The American founding as restoration

One question that keeps coming up in conservative & libertarian circles regards the relationship of the American founding with the deeper and broader traditions of Western civilization. Were the American revolutionaries as a whole seeking to create the world anew, or were they seeking to a re-establish the fundamental norms of civilized government that they had known and learned about during the colonial period -- the rights of Englishmen & the natural rights of all human beings?

This question is recurring because it goes to the heart of what conservatives & many libertarians view as a key aspect of political legitimacy in America: the rootedness of policy & political theory in the founding genus of American order. Here's one answer:

[T]he founding was the rearticulation of Western civilization in its Anglo-American mode. The founders were thoroughly educated in the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew sources of this civilization, often knowing the classic writings in the original tongues, in addition to French and English literature. While substantially influenced by the secularizing tendencies of the movement from Humanism to Enlightenment, the American Revolution was essentially restorative and retrospective, in the primary meaning of the term as a movement to re-establish truth and justice on a primordial foundation, one lost through corruption and rebellion by men motivated by the perversities of valuting ambition and the lust for power engendered by selfishness, sin, and evil. This model of revolution as the "turn of a wheel" represents the primary -- not exclusive -- tendency of the American and perhaps of all earlier Western revolutions to be restorations.

Elias Sandoz, A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding (University of Missouri Press: 2001), pg. 151.

Garry Wills on conservatism and its view of government

What is the conservative conception of the proper role of government? The American Conservative has posted an essay originally written in 1964 by now-liberal but then-conservative Garry Wills that seeks to answer that question: The Convenient State. Just in the midst of the Goldwater moment in the GOP, Wills wrote a cogent and classically informed take on the necessity and limits of the state in conservative thought.

Far from being utopian or ideological, conservatism as Wills explains builds upon the fundamental conviction within western civilization that there is a zone of individual liberty upon which the state may not intrude, a part of man that is his and his alone. Libertarianism expands this zone beyond its prudential limits, while totalitarianism denies its existence altogether. In the western world, conservatism has thus seen the role of the state as limited, as a vindicator of justice that respects the individuality of the human person. In this, it seeks (as conservatism always does) to preserve balance. In this, Wills follows no less a conservative thinker than Edmund Burke.

Where libertarianism suffers the temptation to eschew justice in favor of maximization of private privilege and restraint from limitation, and totalitarianism absorbs the individual into a vision of the true, the good and the beautiful that is uniform and coerced, for the Wills of 1964 conservatism embraces the contingent nature of justice in human societies marked by diversity and variety. In its quest, conservatism avoids the sterile and dogmatic seduction of rationalism; not for the conservative is the quixotic attempt to remake society on the basis of abstraction. As Wills puts it:

Each society must form a unique constitution, an “agreed station” of components, growing out of the resources it can command. The ideal state–of a justice or a freedom defined outside any particular human context–is as meaningless as some uniform ideal of individual fulfillment. Is monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy the best form of government? Such a question simply breeds further questions: Best for what society? And what kind of monarchy or democracy? These questions are as hopeless as similar ones would be in the case of an ideal life for individuals. Is it better that man be an artist or philosopher, monk or martyr, doctor or teacher, worker or statesman? And if he is a doctor, should he engage in research, psychology, or compassionate work among the poor? If an artist, should he write or paint in an austere or demonstrative style? To attempt an abstract answer to these questions is to deny the mystery of individuality, the secret springs of motive, that make up the human fact of freedom. As ever, rationalism leads to sterile paradox, to an ideal freedom that is a denial of freedom. 

Read it all.

A Madisonian defense of freedom of conscience

That's provided by Ken Masugi over at the Liberty Law Blog: The Conscience of a Madisonian Conservative. I'm more of a Hamiltonian myself, but Masugi makes some very good points, particularly in light of the collapse of the distinction between public & private life that life that lies at the heart of modern liberalism. As Masugi writes, in the current state of the culture & polity, both conservatives & libertarians share a common task:

In their appreciation of the American founding, conservatives and libertarians need to recover the comprehensiveness of its understanding of man, for both external goods and those of the mind. And that means a coherent doctrine of natural right.

Of course, Masugi's call for collaboration between conservatives & libertarians is premised on something which I think is very much an open issue, namely, whether libertarianism as an ideology is capable of properly discerning the line between the public & the private.  While libertarian theorists generally draw the line differently than modern liberalism, many suffer from the same fundamental malady as liberalism, the tendency to make ideologically-driven category errors, in the case of libertarians assigning legitimate state functions to the private sphere.

Libertarianism isn't the same thing as classical liberalism

The often-identified-as-libertarian scholar Richard Epstein makes that point in this post from 2014: My Rand Paul Problem.  As Epstein, one of today's intellectual leaders exploring free markets & smaller government, notes well, libertarianism often overlooks the complexity of modern life in favor of a simplistic & overly naive understanding of human behavior and society. Specifically, libertarianism's rejection of the legitimate authority of the State to enforce basic & fundamental norms overlooks the problem of what Epstein calls "holdouts" -- those who will not refrain from violence or other anti-social behavior:

The sad experience of history is that high transaction costs and nonstop opportunism wreck the widespread voluntary effort to create a grand social alliance to limit the use of force. Society needs a coercive mechanism strong enough to keep defectors in line, but fair enough to command the allegiance of individuals, who must share the costs of creating that larger and mutually beneficial social order. The social contract that Locke said brought individuals out of the state of nature was one such device. The want of individual consent was displaced by a consciously designed substantive program to protect both liberty and property in ways that left all members of society better off than they were in the state of nature. Only constrained coercion can overcome the holdout problems needed to implement any principle of nonaggression.

Epstein holes libertarianism below the water-line with that observation, grounded as it in in the prudential understanding of human nature that undergirds not only the classical liberal approach to politics but also the conservative approach as well.  Like its kissing cousin modern liberalism, libertarianism in practice denies the existence of sin or evil within human nature. And this denial has a host of concrete policy implications, as Epstein explains. The holdouts -- the anti-social and violent that will always be part of human society this side of heaven -- make a libertarian vision of society based purely on voluntary non-aggression impossible. Given human nature, such a society would invariably result in the strong preying on the weak, the sociopathic running riot among the decent. Indeed, it will not be society at all, but rather will be a state where human community will be dissolved to the point of, to use Thomas Hobbes' phrase, "a war of all against all."

As the Prophet Isaiah teaches, the wolf will indeed one day dwell with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6), but only when the fullness of God's reign is established. Until that happy day, human beings live in a fallen and sinful world, where the State is sometimes necessary to restrain the wicked and encourage virtue.