Francis Lieber was an American jurist, gymnast and political philosopher.
Background
Francis Lieber was born on March 18, 1798, in Berlin, the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia (present-day Germany). His early adolescence was spent against a background of various revolutionary upheavals and wars in Europe. In 1815 he volunteered for the Prussian army, fought in the battles of Ligny and Waterloo, was seriously wounded in the assault on Namur, contracted typhus, and nearly died. Out of these early experiences he emerged with decidedly liberal views, to the extent that he dreamed of assassinating Napoleon III.
Education
Lieber did not receive a normal gentleman's education. Returning to Berlin after the Napoleonic wars, he studied hard and passed the entrance exams for the University of Berlin. However, he was denied admission because of his membership in the Berliner Burschenschaft, which opposed the Prussian monarchy. Moving to Jena, Lieber entered the University of Jena in 1820 and within four months finished writing a dissertation in the field of mathematics. As the Prussian authorities caught up with him, Lieber left Jena for Dresden to study topography with Major Decker (briefly).
Career
About 1821 Lieber went to Greece, as did many European students, intellectuals, and litterateurs, to participate in the revolutionary movement for Greek independence. Appalled at the subservience of the modern Greek character, he moved on to Italy, where he spent nearly 2 years in the family of the German historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr. Lieber returned in 1824 to Germany, where he was again imprisoned. While confined he wrote a collection of poems which were later published under the pseudonym Franz Arnold. In 1826 he fled to England, where he remained almost 2 years before going to the United States and setting in Boston.
Out of Lieber's proposal to translate the Brockhaus encyclopedia into English developed the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Americana (13 vols. , 1829-1833), which he edited. During this period he also lectured on politics and history in the larger cities of America and translated leading French and German scholars in the social sciences into English. At the invitation of the trustees of Girard College he developed a plan of instruction for that school which was published in 1834 and which influenced the curricula of various other leading institutions of higher learning. In 1835 he received his first academic appointment as professor of history and political economy at South Carolina College, where he remained until 1856. There he wrote the works which established his reputation as a political philosopher, especially A Manual of Political Ethics (1838-1839), Essays on Property and Labor (1841), and Civil Liberty and Self-government (1853).
Although he was teaching in the Deep South at a time when hot-blooded radicals were demanding secession, Lieber did not hestiate to advance—at no little personal risk— the organic view of the nation. According to this conception, the oneness of the nation is produced through the consciousness of a common culture, history, and destiny which is manifested in political institutions. The nation is an evolutionary growth. It is not something which is produced as a result of entering into an arbitrary contractual agreement, whether that be among individuals or among states. This organic conception of the American Union, accepted in the North, justified the claim that the Union existed in perpetuity and was indissoluble. It was the view uttered by Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address (and in many of his other writings). In his various writings Lieber also stressed that the English political traditions, embodying civil liberties and local self-government, derived their importance as guarantees of personal liberty from the fact that they were institutional growths, not because they were paper guarantees for certain liberties.
During the Civil War, Lieber was one of the strongest academic supporters of the Union. At the request of the general in chief, he wrote Guerilla Parties, Considered with Reference to the Law and Usages of War (which was also influential during the Franco-German War) and the influential and significant Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field, which became the basis for subsequent efforts to codify the international law of war; its basic principles reappear in the Hague Conventions.
Following the Civil War, Lieber was a supporter of the Radical Republicans. He wrote numerous essays on political subjects, vigorously urging, for example, free trade. An ardent nationalist and defender of civil liberties, he managed to combine the academic and the practical life through the range of his thought—from the more theoretical subjects of politics such as the nature of the state to the more practical subjects such as civil administration and guerrilla warfare.
From 1856 to his death on October 2, 1872, Francis Lieber taught at Columbia.
Views
Quotations:
"Great truths always dwell a long time with small minorities, and the real voice of God is often that which rises above the masses, not that which follows them. "
"Races are very often invented from ignorance, or for very evil purposes. "
"It belongs to American liberty to separate entirely from the political government the institution which has its object the support and diffusion of religion. "