So I just got in the mail the impressive newsletter from Pat Deneen’s Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown. Here’s its prosaic but kind of pithy summary of what I said there on Constitution Day:
Dr. Peter Lawler argued that Locke’s ideas fit the Mystery Passage [ Planned Parenthood v. Casey ] definition of liberty. He pointed out that the Founders, whose diverse persuasions varied from Lockeanism to Calvinism “built better than they knew” through legislative compromise. This compromise appeared as an “accidental Thomism” which broke down, however, because Supreme Court judicial activism replaced legislative compromise in the states.
The other speakers sort of disagreed. “Dr. [Richard] Hassing said . . . ’it is impossible to find a seed of something as radical as the Mystery Clause in the American Founding’; the Founders were influenced by the premodern notion that man has an end prior to his choices.”
I, of course, did not deny that influence, but it didn’t come from Locke’s radicalism.
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