Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 57

ORESTES BROWNSON

Brownson's opposition to this theory emerged from his deep
reading of the Western political tradition that had articulated the
naturalness of political authority, our inbuilt need for society, and
with Christian revelation, man's relational capacity and his end in
God, which gives his life a purpose beyond government, forever
circumscribing its powers.
Brownson contends that the deficiencies in modern political
theory are evident in both liberalism and socialism insofar as they
reduce man's social and political existence to abstract doctrines
of popular sovereignty or egalitarianism without asking what is
true and false in both of these conceptions and fully reckoning
with the complex requirements necessary for free societies to
endure. Brownson criticizes a Continental European liberalism
that insisted upon the natural rights of the sovereign individual
possessed separately apart from any authoritative preliberal traditions. The problem with this liberalism, Brownson thinks, is its
constricted belief that the individual and the state are the only
two political realities of modern society needed for a free and
decent political order.
The individual armed with a bevy of rights before the state is
likely to be swallowed, Brownson observes, by a collectivism made
possible by the elimination of various types and scales of communities that stand between the individual and that state. There
would, it follows, be no context and content for being a truthfully
free and relational person. Only if the person is understood to be
more than a consenting individual can the limits to government
be more than "negative" or empty. To be sustainable, they must
correspond to the whole truth about who we are. Brownson,
for this reason, wrote of humanitarian liberals as "abolitionists"
about the business of abolishing the real human distinctions that
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Modern Age - Spring 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Spring 2016

Contents
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