Dan Deniehy and Charles Harpur were contemporaries. A common strand in their writings is that humanity's destiny is moral perfection. Deniehy argues that the main impediment to achieving that goal is tyranny and despotism. This is a very modern argument of natural rights.
Deniehy moved to Goulburn in 1850 and set up a law practice in the town. This gave him direct access to the regional newspaper, the Goulburn Herald, which he wrote constantly for over the next three years. He developed the moral basis for Republicanism and his political philosophy while at Goulburn before joining the NSW Legislature in 1857.
Like Harpur's
for the faith that is in them
, Deniehy saw humanity's destiny as achieving moral perfection;
Few individuals who have traced the progress of society even from a semi-barbarous state to its present condition, will venture to deny that man is destined in this world to attain a state of moral perfection., in comparison with which the most refined and polished communities of ancient and modern times are sunk in the shade.Deniehy was also a technologist and believed progress meant the constant improvement of the political and social systems, presumably until moral perfection of the individual, society and humankind was obtained.
The progress of events as viewed in the visible outside world around us, bespeaks an era of moral and social enjoyment, when an ordinary member of the community looking down through the sombre vista of time upon the philosophy of past ages, dimly shadowed in the distance, will exult in his destiny having placed him so far in advance of the wisest and greatest who preceded him. So irresistible if the onward course of man in the march of improvement that even the trammels which the despotism of a northern dynasty has for centuries been weaving to enthral the human mind in a state of perpetuity, will at no distant day, snap asunder, and regenerated and intellectual man proclaim from the highest point of the Septentrion the triumph of a great social and moral revolution.To Deniehy, tyranny and despotism are external afflictions on the moral nature of the individual and society. They hold back humanity from attaining its destiny of moral perfection. Essentially, tyranny becomes a crime against the individual and the society. Since Deniehy writes that humankind's natural state is pure moral perfection, tyranny becomes a crime against nature as well. He was so far ahead of his time. This is a very modern version of the natural rights argument. The Virginian Republicans prior to the American Revolutionary War used the natural rights argument to advance a Bill of Rights in the Virginian government. They argued that natural rights were divine right and granted by God. Enlightenment liberals like John Locke has trouble reconciling the autonomous individual of liberalism with religion. The religious natural rights argument is an outcome of this. For the Virginian Republicans it was also an adroit political argument. It countered the monarchs argument of divine right to rule and was pretty unassailable from other quarters. Hate natural rights and well, you must hate God! Deniehy's argument make no appeal to God or divine right just the perfectibility of humankind as the natural goal of the individual and society. Republicanism as an organisational technology is Deniehy's means to create a system of constant improvement in social organisation. Explicit in Deniehy's description is the eradication of tyranny. Implicit is the protection of liberty in the organisational technologies of Republicanism such as the constitution. cam
