Where's a modern-day John Locke when you need one?

[jaunthie]

Andrew Sullivan has an interesting essay in the April 20th issue of The New Republic on the ongoing schism in the Republican party between what he calls the "conservatives of faith" (fundamentalists) and the "conservatives of doubt" (old-school small-government fiscal conservatives). I don't always agree with him, but he writes well and has one of the more interesting perspectives out there in the blogosphere (being a republican Catholic HIV-positive gay man). One of the money quotes from his essay:

"In the seventeenth century, men such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke looked at what the consequences were of various faiths battling it out for control of the moralizing state - and they balked. They saw civil war, religious extremism, torture, burnings at the stake, police states and the Inquisition. They saw polities like Britain's ravaged by sectarian squabbles over what the truth is, how it is discovered, and how to impose it on a society as a whole. And they made a fundamental break with ancient and medieval political thought by insisting that government retreat from such areas--that it leave the definition of the good life to private citizens, to churches uncontaminated by government, or to universities, where liberal education would seek and discuss competing views of the truth."

Sadly, our America today bears much more resemblance to those moralizing states than the Lockean ideal we started with. And I don't see any modern-day John Locke or Thomas Hobbes on the horizon.

You can read the whole essay here.

Comments

[fisherbear.livejournal.com]

Interesting stuff. Noah Feldman has a related (and long, and I think good) editorial in the New York Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/magazine/03CHURCH.html.

I haven't really processed the two of them yet, but I think I'm going to.