WordBridge Publishing
info[at]wordbridge.net
Covenant and Capital
Tracing the history of liberty was a cherished occupation of 19th century liberals, who saw it, of course, culminating in their regime of classical economics combined with electoral politics, whereby the church as a public institution had been superseded. One of the major protagonists of this version of history was John Lothrop Motley, who in his The Rise of the Dutch Republic linked the revolutions conducted by the Dutch Republic, England, and the United States into "links of one chain," "a single chapter in the great volume of human fate," the chapter in which liberty finally was wrested from the hands of despots. The following is from the preface to volume 1:
THE rise of the Dutch Republic must ever be regarded as one of the leading events of modern times. Without the birth of this great commonwealth, the various historical phenomena of the sixteenth and following centuries must have either not existed, or have presented themselves under essential modifications. Itself an organized protest against ecclesiastical tyranny and universal empire, the Republic guarded with sagacity, at many critical periods in the world's history, that balance of power which, among civilized states, ought always to be identical with the scales of divine justice....
So much is each individual state but a member of one great international commonwealth, and so close is the relationship between the whole human family, that it is impossible for a nation, even while struggling for itself, not to acquire something for all mankind. The maintenance of the right by the little provinces of Holland and Zealand in the sixteenth, by Holland and England united in the seventeenth, and by the United States of America in the eighteenth centuries, forms but a single chapter in the great volume of human fate; for the so-called revolutions of Holland, England, and America, are all links of one chain (pp. iii-iv).
Motley's treatment is typical of that age: every crowned head a despot, every revolutionary a freedom fighter. The abolition of king and priest (or Protestant cleric, for that matter) was in itself sufficient for a new age to dawn, for darkness to be dispelled. But this Victorian blindness does not take away from the fundamental insight. Motley was right in this, that liberty does have a lineage, and that this lineage did pass through these three countries, the one to the other. Only that the manner in which this happened, as well as the import and ramifications of this so-called "rise of liberty," require drastic revision. That is what Covenant and Capital provides.
Firstly, following the paradigm presented in Common-Law Conservatism, Covenant and Capital embeds liberty within the developing structure of authority as it was generated in Western civilization in the Middle Ages. King and priest, therefore, made an essential positive contribution to this development.
Secondly, it integrates the role of both capitalism and Calvinism into the narrative. Here of course is a thicket of controversy as far as intepretation is concerned, but with the common-law conservatism paradigm at hand, both capitalism and Calvinism can be properly assessed and their roles appreciated in the history of liberty.
At bottom, Covenant and Capital opens the door to a vista of liberty as the growth of centuries of labor and struggle, of achieving potentialities within the framework of Augustinian civilization. And as such it is a declaration of independence from the theories of natural rights which would view liberty as simply the result of authority and institutions being cast off. The institutions of liberty are in fact embedded in authority, and not vice versa.