The “Arab Spring” that began in 2011 helped to inspire the so-called “American Autumn” of protests against the excesses of Wall Street, the big banks, “corpo-rate greed,” and the power of “big money” in American politics. In late Septem-ber 2011a movement calling itself Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district. Despite some police harassment, including the un-provoked pepper-spraying of peaceful protesters, the occupation continued to
grow. It also inspired similar “Occupy” movements in cities all across the coun-try and even beyond the borders of the United States. Their slogan—“We are the 99 percent”—referred to glaring and still-growing inequalities in American society. In 2005, the top 300,000 Americans made roughly as much income as the bottom 150 million of their fellow citizens, with the top one-hundredth of 1 percent (.01 percent) having an average income of $25.7 million. The average income of the top 1 percent of individual earners grew 275 percent between 1979 and 2007. By 2010, the top 1 percent of households owned 35.4 percent of all privately held wealth, and the next 19 percent had 53.5 percent, which means that just one-fifth (20 percent) of the peo-ple owned 89 percent of the wealth, leaving 11 percent for the bottom 80 percent.59
The problem, as protesters point out, is not that wealth is a bad thing—far from it—but that economic wealth translates very quickly and readily into political power.
And that power enables the very wealthy to pay lobbyists to influence legislators to pass laws and promote policies that favor the wealthy few while ignoring the inter-ests of the less affluent majority. These legislators, the Occupy movement argues, are increasingly beholden to wealthy individuals and corporations for campaign con-tributions. In a series of sweeping decisions, including Citizens United (2010), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that campaign contributions constitute a form of free speech and are therefore protected under the First Amendment; reaffirmed that cor-porations are artificial persons with many of the same rights and privileges as real persons, including the right to donate as much money as they wish to candidates of their choosing; and that the candidates they choose to support are those who will promote policies and pass laws favorable to their interests. Taken together, say the Occupy Wall Street protesters, these interconnected developments are contributing to the demise of democracy in the United States.
NOTES
1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 11; see Terence Ball, Richard Dagger, and Daniel O’Neill, eds., Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader, 9th ed. (New York: Pearson, 2014), selec-tion 3.11.
2. Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13.
3. Quoted in Herbert Muller, Freedom in the Western World: From the Dark Ages to the Rise of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 307. The English Bill of Rights (1689) should not be confused with the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791), which comprises the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
4. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), paragraph 6, p. 271; Locke’s italics.
5. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, paragraph 4; Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.12.
6. For a systematic comparison of the Declaration of Independence and Locke’s arguments, see Garrett Ward Sheldon, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 42–49. On the background and meaning of the Declaration, see Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Random House, 1942); Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978); Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
7. The full text of the Declaration is printed in Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, Ideals and Ide-ologies, selection 3.14. For Jefferson’s original draft, see Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball, eds., Thomas Jefferson: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 96–102.
8. Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny (London, 1775); quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960 [1791]), p. 876.
9. See James Farr, “‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate’: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political Thought,” Political Theory, 14 (1986): 263–289.
10. For a debate on Locke’s purported “feminism,” see Melissa Butler, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy,” American Political Science Re-view, 72 (1978): 135–150, and Terence Ball, “Comment on Butler,” ibid., 73 (1979):
549–550, followed by Butler’s “Reply,” ibid., 550–551.
11. Muller, Freedom in the Western World, p. 382.
12. As translated in Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1792); emphasis in original. For the full text of the Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen, see Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.15.
13. Included in Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, Ideals and Ideologies, as selection 8.54.
14. Michael Walzer, “Citizenship,” in Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 211–219, provides an insightful account of the notion of citizenship in the French Revolution.
15. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (1776), R. H.
Campbell and A. S. Skinner, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 2 vols., vol. I, Book I, Chapter 2; pp. 26–27; see Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, Ideals and Ideologies, selec-tion 3.16.
16. Smith, The Wealth of Nations , vol. I, Bk. IV, Chapter 2, p. 456.
17. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. I, Bk. II, Chapter 2, p. 324.
18. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 1.
19. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 25, 61–62.
20. J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition: Leonardo to Hegel (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 455.
21. Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York:
Hafner, 1948), p. 1.
22. Ibid., p. 70.
23. Bentham, The Rationale of Judicial Evidence, J. S. Mill, ed. (1827), in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, John Bowring, ed. (Edinburgh: W. Tait, 1843), vol. VII, p. 334.
24. For Bentham’s views on voting, see Terence Ball, “Utilitarianism, Feminism and the Franchise,” History of Political Thought, 1 (1980): 91–115.
25. See R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 2 vols.
26. James Mill, Government, in James Mill: Political Writings, Terence Ball, ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 3–42.
27. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in J.S. Mill: On Liberty and Other Writings, Stefan Col-lini, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 13; see Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.18.
28. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-lina Press, 1982 [1785]), p. 159.
29. Mill, On Liberty, p. 14.
30. See the excerpt from Mill’s Representative Government in Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, Ide-als and Ideologies, selection 2.9. For further discussion of “protective” (or “economic”)
versus “educative” theories of democracy, see Terence Ball, Transforming Political Dis-course (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), Chapter 6.
31. Mill, On Liberty, pp. 13–14.
32. See J. S. Mill’s posthumously published “Chapters on Socialism” (1879) in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, John M. Robson, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991), 33 vols., vol. V: Essays on Economics and Society—Part II (1967); also in On Liberty and Other Writings, Collini, ed., pp. 221–279.
33. We accede here to a popular if not altogether accurate description of Darwin’s theory, which holds that the “evolution” of a particular species is a demonstrable fact which the theory of natural selection serves to explain. Thus for example, the fact that some bacteria evolve so as to become resistant to antibiotics is due to their having an accidental genetic or other “adaptive advantage” that most other bacteria lack; hence their survival and sub-sequent capacity to reproduce antibiotic progeny.
34. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1970), p. 88; see Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.19.
35. Ibid., p. 114.
36. See Green’s essay, “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,” part of which appears as “Liberalism and Positive Freedom,” in Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, Ideals and Ideolo-gies, selection 3.20.
37. For an important and influential critique of positive liberty, see Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Berlin, Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For a critique of Berlin and a defense of positive freedom, see Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty,” in Alan Ryan, ed., The Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
38. For an overview, see Michael Freeden, “The Coming of the Welfare State,” in Ter-ence Ball and Richard Bellamy, eds., The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See, further, Robert E.
Goodin, Reasons for Welfare: The Political Theory of the Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
39. See Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1968).
40. See, for example, “The Port Huron Statement” of the Students for a Democratic Society;
reprinted in James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 329–374.
41. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
42. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 169.
43. See Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” printed as the Appendix to his The Consti-tution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
44. For an elaboration of the libertarian anarchist position, see Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1973); also Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, Ideals and Ideolo-gies, selection 3.22.
45. See Terence Ball, “Imagining Marketopia,” Dissent 48 (2001): 74–80; reprinted in a slightly revised and updated version as “A Libertarian Utopia” in Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.26.
46. Edison Electric Institute report, “Why Are Electricity Prices Increasing?” (Washington, D.C.: The Edison Foundation, Summer 2006); David Cay Johnston, “Competitive Era Fails to Shrink Electric Bills,” New York Times, Oct. 15, 2006, pp. A1, A27; and “Flaws Seen in Markets for Utilities,” New York Times, November 21, 2006, pp. C1, C4.
47. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
48. See, for example, William Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George Sher, Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., Civic Liberalism:
Reflections on Our Democratic Ideals (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
49. Amitai Etzioni, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 12.
50. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has since sought political asylum in the United States and published an autobiography, Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007).
51. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government in Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, A. D. Lindsay, ed. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), p. 247.
52. “Across Europe, Worries on Islam Spread to the Center,” New York Times, October 11, 2006, pp. A1, A12.
53. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003).
54. Richard Posner, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
55. “Police to Get Tough New Terror Powers,” The Sunday Times, May 27, 2007; at www .timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1845196.ece, as of August 19, 2007.
56. Ronald Dworkin, “Terror and the Attack on Civil Liberties,” New York Review of Books, 50 (November 6, 2003): 37–41.
57. John McCain, “Torture’s Terrible Toll,” Newsweek, November 21, 2005; available at www.newsweek.com/id/51200 as of July 22, 2009.
58. Many free-market libertarians, including Ayn Rand follower and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, were by their own admission caught completely off-guard by the Great Recession that threatened to turn into the Great Depression 2.0. For one liber-tarian-leaning thinker’s rethinking of unregulated free-market capitalism, see Richard A.
Posner, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Note that Posner writes of “a fail-ure,” and not (as a socialist might) of “the failure” of capitalism. His point is that this is a particular failure from which we can learn lessons about what reforms and regulations are needed, and why. But he regards “recession” as a euphemism and insists that “depres-sion” better describes “the crisis of ’08.” So too does the economist Paul Krugman in End this Depression Now! (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012).
59. David Cay Johnston, “Income Gap is Widening, Data Shows,” New York Times , March 29, 2007; Robert Pear, “Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds,”
New York Times, October 25, 2011; G. William Domhoff, “Wealth, Income, and Power,” cited at http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html. Dom-hoff is a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
FOR FURTHER READING
Ashcraft, Richard. Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Berlin, Isaiah. Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Boaz, David. Libertarianism: A Primer. New York: The Free Press, 1997.
Dagger, Richard. “Communitarianism and Republicanism,” in G. Gaus and C. Kukathas, eds., Handbook of Political Theory. London: SAGE Publications, 2004.
Dworkin, Ronald. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.
Elton, G. R. Reformation Europe, 1517–1559. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
Etzioni, Amitai, ed. New Communitarian Thinking: Persons, Virtues, Institutions, and Com-munities. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.
Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. Free to Choose. New York: Avon Books, 1981.
Goodin, Robert E. Reasons for Welfare: The Political Theory of the Welfare State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1988.
Gray, John. Liberalism. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Open University Press, 1986.
Halévy, Elie. The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. London: Faber & Faber, 1928.
Hayek, Friedrich. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Krugman, Paul. The Conscience of a Liberal. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.
Manning, D. J. Liberalism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976.
Miller, James. Democracy Is in the Streets: From the Port Huron Statement to the Siege of Chicago. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Moon, J. Donald. Constructing Community: Moral Pluralism and Tragic Conflicts. Princ-eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Ryan, Alan. The Making of Modern Liberalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Ruggiero, Guido de. The History of European Liberalism, trans., R. G. Collingwood. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1959.
Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Selznick, Philip. The Communitarian Persuasion. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002.
Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Spragens, Thomas A., Jr. The Irony of Liberal Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Terchek, Ronald. Republican Paradoxes and Liberal Anxieties. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1997.
Wolfe, Alan. The Future of Liberalism. New York: Random House, 2009.
From the Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill Reader Ideals and Ideologies, Ninth Edition
Part III: Liberalism
3.11 Thomas Hobbes—The State of Nature and the Basis of Obligation 3.12 John Locke—Toleration and Government
3.13 Thomas Paine—Government, Rights, and the Freedom of Generations 3.14 Declaration of Independence of the United States
3.15 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens 3.16 Adam Smith—Private Profit, Public Good 3.17 Immanuel Kant—Freedom and Enlightenment 3.18 John Stuart Mill—Liberty and Individuality
3.19 William Graham Sumner—According to the Fitness of Things 3.20 T. H. Green—Liberalism and Positive Freedom
3.21 Franklin Delano Roosevelt—Commonwealth Club Address
3.22 Lyndon B. Johnson—“To Defend These Rights”: Speech at Howard University 3.23 Barack Obama—Remarks by the President on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas 3.24 Donald Allen—Paternalism vs. Democracy: A Libertarian View
3.25 Murray Rothbard—Libertarian Anarchism 3.26 Terence Ball—A Libertarian Utopia