It may well be a historical accident that the month of July — named for a Caesar, Julius Caesar — is punctuated by three fireworks-laden holidays celebrating political freedom.
Let us consider each holiday's particular conception of freedom.
The month's celebrations began on the same day on which the signed Declaration of Independence was presented to the public, in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. The month nears its end with commemorations on the day on which many of our Utah forefathers set foot into the Great Salt Lake Valley: July 24, 1847. Both provide us the opportunity to take stock of liberties that we enjoy in this land.
But smack-dab in between our nation's Independence Day and Utah's Pioneer Day sits a holiday very much foreign to our soil
In France, July 14 is Bastille Day. It commemorates the 1789 storming of the citadel of that country's former absolute monarch, perhaps best exemplified by King Louis XIV's famous statement that "the state is I." His successor, Louis XVI, and his wife, Marie Antoinette, experienced a fate less regal: they were guillotined in the French Revolution that established republicanism in France.
The Fourth of July and July 24 represent that all people are created equal, that God has endowed each of us with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that the freedom to worship according to the dictates of our conscience may require sacrifices as extreme as those of the Puritans who fled to this nation's shores, or of the pioneers who crossed a continent to this desert soil.
What about Bastille Day, which is as French as the Fourth of July is American? What does its history teach us about liberty's meaning in the human experience?
This past week, I was struck by the contrast between two public Facebook posts by American friends of mine — one excoriating the French Revolution, the other praising it. These weren't political adversaries. They were both libertarians!
Berin Szoka said this: "Happy Bastille Day! Death Toll: Reign of Terror (1793-94), approximately 40,000. Vendee Rebellion (1793-96), approximately 100,000; French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), up to 800,000; Napoleonic Wars (1803-15), between 3.5 and 6 million. Ballpark total: 4.3 million to 6.8 million deaths."
David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, was more inclined to see the good in France's rough transition to liberty. It was not as smooth and relatively bloodless as the American Revolution. But the ideological underpinnings of the philosophies, and the ultimate outcome of a republic with political freedoms to work, travel and live without being accountable to centralized power, suggest that it should not be compared — as it is, frequently, by American conservatives — to the 1914 Russian Revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union.
Today, communism lies in the ash-heap of history. There is a global recognition of the rights of men and women — rights that cannot be infringed by kings, by presidents or by rulers.
A rights-based approach has also come to dominate political philosophy. This is exemplified by the contrasting approaches of the late John Rawls and the late Robert Nozick, both former professors at Harvard. Although agreeing that rights are individual, they differed on what rights we have and how these right were justified.
Rawls' "Theory of Justice" begins with a thought experiment: What rights would a grand council of decision-makers allocate to individuals if they were creating society's rules behind a "veil of ignorance" about the particular station they would enjoy on earth? From this, Rawls then derives an elaborate theory of rights to welfare entitlements against the state. On this approach, the state doesn't merely protect rights; it grants them, too. This squares with a conception of liberty held today by many French and other liberals.
Nozick's approach in "Anarchy, State and Utopia" is very different: Starting from a state of nature (as with many of the philosophers of the American and French revolutions), he concludes that the only state that can be justified is the minimal "night-watchman" state that protects individual rights against state infringement — those which are enjoyed, simultaneously, equally and by all. I think of Nozick as providing a modern intellectual scaffolding to the libertarian ideals of our nation's Founding Fathers.
Nozick doesn't end there. His book's final chapter, "A Framework for Utopia," articulates a vision of multiple associations and communities, each of which espouse particular values enshrining their inhabitants' views of the good while guaranteeing everyone those same rights. Rather than dictating that all people everywhere must espouse the same beliefs, Nozick's framework permits each community the same free exercise of its own profoundly held beliefs.
And to me, that sounds a lot like the reason I celebrate Pioneer Day each year.
Drew Clark can be reached via email: drew@drewclark.com, or on Twitter @drewclark.