John Locke Discovers Justice and Tolerance: The Integrated Aspects of Lockean Thought

The decades before Locke’s adulthood were grim: the Gunpowder Plot, the execution or assassination (depending on one’s view) of Charles I, the English Civil War, the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, and the Thirty Years’ War, among other painful events. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes lived through these years, and his sinister assessment of human nature is perhaps colored by them.

By 1660, these episodes were over, and Locke would have been 28 years old.

For most of his adult life, Locke lived in an era which was still mixed, but perhaps slightly better. Locke was suspected of being involved in the Rye House Plot, a failed attempt to assassinate Charles II; Locke had to flee to the Netherlands in 1683.

But on a happier note, Locke also witnessed the Glorious Revolution, so called because it was accomplished without violence or casualties. The concepts of parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy were developing during Locke’s life — indeed, he was involved in the development himself — and both of those concepts had an optimistic aspect.

Locke suspected that much of the world’s misery and violence had its roots in a distorted version of Christianity, as historian Joseph Loconte writes:

Conspiracy theories, nativism, militant religion, mob violence, a plot to topple the government — welcome to 17th-century England. English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) lived through one of the most turbulent and divisive periods in British history. At the center of the storm, he believed, was a degraded form of Christianity. “All those flames that have made such havoc and desolation in Europe, and have not been quenched but with the blood of so many millions,” he wrote, “have been at first kindled with coals from the altar.”

By contrast, Locke saw uplifting events in history as based on an authentic and accurate understanding of Christianity. He studied the New Testament carefully, and saw in it a source of tolerance and justice, as Joseph Loconte explains:

Locke’s response was to offer the world a new political vision: a liberal society based on a radical reinterpretation of the teachings of Jesus. The bracing message, contained in his Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, was about the liberty and dignity of every human soul. It would form the bedrock of the American political order.

Behind Locke’s embrace of majority rule is founded on the notion of imago dei — the idea that each human being carries an imprint of the supreme intelligence which oversees the universe. The principle of majority rule is attractive only if there’s some reason to believe that the majority of people will produce the right answer in the majority of cases. If each human being bears the imago dei, then it increases the chances that the majority of a group has likely chosen the correct course of action.

A similar logic provides a foundation for the concept of popular sovereignty.

Additionally, Locke sees God as valuing each human being. If God attributes worth to every human, then no human can deem another human to be worthless. The notion that God values people arises in part from the notion that He owns all people, having created them.

For Locke, the first order of business was to insist that every human being bore the imprint of an intelligent, personal, and purposeful Creator. No one must be treated as a means to an end, as someone else’s property. Rather, every individual belonged to God, and was designed for a noble and transcendent purpose. As Locke declared in his Second Treatise: “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one Sovereign Maker, sent into the world by his order and about his business, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.”

The work ‘workmanship’ alerts the reader to a New Testament passage:

Most of Locke’s audience, literate in the Bible, would have recognized his allusion to a passage from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).

Long before John Locke, authors such as Richard Hooker used the phrase “divine right” to describe royal authority in his book of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie published in the 1590s.

Against the notion of a “divine right,” Locke posed “popular sovereignty,” a concept which would appear often in American civilization after Locke’s death.

The political and religious leaders of Locke’s day invoked the “divine right” of kings to justify political absolutism. In contrast, Locke argued that only a government based on the consent of the governed could honor the divine prerogative. Here, in brief, is his religious argument for the right to revolution: If the political authority tries to oppress God’s servants — by threatening their life, liberty, or property — it becomes morally illegitimate.

There is a thoroughly Lockean sentiment in these words: The purpose of a government is to protect the lives, liberties, and properties of its citizens. Anything less is negligence; anything more is tyranny.

Locke’s search for the “why” of government — what is the purpose of government? — shifted the emphasis of the debate. The apologists for absolute, or near absolute, monarchy were busy explaining that the dynasty rightly held all the power. Locke is asking, not who holds the power, but for which purpose is the power held?

Once the purpose of the sovereign is clear, then it is also clear that imposing an arbitrary religion on the subjects does not serve that purpose. This is a reflection on the struggles between the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics in the British Isles: since the early 1530s, this had been a matter for the Crown and the Parliament to ponder.

But Locke is suggesting that neither the Crown nor the Parliament needs to busy itself with choosing between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. The task of protecting life, liberty, and property is indifferent to the question of religion.

In the century before Locke’s birth, the Protestant Reformation had opened the doors to religious pluralism throughout Europe. For his political theory to work in societies with competing religious traditions, another sea change in thinking was required. The state must stop punishing people for refusing to endorse the preferred national religion. Likewise, church leaders must stop trying to manipulate the levers of power to impose their sectarian values on an unwilling population. “No peace and security, no, not so much as common friendship, can ever be established or preserved amongst men,” Locke wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration, “so long as this opinion prevails . . . that religion is to be propagated by force of arms.”

The Lockean notion of tolerance was directed to the practitioner of a faith, not to the faith itself. Given this nuance, Locke was free to argue for the ‘toleration of the dissenters’ without committing himself to the truth of their faith; likewise, tolerance for the Jews or the Muslims, to the extent that they practice their faith without damaging the lives, liberties, or properties of citizens.

Spanning two centuries, a number of conflicts had been named ‘wars of religion’ — the French Wars of Religion from 1562 to 1598, the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to 1648, and the fighting in Ireland. Locke saw that these wars were not truly about religion, but simply about political power. He also saw that the results of these wars left governments in place which failed to serve the purposes for which any and all governments are instituted.

Locke became an eloquent and modern champion of tolerance, as Joseph Loconte reports:

In the wake of the wars of religion, it was assumed that the best guarantee of civic peace and social cohesion was the rigid imposition of a national creed — Catholicism in France, Calvinism in Geneva, Anglicanism in England, and so on. Yet laws criminalizing dissent created a permanent underclass across Europe. Locke watched in anguish as religious dissenters were persecuted, jailed, executed, or sent into exile.

Locke never set foot in America, but his formulation of religious tolerance both shaped and expresses an American point of view:

Locke decided to turn conventional thinking on its head. The key to political stability was not conformity through coercion. Rather, a government that protected — with equal justice — the rights and freedoms of people of all faith traditions would enjoy widespread support. Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Catholics, Quakers, Jews, even Muslims — no one, according to Locke, should be denied his essential civil rights because of religion. “The sum of all we drive at is that every man enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.” (Locke is routinely accused of having denied toleration to Catholics, but a close and contextual reading of his Letter strongly suggests otherwise.) Here is a revolutionary application of the Golden Rule, one of the pillars of Christian morality.

The creation of the United States leaned on many thinkers: Montesquieu, Burlamaqui, Cicero, and others — but perhaps on Locke most of all. Yet Locke’s influence on the U.S. can be misunderstood. He advocated for a truly revolutionary level of religious tolerance; yet he understood that act of tolerance itself as a Christian act.

Locke might say that extending tolerance to a Jew or to a Muslim is itself a distinctively Christian act.

The American Founders, supported by the nation’s clergy, thoroughly absorbed Locke’s political principles — from the separation of powers to the separation of church and state. Nevertheless, many on today’s religious right reject Lockean liberalism for supposedly opening the door to relativism and “radical individualism.” Progressives, on the other hand, applaud his commitment to individual rights but rip it from its religious foundation.

An examination of Locke’s writings reveals the detail and seriousness of his study of theology, and the depth to which his theological studies shaped both his political and his philosophical texts.

In fact, Locke’s political outlook was saturated with Christian assumptions about justice, equality, freedom, and natural rights. Like no thinker before him, Locke combined Whig political theory with a gospel of divine grace and mercy.

God’s omnibenevolence was, for Locke, a foundation for popular sovereignty, majority rule, and the idea that each and every human life has value and is therefore to be protected.

A lifelong student of the Bible, he searched the scriptures for examples of God’s indiscriminate love. He founded a philosophical society that required prospective members to affirm their love for “all men, of what profession or religion soever.” For many years he kept notes from a sermon based on Galatians 5:6, “the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” — a theme that appears throughout his writings and personal letters.

The text of the New Testament was, for Locke, a roadmap to the goal of ensuring that every human life is valued and protected. It is debatable whether Jesus is moderately pacifistic or radically pacifistic, but in either case, Locke saw in Jesus the principle of protecting lives, liberties, and properties.

The life and teachings of Jesus were his lodestar. Jesus never bullied people into becoming his followers, never used force, and scolded his disciples when they were inclined to do so. Christ came into the world, Locke believed, to bring life and peace to those who had become God’s enemies. To Locke, Jesus was “our Savior,” “our Lord and King,” “the Captain of our Salvation,” and “the Prince of Peace.”

By 1695, Locke had expressed his religious views in detail. He was solidly Anglican; he devoted care to the precise study of Scripture, and he did all of this in a way which nonetheless won him admiration from Deists and Unitarians.

Tolerance was, for Locke, not an option but a duty:

Thus, the moral economy of the Christian story must inform the ideals of a political society: The gospel offered a path by which people could live together with their deepest differences. “The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion, is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the genuine reason of mankind,” Locke wrote, “that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind, as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.”

Locke’s texts may be sorted into three main groups: political, religious, and philosophical. In addition, there are other writings about the natural sciences or about economics. Yet Locke himself might have argued that such distinctions are not justified. He might have seen his political, religious, and philosophical writings as related and interconnected. The legal concept of a jury trial might be based in part on his empirical epistemology and in part on the concept of each human possessing the imago dei.

The Three Phases of the Roman Empire and Their Corresponding Military Strategies

The Roman Empire began around 27 BC, replacing the Roman Republic. During the five centuries of its existence, the empire would expand significantly. While expansion is success, it also creates a need for military strength — and that need is continuously changing.

Historian Edward Luttwak describes the geopolitical history of the empire in three phases, in order: the growth, maintenance, and defense of the empire:

The first expansive, hegemonic, and reliant chiefly on diplomatic coercion; the second meant to provide security even in the most exposed border areas, in part by means of fortified lines whose remains are still visible from Britain to Mesopotamia; and the third a defense-in-depth of layered frontier, regional, and central reserve forces that kept the western empire going till the fifth century and the eastern empire for much longer.

For roughly the first century of its existence, the military policy of the empire was expansion. The empire was birthed in the midst of the collapsing republic. One of several reasons for the end of the republic was that it was a form of government suited to ruling the city of Rome and the surrounding territories in central Italy, but it was not suited to ruling a world empire. Although the empire would ultimately rule more territory than the republic, the republic, during its last years, had control of millions of square miles, including the areas of present-day Spain, France, Greece, Turkey, and North Africa.

Maintaining effective military control of occupied regions, and mounting campaigns to gain control of still more land, was a task which required quick and consistent decision-making and a clear chain of command. The Senate, which was the main governing body during the republic, was a deliberative institution which engaged in debate. Military commanders in the field, sending requests for instructions to Rome, couldn’t wait for the Senate’s thorough discussions.

“The first system of imperial security was essentially that of the late republic, though it continued” until around 68 AD, when Nero died. This first system operated “under that peculiar form of autocracy we know as the principate.” The principate was a legal fiction created by Octavian, designed to retain the appearance of a republic while concealing the fact that the actual machinery of government was functioning as a dictatorship.

The empire was born in war, and kept a martial flavor for most of its existence, as Edward Luttwak explains:

Created by the party of Octavian, himself a master of constitutional ambiguity, the principate was republican in form but autocratic in content. The magistracies were filled as before to supervise public life, and the Senate sat as before, seemingly in charge of city and empire. But real control was now in the hands of the family and personal associates of Octavian, a kinsman and heir of Julius Caesar and the ultimate victor of the civil war that had begun with Caesar’s murder.

That war had been an internal power struggle between the three members of the Second Triumvirate: Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus. In 36 BC, Lepidus was defeated by Octavian and sent into exile, where he lived safely and died of natural causes around 13 BC or 12 BC. That left Octavian and Mark Antony to face each other. Mark Antony had Cleopatra as an ally, but the war ended in 31 BC “with the final defeat of Antony and Cleopatra.”

Octavian now had all the power which was originally divided among three men: the separation of powers was destroyed, the Senate largely powerless, and Octavian, becoming emperor, chose a new name: Augustus.

Octavian-Augustus was succeeded by Tiberius, then Caligula, and later Claudius. At the death of Claudius, Nero became emperor.

Nero’s tyranny and excesses provoked rebellion. In part because Nero failed to clearly identify a successor, and in part because any successor named by him would likely not have been acknowledged, there was an open question about who would be the next emperor.

“When Nero died,” writes Luttwak, it was under mysterious circumstances. He had been obliged to flee the city of Rome because of uprisings against his tyrannical rule. Some historians write that he committed suicide; other write that the governor of a Greek island discovered him living in disguise and ordered that he be executed. Most of the evidence points toward suicide. In any case, when Nero died in 68 AD, “another had already claimed his place.”

On June 8, 68 AD, the Senate, seeing that Nero was unlikely to retain power in the face of the rebellion, named Galba to be emperor. Most evidence points toward Nero dying by suicide on June 9 in Rome. Galba, however, had been in Spain when the Senate named him emperor, and was not yet in Rome.

But the new emperor, Galba, did not arrive in Rome until October and did not live beyond January 69. M. Salvius Otho, an ex-governor of Lusitania, though in Rome as Galba’s follower, procured his murder at the hands of the Praetorians and was acclaimed emperor in turn. By then yet another had risen to claim the office, Aldus Vitellius, governor of Lower Germany and master of its four legions. So far, contention had been resolved through suicide and murder; now there was to be civil war also.

The lower levels of the Roman bureaucracy trundled along, keeping the empire running, while at the highest levels, open warfare among would-be emperors manifested itself in a string of assassinations. After Nero’s death, Rome would have four different emperors within a year.

The military, especially those units on the frontiers, had no steady source of instructions. It engaged largely in holding actions during this time. The era of grand expansion was over.

The outstanding virtue of the principate, the constitutional device invented by Augustus, was its reconciliation of republican forms and traditions with autocratic efficiency. Its outstanding defect was that the succession was dynastic, but without any mechanism to secure it as such, or to replace an unfit dynast. When a tolerable emperor chose a capable successor and made him a son by adoption, all was well. Adoption satisfied the dynastic sentiments of the army and the common people without offending the anti-dynastic prejudice of the Senate. But if there were no adequate son and none were adopted, he became emperor who could make himself emperor; usually by force.

During the next two centuries, succession was not always as chaotic and violent as it was after the death of Nero. But the flaws in Augustus’s precedent had been visible, and succession remained a point of contention for the remainder of the empire.

Although there would be occasional bursts of expansion, the empire energy and focus could not be as devoted to conquest as it had been earlier, because some amount of attention was continuously absorbed by the matter of succession.

Babylon: Military, Political, and Cultural Grandeur Come Eventually to Naught

In the Ancient Near East, Babylon had a central role: it was both conqueror and conquered. It lay at a crucial location on the Euphrates River, where the river had been divided into a number of trenches and canals which flowed through and around the city both to provide water, mainly for agricultural irrigation, and to provide defense in a system of moats.

The Tigris River was not far from Babylon, and together the Tigris and Euphrates gave the region both moisture for crops as well as transportation in the forms of ships and barges which moved up and down the waterways.

The earliest written documentation of the city seems to be from around 2250 B.C., and the cities importance waxed and waned: during its highpoints, the city was the political center of the Babylonian Empire; during its low points, it was a vassal to other empires.

The word ‘Babylonia’ refers to the larger region controlled by the city of Babylon, i.e., the Babylonian Empire.

During one of its last glory days, Babylonia conquered Israel and brought most of that nation’s citizens to Babylon as slaves: this would have happened approximately during the time from 598 B.C. to 586 B.C.

The military defenses of the city were formidable. The captured slaves would have been impressed, and probably depressed, by the structures of the city, as described by historians Joachim Marzahn & Klaudia Englund:

Babylon was situated on both sides of the Euphrates, the old town to the east, another half of the town to the west of the river. It was protected by a double ring of walls, the inner wall being some 6.5, and the outer wall 3.5 meters thick. At distances of 17-18 meters, towers of, respectively, 11 and 4.5 meters width formed part of the defenses. At least 8 double gateways stretching 50 meters afforded entrance to the city. The old town alone comprised an area of ca. 2¼ km², a large part of which was occupied by palaces and temples. Further protection was offered by the eastern wall spanning some 8 km, which also protected buildings beyond the inner city, for example, the Summer Palace in the north.

This system of walls and gates was not only a military defense system, but rather also an impressive work of art and architecture. The famous Ishtar Gates featured bricks with a glossy blue glazed finish. Accents of gold or yellow were mainly in the form of lions.

Beneath the walls and gates, the foundations extended downward even further than the walls above ground extended skyward: This was to prevent an attacking army from tunneling under the walls.

The physical strength and architectural grandeur of the walls of Babylon was paired with the intellectual resources of the city, which was a center of both literary and scientific work.

In 539 B.C., Cyrus of Persia conquered the city with little actual fighting: the city seems to have surrendered quickly. Babylon was incorporated into the Persian Empire, but retained some importance as a regional administrative and cultural center.

Cyrus died around 529 B.C., and various kings succeeded him as rulers of Persia. One of those later kings was Xerxes.

In 482 B.C., the city revolted against Xerxes. He put down the rebellion and, as historian Henry W.F. Saggs writes, the uprising

led to destruction of its fortifications and temples and to the melting down of the golden image of Marduk.

(Marduk was a major figure in the Babylonian polytheistic system.)

Although the city remained in existence for several centuries after this, it was never again a major player in the politics of the Ancient Near East.

The Ethics of Capitalism: The Moral Side of the Free Market

Arguments against capitalism often take a moral tone, and accuse capitalism of deifying avarice: of making greed into a virtue. Who wants to defend an economic system which amounts to codified selfishness?

Such attacks are misguided on multiple fronts.

A polemic against capitalism, if it does not further specify what it is condemning, is fundamentally ill-founded, because the word ‘capitalism’ possesses multiple distinct, different, and mutually exclusive definitions. On the one hard, there is ‘crony capitalism,’ in which a small number of companies develop relationships with the government, in the process inducing the government to so regulate trade and commerce that only these companies have the advantage, and that the majority of companies are burdened by regulation and unable to effectively compete: such “crony capitalism” is opposed to any intuitive sense of fairness.

On the other hand, there is “free market capitalism,” which seeks precisely to correspond to this intuitive sense of fairness: the job of the government is to be a neutral referee or umpire, allowing companies to compete fairly by offering various products at various prices.

In addition to those two types of capitalism, one can even make the counterintuitive argument that Marxist communism or socialism is a type of capital: it argues that the “means of production” should be jointly owned by all the people, in the form of government ownership — and the means of production is nothing else than capital. Marxism, in the form of socialism or communism, can be characterized as “state capitalism.”

If one is to find fault with capitalism, then one must specify which type of capitalism one is vilifying.

Crony capitalism is easy game: it is almost universally seen as unfair, to the extent that even those who engage in it take pains to hide their activity. Beyond that, crony capitalism is of no utility to the citizens: the market is provided with goods of low quality at high prices, and shortages are frequent. Consumers have fewer options and choices in such a system.

State capitalism is sometimes advocated by people of good will, as a route to social justice. Other times, it is cynically implemented by those who see it as an opportunity for personal power. In either case, it leaves the citizens with fewer choices, higher prices, less quality, and shortages.

A free market system, on the other hand, can achieve the social justice which state capitalism claimed to seek. As economist Ludwig Erhard phrased it:

When I speak of a social market economy, I do not mean that the market needs to be made social. I mean that the market is intrinsically social.

A free market corresponds to an intuitive notion of social justice: a market economy is socially conscious because, as suppliers seek to sell to every demand, then every consumer benefits from the competition to offer better products at a lower price. Everyone is a consumer, and everyone is part of the economy’s aggregate demand. In a competitive market economy, every supplier wants to meet as many demands as possible, and suppliers will lower their prices and raise quality in order to sell to those demands.

Because suppliers want to sell to as many consumers as possible, they find ways to offer products at lower prices. Because suppliers compete with each other, they find ways to offer better quality at those lower prices. As consumers are able to obtain better products at lower prices, the goals of social justice are attained.

Ludwig Erhard showed that market economies lead to social justice, and that property rights lead to civil rights. He showed that when suppliers are free to creatively meet demands and consumers are free to choose, all parties in the marketplace benefit.

As a brilliant byproduct, free markets also give consumers more choice and more abundance.

Efforts to censure capitalism as immoral are effective against crony capitalism and against state capitalism, but gain no ground against free market capitalism, as Russ Roberts writes:

A lot of people reject capitalism because they see the market process at the heart of capitalism — the decentralized, bottom-up interactions between buyers and sellers that determine prices and quantities — as fundamentally immoral. After all, say the critics, capitalism unleashes the worst of our possible motivations, and it gets things done by appealing to greed and self interest rather than to something nobler: caring for others, say. Or love.

It is plausible to make moral arguments against greed. But in a free market, the retailer is working simply to feed his family: this is not greed, it is responsibility. How he would be chastened if he did not attempt to provide for his family!

Buyer and seller function as a couple dancing: each plays a part. Buyer and seller function as teammates in a sport: one would hardly accuse the player who caught a teammate’s pass as greedy because he received the ball.

In any discussion of the various forms of capitalism, it is good form to quote from the writings of Adam Smith, whose The Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776 and became a foundational text in economics:

Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

If capitalism were merely greed cloaked in the equations of economists, it would be morally suspect, as Russ Roberts recites:

Capitalism, say its critics, encourages grasping, exploitation, and materialism. As Wordsworth put it: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” In this view, capitalism degrades our best selves by encouraging us to compete, to get ahead, to win in business, to have a nicer car and house than our neighbors, and to always look for higher pro.ts and advantages. In the great rat race of the workplace, we all turn into rats. Is it any wonder so many want to kill off capitalism and replace it with something more just, more fair, more humane?

But he goes on to point out that only in a free market system does the retailer have a motive to treat his customers honestly and fairly. Only in a free market does the employer have a reason to pay his workers well. The freedom of the marketplace means that the consumers can go elsewhere if they perceive that they’ve been given a bad deal. Workers can go elsewhere if they feel unappreciated.

This is why people who live in countries with even a partially free market inevitably have a better standard of living than those who live in “command economies” or “planned economies.”

The political freedom and personal liberty which accompany a free market are pleasant byproducts of the laissez faire economic system.

Endless tirades have been made — and will be made — against “capitalism,” but when those attacks are carefully analyzed, they fail to undermine the results obtained by a free market system. Those who benefit the most from a free market are not the wealthy capitalists — for such people will enjoy a high standard of living in any economic system — but rather the working-class people, who obtain a level of prosperity not available to the working class in nations governed by other economic doctrines.

Radically Different Types of Capitalism: Why the Discussion Gets Confusing

People constantly debate about economics and politics. Sometimes they even fight about it. But these discussions are often confusing, unclear, and ambiguous. Why?

One simple vocabulary word can be misleading: “capitalism.”

Before deciding whether capitalism is good or bad, one must first discover what capitalism is. To complicate matters, it soon becomes clear that there are different types of capitalism — so different from each other that they are nearly opposites.

So when Ben Shapiro makes a radical statement like “Capitalism is morally preferable to socialism,” the meaning of his statement can vary, depending on which definition of ‘capitalism’ the reader has in mind.

The word ‘capital’ is used to denote, in the simplest sense, money. More specifically, it refers, in economic contexts, to money used to form “the means of production,” i.e., money invested to create jobs, factories, businesses, etc.

It is not possible to have an economy without capital: without value used to create production. Even socialist and communist economies have capital. So, in that sense, communism is a type of capitalism! That might seem like a confusing statement, but only because, in everyday conversation, the words ‘communism’ and ‘capitalism’ are used vaguely.

Friedrich Engels, who worked closely with Karl Marx, wrote, “State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the key to the solution.” Many communists, therefore, desire “state capitalism” — i.e., the government ownership of the means of production, which is the government ownership of factories and businesses.

Wilhelm Liebknecht, an early follower of Marx and Engels, wrote that “State Socialism is really State capitalism.”

To clarify matters, an adjective can precede the noun ‘capitalism,’ as in “state capitalism,” or “crony capitalism,” or “free market capitalism.”

“State capitalism,” as used in the above quotes from Engels and Liebknecht, is a type of communism or socialism, in which the government owns and controls much or all of the means of production.

“Crony capitalism” is a system in which government leaders cooperate and collaborate with those who own large amounts of capital. In “crony capitalism,” governments make regulations which favor large and influential businesses, and which do not create a fair or neutral marketplace for economic competition. “Crony capitalism” is a corruption of the system, and the role of the government fails to be impartial and unbiased. In “crony capitalism,” people cannot rely upon the government to be an objective referee or adjudicator between competing businesses. Instead of being neutral, the government in a “crony capitalist” system works to help some businesses and hinder others.

On the one hand, “state capitalism” leads to shortages in the marketplace and leads to a loss of freedom and prosperity. On the other hand, “crony capitalism” leads to a lack of opportunity for ordinary people: they can’t have a fair chance of competing with those who have a special relationship with the government. Crony capitalism also leads to higher prices and lower quality in production.

“Free market capitalism” corresponds to the everyday notion of a “level playing field” or a “fair game.” In free market capitalism, individuals have freedom, and have the opportunity to make offers: to bargain about prices. Individuals have the freedom to choose which type of work they want to try, and for which employer they might work. They also have the freedom to start their own business. Fair competition between businesses leads to lower prices and higher quality. Individuals have opportunities to seek higher wages, and thereby raise their standards of living. When the rules are fair, and fairly enforced, everyone has a chance.

Because the word ‘capitalism’ gets used in these different ways, debates become garbled. Those who say that they are in favor of capitalism are really in favor of free market capitalism; those who say that they are against capitalism are actually against crony capitalism. Those who say that they are in favor of socialism or communism do not realize that they are actually in favor of a type of capitalism.

It “free market capitalism” that Ben Shapiro has in mind when he writes:

Capitalism is the greatest single force for the empowerment of human beings in the history of mankind. Free markets defeated the global scourge of communism, which was responsible for the impoverishment of half of mankind and the murder of a hundred million people; free markets raised nearly the entire globe out of abject poverty.

In a historical perspective, capitalism is often linked to the Industrial Revolution. This link is real, but also indirect. On the one hand are the advances in technology and inventions which radically changed work and life; on the other hand is the financial system which enabled this creativity and inventiveness.

Although the Industrial Revolution is sometimes linked with images of urban poverty and hardship, in many places it led in fact to a rising standard of living for the lower and middle classes. In the Soviet Socialist system, however, it led to shortages and lower standards of living. The former was a free market system, the latter was a form of state capitalism.

One of the principles that distinguishes “free market capitalism” from the other types of capitalism is that freedom is related to prosperity. Where there is freedom for people to make their own economic choices, standards of living rise. In general, human beings desire both freedom and prosperity; it turns out that those two are almost the same thing.

Capitalism is about the notion that you are not a slave. You own your own time, and you own your own labor, and you may do with it precisely what you wish. The miracle of capitalism is that such freedom doesn’t result in billions of artists finger-painting — it results in billions of people investing their time and effort into creating products for one another. Capitalism results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don’t give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution.

To take away people’s freedom is to lower their standard of living. To control people is to impoverish people. To willingly inflict both control and poverty on people is morally questionable.

Luther’s Inner Life Changed the World: A Personal Struggle Became a Global Reformation

Born in 1483, Martin Luther was around 34 years old when the Reformation began. As a multi-year event which changed society, civilization, and culture, the Reformation can be understood on various levels: spiritual, intellectual, political, ecclesiastical, and even economic.

The precipitating cause for all of those changes was, however, personal: The Reformation finds its roots in the conscience of Luther. His self-analysis and his questions about his own status — specifically, his status vis-a-vis God — were the causes of theological questions which lie at the core of the Reformation.

As Jonathan Kay writes:

Luther’s struggle against the Vatican began as a struggle against himself. He started his career as a tortured German academic whose spiritual neuroses were tangled up with biblical exegesis — a state of constant agitation that members of the religious classes then referred to as the “bath of hell” — according to Craig Harline’s outstanding new history, A World Ablaze: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation.

The problem for Luther was this: Like any human being, he knew that he was imperfect and flawed. In spiritual terms, this meant that he was sinful; everyone occasionally does the wrong thing, and Luther was no exception. What, then, is to be done about the resulting guilt?

The guilt which concerned Luther was not the feeling of guilt, but rather the objective fact of it. No matter how people feel about their failings, the failings themselves are events which cannot be wished away.

At first, Luther attempted to embrace the common teachings of the times: One could pay for one’s sins, and work off the guilt. A person could identify failures, confess them to a priest, and perform specific tasks assigned as penances.

Luther eventually identified several problems with this system: First, one had to identify the sins. What if a sin was forgotten and unconfessed? Second, given the perpetually imperfect nature of human beings, the next wrongdoing would soon be committed, and so the individual is in a never-ending cycle of confessing sins and working them off. Other problems permeated the system: How does one know if the prescribed penitential actions are sufficient? etc.

Luther’s search for inner peace — his search for a confident hope that he would not face painful eternal punishment for his sins — took place in the context of late medieval monasticism. Imposing hardships on one’s own self was a type of continual penance. Luther became a monk and lived, at first, in the monastery in Erfurt, starting in 1505. He had arrived in Erfurt in 1501 to study at the university there.

Luther was both a monk and a scholar, i.e., a highly-educated person. Some men were monks but not scholars; others were scholars but not monks. Luther was both.

Kay writes about Harline’s book:

Harline lingers on details of archeology, food and hygiene that allow the reader to imagine cloistered life in the 16th century. Even in a relatively well-funded monastery, such an existence was hard, filthy and, in the winters, freezing. As a scholar, Luther found a measure of comfort and privacy in his friary’s unglamorous nooks — including a third-floor tower room that once had been part of Wittenberg’s outer battlements, the visitors’ chambers and even the cloaca (cesspit).

The self-imposed hardships were a type of comfort to Luther: They made him feel that he was in some way addressing his own imperfections. Yet he still suffered from anxieties, wondering if he had done enough to earn forgiveness. In the word ‘earn’ lay the cause of most of Luther’s troubles.

The church of Luther’s era presented a muddle of ideas concerning salvation. It taught, on the one hand, that entry into the afterlife was a free gift. But on the other hand, it taught that each individual had to prove herself or himself worthy of that gift. Luther’s ideas amounted to a challenge to this usage of the words ‘free’ and ‘gift.’

Luther reasoned that, if one had to prove one’s self worthy of a gift — by feeling contrite, by performing acts of penance, by adhering to the traditions of the church — then it wasn’t really free. Luther focused on the word ‘grace’ and used it to refer to a unilateral gift, given by God to human beings, bestowing upon them a salvation and a justification in which they were passive: a “justification” which declared that compensation had been made for their sins and which thereby purchased the “salvation” which gained them entry into the afterlife — entry into heaven.

Compensation had been made for people’s sins, but people didn’t make that compensation. The compensation was made by God, as a gift to people.

As Luther’s career progressed, he became a priest and a professor. As a priest, he carried out certain tasks within the church and on behalf of the church. As a professor, he taught, researched, wrote, and published. His work as a professor initiated, or at least accelerated, certain skepticisms which Luther began to have regarding some of the church’s teachings and some of its practices.

In this context, the word ‘church’ refers to the organization which oversaw the spiritual life of nearly all of western Europe. This would later be called the ‘Roman Catholic’ church.

Luther’s research led him to the conclusion that the church had departed from its foundation: It was created to carry out the teaching and work of Jesus, but in fact had become something different. The church was failing to put into practice the ideas of Jesus, even though it had been founded to do that very thing. In short, the church was no longer Christian.

It is from this idea that the word ‘reformation’ arises: Luther wanted to reshape the church, to form it again, so that it would return to its original mission and purpose.

But Luther’s ideas remained, for a long period of time, in Luther’s head. He was not famous and hadn’t published much. His lecturing at the university and his preaching in church didn’t directly touch on the issues which were most troubling him — although, in hindsight, it can be seen that these issues were indirectly and obliquely simmering under the surface of his public speaking and writing, a sort of latent reformation in the making.

When Luther’s concerns about the church became public, they were mature, having benefited from a long period of reflection. Luther’s thought appeared in a mature form, as Jonathan Kay explains:

Luther’s first set of theses — not the famous 95 titled Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, but a more plodding 99 denouncing Aristotle’s influence on Christian theology — was almost completely ignored. Luther waited, pathetically, for many weeks, expecting some form of appreciation or critique from fellow scholars. Even when he produced his more provocative set of theses in October 1517, it took more than a month for any feedback to roll in — despite Luther’s efforts to move things along by sending personal copies to local bishops.

Although Luther was perhaps frustrated by a lack of speedy response and attention, it was, Jonathan Kay hypothesizes, this slow pace which allowed Luther’s thought to continue to develop and mature, and finally emerge as a considered viewpoint with substantial supporting argumentation. The years leading up to these two sets of theses, as well as the weeks and months afterwards, constituted a time of refining.

Kay suggests that, had Luther’s ideas gain fame sooner, they might have been weaker, and readily dismissed.

Was Wordsworth a Liar? No: Read Him Carefully

In the year 1800, William Wordsworth wrote that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Scholars, teachers, and students quote this sentence often, and it has become part of the standard understanding of Romanticist literature.

This sentence is also wildly false.

Aside from the ambiguity of what “good poetry” might be, in contrast to other poetry, the alleged spontaneity of poetry in general, and Romanticist poetry in particular, is a standard motif in the self-advertisement of Romanticism. Like much self-advertisement, it is at least exaggerated, and more likely simply wrong.

Romantic poetry, both in its British and in its German incarnations, routinely features rigorous structures. Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is structured in multiple ways: the number of syllables per line, the stress on the various syllables in the form of an iambic foot, the division of the poem’s twenty-four lines into four stanzas of six lines each, and the strict rhyme scheme. A close reading will reveal yet more ways in which the poem is calculated. A stricter poetic structure is difficult to imagine.

The same is true of Romanticist poetry from Germany: Goethe’s “wild” poetry is meticulously planned.

Wordsworth was a smart man. Why would he write about poetry as a spontaneous overflow of emotion, when it is a premeditated and numerically determined product? He might have written this for various reasons.

His famous statement might have been a continuation of the self-advertisement of the Romanticist movement. Romanticism needs its readers to believe that such poetry is an unplanned eruption of uncontrollable emotions. In fact, Romanticist poetry is carefully planned to appear unplanned, strictly controlled in order to appear uncontrollable, rationally calculated to appear irrational. Perhaps Wordsworth was delivering the standard Romanticist trope in order to encourage his audience to continue buying his books.

A second, and more honorable motive, might be that Wordsworth wrote what he wrote because it didn’t mean it in the way in which it is often understood. A careful reading of the context in which Wordsworth’s famous sentence finds itself may illuminate a slightly different meaning.

The text from which the famous quote comes is the preface to one of his own books. Introducing his book to the reader, he comments about his colleagues, the other writers who were part of the British literary scene at that time. He writes:

I cannot, however, be insensible to the present outcry against the triviality and meanness, both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is more dishonourable to the Writer’s own character than false refinement or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time, that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences.

Seeking to differentiate himself from some of the less than desirable practices of these other writers, he explains that his writings have purposes, unlike the texts produced by those other authors:

From such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy purpose. Not that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formerly conceived; but habits of meditation have, I trust, so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose.

In defending and promoting his poems, Wordsworth argues that his writing is shaped by his “meditation” — the opposite of an irrational eruption of passion. He further boasts that he has “regulated” his feelings — again in contrast to wild uncontrollable emotions. Indeed, the very claim that his poems have “purpose” entails that they are subjugated to a higher purpose, and therefore are disciplined.

Then comes his famous generalization about “all good poetry” — yet in the same sentence, he argues that such poetry is product of “thought” — thought being the antipode of feeling.

If this opinion be erroneous, I can have little right to the name of a Poet. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.

By using the word “purpose,” Wordsworth is indicating that his writing is premeditated, and therefore the antithesis of a “spontaneous” outburst of emotion.

Why, then, does he insist on writing about this alleged spontaneity?

The spontaneity that he describes is not an unregulated eruption, but rather the reaction or response of a trained intellect. It is a spontaneity born of training and intellect.

Wordsworth tells the reader that the feelings are not raw and wild, but rather “modified and directed.” By training and practice, “by the repetition and continuance” of such discipline, people obtain the mental habit of connecting their feelings to “important subjects.”

After being subjected to such rigorous training, the intellect of the would-be poet will be such that it automatically or reflexively composes verse in a way, and about such subjects, as Wordsworth indicates.

For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature, and in such connexion with each other, that the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified.

The reader might consider the example of an athlete, whose long hours of training allow him to react quickly and automatically — spontaneously — in a game. This act may seem spontaneous, but it is the product of long and arduous training.

Or likewise also the example of someone who has learned an affected and highly technical way of speaking — perhaps a lawyer or a physicist, or one who has learned a foreign language. That individual will react quickly — spontaneously — in a conversation, but that reaction is the fruit of a long process of mental discipline.

When Wordsworth, then, writes that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” he was indicating, not a natural and untamed spontaneity, but rather an automatic reaction, a learned reflex, instilled into the mind by training and discipline. An examination of the disciplined structure of Wordsworth’s own texts supports this reading.