By Michael J. Ortiz
I.
Though his star has somewhat dimmed in the fogs of contemporary ideology, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was a literary colossus during his lifetime and well into the twentieth-century. Born in the midlands of England, by the 1760s Johnson was already widely celebrated as “Dictionary Johnson,” the man who nearly single-handedly wrote the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language. His career as a writer was impressive, its rise from obscurity powered by the success of his dictionary alongside poems that caught the attention of London’s literati. Over the years he would write more poems, prefaces, hundreds of essays (many of deep moral import), pamphlets, and short biographies, in addition to editing the works of Shakespeare. His dictionary in 1762 inspired a young King George III to award Johnson a life-long pension for his labors in furtherance of their country’s literature.
Johnson’s work represents a high-water mark in literary history for its classical genius, with roots deep in Western antiquity. His father was a bookseller, and though Johnson only spent thirteen months at Pembroke College, Oxford, he was already well-read in the classics before he skipped his first college lecture.
On May 17, 1763, a twenty-three-year-old James Boswell met Johnson for the first time in a London bookshop owned by Thomas Davies, a sometime actor. Boswell was the son of a Scottish Laird of Auchinleck. His father was a successful lawyer and a member of the Supreme Civil Court of Scotland, a practical man who wanted his son to settle down into a life in the law and then tend the family estate that encompassed nearly twenty square miles. Boswell was everything his father wasn’t: mercurial, witty, a drinker, a social climber, an impressionist of considerable skill, in short, the life of the party with a particular gift for bringing people out of themselves. This latter talent—alongside an ability to write up a scene or a character with fluency and imagination—made him perfectly suited to author the first great biography in English literature, The Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791.
For the past year, I have been teaching Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson to high school juniors and seniors. It’s been an invigorating experience. Most of my students have dug into the 1006 pages of the biography with admirable resolution. Their essays in class have been uniformly very good to excellent. But in class discussions, Johnson’s pre-modern views have come to the fore, and challenged my students with the inapposite, contradictory pressure they put on their assumptions about the function and nature of government. They took Johnson the lexicographer, essayist, poet, critic, biographer, and editor pretty much in stride. They hadn’t a clue about what to do with Johnson the integralist. Except disagree.
Johnson is often portrayed as a fire-brand of a Tory, but in actuality he was nuanced in his political philosophy. He agreed with the Whigs on slavery, for instance, once offering the toast: “Here’s to the next rebellion of the negroes in the West Indies,” but disagreed with them on virtually everything else. No friend of the United States, which he derided almost as often as he did the Scots, Johnson’s animus against the Whigs had its origins in what he believed must be the heart of all government: the moral good which can provide order in society.
II.
To take one scene from the Life: on Friday, May 7, 1773, in house number 22 in the Poultry (a street inhabited by poultry sellers by Cheapside, the marketplace), Boswell and Johnson dined with the bookselling Dilly brothers, Edward and Charles. Other guests included old friends Oliver Goldsmith and Bennet Langton, as well as the Reverend Dr. Mayo (“a dissenting minister” according to Boswell), and the Reverend Augustus Toplady and Boswell’s friend, Reverend Mr. Temple. The discussion is artfully set. Johnson and his company have been talking about the migration of birds, and the necessity of close observation to ascertain their patterns. Johnson rails against romanticizing the natives of Tahiti. Boswell then introduces the subject of “toleration,” a policy that regulated the civic place of those outside the Anglican Communion, the official religion of the British government.
Johnson opens with a position from which he will—as usual—maintain his ground: “Every society has a right to preserve publick peace and order, and therefore has a good right to prohibit the propagation of opinions which have a dangerous tendency.” Mayo asserts “liberty of conscience in religion.” Johnson counters: “Every man has a right to liberty of conscience, and with that the magistrate cannot interfere. People confound liberty of thinking with liberty of talking; nay, with liberty of preaching. Every man has a physical right to think as he pleases; for it cannot be discovered how he thinks. He has not a moral right, for he ought to inform himself, and think justly. But, Sir, no member of a society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what the society holds to be true.” Mayo tries to corner Johnson, saying we cannot discover truth if that truth is forbidden in the court of opinion by the magistrate. Johnson replies that “martyrdom…is the only method by which religious truth can be established.” Boswell brings up a certain Mr. Elwal, a dissenting Baptist, who Johnson implies was mentally unstable and should have been put in the stocks: “A man who preaches in the stocks will always have hearers enough.” Boswell says, “But Elwal thought himself in the right.” Johnson doesn’t back down: “We are not providing for mad people.” Johnson then meets another objection: Mayo says it’s unreasonable that he shouldn’t be allowed to teach his children what he believes is the truth. Johnson asks, should you be allowed to teach them “the community of goods,” which in this sense means teaching children that thievery is a good thing? Or, Johnson asks, if you teach them “the notion of the Adamites, and they should run naked into the streets, would not the magistrate have a right to flog ‘em into their doublets?”
This is a particularly dense passage, albeit leavened by Johnson’s wit as is so often the case. He shows his pre-modern colors right out of the gate: “peace and order” are not found in some neutral space rendered possible by agnostic principles of metaphysics. Johnson, no surprise, is careful with his words. The state has a “good right” to “prohibit the propagation of opinions” which might endanger that peace and order. Somewhat surprisingly, Johnson’s thought tracks with that of Pope Leo XIII, who a little more than a century later would issue Libertas, an encyclical that explores the contours of freedom amid the various types of human community, particularly civil society or what Leo calls “the State.” Johnson makes a distinction uncannily similar to Leo XIII when he distinguishes between a “physical right” and “moral right.” Leo XIII uses “natural freedom” and “moral freedom” (Libertas, 3) to make the same distinction: the first is the “fountainhead” from which our power to choose comes; the second is the will choosing the good “enlightened by the knowledge possessed by the intellect” (Libertas, 5). Johnson, like Leo XIII, posits a pre-modern vision of freedom that is substantive, not merely procedural, that sees human freedom as a condition of ethical activity, not its primary goal or terminus.
Saying we can choose to do something, for Johnson, simply sets up the possibility of good human action, due to our ability to see what is present before us, hence the guiding function of intellect whence this power flows. Following this, both men see “right” as a “moral power” (Libertas, 23). Towards the end of their discussion, Johnson makes further distinctions, all at variance with liberalism’s view of civil authority: “If I think it right to steal Mr. Dilly’s plate, I am a bad man; but he can say nothing to me. If I make an open declaration that I think so, he will keep me out of his house. If I put forth my hand, I shall be sent to Newgate. This is the gradation of thinking, preaching, and acting: if a man thinks erroneously, he may keep his thoughts to himself, and nobody will trouble him; if he preaches erroneous doctrine, society may expel him; if he acts in consequence of it, the law takes place, and he is hanged.”
Not only does this accord with Thomistic teaching on the reach of human law which forbids “chiefly those [acts] that are to the hurt of others” (ST, I-II.96.2), but it also shows similar nuances acknowledged by Leo XIII concerning “opinion” which “God leaves to man’s free discussion” (Libertas, 23). Johnson knew that the Anglican church of his day could not compel baptism as it must be accepted by a free act of faith. This also obtains when the state is acting according to unique privileges the Church can delegate to it. But once that relationship exists, there are sanctions the state can impose to encourage or discourage certain behavior. Likewise, Johnson thought the state should in large measure act paternalistically towards its citizens (“who are the children of the State”, Boswell, 768). Johnson, moreover, never saw political order of this kind inhibiting personal initiative or creativity. He could be forceful in his jostling with others over ideas about all kinds of things. He welcomed what Jane Austen referred to as “the compliment of rational opposition.” Boswell’s biography is itself a testimony to Johnson’s roving, tireless intellect engaging others about everything under the sun.
For the realities he most cherished as sacred and essential to a harmonious existence in the bustling world, Johnson was anything but a proceduralist. What he thought the government shouldn’t tolerate, neither did he. When Boswell tells us that “a gentleman present” asked Johnson, as there didn’t seem a “material difference” between toleration of “opinions which lead to action” and “opinions merely speculative,” would the magistrate be allowed to tolerate “those who preach against the doctrine of the Trinity?” Johnson’s reaction is so strong it obscures the fact that he does make such a distinction. Boswell shows us Johnson shutting the man down, saying, “’I wonder, Sir, how a gentleman of your piety can introduce this subject in a mixed company.” Shortly after this, the same unnamed gentleman asks if it be “politick” to tolerate such cases. Johnson replies: “Sir, we have been talking of right: this is another question. I think it is NOT politick to tolerate in such a case.” Similarly, in a predominantly Catholic state, prudence could allow minority sects to worship according to their traditions “for the sake of securing some great good or of hindering some great evil” (Libertas, 36), without, however, having the right to espouse their convictions publicly and cause Catholics to defect.
Johnson and Leo XIII have no problem with the government using force in correcting “the excesses of unbridled intellect.” Should not the state primarily exist for protecting the weak from such injuries that would wound public order itself? Both men would say yes, for both men are part of a pre-modern tradition that sees ideas circulated in public as capable of hurting others, though not physically. The reduction of “public order” to the sphere of physical actions would have struck them as culpably naïve. Johnson could see the complexities of human society. He loved life in London, with its rambunctious population of well over half a million, its seemingly endless variety a major part of its charm. He believed order—particularly political order—was not life-crushing, but life-enhancing.
Johnson’s recognition of the variability of social life comes out with notable eloquence in a passage from his last major work, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781). Johnson gives us a biographical overview and critique of around fifty poets. In his “Life of Milton” (never one of his favorites, due to Milton’s republican, anti-royalist positions) he nevertheless was objective in lauding Milton’s extraordinary poetic gifts. When we come to Johnson’s take on Milton’s defense of free speech, we can see Johnson grappling with all the nearly interminable problems of human society’s cultivation of forces which can both further and frustrate its essential end of human flourishing:
The danger of such unbounded liberty and the danger of bounding it have produced a problem in the science of Government, which human understanding seems hitherto unable to solve. If nothing may be published but what civil authority shall have previously approved, power must always be the standard of truth; if every dreamer of innovations may propagate his projects, there can be no settlement; if every murmurer at government may diffuse discontent, there can be no peace; and if every skeptick in theology may teach his follies, there can be no religion. The remedy against these evils is to punish the authours; for it is yet allowed that every society may punish, though not prevent, the publication of opinions, which that society shall think pernicious: but this punishment, though it may crush the authour, promotes the book; and it seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.
Couched as it is in some of the grand generalizations of Johnson’s time, the passage upon careful reading shows a real subtlety. For its terms, to bind or unbind, that is, to allow or prohibit, a publication never quite fix the issue firmly in place. And, I suspect, that is just what Johnson intended. He knew there were no easy answers, though there were certainly wrong ones. Punishment seems entirely too late, as the thief allowed in the unguarded home works his mischief despite later penal consequences. Pope Gregory XVI in 1832 put forth a similar line of thought, asking, when condemning the “right” to free speech: who would allow poison to be in easy reach of everyone simply because an antidote is available “and those who use it…be snatched from death again and again?” (Mirari Vos, 15)
III.
Studies of Johnson’s politics in the context of his era can be Byzantine in their complexity. Political parties were less a locus of loyalty than individuals such as William Pitt the Elder or Lord Bute. Johnson actually rebuked Edmund Burke, a good friend and a member of Johnson’s Literary Club, for being a liar in saying he would vote in parliament with his party the Whigs. Nevertheless, following Anthony Quinton’s “The Politics of Imperfection” (London, 1978), we can put Johnson in a line of religious conservatives including “Hooker, Clarendon…Burke, Coleridge, and Newman” as opposed to the “secular” conservatives “Halifax, Bolingbroke, Hume, Disraeli, and Oakeshott.” Two things we can say with certainty: Johnson was a devout Anglican who had no qualms about his government enforcing Christian standards of behavior in public life in critical points very much in line with papal teaching over the centuries; he also seems to show an almost Augustinian distrust of human faculties acting individually or corporately without the healing balm and illuminating effects of supernatural grace. Spurning the ultimate sources of order, he saw in his own long life, leads eventually to chaos.
Of course, Johnson was not a systematic thinker in the contemporary sense of the word. He is representative, however, of an eighteenth-century Anglicanism that found many points of similarity with Catholicism. As historian James Sack has shown, after 1789 Burke and many other Anglicans made common cause with Catholics against the incendiary and destabilizing ideas of revolutionaries. After 1801, and ironically coincident with the rise of the Oxford Movement, rabid anti-Catholicism gradually became more wedded to the English political right. Johnson—with Burke and Pitt, among others—labored under no such animus. Johnson thought there were some doubtful historical developments in Catholicism (purgatory, for example) but he did not allow Boswell’s objections to “Romanism” to spin their falsifying web of misrepresentations before his vigorous mind.
Johnson saw humanity in its fallen state with great clarity. He can be considered a fellow traveler with integralism precisely because he thought the mad, interminable mixtures of human error did not incapacitate political institutions from acknowledging—and acting by virtue of—the highest sources of their authority. In point of fact, according to Johnson all political authority in the end implicitly invokes some form of the absolute:
There may be limited royalty, there may be limited consulship; but there can be no limited government. There must, in every society, be some power or other, from which there is no appeal, which admits no restrictions, which pervades the whole mass of the community, regulates and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws or repeals them, erects or annuls judicatures, extends or contracts privileges, exempts itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity (Taxation No Tyranny, 1775).
Such authority is in the nature of the case, but far from necessarily, restrictive of human goods or ends, temporal or spiritual. Johnson considered the highest goal of human earthly happiness something greater than political activism, the endless agitation of the utopians. As he wrote in one of a Rambler essay on November 10, 1750: “To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.” Johnson isn’t denying some lives have wider consequence and duties for the public welfare. His political theory at once constrains politics (with a hint of subsidiary, perhaps) and frees it to serve ends proper to the highest destinies of the human person which an agnostic public square can never do.
Though he would likely instead call it “whiggery” (as in “the first whig…was the devil”), Johnson would surely accept Kenneth Craycraft’s definition of liberalism:
The basic moral anthropology that animates the whole political spectrum in the United States, from the far left of the Democratic Party to the far right of the Republican Party. This anthropology is characterized by at least two elements: (1) radical personal autonomy and (2) an absolute commitment to individualism, characterized by the language of “individual rights” as the basic moral foundation (or, indeed, for some the only measure of moral action (Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America, 2024).
To Johnson, whiggery was a faction because it accepts as the basis of government the freedom of the individual from all constraint except his or her own will, due to a putative unknowability of the good. This principle is a centrifugal one, which by first destroying the interior order of virtue, abolishes the exterior order of peace.
Michael J. Ortiz teaches at The Heights School, in Potomac, Maryland. He is the author of Swan Town: The Secret Journal of Susanna Shakespeare (HarperCollins, 2006), and Like the First Morning: The Morning Offering as Daily Renewal (Ave Maria, 2015) in addition to essays and poems in various venues, including The Wall Street Journal.
