Rational Secular State -- Introduction Continued

The difficulty, of course, was the emergent difference between liberty and agency.  To grant liberty, and to protect it as a universal right through legal restrictions placed on the state itself, did nothing to guarantee agency.  The freedom to act did nothing to guarantee the capacity to act.  I say 'emergent difference,' in part because the American continent provided a unique set of circumstances that, for a while at least, made the necessary condition of liberty seem wholly sufficient.  Within the largely agricultural and mercantile economies of the colonies, coupled with the open land to the West free from hereditary holdings, the guarantee of liberty gave men a "new sense of power over their own fate, the belief in the unbounded possibilities of improving their own lot," to borrow a phrase of Hayek, a belief buttressed by the "the success already achieved among men."  The narrow gap between liberty and agency was brought about by a unique set of historical contingencies, by colonization and the fresh green breast of the new world, a land not only commensurate with man's capacity to wonder, but also a land open to those willing and able to exploit it.  If the individual was no longer subject to the subjectivity of the state, if they were no longer limited by the subjectivity of the public sphere, they were limited only by those attributes of character always relegated to the private sphere -- what Franklin and others, were they alive today, might describe as their 'work ethic.'  Their fate was not contingency-imposed, but the self-imposition of one's conscientiousness, one's industriousness, one's courage, one's imagination and intelligence.  The gap between liberty and agency had always been wider elsewhere, and with the emergence of the industrial capitalist economy, wider on the American continent as well.  It was not immediately apparent, in part because the industrialization of the US fueled and made possible the westward expansion, a contingency that continued to blur the class distinctions that were more visible in the motherland of Britain, but the capacity to act depends upon the means available, and in the capitalist economy, those with means were clearly more liberty to act on behalf of their interest than those without.  If 'the rich were different,' and it seemed clear enough to most as the industrial capitalist economies matured that the rich were in fact different, a good deal of that difference lay in the accumulation of 'means.'  Those with means were clearly more at liberty to act than those without, and as the gap between the have's and the have-not's widens, so too does the gap between those who are and those who are not at liberty pursue their private interests.  Again, however, it was not immediately apparent, in part because the anecdotal exception, the rise from rags to riches, seemed at least possible (though perhaps always a bit implausible) as a matter of romantic self-assertion -- if one exercised diligence, if one worked-hard, if one took risks, especially if one were clever, then one could rise above the contingency-imposed limitations and acquire the means to pursue one's private happiness.  One suspects, however, that contingency more often than not disappointed the hopes of the aspirant.