The Peasant as a Type of Pre-Citizen
One month ago on this website, we began a discussion of the historical waxing and waning of republics, which is the subject of Victor Davis Hanson’s excellent book, The Dying Citizen (Basic Books, 2021). Hanson references Kantian political theory before proceeding to focus on U.S. citizens.
Section 46 of Kant’s Metaphysical Elements of Justice [Metaphysische Anfangsgruende der Rechtslehre], which is a subset of his Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], defines citizens as the members of civil society who are united for the purpose of forming a republic and making laws. The citizen has three characteristics: the lawful freedom to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent; equality with all others before the law; and civil independence, or the responsibility for the provision of his own support as a member of the commonwealth. Proceeding from the presupposition that a citizen must be sufficiently muscular in order to wield the tools of war and commerce, thereby becoming “materially invested” in the success of the state; Kant finds that people such as apprentices, servants, minors, and women, etc., may be designated as “fellow comrades of the state,” but not as voters or citizens - - at least not in the year 1797.
It is to be emphasized that there are three basic characteristics of a Kantian citizen: freedom to choose one’s republic and vote for its laws, equality before the law, and economic autonomy.
In Section 47 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant introduces the notion that the act by means of which the people constitute themselves as a state (a civil society with coercive power) is the original contract. (One assumes that “the people constituting themselves” may be a one-time constitutional convention, an accumulation of historical precedents, or some combination thereof.) The people give up their external freedom and take it back immediately as members of a commonwealth (republic). An individual, as a “pre-citizen,” abandons his wild, lawless freedom (the Hobbesian “perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceases only in death”) in order to find his freedom as a law-abiding citizen.
One notes here a certain, ever-present danger of equivocation on the term “pre-citizen.” First, that term may refer to hypothetical or quasi-mythical individuals lost in the mists of time, some of whom are said to have participated in a legendary constitutional convention or to have memorialized certain political precedents. Alternately, that term may refer to a definite population from which were drawn certain known individuals who participated in an actual constitutional convention. Finally, that term may refer to contemporary, erstwhile citizens who have lost their previously inalienable rights due to a revolution against a previously established republic.
According to Hanson, there are three types of pre-citizens: peasants, “mere residents,” and tribes. Today, the concept of peasant focuses primarily not on an originally agrarian type of work, but rather on an abject subservience and lack of upward mobility. In the third blog posting in this series (8/1/22, 9/1/22, and 9/17/22), the concepts of “mere residents” (individuals purporting to have the rights of citizenship without the corresponding duties) and of tribes (individuals purporting to have social preferences based on superficial appearance rather than on legal merit) will be discussed.
In the Kantian analysis of citizenship, it would seem to follow that if the constitution of a republic is corrupted by physical violence or by an Orwellian redefinition of terms; then erstwhile citizens will be divided de facto into one or another of two new classes: either a newly subjugated, non-free, unequal, and dependent class of “pre-citizens,” analogous to the “head count” of ancient Rome and sorely in need of a new constitutional convention; or a newly privileged ruling class of “post-citizens,” by which is meant a class of overlords who rule as unelected bureaucrats, evolving-document theorists, and economic globalists.
The thesis has often been advanced that a republic and its citizens depend on the existence of a middle class that can moderate some occasional political storms. (Hanson notes on his pages 22-23 that this idea dates back to the ancient Greeks, who doubted the reliability of the poor, who could not afford weapons; as well as the zeal of the rich, who were too indolent to defend their polis.) Failing such a middle-class defense, a republic can easily bifurcate into a new class of contemporary pre-citizens who lose the enforceability of their rights, however recently deemed to have been inalienable; and into a new class of post-citizens who gain overlordship via purported expertise in public administration, in flexible legal interpretation, and in beneficent economic redistribution.
Kant’s third criterion for citizenship, namely, that citizens be civilly independent (economically autonomous) is violated in case the middle class does not have the material resources to resist encroachments against its freedoms. If a middle class sees declining economic circumstances and ruinous debt (think: unfair trade and trillions of dollars of student-loan debt); then the corresponding republic wanes, its citizens move away and/or die off, and a bimodal distribution of peasants and masters arises. In this case, Hanson writes on his page 15, “the function of government is not to ensure liberty but to subsidize the poor [in order] to avoid revolution and to exempt the wealthy” from adverse outcomes of government policy. The wealthy then “reciprocate by enriching and empowering the governing classes.”
On his pages 40-42, Hanson points out that the contemporary U.S. middle class foresees very limited possibilities for long-term employment and family formation; and a much greater likelihood of becoming peasants resembling their rural predecessors in having few options. However, some problematic options do exist: Hanson writes of two recent, government-sponsored advertisements for ameliorating individual helplessness via public largess. First, the Pajama Boy (2010), an Obamacare supporter, portrays a young man who appears self-assured and at ease while pitching Obamacare despite wearing a child’s red-plaid pajamas. This advertisement, Hanson finds, is an inadvertent confirmation of de Tocqueville’s warning about the connection between government subsidies and eternal childishness. Second, the Life of Julia (2012) is the story of a woman reflecting back on her satisfying lifetime of harvesting public payments and accommodations, all the while oblivious to the looming financial problems of the Social Security system. Neither the Pajama Boy nor Julia offer a real solution to the contemporary violation of Kant’s third criterion for citizenship.
In sharp distinction to Julia’s lifetime reflections on her dependency, Hanson (on his page 60) can reflect back on his “free-range” childhood in Fresno County, California, and see something completely different: He and his siblings could wander unsupervised over miles of rural countryside as the children of free citizens in a stable Republic. By today, however, that Republic - - a least in its previous incarnation - - has already fallen; because its citizens, having run afoul of Kant’s third criterion for citizenship, have for the most part gone bankrupt, moved away, and are dying out. Indeed, allowing children so to roam the countryside today would be considered as a form of child abuse because of ubiquitous gangs, untethered fighting dogs, and illegal, toxic trash dumps. The Republic that we see today does indeed seem largely to have achieved the bimodal distribution of peasants and masters that Hanson has described.