Posted by
Jeffrey Hall on Monday, May 18, 2009 2:23:20 PM
I was reading through a column by Harry Jackson (a black D.C. pastor who's column is on townhall), and came across the fact that Rep Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) was being smeared in the D.C. press for stating that he'd oppose a City Council resolution granting gays married elsewhere to transfer in their marriage, with Chaffetz wanting to let the people of D.C. vote, rather than have the council decree the city's position. A search on his name led me to a website that had a quote from Aristotle as the banner across the top: "Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved." http://blueinredzion.com/2009/05/the-hypocrisy-of-jason-chaffetz/comment-page-1/#comment-286
While that quote made a good banner for a liberal faux-intellectual website, it made me wonder what was actually meant by it. Googling it did reveal the quote to be genuinely attributable to Aristotle (not surprising, but one must check such things, as liberals have shown an inordinate fondness for inventive recollection, especially as of late in the Pelosi vs CIA cluster). Further checking for context of the quote led me to a section from a journal article on Aristotelian Liberalism:
In the present struggle between liberals and communitarians,(1) it is most often the communitarians who are seen bearing the standard of Aristotle. Yet liberalism's Aristotelian roots are deep; a continuous line of influence can be traced from Aristotle through the Scholastics to Locke and Jefferson (the natural law strand), and alongside it a parallel line from Aristotle through Polybius to Montesquieu and Madison (the constitutionalist strand).(2) Fred Miller's recent book Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics(3) is the latest in a growing number of attempts to reclaim the Aristotelian heritage, at least in part, for liberalism. As a fellow laborer in the same field,(4) I very much admire what Miller has accomplished in his book.
In particular, Miller argues persuasively for attributing to Aristotle thee following theses--theses traditionally rejected by communitarians as liberal innovations antithetical to the Aristotelian point of view:(5)
a) individuals have rights;
b) these rights are natural, not merely legal or conventional;
c) these rights forbid any sacrifice of the individual's interests to the interests of the community;
d) the state has an obligation to respect and protect these rights
e) in order to secure these rights, the state's constitutional structure should be arranged so as to provide checks on governmental power;
f) legitimate political authority rests on the consent of the governed; and
g) a government that fails to respect the rights of its citizens may legitimately be overthrown.
This sounds much less like the current meaning of liberalism, and much more like libertarianism, making the use of the quote to implicitly give validation from a well-known historical intellectual for liberalism at the least intellectually dishonest. But this redefining of words while keeping the historical support for those words (not the ideas the words themselves represent) seems to be coming more into vogue within the Left.