http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100265432/why-we-not-the-ancients-really-did-invent-freedom/
Cato the Younger killed himself rather than live under tyranny
The English-speaking peoples didn’t invent democracy. The Athenians were casting pebbles into voting urns when the remote fathers of the English were grubbing about alongside their swine in the cold soil of northern Germany. Nor did they invent the concept of the law: the Egyptians, Sumerians and Babylonians had chambers full of legal scrolls even before Moses climbed down from the summit of Sinai. The Anglosphere miracle lies in something more specific and more transformative: the invention of constitutional freedom.
Parliamentary government, in the common law tradition, is a guarantor of the rights of the individual, not a licence for the majority to override the minority. Power is divided, dispersed, delineated. If you want an encapsulation of Anglosphere exceptionalism, you could do worse than John Adams’s summary of the first Massachusetts state constitution: “A government of laws, not of men.” (Actually, that phrase was not Adams’s: he was quoting, without attribution, a seventeenth-century English Whig called James Harrington – yet another manifestation of the shared origins of Anglo-American liberty.)
Ah, you say, but what about the Romans? Didn’t the patriarchs of the United States look back in awe at the Roman Republic? Didn’t they consciously mimic classical architecture and name their official buildings senates and capitols? Didn’t they write their tracts and pamphlets under such pseudonyms as Brutus, Cincinnatus and Cato?
They did. Yet I largely excluded the original bearers of these names from my history, How we Invented Freedom, to the puzzlement and annoyance of some critics. Why didn’t I give the Romans a couple of chapters?
Two main reasons, other than considerations of space. First, because mimicry is not the same as unbroken descent; and second, because Roman liberties – like so many that came after – tended to be more theoretical than actual.
There was a mania for ancient authors during the eighteenth century. The late Roman republic is an unusually richly documented period, chronicled by Appian, Plutarch, Sallust and Dio Cassius, recalled by Tacitus and Suetonius and recorded by two of the principal actors, Cicero and Julius Caesar. (If you want to read about the period in the comfortable armchair of fine contemporary prose rather than on the hard stool of original sources, I can’t recommend Tom Holland’sRubicon too highly; or, indeed, Robert Harris’s Cicero novels.)
Whigs in Great Britain and in North America – who, of course, thought of themselves as fellow-countrymen and members of the same faction – were especially drawn to classical authors who emphasised republican virtue. But they never tried to claim that they were lineal heirs to these men or their philosophy.
When the American Founders borrowed the iconography of Rome, they were embellishing their polity with colourful flashes. They were aware that the writers they admired had had an agenda, that their virtues were idealised rather than actual, that the reality of the Roman republic had often been very grubby. But that didn’t matter: it was as an ideal, not as a historical entity, that Rome inspired them.
The heritage of English liberty, by contrast, was very real to the Founders. They did not see Magna Carta as an inspirational mediaeval document, but as an immediate portion of their birthright, as much theirs as the homes and goods they had inherited from their parents. The 1689 Bill of Rights was not the by-product of some old quarrel between a past king and a past parliament. It was, prior to 1776, the current constitution, whose violation by George III had prompted the colonists’ resistance, and whose clauses were afterwards reproduced, often without amendment, in the foundational texts of their republic.
It never occurred to the authors of the U.S. Constitution literally to copy the Roman model, and establish an oligarchy complete with aediles, praetors, consuls and the rest. They wanted, rather, to retain the parliamentary tradition whose roots they traced to pre-Norman England. They saw themselves as conservatives, not innovators; defenders of an ancient inheritance, not creators of new rights; revolutionaries only in the sense that they were completing the turn of the wheel, restoring that which had been tipped on its head.
There was a categorical difference, in their minds, between English and Roman liberties. The former had endured; the latter had failed. To be sure, English liberties had had to be defended. The ancestors of the Founders (all of whom, to repeat, grew up thinking of themselves as Britons) had had to take to the field against King John, Charles I and James II, just as they had themselves had to press their claims against George III. Yet, through all its trials and vicissitudes, freedom had survived. The political heirlooms that the first settlers had carried across the Atlantic, from the right to bear arms to impeachment mechanisms, were founded in England’s unwritten constitution, what contemporaries called “immemorial custom”.
The Roman Republic, of course, had eventually succumbed to dictatorship. But, as eighteenth-century writers were perfectly aware, it had had a tendency to arbitrary government long before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Rome had lacked the common law emphasis on individualism, ownership and the sanctity of contract. Its economy was based on slavery, inherited status and heavy taxation. Property rights were contingent, confiscations common. A citizen was not free to make agreements with other citizens as he pleased: his social relationships were dictated by caste and custom.
Politics was a high-stakes game in the Roman republic. It was well understood that losers of elections might face expropriation, exile or execution. The law existed, but it never truly stood above the government.
Now consider how aptly those words might apply to, say, contemporary Italy, where losing politicians equally know that they might face prosecutions, and where office is often sought for the legal immunity it brings. Not that I want to pick on Italy. Winner-takes-all government is the normal condition of humanity. Consider, to pluck a current example, events in Ukraine, where all sides seem to take it for granted that a change in regime means a series of impeachments and incarcerations. Most people, in most ages, live in Ukraines; very few live in Canadas.
Anglosphere values can flourish wherever the right institutions are in place. The Ukrainian constitution notionally guarantees people the right to freedom of speech, assembly, worship and so on; but if you want to find a place where large numbers of Ukrainians can confidently exercise those freedoms, go to Canada.
You can, of course, find abuses in Anglosphere societies, too; but not the assumption of abuses. We may not go in for flashy human rights codes; but, over the years, we have had a pretty good record of defending civil freedoms when others have fallen to authoritarianism. Disraeli once expressed the difference with characteristic swagger: “To the liberalism they profess, I prefer the liberty we enjoy; to the Rights of Man, the rights of Englishmen”. It may be the truest thing the vain old fox ever said.
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