John Farthing was born at Woodstock, Ontario March 18, 1897 and died in Montreal on March 9, 1954. He was a student, soldier, thinker, philosopher, economist, teacher, and the author of the seminal Tory tract Freedom Wears a Crown.
Early Years
Farthing's Father - the Right Reverend John Cragg Farthing - was for many years Anglican Bishop of Montreal. The youngest of two sons, Farthing attended Lower Canada College, and McGill University. After his second year at McGill in 1915, he enlisted with, and went overseas as a Gunner in the McGill Battery, Canadian Field Artillery. He served the balance of the war in France with his battery.
Post-War Life
After the Armistice, Farthing resumed his studies at McGill and headed to University of Oxford where he entered New College to begin Graduate studies. In 1924 he matriculated with degree in Modern Greats. For five years after his return from England, he was a lecturer in Political Science & Economics at McGill - one of the brilliant young thinkers recruited and nurtured by Stephen Leacock. Farthing was an early sceptic regarding Keynesian Economic Theory, and as a result of what was seen as his apostasy, became disillusioned with academe - and so felt compelled to resign his position in 1929.
He spent the tumultuous decade of the 1930's buried in deep thought - with a view to developing new economic theories. In 1940 he returned to education, this time at Bishop's College School as a Master, a position he maintained until 1949. From then on, he was engaged in critical observation and deep thinking on that nature of Civil Society, Canada, and the philosophical implications of the Cold War
Philosophy
In Freedom Wears a Crown Farthing argues that the world is torn between an American-style liberty and Marxian socialism, and that Canada and the Commonwealth have the means to direct men to a better "third" way - a way that has been proven over many centuries to be the "best" way to order human affairs.
The central problem with republicanism (the US way) is that it assumes that the majority is always right, and that majorities will always rule justly. The opposing socialist paradigm, is also problematic because is assumes the same for itself. Both systems are seen as tending to, or desirous of, perfection. As perfection is unattainable, creating a political and economic system with that as the ulitmate goal, can only lead to anarchy and alienation.
Farthing notes:
"There is no such pride and presumption in the ideal of kingdom. It knows nothing of absolute perfection, whether of the present state of liberty, or of a future state of communism. It seeks only to re- tain what it knows to be good and to attain to whatever is better. And meantime to perfrom the duties of the moment in which past and future are fused."
The essence of the critique is that first principles and natural law arguments about Man's natural state a la Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx (as related to his concept of "species being") are bound to lead to erroneous conclusions - for who can actually "know" what man's natural state truly was? It is lost in the mists of time. It was unrecorded and undocumented, and is so unknowable. To base a civil society on first principles that are unknowable is highly problematic.
To Farthing, the British Monarchy and Westminster model of Parliamentary government are the best guarantors of man's freedom, security, and happiness - because they do not claim to know the unknowable, and do not seek perfection. Monarchy and Parliament are not based on mere ideas of perfection, or pure logic, but rather on the acummulated experience of a particular culture over 1000 years. They have also been - in the form of kingship - a part of man's recorded history many times; since at least the days of classical antiquity. They are not creations of a man or men, but of generations of men and women. They are the accumulated wisdom of a civilised people.
and further ...
"The British idea of a Realm does not deny the importance of Law. It denies only that Law is Supreme."
This is a critical distinction to Farthing, for the law is mutable and changes with the generations to fit the needs of particular times. To saddle an entire culture with base laws that are said to speak for all times, is the height of arrogance. Who can know what will be deemed "just" 400 years from now? For Farthing, only free men assembled in a parliament can know such things. Parliament alone is Supreme. And that Supremacy is shared with - in fact, derived from - the Crown.
That the unwritten British constitution is capable of such change, reform, and at times retraction, seems to Farthing to make it the most sensible form of govenment. It highlights, in a very Burkean way, the fact that the British system of government is truly a "contract between the living, the dead and those who are yet to be born." To Farthing, that is its essential genius, and something that Canada should not give up too lightly in trying to emulate the United States - and other such ideological and inorganic systems of government.