John Dewey on rights and government

Jonah Goldberg's article The Newest Deal in The Dispatch includes the following about John Dewey, a leader in the "progressive" Progressive movement during its formative years:

Philosophically, the New Deal drew on—or at least reflected—Dewey’s and Woodrow Wilson’s contempt for the outdated vision of the Founders. The Founders “lacked,” Dewey wrote in Liberalism and Social Action, “historic sense and interest.” The Burkean and Madisonian vision of government simply serving to protect liberties and enforce fair, neutral rules was inadequate next to what could be accomplished with a sufficient application of will by experts given the power to provide meaning to every individual.

This is what the lid-less, unconstrained universe had to offer planners. Indeed, even the idea of individual rights was a bygone relic. “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology,” Dewey explained. Rights can only be properly secured through “social control of economic forces in the interest of the great mass of individuals.” For Dewey, humans were “nothing in themselves”; the General Will was everything.

I have read very little by John Dewey. I don’t have a copy of Liberalism and Social Action, so I looked on Amazon to see if I could find these quotes in Liberalism and Social Action. Unfortunately Amazon does not have a "look inside" feature for the book.

Anyway, if Goldberg’s claims are legitimate enough, these quotes are enough for me to strongly disagree with Dewey’s political philosophy. The bedrock views of today's Progressives surely agree with Dewey's. The so-called General Will, even if it expresses the wants of a majority of the people subject to the government’s rules, can realistically only be wielded by politicians backed by government force.

The Cost of Rights

In my August 27 post I said Passions and Constraint was unclear about where the author stood on controversial rights and how far government can go to reach its goals. I said maybe his answer is in another book, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, co-authored with Cass Sunstein. It wasn't there.

The Introduction holds that there are two kinds of rights – moral rights and legal rights. It has little to say about moral rights and says they are "toothless by definition." There is nothing about natural rights along the lines of John Locke. In contrast legal rights have "teeth." They are defined and enforced by governments. The authors claim that legally enforcing rights costs money, but this is "ignored by almost everyone." Really? Is almost everyone ignorant of total government spending is now about 36% of GDP, was 41% in 2009, and 40% in 2010-11? Is almost everyone ignorant about taxes?

The authors continually confound rights with enforcement of rights.

Chapter 1 claims that all rights are positive, and that the common distinction between negative rights and positive rights is inadequate because “all legally enforced rights are necessarily positive rights.” Usually negative rights are meant to prohibit what others can do to you. Positive rights are meant to require actions by others on your behalf. They portray the views of others correctly: “Negative rights ban and exclude government; positive ones invite and demand government.” “Negative rights protect liberty; positive rights typically promote equality.” However, these and others are only  “storybook distinctions” in the authors’ opinion (p. 41). They belittle the difference between rights as limiting the actions of government and limiting the actions between private persons. Co-author Holmes in Passions and Constraint wrote about factions and the Founding Fathers’ great concern about the encroachment of government on the rights of citizen. The book says nothing about Founding Fathers, Madison, or Jefferson.

As I expected, the authors laud welfare rights as they construe them. The Cost of Rights reads like a puff piece for Progressivism. I was not surprised to find more 1-star reviews than 5-star reviews on Amazon.