Who Will Define Virtue?
The second ambiguity concerned the Americans’ conception of liberty itself. To them as to the English authorities they read, liberty meant the absence of governmental restraint or favor. In the words of the cliche, that government was best which governed least. Such a notion was based on the assumption that society would function better and men would behave themselves better in proportion as the power of government was reduced—or, more simply, that the fewer the external restraints, the better people behaved. Underlying that assumption was still another, namely that people were basically or “naturally” good. Questionable as the underlying assumption was, some found it believable by accepting Locke’s idea that man was born tabula rasa, neither good nor evil but with limitless possibilities in either direction, and by the romantic conception of primitive man as a creature of boundless virtue. But if people were good and government were evil, it followed that the greater the share the peo
