Liberty Without Responsibility Is a Very Short Road to Losing Both

Everybody wants freedom. Almost nobody wants the receipt. That is the thing the brochures leave out. Freedom arrives in the mail with an invoice stapled to it, and the invoice is made out in a currency called responsibility. You can ignore the bill for a while. People do. But the account is in your name, and at some point somebody collects, whether it is the bank, the family, the neighbors, or, finally, the government, which is the collector of last resort and the one with the biggest truck.

That is the conservative claim, and it has an old and respectable pedigree: liberty and responsibility are not two ideas that sometimes get along. They are one idea, seen from two sides. A person who wants all of the first and none of the second does not end up freer. He ends up with a short road ahead of him, and at the end of it, he has lost both. Let me make the case, give the critics their best shots, and then tell you what it means for the way you run your own house.

The claim

Put simply, here is what I mean.

1. Freedom is the power to govern yourself. It is the ability to make your own choices about your work, your money, your family, your faith, and your speech without asking a bureaucrat's permission.
2. Self-government requires a self that can govern. A person who cannot control his spending, his temper, his appetites or his word cannot be left alone, because the result of leaving him alone is damage to himself and others.
3. When the self fails, somebody else steps in. Other people, whether family, charity, creditors, or the state, have to fix, pay for or restrain what the self could not manage.
4. The more outside control is needed, the less freedom is left. So the person who rejects the duties of liberty is not abolishing control. He is choosing a worse kind of control.

That is the logic. The next question is whether the great thinkers of the Anglo-American tradition thought the same, and they did.

Burke: the passions forge the fetters

In 1791 Edmund Burke, writing in his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly in the early years of the French Revolution, put it in a sentence conservatives have been quoting ever since: men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exist, he continued, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite is placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. "It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things," he wrote, "that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

Read the arithmetic in that. There is a fixed amount of restraint a society needs. It can come from inside the citizen, as conscience and habit, or from outside, as police and law. The less of the first, the more of the second. A people with no self-restraint will be governed by force. That is not a conservative threat; it is a description.

Washington and Adams: the founders said it plainly

Burke's point was not a European curiosity. The American founders insisted on it. In his Farewell Address in 1796, George Washington wrote that of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports, and that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. In 1798, John Adams wrote to the officers of a Massachusetts militia unit that "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

James Madison, the most hard-headed of the lot, said the same thing in Federalist No. 55. Republican government, he wrote, presupposes in the people qualities of virtue and trustworthiness "in a higher degree than any other form." A king can be ruled by fear. A free people can only be ruled by itself.

Notice the shape of the founders' argument. They did not think the Constitution would do the work alone. They knew that paper does not run a republic. They designed a government with limited powers, which means a government that leaves most of life to the citizen. And that design only works if the citizen can handle the load. Take the quality of the citizens out, and the limited government has to stop being limited.

Tocqueville: self-interest rightly understood

When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s, he went looking for the secret. In the second volume of Democracy in America, published in 1840, he said that Americans fought the dangers of individualism, the tendency to retreat into a small circle of family and friends, with a doctrine he called "self-interest rightly understood." Americans, he observed, did not preach sacrifice for its own sake. They argued that serving your neighbors, joining the church, helping the town, and keeping your word are in your own interest over the long run. We unpack the observations from his travels in Tocqueville Found America's Secret in the Barn Raising and the Town Meeting.

Here is the lesson. Responsibility does not mean misery. It means that the person who understands the whole picture realizes the neighbor's good and his own are tied together. That is how a free society works without a policeman on every corner.

Four everyday examples

Let me move from philosophy to the kitchen table. These are all hypothetical, so no resemblance to anyone you know.

Debt. Picture a household that treats a credit card as a freedom machine. It carries a balance of $8,000 at an annual rate of 24 percent. The interest alone, ignoring compounding, comes to $8,000 times 0.24, which is $1,920 a year, or $160 a month. That is $160 a month that no longer belongs to the family. The credit card gave them the freedom to buy now, and then took away the freedom to choose how to spend next year's paycheck. The old proverb said the borrower is servant to the lender. It is not a moral lecture. It is a bank statement.

The jury box. The Sixth and Seventh Amendments guarantee trial by jury. But a jury needs jurors, and jurors are ordinary citizens who have to show up when summoned. A people who treat jury summons as an annoyance are quietly choosing to have no juries. A right that depends on citizens performing a duty cannot survive if the duty is neglected.

Speech. The First Amendment protects your freedom to speak, and nothing in it requires you to be careful, fair, or kind. A free people is therefore only as healthy as the habits of its speakers and listeners. A culture where everyone shouts and nobody checks facts will find that someone proposes to regulate speech, and the cure will be worse than the disease. Free speech needs a population that can hear things it dislikes and answer them instead of calling for the censor.

The ballot. The right to vote is the most powerful tool a citizen has. But a voter who never learns what his representatives do, who votes for the loudest name on the sign, and who then complains about the result has given his power away. Responsibility here means reading, asking, and showing up, and you can start with the records on our /politics/votes/ page.

The strongest objections

I would be a poor debater if I only quoted people who agreed with me. There are two serious objections, one from each direction.

The libertarian objection

A libertarian will say: fine, responsibility is a good thing, but you are slipping something in. Once you say that freedom requires virtue, you have given the state a reason to enforce virtue. Today it is "responsible citizen." Tomorrow it is a law against whatever the party in power calls vice. John Stuart Mill made the case in On Liberty in 1859: the only purpose for which power may rightfully be exercised over a member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. A person's own good, physical or moral, is not enough.

This is a real criticism, and conservatives who ignore it get into trouble. The best answer comes from inside the movement. Frank Meyer, the National Review writer who developed the idea of "fusionism" in books like In Defense of Freedom in 1962, argued that virtue has to be freely chosen to be virtue at all. A man forced to be good is not good; he is merely restrained. So the state's job is to secure the freedom, and the work of building character belongs to the family, the church and the school. We explain how that deal was struck in Fusionism Was the Deal That Made the Modern Right Possible, and what the libertarian wing keeps right in What Libertarians Teach Conservatives and Where the Two Part Ways.

So here is my answer in short form. The conservative position is not "the government should make you responsible." It is nearly the opposite: because the government should be small, you had better be responsible. The duty talk is aimed at you, your family and your community, not at a bureau. The state's proper role is to punish harm to others, as Mill said, and otherwise to get out of the way. The more responsible people are, the less the state has to do.

The progressive objection

The other side says something different. When conservatives talk about "personal responsibility," they claim, it often means blaming people for things they did not control. A worker laid off because a plant closed has not failed morally. A child born into a bad neighborhood did not choose it. Telling them to pull themselves up, the critique goes, is a way for the comfortable to avoid helping.

Again, there is truth here. Nobody should say that every setback is a character flaw. Luck exists, and so does bad luck. But the objection runs together two different ideas. Responsibility is not blame. It is the recognition that you are the author of your next move, even when you did not write the first chapter. And it comes with a matching duty from the rest of us. The family, the church, the neighborhood and the community are the first line of help, and conservatives have good reason to believe those are better at it than a distant agency, as The Family Is the Original Welfare State and the Cheapest One argues. The point is not "you're on your own." The point is "we're in this together, and everyone has a part."

The deeper difference is about what treats people with respect. To tell a man he is responsible for his life is to treat him as an adult, capable of acting, not a case to be managed. That is a form of dignity, and I would argue it is the one people actually want.

Responsibility has to run uphill too

One more point, and it is the one my own side forgets. If duty talk is only ever aimed at the poor, it is not a principle, it is a prejudice. The banker who takes a risk with other people's money, the official who spends a budget he did not earn, and the politician who promises what the next generation will pay for are all being asked the same question: who carries the cost of your choices? When the answer is "somebody else, later, without a vote," the liberty has been taken from the people who inherit the bill. That is exactly why conservatives press for balanced budgets and for officials who answer for the money they spend, a theme in A Balanced Budget Is a Moral Argument Before It Is an Accounting One. A creed of responsibility that exempts the powerful is a sermon, not a creed. Apply it to the renter, the retiree, the CEO and the committee chairman alike, and it earns its keep.

Why the two are really one

Lord Acton, the British historian, put it in 1877: liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought. That is the whole thing in a sentence, and it is why this theme runs through the writing of Russell Kirk (see Russell Kirk's Ten Principles Are the Best Short Course in Conservatism) and through the arguments about equal opportunity in Equal Opportunity, Unequal Results and Why That Difference Is Freedom.

The Preamble to the Constitution says its purpose is to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Posterity. Liberty was not a gift to be spent in one lifetime. It was an inheritance, and an inheritance can be squandered. The generation that fought for it understood that the way to lose it was not usually a coup. It was a slow trade, a little freedom for a little convenience, over and over, until the account was empty. Burke's fetters, forged one appetite at a time.

The bottom line

• Freedom and responsibility are one idea. The less restraint a people has inside, the more it will get from outside, and the outside kind is always cruder.
• The founders said so: Washington on morality as a necessary spring of popular government, Adams on a Constitution made for a moral people, Madison on the virtue republican government presupposes.
• Take the libertarian worry seriously. The answer is to keep the state small and let families, churches and communities do the work of building character.
• Take the progressive worry seriously too. Responsibility is not blame, and it comes with a duty on the rest of us to help neighbors who fall.
• Start at home: pay down the debt, show up for the jury summons, read before you vote, and teach your kids that every right is also a job.