender of the displacement of medieval rights of overlapping interests in property with the notion of fee simple:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee_simple

by which wealthy property owners in Britain expropriated traditional commons -- lands where small landowners could graze their farm animals -- and the development of commerce overseas in which he was personally an investor ---> what is called today by some an "Ownership Society."

Locke (and the recently deceased libertarian, Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State and Utopia)) argued that any individual who mixed his labor with unclaimed lands or resources acquired absolute rights of ownership of them. Any left out, Locke suggested, with only their labor to sell might emigrate to America where open lands abounded.

Locke's theory of private ownership was utilized by our 17th century British settlers to justify their expropriations of native American lands which were communally held and used by these natives -- the New Israel or our so-called Manifest Destiny:

http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/joshua/manifest.html

For instance, the five Iroquois tribes for whom our upstate NY lakes are named shared in democratic fashion their common resources which were allocated and adjusted by communal meetings after which our New England town meetings were modeled. Now only their footpaths around their namesake lakes and occasionally discovered arrow heads remain of their heritage. Our American Constitution more or less incorporated Locke's property conceptions, including the right to hold slaves (if properly captured), the right of political representation for European roots male property owners only. Our Republic was founded with minimal rights for a very few -- amended slightly by the Bill of Rights with a few all too frail protections against slavery, and only one mention of equality in the 14th Amendment 'due process' clause that was gotten round in 1896 by the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson decision, that spawned "separate but equal" racism which, of course, opened the doors wide to segregation in all areas of American life:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson

In contrast to Locke's defense of property as the primary natural right to be defended Rousseau's version of social contract attacked private property ownership which he had identified in his Discourse on Inequality as the starting point of social injustice. In his Social Contract he pondered how the "General Will" of a democratic government might be induced to represent the best interests of ALL rather than an accidental gang up of particular individual interests against minorities -- an enduring problem with democracies also recognized by Alexis De Tocqueville in his Democracy in America in 1835 and echoed later by J.S. Mill's On Liberty. The Rousseauean values were spread through Europe by Napoleon's conquests and echoed in their Civil Codes in contrast with the British and American common law tradition.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the widow of FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, as our U.N. representative, was drafted just before the Cold War emerged to shatter the post WW2 consensual efforts to establish universal standards of justice that would preclude the possiblity ever again of ruthless and destructive wars such as WW1 and WW2. It is these human rights standards that are now threatened around the world by the agressive actions of smaller and larger political forces, including the U.S. One is horrified, therefore, to read two of today's NY Times editorials: one directed against our Vice President's attempt to end run around our Senate's forceful condemnation of torture by Americans, directly or indirectly, and the apparent intent by some in Congress to shatter supports for our nation's poor and particularly our poor children:

Legalized Torture, Reloaded
Vice President Dick Cheney's proposal to allow the Central
Intelligence Agency to torture prisoners is absurd and
should be rejected by the House.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/opinion/26wed2.html?th&emc=th

..................

Stalking the Poor to Soothe the Affluent
Congress's desperate attempt to find budget cuts after four
years of tax cuts for the affluent should be scuttled and
the poor protected.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/opinion/26wed3.html?th&emc=th
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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