"Private Rights and the Common Good"

A superb piece by James Gordley here. Gordley performs a great service by clarifying the notion of rights in the context of a traditional notion of the common good. From Aristotle until the nineteenth century, rights were legal powers by which persons could act individually for the good in the context of a community. In other words, rights had a telos. And that telos was the Good of both the individual and the community of which the individual was a member. The good of the community, in turn, was understood in terms of distributive, commutative, and general justice.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, on one account, rights were absolute powers of individuals that could be limited only to the extent that their exercise interfered with the rights of another. On another account, individual rights amounted only to a delegation of power from the state that could be created, circumscribed, or eliminated as the public interest required. Today we find it difficult to think outside either of these accounts even though neither would have occupied the social imaginary of, say, the Founding generation of an independent United States.

I won't take the time to quote from or further summarize Gordley's argument. It stretches across only 36 pages. As an added bonus, Gordley adds a ten-page appendix in which demonstrates that the libertarian account (the first in the preceding paragraph) cannot be drawn from John Locke. Gordley argues with demonstrable care that, while Locke moved from the historical Christian-Aristotelian account with respect to the origins of political society (from innate sociality to the social contract), the purposes of political society were congruent with the Western tradition exemplified in Aristotle, Aquinas, and Richard Hooker: 

In this account [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding], Locke spoke of the pursuit of “true happiness.” When Aristotle spoke of happiness (eudaemonia), he did not mean an agreeable state of mind which is the opposite of sadness.  He meant to live well and to flourish, pursuing what is worthwhile.  Hooker used the word “felicity” in the same way.  It is “the utmost good and greatest perfection whereof nature hath made [us] capable.” According to Locke, “a “steady prosecution of true felicity” requires that human beings choose those things that “lie in the way to their main end, and make a real part of that which is their greatest good.”  “[W]e should take pains to suit the relish of our minds to the true intrinsic good or ill that is in things....”  “[T]he highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.” ...

[Thus,] “the necessity of pursuing true happiness is the foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty.”

In short, Lockean liberty consists in the freedom to pursue the Good individually, socially, and as a political community. Locke was not libertarian; he was an Anglican Whig.