Frank Meyer (political Philosopher) - Freedom and Tradition

Freedom and Tradition

In his most influential book, In Defense of Freedom, freedom was defined in what Isaiah Berlin would label "negative" terms as the minimization of the use of coercion by the state in its essential role of preventing one person's freedom from intruding upon another's. While left-utopianism was considered the immediate threat to the survival of this freedom, Meyer aimed at a "New Conservatism" as the principle protagonist against liberty from the right in his day. This new conservatism viewed society as an organism whose agent was the national government rather than the states or private entities. The new conservatives were less statist than the left and even rhetorically supported freedom, but it was a freedom defined as an end rather than a means, with Meyer using Clinton Rossiter's 1955 definition of positive freedom in his Conservatism in America as his major foil.

Meyer argued that virtue could reside only in the individual. The state should protect freedom but otherwise leave virtue to individuals. The right of others to freedom must be respected by the individual even if the state does not respect it. The state has only three legitimate functions: police, military, and legal system, all necessary to control coercion, which is immoral if not restricted. There is an obligation to others but it is individual, for even the "Great Commandment" is expressed in individual form: God, neighbor and oneself are each individual. Virtue is critical for society and freedom must be balanced by responsibility but both are inherently individual in form. Forced values cannot be virtuous. The question of how to preserve moral order is important but would take "another book," which he never wrote. Yet even when the state takes properly limited acts to protect freedom, tradition will necessarily shape every such decision.

Freedom by itself has no goal, no intrinsic end. Freedom is not abstract or utopian as with the utilitarians, who also make freedom an end rather than a means. A utopia of freedom is a contradiction in terms. In a real society, traditional order and freedom can exist together only in tension. To retain the essentiality of both freedom and tradition, the solution to the dilemma is "grasping it by both horns." The solution is a synthesis of both, even in the face of those such as Leo Strauss who argue that no such synthesis is possible or even logical. Donald Devine has argued Meyer's synthesis is a first principle or axiom that is as valid as Strauss's monist first principle and relates this to Hayek's critical rationalism philosophical tradition and those he identifies with it such as Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Montesquieu, John Locke, Adam Smith and Lord Acton.