[Liberating Liberty; Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness and the Creator of Man by Bert Schwitters (De Facto Publications, 2024; 621pp.)]

Bert Schwitters has written a truly remarkable book that displays immense knowledge of both philosophy and history, but it is for that very reason difficult to review, as his philosophical thought is complex and demands intense study. The author has been greatly influenced by Eric Voegelin, who sees man as living in the space between the Transcendent and the quotidian world. In our present life, we “see through a glass darkly.” But some are not content with this and construct a “Second Reality” that professes to give us superhuman knowledge that attempts in an impossible and diabolical way to alter human nature. In Voegelin’s famous phrase, these Gnostics endeavor to “immanentize the eschaton.”

I have written about Voegelin—whom I knew—elsewhere, and in this column, I shall “take the easy way out” and confine myself to discussing some of the author’s insights about American history. These center on the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the deformation of this meaning by Abraham Lincoln.

Schwitters points out that when the colonies renounced their allegiance to the British Empire, they claimed that their existence as separate nations did not depend on recognition by another nation or group. He deploys a philosophically interesting argument in support of their claim:

Men, peoples, and societies do not come into being as a result of recognizing each other as such. For this would mean that separateness and equality of one human being would depend on recognition of that separateness and equality by another human being or people. This would create a “chicken or egg” problem, since a people would not be able to enter into a state that can be characterized as a sovereign society unless another people would have recognized it as sovereign and independent.

Each nation or people has, in this view, the right to a separate existence; and the erstwhile colonies claimed to be separate nations, not one people united as “America”:

Each of the representatives of the States in statu nascendi signed the Declaration on behalf of his own State, thus representing 13 sovereign peoples, who jointly declared their independence from Britain.

Schwitters goes further, arguing that—in declaring their independence from Britain—the colonists were also declaring their independence from each other:

When the States declared and established their independence from the British Empire, they implicitly and explicitly also declared their independence from each other. The ensuing Confederation was, strictly speaking, a relationship of international law. This relationship ended when, a few years later, the Confederation evolved into a Constitutional Federation, a legal subject that, qua Federation, became one of public law, even though the States retained their interstate relationships.

Most definitely, the Declaration did not establish a sovereign state, in the sense analyzed by the German jurist Carl Schmitt, who famously identified the sovereign with the person who has the power to suspend the law in a state of exception or emergency:

Political sovereignty becomes relevant only in the context of the presumption of the State. If there is no political structure that can be defined as State, as the organization of political and public power, there will never be an exceptional situation that can be perceived as an existential threat to that particular, in terms of history relatively recent, structure of power. The Declaration of Independence documents that the states shall only exist to use the powers granted to them by the governed in the exclusive interest and defense of the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness of those governed. This is the magical formula. . . . In the United States each State is sovereign in that, as a State, it may seek to defend itself against disintegration, ultimately by abolishing its legal order in cases of exception.

Although the Constitution, which Schwitters regards as a mistake, partially changed the situation in that the states delegated some of their powers to the federal government, by no means did it establish a completely centralized government, and the constituent states retained a great deal of their sovereign powers. The Preamble to the Constitution, which avers that, “We the people of the United States. . .do ordain and establish this constitution,” cannot be cited as evidence against this, because the Preamble should be understood as meaning, “We the people of the several states” rather than as “we the people of a united nation,” and the document was ratified by conventions of the people of each state, some of which explicitly noted the ratification was made under express conditions and could be revoked. In his analysis, Schwitters relies on the important work of the jurist Abel Parker Upshur, who wrote against the nationalist view of the Preamble defended by Justice Joseph Story.

Lincoln endeavored to change this, claiming in his first inaugural address that the Declaration had established a new nation:

In the words “civil war” he announced his firm intention and determination that the American Government, which he described as the locus of the true sovereign of a free people, as the sovereign that was the emanation of the political will of the nation’s majority, as the government that he Lincoln, and sworn to preserve protect and defend, was fully prepared to wage war against any group of citizens, whether organized as states or as “minorities,” that would refuse to accept the imposition of this dream.

Schwitters exposes the sleight-of-hand by which Lincoln defended his view which, as he aptly reminds us, led to a bloody war with disastrous consequences. In addressing his “dissatisfied fellow countrymen” who had seceded from the Union, Lincoln said that he had sworn a “‘most solemn oath’ to preserve, protect and defend” the government, when he had, in fact, done no such thing. His oath was to the Constitution, not the government:

By substituting the Constitution—the written constitutional checks and limitations designed to restrict the government—for the Federal Government in the very first inaugural speech following his very first Presidential oath, Lincoln broke the oath he so solemnly took.

Few American historians possess Schwitters’ erudition and analytical power, and I highly recommend Liberating Liberty.