William Penn, Pragmatist

30 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION WILLIAM PENN, PRAGMATIST By E. C. O. Beatty1 THE PHILOSOPHY of William Penn was rather the product of an active and contentious life than the carefully studied system of a closet philosopher. He was not content to adopt the detached attitude of the scientific observer; nor did he, like the mathematician, choose to look upon the universe sub specie aeternitatis. Though a Quaker—and a Quaker who knew Stoicism—Penn was not gifted with that essential characteristic of the seer, so aptly defined by Matthew Arnold—the ability to see life steadily and to see it whole. Serenity was not his constant companion ; and if at times he was contemplative, his life was too full of distractions for much purely speculative thinking. If he was not original in his contributions to the literature of his day, neither was he consistent in his borrowings from others. He was fundamentally religious, and his reasoning was more often inspirational and ex cathedra than logical and inductive. By nature a controversialist, he regarded his professed principles rather as positions to be defended than as hypotheses to be examined. William Penn was more a man of faith and action than a man of thought. His ideas of the origin of the state and his conception of the nature of sovereignty exhibit striking contradictions and inconsistencies . To explain the beginnings of society be blended Genesis with Hobbes and Locke. To account for government he postulated a Divine origin and a patriarchal development; and on another occasion he chose to explain human association on the Lockian ground of consent. He thought, sometimes, that political authority was an ordinance of God ; he declared, at other times, that government "must either stand upon will and power, or condition and contract," and that "every man is a sort of little sovereign to himself." He asserted on one occasion that the "Divine right of government" was settled "beyond exception"; he wrote on another, like Rousseau, of man's coming "to incor1 Professor E. C. O. Beatty of Northern Illinois State Teachers College is the author of Williarm Penn as Social Philosopher, New York, Columbia University Press, 1939, xv + 338 pp. WILLIAM PENN, PRAGMATIST31 porate himself," and submitting the "royalty," with which in the original state of nature each human individual is endowed, "to the convenience of the whole." Usually a pluralist in his interpretation of the nature of sovereignty, he nevertheless could advocate, in true Quaker fashion, submission to the decrees of government except when those decrees touched upon conscience, and using the words of the Apostle he could urge men to "let every soul be subject to the higher powers, for there is no power but of God." Government, Penn thought, was a means, not an end. The purpose of government was "the glory of Almighty God and the good of mankind." He stated in other phraseology that "the reason and end of government" was properly "the civil interest of the people." Such a definition was broad enough to make of his ideal state a markedly paternalistic society. As to forms of political organization, his earlier draft of the proposed Frame for Pennsylvania recites that the "manner or frame of government" is "a matter of great weight, but once to be well done, and that is by the founders of governments." Later, in the final draft of the first Frame, he refused to choose between monarchy, aristocracy , and democracy; and solved the question by declaring that men were more important than laws and forms of government, that "any government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where the laws rule and the people are a party to those laws . . . ." T^ROBABLY because of his Quaker faith, Penn showed at·*- times an equalitarianism in his dealings with the settlers in his province that might be considered democratic ; but on other occasions he manifested an arbitrary spirit that was the antithesis of democracy. If belief in representative government makes one a republican, that Penn was. He opposed, however, the theory of parliamentary supremacy and forcefully supported the delegation theory as the true explanation of the source of legislative power. He praised James...