Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France 9780674274013

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C I T I Z E N S A N D C I TOY E N S

Citizens and Citoyens Republicans and Liberals in America and France

 Mark Hulliung

H A RVA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

•

2002

Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hulliung, Mark. Citizens and citoyens : republicans and liberals in America and France / Mark Hulliung p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00927-4 (alk. paper) 1. Liberalism—United States—History. 2. Republicanism—United States—History. 3. Liberalism—France—History. 4. Republicanism—France—History. I. Title. JC574.2.U6 H86 2002 320.51⬘0944—dc21 2002068577

To my students

Contents

C O N TE N TS

Preface

1

ix

Acknowledgments

xiii

A Brief Chronology of French Political Regimes

xiv

Republicanism and/or Liberalism?

1

Past and Present Republics Ancient and Modern Tocqueville’s Return Trip 2

“Rights Talk” in American and French Accents

22

The Persistence of “Rights Talk” in America From the Old “Rights Talk” to the New The General Will and Individual Rights Rights in France: Liberals vs. Republicans Atlantic Crossings 3

The Institutions and Ethos of Freedom

56

Political Institutions, Liberal and Republican Mainstream vs. Backwater Republicanism France: the Search for a Liberal Ethos America: the Search for a Civic Ethos 4

The Uses of Republican Rhetoric in America Down with the Monarchists Down with the Aristocrats Republics and Democracies Corruption and Conspiracy vii

92

viii 5

Contents

The Strange Career of Liberalism in France

128

From Liberal to Conservative From Solidarist to Conservative From Politique to Mystique 6

Liberal, Illiberal, and Antiliberal Republics

160

The Illiberal Republic The Antiliberal Republic The Liberal Republic

Notes

195

Index

243

Preface

Preface

P R E FAC E

In the mid-1950s Louis Hartz published The Liberal Tradition in America. Ever since, intellectuals have sought a compelling alternative to his view that in the United States the liberal tradition has provided not “a” but “the” language of politics. Beginning in the late 1960s, scholars turned their attention to examining what it means to say that America is a republic, and that its founders saw the world through the prism of their classical education. Over the last few decades we have witnessed an explosion of debates about liberalism, republicanism, and their roles in defining the American past, present, and future. Across the Atlantic, late in the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, French intellectuals shifted their focus away from Marxism and directed it, with increasing intensity, to studies of their nation’s neglected and half-forgotten republican and liberal heritages. In both countries intellectuals have been laboring to understand the republican and liberal traditions. During the course of these investigations, Tocqueville’s name has been constantly on our lips. We have read Tocqueville, bowed in reverence to his name, cited him on this or that point, enlisted him on our side in ideological debates. Few investigators, however, have heeded his admonition that we shall never comprehend either American or French political culture until we understand something of both.1 The purpose of the present book is to make a contribution to the study of republicanism and liberalism in comparative perspective. The primary focus will be on America, because of the anticipated audience and also to bring a wide-ranging inquiry under sufficient control. My approach builds on thematic and interrelated essays rather than on an all-embracing narrative. The chronological cut-off point will be the end of the twentieth ix

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century: nothing that happened after the year 2000 will come under my purview, and much that happened before that date will also be ignored because a comprehensive study would prove unwieldy and unfocused. To halt this study at the end of the century is not to suggest that the debate is over. Every time someone has announced that we have reached the end of the road, a flurry of new contributions has appeared.2 The closing years of the twentieth century witnessed the publication of a spate of books on American republicanism and liberalism that were more ambitious in scope than anything previously written.3 In my opinion, not the least of the reasons why the liberalism/republicanism debate continues is that it is a vessel that intellectuals never tire of filling and refilling with the ideological struggles of our times, those between the heirs of the New Left and their neoconservative opponents. If so, then what better way to gain a measure of critical distance from both sides than to make use of the resources of the comparative method? Possibly the act of comparing can pull the debaters out of their present-day preoccupations for a moment, just long enough to see the liberalism/republicanism debate in a new and revealing light. Talk of “objectivity” is met, in our Nietzsche-intoxicated age, with responses ranging from embarrassment to contempt. We might, therefore, do well to recall exactly what Nietzsche said about objectivity: “All seeing is essentially perspective, and so is all knowing. The more emotions we allow to speak in a given matter, the more different eyes we can put on in order to view a given spectacle, the more complete will be our conception of it, and the greater our ‘objectivity.’”4 Studying America by comparisons with France is not only a matter of enhancing our range of knowledge about specifics. Potentially, it is a way of seeing the sister republics with different eyes and speaking about them with different emotions. To provide the reader with a road map to the chapters that follow, it may be well to summarize in advance a few of my findings. On the French side, I argue that the standard Anglo-American depiction of an eternal Jacobin republican tradition, illiberal to the core, is not only overdrawn but fatally misleading. In reality, it was the nineteenth-century liberals who undermined the cause of French liberalism, largely because of their fear of the dawning democratic age; and it was the republicans who saved liberal ideals, as symbolized by their constant efforts to enshrine the Declaration of

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Rights of Man and the Citizen, which the liberals repeatedly sought to put out of sight and out of mind. In their haste to denounce the French Revolution, Americans have failed to appreciate the evolution and liberalization of the French republican tradition(s) over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taine is the French historian on whom generations of Americans have been reared—Taine, the most conservative and antidemocratic of liberals, and a historian who falsely portrayed every moment of republican history as a replay of the sorry Jacobin beginning. Taine in translation has sold well in America5 because he reinforces our long-standing prejudice against the French republican tradition. As recently as 1989, the surprising popular appeal of Simon Schama’s lengthy study of the French Revolution, Citizens, probably had something to do with the presence of Taine-like passages in its pages.6 Americans dedicated to liberal ideals have failed to do justice to the liberal promise and achievements of the French republican tradition. On the American side, our findings are that antiliberal intellectuals have falsely conjured up a history of the United States wherein moral and rooted republicans once held sway until amoral and uprooted liberals gained the upper hand. Whatever Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood may have intended, their progeny live to criticize liberalism and do so by sighing for a lost tradition of civic republicanism. The antiliberalism of the New Left, of their neoconservative adversaries, and of the communitarians permeates much of the “republican” scholarship. France, rather than America, is the country in which republicans and liberals waged a long struggle. Comparison with France offers compelling evidence that the American republic, with its origin in the Declaration of Independence, was from the beginning both republican and liberal, not one or the other. The question dominating much of American history has been not whether the nation would be republican or liberal, but whether it would ever fulfill the promise of the Declaration. In the same year (1955) that Hartz published his book proclaiming the one-dimensional and monolithic liberalism of the American tradition, John Higham brought forth his invaluable study of the powerful strands of scientific racism, nativism, and other forms of deep-seated illiberalism that have compromised our liberalism.7 Setting forth a “republican” interpretation of American history has in truth been a favorite way to vent hostility to liberalism. In the republican scholarship the more civic varieties of liberalism are deliberately over-

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looked, its many historical and philosophical forms ignored, its commitment to constitutionalism and the sanctity of the individual reduced to mere legalism and selfishness. After emptying the liberal tradition of its riches, the republican New Leftists, neoconservatives, and communitarians indict the barrenness of liberalism. New Deal liberalism and its commitment to social justice suffer most of all in a world in which small is beautiful, the federal government ugly, and a concern for procedural fairness is regarded as an abdication of moral responsibility.8

AC K N OWL E D G M E NTS

Because this book is dedicated to my students, it is appropriate that I express my gratitude to a few of the undergraduates and graduates who have, in one way or another, inspired my research in recent years: Ariel Ahram, Jennifer Allison, Brad Clarke, Andrea Jakobs, Anja Karnein, Rachel Margolis, and Charles McKinley. My thanks also to the following scholars: Lance Banning, John Burt, Ran Halévi, Paul Jankowski, James Kloppenberg, Denis Lacorne, James Miller, Patrick Riley, George Ross, Peter Schuck, Rogers Smith, Michael Zuckert. A special word of thanks is due James Hollifield and Sidney Milkis. Jim provided me with the first forum in which I had a chance to test some of my ideas; he has also magnanimously shared with me his vast knowledge of France and the comparative method. Sid shared with me his expertise in American politics; it was while teaching with him that my ideas about American history began to come to maturity. Finally, I wish to thank my talented and thoughtful editor, Kathleen McDermott.

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A B RI E F C HRO N O LO G Y O F F R E NC H P O L I TI C A L R E G I M E S

Old Regime (Bourbon monarchy) until 1789 Constituent Assembly, 1789–1791 (Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen, August 26, 1789) First Republic established 1792 Convention, 1792–1795 Directory, 1795–1799 Consulate and First Empire (Napoleon Bonaparte or Napoleon I), 1800–1814 Restoration Monarchy (Bourbon), 1814–1830 July Monarchy (Orleanist), 1830–1848 Second Republic, 1848–1851 Second Empire (Louis Napoleon or Napoleon III), 1852–1870 Paris Commune, March 18–May 28, 1871 Third Republic, 1870–1940 Vichy, 1940–1944 Fourth Republic, 1946–1958 Fifth Republic, 1958–the present

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Republicanism and/or Liberalism?

Citizens and Citoyens

Chapter



1

Republicanism and/or Liberalism?

What does it mean to say that America is a republic, and why should anyone care? Ordinary citizens of the present era respond strongly and favorably to the notion that the United States is a democracy but feebly and indifferently to the statement that their country is a republic. Who can blame them, when even the most famous Founders confessed their perplexity as to the meaning of the word “republic”? A puzzled Jefferson observed in 1816 that “the term republic is of very vague application in every language.” Three years later, his friend John Adams remarked that “the word republic, as it is used, may signify anything, everything, or nothing.”1 American intellectuals of the last several decades have nevertheless been relentless in their quest for a republican heritage. From the late 1960s to the millennium, the search for a republican past took place on an ever more sweeping scale. Beginning in the circles of historians with Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) and Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic (1969), the list of “republican” investigators steadily broadened to include philosophers, political theorists, legal scholars, literary critics, political scientists, and various semi-popular journalists and commentators. The temporal scope of investigation also expanded exponentially, from Bailyn’s and Wood’s accounts of the Revolution and the Founding, to cover the entire course of American history. To the intellectuals who tout the significance of America’s republican identity, the indifference of the public simply proves the urgency of their scholarly undertakings. Before it is too late, the past must be mentally recovered (they reason), lest its works be forgotten and its promise lost forever. For scholars committed to the republican research project, the hope 1

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is that the past is not yet dead. Embracing the republican past, in their estimation, is the key to showing the living the way to a better future in which the word “citizen” will once again mean something to the average American. A revisionist footnote must therefore be appended to Tocqueville’s generalization that “democratic peoples do not bother about the past but they gladly start dreaming about the future.” Because his visit to America occurred during the age of Jackson, Tocqueville had good reason to believe that “in a democracy each generation is a new people”2: the sovereign autonomy of the living generation was, indeed, a favorite theme of Democratic journalists. Nevertheless, it did not take long before Jacksonian politician and writer George Bancroft found it necessary to write histories establishing a distinctive American democratic identity vis-à-vis European nations. Despite their initial insistence that the past was irrelevant to the United States, the Jacksonians soon came to believe that they sorely needed a history to call their own. So, apparently, do we. Rarely have Americans been more eager than in our own time to have history at their disposal. The search for a republican past has been fraught with an urgent sense of contemporary civic crisis and energized by intense ideological passions. At least one question remains, however: has the past been used to enrich our comprehension of present-day dilemmas, or have present-day concerns been illicitly projected into the past?

Past and Present The great peculiarity of the “republican” scholarship is that, almost from the start, it was in danger of concentrating more on liberalism than republicanism. The republican historians of the late twentieth century were outspokenly on a mission to banish liberalism from the Revolution and Founding, and then from as much as possible of the nineteenth century. Following in the wake of the historians came the political theorists, who did their best to turn the newly discovered republican tradition into a critique of liberalism, ungenerously interpreted as a doctrine preaching a narrow, rootless, uncivic individualism. The concept of republicanism has lived as a parasite on the body of the liberalism it aims to displace or to denounce. When historian J. G. A. Pocock published his works in the early 1970s,

Republicanism and/or Liberalism?

3

no one could doubt that the point of much of the republican scholarship was to refute Louis Hartz’s highly influential study, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). In contrast to the Hartzian view that American political thought was monolithically liberal in orientation, with John Locke an omnipresent figure, Pocock went out of his way to find Locke nowhere. Where natural rights once stood, Pocock placed a tradition of “civic humanism” stretching from antiquity to the Italian Renaissance to James Harrington to America. Repeatedly, Pocock invited his readers to repudiate Hartz’s book.3 If the historians did their utmost to write liberalism out of much of the American past, the “communitarian” philosophers enlisted the newly discovered republican tradition to offer Americans the roots supposedly denied them by John Rawls in his noteworthy treatise, A Theory of Justice (1971). For the liberal Rawls’s updated version of humans in a state of nature, hypothetically denied knowledge of their social circumstances in order to promote a fair-minded discussion of the principles of justice, the antiliberal communitarians substituted the socially constituted, civicminded, republican Americans of yesteryear. Everywhere one looked, the republican scholarship was caught up in discussions of “liberalism and its critics.”4 Liberalism was constantly under attack during the last decades of the twentieth century, in practical politics no less than in scholarly disputes. Republican candidates for President damned their Democratic opponents by calling them liberals, and the Democrats sought to shed the old liberal label, once proudly worn but increasingly a liability. No one remembered how angrily Herbert Hoover had accused Franklin Delano Roosevelt of stealing the coveted word “liberal”5; everyone recalled that Lyndon Johnson had tried to outliberal FDR, with results the Democrats deemed ambiguous and the Republicans repulsive.6 Antiliberalism was the order of the day, both in the academy and in party politics. One can be antiliberal either from the left or the right; not surprisingly, therefore, liberalism came under formidable intellectual attack both from the New Left and from the neoconservative intellectuals who defined themselves against the student radicals of the 1960s.7 Sometimes for better, at other times for worse, historical studies of republicanism and liberalism have derived their vitality from the cycle of ideologies and counter-ideologies that started in the 1960s and is still with us today. Gordon Wood’s lament, in the last chapter of his book, that the ratification of the Constitution marked the end of civic politics, struck many of his readers as bearing

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more than a vague affinity with Tom Hayden’s earlier New Left fretting over the fate of “participatory democracy.”8 Michael Sandel’s communitarian reading of American history, which flirts with both the left and the right while living off hits at liberalism, resembles the position Paul Goodman took in his 1960 essay “In Search of Community,” which launched Goodman’s career as a guru of the New Left even though it ended with a glowing tribute to the conservatism of Coleridge.9 It is undeniable that the new political ideologies, born of or in reaction against the Sixties, sometimes led historical investigators to see important aspects of the past that had previously eluded their gaze. Religion, in particular, had been a blind spot of unbelieving intellectuals writing in a secular age. That changed, however, when neoconservatives suggested that a return to religion might provide an antidote to the antibourgeois, libertarian student “counter-culture,” which, Daniel Bell scornfully remarked, was really a “counterfeit culture.”10 Perhaps as a response to neoconservative concerns, many historians since the end of the 1960s have devoted their labors to showing the powerful and sometimes admirable influence of evangelical religion in American politics. Abolitionism and a multitude of other antebellum reform movements are incomprehensible unless we take into consideration the inspiration provided by religious faith.11 Possibly the neoconservatives also deserve a measure of credit for pointing historians in the direction which has led to the rehabilitation of the reputation of the antebellum Whig political party. Americans had been trained to speak of “the age of Jackson” rather than the age of Whigs; liberal Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s 1945 portrait of the Democrats as progressives and the Whigs as hopeless reactionaries had long held sway.12 The turning point came when neoconservative journalist Irving Kristol began in 1970 to look in history for progressive capitalists who were also upstanding citizens and good bourgeois moralists. Kristol wanted a tradition of ordinary business-minded Americans who practiced self-denying virtues and dedicated themselves to community affairs: in short, he wanted early neoconservatives to contrast with his candidates for early New Leftists, the egalitarian and libertarian Jacksonians. “Republicans” was the name Kristol conferred upon his upright Americans, whose self-mastery he contrasted with Jacksonian self-indulgence.13 “Whigs” was historian Daniel Walker Howe’s more accurate designation for them. With impeccable scholarship Howe and others proved (in effect) that Kristol’s intuitions were correct. The Whigs had, indeed, sought to remake and elevate them-

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5

selves and their fellow citizens, whether through educational and penal reform, the construction of insane asylums and reformatories, support for temperance movements, or other like-minded measures.14 On occasion, then, ideologically motivated visits to the past have enabled us to see what was previously overlooked. More frequently, however, intellectuals carrying New Left or neoconservative preconceptions with them on their journeys through history have adamantly refused to notice what was in plain sight, or have tricked themselves into seeing what was not there.15 Communitarians, for instance, have desperately wanted to find in the “republican” past an American version of the social contract that Burke had construed as “a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”16 Unfortunately, the admirers of generational continuity could only achieve their ends by ignoring the words of the very Jefferson they claimed as an ardent republican. Nothing could be less communitarian than Jefferson’s frequent proclamations that “the earth belongs always to the living generation,” “one generation is to another as one independent nation to another,” and “the dead have no rights, they are nothing.” Nor can the organic vision of society favored by communitarians be reconciled with Jefferson’s statement that “the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of individuals.”17 What strange communitarians the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians make, with their constant readiness to invoke Jefferson’s words. Trying to turn the sage of Monticello and his offspring into democratic Burkes is a futile and indefensible endeavor.18 The living have also played tricks on the dead when trying to infuse the new republican research into the old study of labor movements. While “neocons” have been especially keen to find their lost roots in a republican past, the heirs of the New Left have wanted to discover a left-wing and working-class republicanism in early American history. Student leader Tom Hayden had called for a new left that would “speak American” rather than European and socialist19; his academic heirs decided the concept of labor republicanism was the answer to his and their prayers. No doubt their historical studies of “the rise of the American working class” contain abundant insights into the life of workers in early America. Yet even reviewers most predisposed in favor of the new scholarship have noted how thin the evidence is upon which the republican thesis rests.20 In truth, the document most in evidence in the history of labor movements is the Declara-

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tion of Independence, which was periodically reissued down to 1901 by fledgling organizations of workers.21 But since the Declaration spoke the liberal language of natural rights, it has been deliberately overlooked by republican-hungry, liberal-repudiating historians. All too often the present has infringed upon the past during the course of the liberalism/republicanism debate. Contemporary myth-making has frequently stymied the search for historical understanding, which is one reason why so many fundamental questions remain unresolved decades after the publication of Bailyn’s path-breaking book. The malady of the republican scholarship is obvious, and so, one might think, is the remedy: henceforth we should strive to speak of the past in the language of the ages prior to our own, and then all will be well. Alas, matters are not so simple. There has been, in fact, no shortage of “republican” historians who have made it their special concern to take the past on its own terms; but they have frequently overshot the mark and overextended the past into more recent ages. Spurious continuity has bedeviled the republican research: the supposed corrective to reading the present into the past has too often turned out to be a second and opposite error, that of construing the new as simply another instance of the old.22 One of Pocock’s generalizations graphically illustrates what is problematic in the reasoning of the republican historians: “The American Revolution [was] less the first act of revolutionary enlightenment than . . . the last great act of the Renaissance.” America, he continued, was founded in a “dread of modernity.”23 Similarly, Wood asserted that “republicanism as the Americans expressed it in 1776 possessed a decidedly reactionary tone.”24 Following in the footsteps of Wood and Pocock, some of the best historians engaged in republican research have slid from a praiseworthy skepticism about “modernization theory” to a rather more dubious denial of the modernity of Americans living in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Historians pursuing the new research agenda have forgotten that Jefferson, Paine, and Madison, among others, forcefully argued that the Revolution marked a new beginning, a novus ordo seclorum, for America and perhaps for Europe as well. Without question, Pocock and his cohort were right to rebel against the theories of modernization that dominated the social sciences after World War II and upon which Hartz relied for his book. In one study after another the proponents of modernization theory had shamelessly read the

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present back into the past, calling Renaissance condottieri “military entrepreneurs,” for instance, and seventeenth-century Englishmen “possessive individualists.”25 Hartz, too, projected a recent age into the past when he used Karl Mannheim’s theory of nineteenth-century ideologies to explain the course of early American history.26 Rather than study the political language of Jefferson or Madison, Hartz imposed the conceptual scheme of Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia upon pre-industrial America. He accepted Mannheim’s master assumption that ideologies are carried by social classes—conservatism by the aristocracy, liberalism by the middle class, socialism by the workers—and deduced the consequences. Since both the top and the bottom of European society, the nobility and the proletariat, were missing in America, since everyone in the United States aspired to be middle class, it followed that liberalism was the one and only ideology. All political struggles in American history, Hartz concluded, were unconsciously fought within the confines of what in Europe was labeled liberal ideology. Whether Jefferson actually read Locke did not matter to Hartz, because all Americans were and are Lockeans whether they know it or not. By the time the republican historiography got under way, historians had for some years been deeply involved in efforts to rid themselves of the fallacies of modernization theory. For the scholars dedicated to the new program of research, it was imperative that they learn to place actors and texts in their proper historical context, which required researchers to recover the political vocabulary of early modern times. Instead of bourgeois and proletarian, the historians learned to speak of Catholic and Protestant, town and hinterland, dynasty and pays, court and country; instead of pre-capitalism, they learned to talk about mercantilism and patriarchy.27 Soon Filmer was regarded as being as important as Locke, possibly more so in the seventeenth century.28 The finest hour of the republican historians came when they showed how the colonists saw the actions of the English government through the eyes of Sallust, Tacitus, and other Roman historians, or through those of James Harrington and his successors, the Commonwealthmen (also known as Real Whigs or Opposition Whigs) who refused to relinquish all republican themes after the Restoration of the monarchy. Executive infringement upon popular freedoms, executive efforts to corrupt the legislature, executive use of standing armies to overthrow constitutional government, were old republican themes which took on fresh significance

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when George III decided the time had come to compel the colonists to pay their fair share of the costs of maintaining an empire. The radical disjunction between the relatively modest acts of the British government, on the one side, and the panicky colonial interpretation of those acts as the works of an ever more despotic regime, on the other, constitutes a marvelous display of the power of ideology in public affairs. Another accomplishment of the republican historians was to demonstrate that the Commonwealthman ideology did not end in America after the Revolution. Lance Banning has proven that “the Jeffersonian persuasion” was, in some measure, based on a revival of the old themes. In England the Commonwealthmen had denounced Prime Minister Robert Walpole for using executive patronage to control the legislature. In America the Jeffersonians saw Alexander Hamilton as a latter-day Walpole, resorting to the same methods and with the same potential result of destroying the constitutional balance between executive and legislative powers.29 The defect of the republican scholarship is that its practitioners have been slow to appreciate how the old words took on modern meanings in the American context. Jefferson’s agrarian bias no more locked him into a traditionalist view than did Adam Smith’s similar insistence that agriculture must come first. Nor were Jefferson’s followers trying to preserve a Gemeinschaft from the threat of a Hamiltonian Gesellschaft: “Commercial farmers, small planters, urban tradesmen, and aspiring professional men poured into Jefferson’s party as soon as he sounded the alarm about Hamilton’s program,”30 Joyce Appleby has noted. Jeffersonians confronted Hamiltonians in a conflict between different types of capitalists rather than between opponents and proponents of a modern economy. Against British and Hamiltonian mercantilism, Madison and Jefferson proposed international free trade, domestic laissez-faire, commercial agriculture, and westward expansion.31 Americans of the Revolution and early Republic spoke in several conceptual languages, one of which was undeniably old and republican.32 But the citizens of the New World had a distinctive way of putting the old republican expressions to new uses for a new era. Republican Thomas Paine announced in Common Sense (1776) that “the birthday of a new world is at hand.”33 Republican Thomas Jefferson, rejecting the classical notion of cyclical history, insisted that the American experience proved there was something new under the sun34; characteristic of Jefferson was his remark to John Adams, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of

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the Past.”35 Ardent republican John Taylor believed that “political philosophy remained unimproved until the American revolution, because it assumed ancient theories for settled facts”; America, “by demolishing the barrier hitherto obstructing the progress of political science, . . . [has] cleared the way for improvement.”36 Even James Madison, the most cautious of republicans, urged his fellow citizens to adopt a “novel” and “experimental” form of government: “Is it not the glory of the people of America that, whilst they have paid a decent regard for the opinions of former times . . . , they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity . . . to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense?”37 The writings of Madison, Taylor, Jefferson, Paine, et al. strongly suggest that American republicanism was modern and forward-looking, rather than backward-looking and nostalgic.38 Neither the place of republicanism in American political culture nor the relationship between republicanism and liberalism can be satisfactorily addressed until we deal with the prior question of the link (or rupture) between classical and modern republican ideals.39

Republics Ancient and Modern Barely had the republican scholarship come into being than Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock set forth the notion that the American Revolution amounted to a rebirth of “classical republicanism.” Dedication to the public good, willingness to sacrifice one’s private interests to the common interest, the belief that to participate in public affairs is the most worthy of activities whereas to live in privacy is to be deprived of human dignity, were among the notions that Wood and Pocock discovered in the classics and rediscovered in the thought of the American Founders. Republics ancient and modern, on their reading, were ideologically interchangeable. The reason why so many scholars—and some journalists—find the concept of “classical republicanism” enticing is no mystery. Both the antimodernizers and the antiliberals have reasons to value a concept enabling them to obliterate the distinctions between ancient and modern republican ideals. The critics of modernization theory want to believe that the classically educated Founders were under the spell of the past; the antiliberals embrace classical republicanism because it provides them with a nostalgic “world we have lost,” a “path not taken,” or, for some, a world that can still be revived.40

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Generally speaking, the purveyors of the notion of classical republicanism agreed that their ideal world had once existed but was no more, and that its successor was a liberal political culture centered in individual rights, self-interest, procedural justice, and privacy. Ever since Gordon Wood published his book in 1969, historians have been trying to answer the question he posed: when did classical republicanism end and liberalism begin? He dated its demise from the adoption of the Constitution, which to his mind was the moment when liberal institutional checks and balances triumphed over the ideal of dedication to the public good as the most promising formula for securing the legacy of the Revolution. Other historians, intent on furthering Wood’s work, soon devoted themselves to the task of extending the life of classical politics, postponing the funeral as long as possible into the nineteenth century. Initially the date on its tombstone was 1787, but that was later changed to 1815 or thereabouts; then the expiration date was reset for the second-party system; and so on, until we heard that Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republicans have been “incorporating themes from the tradition of classical republicanism.”41 No one dared say that since a modern version of classical republicanism never existed in the first place, the controversy about its demise has been pointless. Republicanism in America did exist, of course, but was from the beginning distinctively modern and infused with seeds that would later develop into modern liberal ideology. Far from being antithetical to liberalism, the republican ideology shipped to the colonies on English boats actually served as midwife at the birth of American liberalism. One way to recapture the proto-liberal character of American republicanism is to reconsider the two books which preceded and inspired the writings of Wood and Pocock, namely, Caroline Robbins’s The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (1959) and Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). Robbins launched the study of the Commonwealthmen; it was her trail-blazing work upon which Pocock decided to build his interpretation of the republican tradition. Quite characteristically, however, he stressed the title but overlooked the subtitle of her book, which reads “Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought [emphasis added].”42 Robbins traced the influence of Opposition Whig ideology down to “the war with the thirteen colonies”; Bailyn extended her research to include the American Revolution. Ironically, their books, which would be cited by all the “republican” historians, said very little about republics. That was because the Commonwealthmen did not want to revisit the bloodletting of

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the English Civil War; their quarrel was not with the monarchical Restoration but with the abuse of political authority, whether by Robert Walpole or George III. Although Commonwealthmen desired that Englishmen be citizens rather than mere subjects, their primary aim was to limit the exercise of political power. Nothing could be less classical than the Real Whig fear of government,43 nor could anything be more conducive to the development of liberalism, American style. The foundation of Bailyn’s book on America was laid by Robbins in her summary of the views of the English Commonwealthmen: “In an age when Englishmen stressed the sovereignty, not of a divinely appointed king but of a triumphant parliament, the Real Whigs reminded them of the rights of electors and of the unenfranchised, of the virtues of rotation in office and of the necessity for constant vigilance against the corruptions of power whether wielded by king, ministers or estates.”44 These Real Whigs lost out early and late in eighteenth-century England to the victors of 1688: early, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon failed to oust Walpole; later, Richard Price and Joseph Priestley lost to Edmund Burke, who opposed George III’s abuse of monarchical prerogative but continued to place his trust in the parliamentary rulers rather than the ruled. The Commonwealthman or Real Whig ideology fared miserably in England but triumphed gloriously in America, where—Bailyn demonstrated—every one of its themes became an article of faith. The ideas of the Real Whigs were much closer to those of the liberals who followed them than to Aristotle or Cicero. Real Whigs held that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so did the liberals of the nineteenth century. Real Whigs denounced standing armies, and so would many liberals. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon were among the many Real Whigs who argued, long before Mill, that “freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty.”45 Dissenting Protestants, the Real Whigs feared religious establishments, as did many Americans during and after the Revolution.46 Constitutional government was dear to Aristotle, the Real Whigs, and modern liberals; unlike the Greeks, however, the Real Whigs and liberals were preoccupied with limiting government and protecting a sphere of privacy from undue governmental intervention. In sum, the ideology of the Commonwealthmen made for anemic republicanism but full-blooded liberalism. When the opinions of the Real Whigs or Commonwealthmen swept America, the outcome was that liberal political culture carried the day. The story of ideology at the time of the American Revolution is a tale

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not of classical republicanism but, rather, of three kinds of Whigs who gave birth to two kinds of liberalism, one English and the other American. Burke represents the type of Whig who stayed at home and nurtured a British-style liberal political culture; the Real Whigs and the Lockean Whigs were the two types who traveled to America and flourished in the colonies. Together, the Real Whigs and the natural-rights Lockeans invented liberalism, American style. Burke can be taken as a leading example of the kind of Whig who thought the Glorious Revolution was glorious because it was not a revolution; he did not talk much about natural rights, did talk about duties to one’s group, opposed royal excess but not the monarchy, deemed an established church essential to social well-being, thought the notion of popular sovereignty reprehensible, and, as member of Parliament, he did not flinch from informing his constituents of his intention to vote as he thought best.47 If we set Burke’s brand of Whiggery, which never crossed the ocean, beside the Real Whiggery, which did, the result is a sharp picture of the differences between the English and American liberal traditions. Without belaboring the point, we may say that whereas Burke defended the unreformed Parliament because he wanted to free its members from their constituents, Real Whigs Trenchard and Gordon gave Americans lessons they would not forget about never trusting their representatives and never granting them a superior status: “Men who are advanced to great stations . . . ought to look upon themselves as creatures of the publick,” Trenchard and Gordon wrote in 1720. Office holders “ought to reflect that thousands, ten thousands of their countrymen, have equal, or perhaps greater, qualifications than themselves.”48 The theory of representation advocated by Trenchard and Gordon was adopted wholeheartedly by many Americans, ever fearful of government and ambivalent about their rulers. In siding with these English Commonwealthmen, the colonists differentiated themselves not only from eighteenth-century Burkean Whigs but from Aristotle and Cicero, who in ancient times had taught that the best men should rule and the many dutifully follow. Even though Trenchard and Gordon wrote under the pen name “Cato,” they educated their American readers in unmistakably modern rather than classical notions of liberty and authority. Locke’s philosophy of inalienable natural rights is yet another form of Whiggery which fared poorly at home49 but emerged victorious on Ameri-

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can soil. In England the Whigs of 1688 were the disciples not of Locke but of Grotius,50 whose Law of War and Peace argued for alienable rather than inalienable natural rights and judged what ought to be according to what had been in the practices of “civilized” nations.51 A century after the Glorious Revolution, Burke fulminated at length against the “metaphysical” natural-rights theories of the French revolutionaries across the Channel and Richard Price at home; he polemicized against “abstract,” unhistorical notions of rights that were vastly inferior, he thought, to the traditionally sanctioned rights of Englishmen. In America, by contrast, Locke’s inalienable natural rights were received with open arms and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.52 The primacy of the doctrine of natural rights demonstrates the unclassical nature of the American republican tradition. As David Hume observed in his essay “Of the Original Contract,” the ideas of a state of nature, natural rights, a social contract, consent, and popular sovereignty are modern conceptions nowhere to be found in Aristotle or Cicero, because classical authors took political obligation for granted.53 From a Humean point of view it is obvious that classical citations were merely the appetizer, the modern theory of contractual obligation the main course on the menu of American revolutionaries. At the top of their list of political principles was the distinctively modern right of the people to constitute a government of their own choosing. The Americans decided to protect their natural rights by collectively willing a new constitution into being—an act incomprehensible to Aristotle (or Burke). If “rights talk” is one of the defining characteristics of liberal discourse, then liberalism entered America at the same time that this country declared itself a republic. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton were classics-loving and Harrington-citing republicans, but also ardent advocates of the doctrine of natural rights that plays a central role in liberal philosophy. The Commonwealthman writings devoured by the Americans crossed the Atlantic in works such as Cato’s Letters, which, although garnished with classical allusions, faithfully repeated all the central tenets of Locke’s political philosophy. Trenchard and Gordon, whose letters were widely read in America, argued that “liberty is the unalienable right of all mankind”; that the only legitimate government is that which rules with the consent of the governed; and that the right to revolution cannot be denied.54 America’s natural-rights republicanism is modern and liberal republicanism.55

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Liberalism made its mark early in American history, and its continuing significance is obvious in the never-ending quest of one group or another for recognition of its “rights.” Nevertheless, scholars in ample supply are determined to have their enduring classical republican tradition, no matter how weak the evidence, usually because they are looking for proof that the disenchanted citizenry of our age is a novel development. The word “virtue” is their friend since it can be found in all eras, and one can easily obscure the difference between civic-minded virtue, on the one hand, and classical republican civic virtue, on the other. Civic, indeed, was the virtue nineteenth-century Whigs pursued with reforms such as the building of insane asylums, the improvement of schools, and the passage of temperance legislation. But the underlying Whig philosophy of duty and self-mastery was very much a doctrine of the individual self, a version of modern individualism taking the particular person as its starting point and then working outward to socio-political action: it was not a philosophy starting with the polis and working back to the individual. Daniel Walker Howe knows this, but so entrenched is the notion of classical republicanism that he cannot keep it out of his studies of the Whigs.56 Modern liberalism is also evident in the willingness of the American Founders and their progeny to substitute reliable self-interest for admirable but fleeting civic virtue.57 Skeptical about our capacity to sustain virtue, John Adams took comfort in the belief that a republic can exist “even among highwaymen by setting one rogue to watch another.”58 No doubt Adams was thinking of James Harrington, the godfather of English and American Commonwealthmen who had written that “as man is sinful, but yet the world is perfect, so may the citizen be sinful and yet the commonwealth be perfect.” Harrington maintained that “it is the duty of a legislator to presume all men to be wicked”59; likewise Hume, who influenced Madison and Hamilton among others,60 held that in matters political “every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end . . . than private interest.”61 Adams maintained that he was “not often satisfied with the opinions of Hume; but in this he seems well founded, that all projects of government, founded in the supposition or expectation of extraordinary degrees of virtue, are evidently chimerical.”62 Trenchard and Gordon, too, took notice of the need to show citizens that “their own interest is involved in the general interest.”63 Other Americans joined with Adams in seeking to ground the new re-

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publican order in the inducements of self-interest. James Madison admired the Constitution because of its “policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives”; by such a strategy “the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”64 John Taylor wrote at great length against Adams in 1814, but sounded much like the man he attacked when he counted on institutional arrangements and selfinterest rather than civic virtue to safeguard American freedom.65 The “procedural republicanism” that the communitarians abhor66 was dear to Americans two centuries before Rawls published A Theory of Justice. As an antidote to our love of civic virtue, we would do well to cross the Atlantic and establish contact with the writings of Benjamin Constant, especially his lucid speech on “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns” (1814) and his reasons for emphasizing not just the futility but the destructiveness of efforts to re-create Sparta in modern times. A good French liberal, Constant wanted an engaged citizenry but never again a citizenry on the march or on a bloody rampage. After reading him, nothing seems more bizarre that the fascination of America’s “republican” intellectuals with Samuel Adams’s attempt to discover a “Christian Sparta” in America.67 An encounter with Constant can also open us to the richer possibilities of liberal thought that scholars of the republican persuasion systematically overlook. Constant’s liberalism is well-informed about the perils of freedom understood “negatively”68 as the absence of coercion: “The danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily.” The self-development of individuals and “moral education of the citizens,” their right “to deliberate on their interests, to be an integral part of the social body of which they are members,” figure in his expansive liberalism.69 As the example of Constant illustrates, the antiliberals of our own age give an impoverished account of liberalism and then complain about the poverty of liberalism. Their accounts of the past fail because they succumb to the temptation to indulge their present-day ideological agendas; they settle for a morality play in one act instead of exploring the past in its richness and complexity. Too often the antagonists in the debate about liberalism and republicanism in America have given us reasons to appreciate Nietzsche’s essay on “the use and abuse of history.”70

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One way to prevent our present-day concerns from overwhelming our historical sensibility is to look for a vantage point outside America from which to investigate the past. Liberalism and republicanism, after all, are political movements and ideologies found on both sides of the Atlantic. In France today the republican tradition is undeniably alive; in France yesterday there was a series of pitched battles between republicans and liberals. How does the American debate look from the shores of the other modern republic, France? For anyone who wishes to study liberalism and republicanism in comparative perspective, the present moment is exceptionally promising, because French scholars have in recent decades provided many missing pieces of the puzzle. Beginning in the 1970s and with increasing frequency thereafter, French intellectuals abandoned Marxism, stopped dismissing nineteenth-century liberals as bourgeois apologists unworthy of scholarly attention, and started investigating the meaning of their republican tradition. Ex-communist François Furet turned to the liberal Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution for guidance when he set out to reexamine the significance of the revolutionary and republican tradition. Many scholars joined Furet on his quest for the republican past, while others devoted themselves to restoring to memory a neglected history of French liberals.71 Remarkably, whenever scholars discuss America’s place in an “Atlantic republican tradition,”72 the reference is always to England and its Commonwealthmen and never to our sister republic, France. Studies of the migration of ideas from England and their naturalization in America have not been complemented by comparative analysis of the French and American republics.73 To issue a call for a comparative study of America and France is, inevitably, to think of Alexis de Tocqueville and his famous book, Democracy in America. From the moment Tocqueville’s name is uttered, however, we come face to face with a paradox: the very American scholars who cannot speak too often of Tocqueville, cannot speak too seldom of France or the comparative method.

Tocqueville’s Return Trip Poor Tocqueville, always cited, claimed by everyone, and never allowed to return to France. It is right and proper that Tocqueville’s voice should be

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heard in our discussions of American citizenship; it is not right that he should be denied his French accent. One would think that he wrote in English, that his intended primary audience was American, that he never sailed back to France, and did not write Democracy in America in order to take part in a French debate. Whether he would have liked it or not, Tocqueville has been granted American citizenship and forcibly enrolled in the American Political Science Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Sociological Association. When political scientist Robert Putnam set out to record the decline of America’s “social capital”—the breakdown of “the networks of civic engagement”—he did so as a self-described social scientist of “neoTocquevillean bent.”74 When sociologist Robert Bellah and his associates studied “individualism and commitment in American life,” they borrowed Tocqueville’s words to fashion their title, Habits of the Heart.75 Tocqueville’s ghost also seemed to hover over political philosopher Benjamin Barber’s writings on “strong democracy.”76 Conspicuously absent in the publications of the foregoing authors, however, is a sustained effort to study America in comparative perspective. Not only do Americans fail to follow Tocqueville back to France; they prevent him from boarding and oblige him to become one of their ideological own. Thus, one of our “communitarian” philosophers likes Tocqueville so much that he grants him the honor of being a “republican,”77 even though anyone the least bit familiar with nineteenth-century France realizes that Tocqueville was a liberal whose concern for revitalizing local government was typical of most of the liberals of his country. Similarly, a historian tempted by neoconservatism depicts a Tocqueville who not only spent most of his time in America in the company of Whigs, but who was practically an American Whig himself—a gentleman and a friend of commerce, a man sympathetic to religion, a foe of Jackson, and an advocate of membership in numerous voluntary, civic-minded associations.78 The Americanization of Tocqueville, the reshaping of his thought in the image of our ideologies, has left us with a Tocqueville who is not a Frenchman. His nervous preoccupation, early in the second volume, with the fate of culture in a mass age; his ever-growing anxiety, toward the end of his study, about the advent of a new form of democratic despotism—his entire European liberal agenda79—all have been lost in the translations of the New Lefters and the neoconservatives. Nothing in recent American readings prepares us for Tocqueville’s own assessment of his intellectual strat-

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egy: “Although I rarely spoke of France in my book,” he confided to a friend, “I did not write one page of it without thinking about her and without having her, so to speak, before my eyes.”80 Tocqueville dropped hints about comparative studies that merit reconsideration. “What above all I have sought to put in relief in relation to the United States and to have well understood, was less the complete picture of that foreign society than its contrasts and resemblances to our own. It is always either from opposition or analogy with one that I set out to give a just and interesting idea of the other.”81 Following Tocqueville’s lead but reversing his national focus, we may infer that we shall never understand America until we also know something of France, no matter that our eyes will always be on the United States. When speaking of France in the chapters to follow, our constant effort will be to seek whatever can serve to illuminate American experience. Tocqueville’s comment that “a new political science is necessary for a world itself quite new”82 was not intended as an endorsement of the positivist research program of his contemporary Auguste Comte. Making a causal argument is not Tocqueville’s design in Democracy in America; he does not recommend that we try to freeze ever-changing human reality while tests are conducted to decide the significance of this or that factor. In his hands comparative analysis yields not so much knowledge of cause and effect as insight into our situation, self-knowledge, and self-criticism.83 For anyone who believes that the human world is temporal, historical, and constantly changing, Tocqueville’s intellectual restraint is welcome. The words “republican” and “liberal,” along with everything else, have undergone constant transmutations. Discussions of liberalism and republicanism degenerate into a dance of reified abstractions unless those words are placed in historical and comparative perspective. Tocqueville’s implied lesson is that Americans cannot understand their culture if locked within it. There is, however, a major obstacle that stands in the way of anyone who would take to heart his suggestion that the study of America requires a journey to France and an immersion in its political culture. Americans archly deny that France, its violent revolution, and its Jacobin tradition are relevant to the supposedly much calmer political climes of the United States. More often than not, when Americans do deign to address the French case, they speak briefly and in a tone of thinly disguised self-congratulation. It pleases Americans to repeat Taine’s comment that, during the Second Empire, the Minister of Education could

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take out his watch at any time of day and announce which page of Virgil all schoolboys were reading.84 It pleases Americans far less to note that by such means peasants were transformed into Frenchmen.85 Nor does anyone wish to recognize that Taine represents a variety of liberalism so undemocratic and emaciated as to verge on self-annihilation (below, ch. 5). The belief that French political culture has nothing in common with its American counterpart is ill-founded. Doctrines of rights were central to the founding moments of both regimes, and, as Gordon Wood has argued in an incisive essay, “actually it may be the drafting of the French Declaration of Rights [August 1789] that influenced the creation of the American Bill of Rights [September 1789]. If so, Jefferson [in Paris] was the conduit through which that influence flowed.”86 It should not be forgotten that Rousseau joined Locke in vigorously denying the claim of Grotius that natural rights are alienable.87 Even the most ardent of the Jacobins continued to believe in “sacred and inalienable rights,”88 while deferring the day of their implementation. Likewise, Robespierre’s speech announcing that “the characteristic of popular government is to be trustful towards the people and severe towards itself ”89 sounds much like the rhetoric of the Real Whigs, English and American. So does the explicit recognition in the Jacobin Constitution of 1793 of a right of each generation to remake the constitution, by revolution if necessary.90 The conceptual underpinnings of these French/American similarities are the theories of natural rights, popular sovereignty, and the social contract to which the republicans of both countries appealed. A good place to begin, if we are to stop dismissing French republicanism out of hand, is with a frank recognition that we have been guilty of a double standard in denouncing the lack of judicial review in the French tradition. By the same standard, Blackstone could be denounced as a Jacobin(!), since he upheld the English tradition of parliamentary sovereignty. Surely it must be conceded, however one looks at the Second, Third, and Fourth Republics, that their parliamentary regimes were not known for passing repressive legislation; whether they could pass any legislation at all was more to the point. The favorite Anglo-American method of scotching the French republican model has been to hurl the epithet “Jacobin” at it. But the label can only be made to stick if one freezes history in 1793 and pretends that all subsequent republican moments have been repetitions of the original moment. In fact, however, the republicans of 1848 were more eclectic, diverse,

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and mild in their theory, and far more accommodating in practice, than were those of 1793. Most of the republicans of the Third Republic were downright conservative in their social views. True, Clemenceau said the Revolution is a bloc, meaning that all must be accepted, the Terror included, or all rejected; but then, again, Clemenceau in power was the least radical of Radicals. Very frequently Americans confuse the power of the French state and its bureaucracy with Jacobinism. They forget that it was Napoleon, far more than the republicans, who built the modern French state; and that all regimes after Napoleon, whether liberal, republican, or Bonapartist, used the state apparatus to secure stability in a strife-torn nation. When decentralization came in 1982, its sponsors were the strongly republican Socialists (below, ch. 3). The term “Jacobin,” when extended beyond the era of the Revolution proper, unfairly burdens the republican tradition with responsibility for every woe of modern France. Just as our scholarly literature on American republicanism overflows with antiliberal sentiments, so do American commentaries on the French overflow with a liberal bias against French republicanism. A decade and more after the end of the Cold War, Americans were still treating the French republican tradition as a precursor of Bolshevism; in recent years we have even heard, amazingly, that French republicans have always been hostile to the doctrine of rights (below, ch. 2). In the chapters that follow we shall wage war on the disparaging American treatment of the French republicans; only by combating an entrenched liberal bias can we hope to move beyond exercises in self-congratulation to constructive comparisons and contrasts between the American and French republics. Rehabilitating the French republican tradition will not be our first priority. Primarily our focus will be on using France to understand America. Among other things, France can teach us that a battle between republicans and liberals presupposes a situation in which one party proposes and the other resists democracy (below, ch. 3). Where, as in America, both sides accepted democracy at an early date, the struggle has been over what kind of democracy there will be, high-toned Whig or populist Jacksonian, national or states rights, one or multicultural, racist or inclusionary? Talk about republics has rarely been as animated in America as in France. Reared on Commonwealthman ideology, Americans have had the luxury of taking a republic and liberal constitutionalism for granted. Republican ideology in America never attained the strength it gained in

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France from repeated struggles to establish a republic. The question to ask about America is, how did republican ideology ever manage in any measure to assert itself, when it was never challenged by Guizot-like liberals or any other antirepublican forces? If we consult the French case, an answer is forthcoming. Before republicans in France fought liberals, they did battle with monarchists and aristocrats. So, too, in America: antimonarchical and antiaristocratic rhetoric came into its own at the time of the showdown between Hamilton and Jefferson and the formation of the first party system (below, ch. 4). Americans have not cared much about civic virtue, but one party has ever been ready to accuse the other of harboring closet monarchists and aristocrats who would corrupt the republic. All in all, it is not a republican but a liberal tradition in America to which everyone pays homage, the antiliberals especially, as attested by their inability to stop talking about liberalism. Rights, constitutional government, the bargaining of interest groups are second nature to American political life. One should not conclude, however, that Hartz was correct in his depiction of a narrow, stifling, hegemonic, and monolithic liberalism. His scheme is both too optimistic and too pessimistic. It is unduly optimistic in that it does not take into account the powerful illiberal currents of culture and thought present from the beginning and still with us today (below, ch. 6). Nor is his pessimism entirely in order: American liberalism is multidimensional and its currents of reform politics sometimes offer hope that illiberalism is not fated to emerge victorious.91 In the chapters that follow my intention is to highlight the liberal possibilities of French republicanism and the civic possibilities of American liberalism.

“Rights Talk” in American and French Accents

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Chapter



2

“Rights Talk” in American and French Accents

The American academic community has grown accustomed to addressing the relationship between republicanism and liberalism in France and the United States by gauging the place of “rights talk” in the two political cultures. Anyone who has followed these American debates has been confronted with a set of remarkable contrasts. France, we are told, suffers from too little rights talk; America from too much. In France, republicanism supposedly is the pressing problem, liberalism the longed-for solution; in America, by contrast, liberalism purportedly is the problem, republicanism the suggested solution. While books and articles on France published in America complain that French republicanism is woefully illiberal, the corresponding books on America bemoan “the impoverishment of political discourse” in a country that incessantly uses and abuses the liberal idiom. More than anyone else in recent years, it is Tony Judt who has argued that the French republican tradition lacks a proper concern for rights, a contention he has stated in two essays, one bearing the ironic title “Liberalism, There Is the Problem,” the other “Rights in France: Reflections on the Etiolation of a Political Language.”1 What makes Judt’s essays (1992, 1993) noteworthy is his stature in the American intellectual community and the vigor, flair, and panache of his writing. British by birth and professor at an American university, he is a reminder that the Americans and the English have ever been willing to bury their differences for a moment or two by joining together in criticizing the French. Throughout the English-speaking world, the notion that the French have been deaf to the language of rights has been a recurring theme2; Judt is simply the latest and perhaps the ablest scholar to tell Americans what they have always wanted to hear about France. 22

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Mary Ann Glendon’s Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (1991) is the flagship of the “communitarian” critics of American liberalism. “Our rights talk,” she contends, “in its absoluteness . . . heightens social conflict and inhibits dialogue that might lead toward consensus, accommodation, or at least the discovery of common ground.” Moreover, the constant recourse to a language of rights fosters irresponsibility, promotes “relentless individualism,” and undermines “the principal seedbeds of civic and moral virtue.”3 Glendon confined her analysis to very recent times and said nothing about the larger course of American history. Other like-minded writers have attempted to project the communitarian critique of contemporary liberalism upon the canvas of American history, turning the past into a battle between communitarian “republicans” and anticommunitarian liberals. In Democracy’s Discontents (1996) Michael Sandel begins by enriching Glendon’s study of recent Supreme Court decisions, and then devotes the rest of his book to capturing the entire American past for the use of communitarians in their quarrel with Rawls and other present-day liberals. Explicitly in Sandel, implicitly in Glendon, rights talk is held to be a recent invention which has displaced an earlier language of civic responsibility. The burden of the present essay is, in the first place, to refute the claim that rights are external to the French republican tradition; and in the second, to deny the claim that rights talk is a new development in America— to argue, instead, that rights talk characterizes all of American history, and that instead of always undermining civic concern, as the communitarians suggest, the politics of rights has in reality frequently served as a primary stimulus of civic participation. French republicanism is far more liberal than has been allowed, and American liberalism far more civic.

The Persistence of Rights Talk in America To deny the contention of communitarians that Americans today are obsessive, shrill, and intolerant in lodging their claims and counter-claims of rights would be foolhardy. As Mary Ann Glendon notes, only in America is environmental politics pursued through assertions that trees have rights.4 But what she forgets to tell us is that if something has changed in American politics over the last decades, the difference must be in the nature of the rights talk, not in its pervasiveness. All through the past, Americans have turned to the language of rights to fight their political battles: present

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from the beginning, with us today, recourse to the vocabulary of rights is now and ever has been a defining characteristic of political culture in the United States. Untidy and complex historical reality may be simplified, sorted, and organized by pointing out that Americans have drawn upon rights talk to nourish at least three kinds of politics: a politics of revolution, a politics of reform, and a politics of order. Perhaps not the third but certainly the first two have strongly fostered keen civic concern, if not civic virtue. Rights talk was integral to the American Revolution and displayed its full might when the colonists switched their rhetoric from claiming the particular, historical, and officially granted rights of Englishmen to something radically different: universal and timeless natural rights, dependent on no concession from rulers but rather the birthright of all human beings.5 Jefferson in A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), and Adams in Novanglus (1775), tried to avoid the final break with England by arguing on legalistic and historical grounds for greater colonial freedom. Even in these works, however, the language of natural rights occasionally slides into their prose. “English liberties,” wrote John Adams in his Novanglus essays, “are but certain rights of nature reserved to the citizen by the English constitution, which rights cleaved to our ancestors when they crossed the Atlantic and would have inhered in them [even] if . . . they had taken no patent or charter from the king at all.”6 Jefferson, too, interjected comments on “the rights of nature” into his historical argument.7 Without skipping a beat, the great Virginian could readily move on to writing the full-blown natural rights rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, and Adams could write the fundamentally similar Declaration of Rights of the Constitution of Massachusetts. What made the American Revolution a revolution, unlike England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, was the ideology of natural rights that triumphed in America but not in the mother country. Locke’s Two Treatises fell upon deaf British ears even as his brethren chased the Stuarts out of the country. Neither the Declaration of Rights nor the Bill of Rights of 1689 was based upon notions of natural rights. No mention was made in England of a right of revolution, of consent as the foundation of government, or of a social contract as the source of political obligation. Determined to avoid the onus of having engaged in revolutionary activity, the governing class of England resorted to the fiction that the king had abdicated.8

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Locke was unsuccessful in 1688, and a century later his brilliant progeny Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others were likewise frustrated in their efforts to influence governmental policy.9 These English radicals, outsiders all as religious dissenters, none to the manor born, found that their trenchant writings in the natural rights tradition were first ignored by officialdom and later subjected to governmental suppression during the French Revolution. Americans, however, welcomed Locke and his heirs with open arms, and one of these English radicals, Tom Paine, played a leading role in making certain that the American Revolution would be the genuine revolution that the Glorious Revolution was not. At a time when the colonists were still wavering in their convictions, still looking for a way out short of a total break, Paine convinced them that “A government of our own is our natural right.” In good Lockean form, Paine spoke of “natural liberty,” of government by the consent of the governed, and asked his readers to imagine the hypothetical meeting of a first parliament in a virgin land where “every man by natural right will have a seat” until representatives are elected. The purpose of government, wrote the author of Common Sense, is to secure “freedom and property to all men, and above all things the free exercise of religion.” Locke could not have said it better. Also reminiscent of the Second Treatise was Paine’s conclusion that “the colonies come of age” and must henceforth assume control of their own rights, much as Locke had insisted that upon achieving maturity, children must become autonomous actors free from the dominion of their parents.10 Without question, the politics of natural rights was central to the American Revolution. An exceptionally pliable doctrine, the revolutionary theory of natural rights was later transformed into the intellectual centerpiece of a notorious politics of order. Toward the close of the nineteenth century many Americans, fearful of immigrants, anarchists, socialists, and blacks, were in a very conservative mood. Natural rights, the battle cry of the people during the Revolution, were used a hundred years later by courts to rally the elites against the masses. Beginning shortly after the Civil War and lasting until 1937, the justices of the Supreme Court sometimes wielded the power of judicial review as a blunt weapon against progressive legislation. When striking down the federal income tax law of 1894, the judges admitted that the legal precedents were not on their side, but took it upon themselves to reverse “a century of

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error” and to stop the “communistic march.” In addition, the Court voided the possibility that the Fourteenth Amendment might provide the basis for building a less bigoted nation when the justices decided that native Americans were exempted from its provisions and that the enforcement clause did not apply to abusive actions against African Americans undertaken by private persons. Jim Crow met with no resistance from the courts, and Plessy v. Ferguson was but one of a number of cases in which the Supreme Court upheld state laws demanding segregation of races. Instead of employing the “due process” and “equal protection” provisions to protect emancipated slaves, the Supreme Court justices used the Fourteenth Amendment to free big business from governmental regulation. Corporations, more surely than humans, were “persons” in the rulings of the Court, which repeatedly struck down social legislation in the name of laissez-faire, property rights, and freedom of contract. Justice Stephen J. Field spoke for the Supreme Court when he proclaimed in 1884 that “certain inherent rights lie at the foundation of all action, and upon a recognition of them alone can free institutions be maintained. These inherent rights have never been more happily expressed than in the Declaration of Independence, that new evangel of liberty to the people.”11 In the hands of the judges, natural rights became an integral feature of a politics of order. Revolution, order, reform—the Declaration of Independence was the holy grail for all three forms of politics. At the time of the break with England, the Declaration played a role in a politics of revolution; in the late nineteenth century it served a Supreme Court justice eager to impose a politics of order upon a potentially unruly populace. Finally, all through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the Declaration repeatedly answered the call of Americans engaged in the politics of reform. Women’s rights advocates, farmers, labor groups, abolitionists, African Americans, Lincoln and the Republicans, even socialists, found themselves issuing alternative Declarations of Independence or demanding that the spirit of the original be upheld.12 Arguably, the history of the Declaration subsequent to the Revolution, in particular its uses in inspiring reform movements, is of much greater significance than its role in 1776.13 When women (and a few men) met at Seneca Falls in 1848 to initiate a women’s rights movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton hit upon the idea of promulgating a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled upon the Declaration of Independence, which would repeat much of the 1776 document word

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for word, while interpolating “and women” at all the crucial junctures. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” Three generations of women would draw moral sustenance from the declaration of 1848.14 The opponents of slavery also enlisted the Declaration in their cause. In his great speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, ex-slave Frederick Douglass asked his audience to consider the holiday more fit for mourning than for rejoicing. “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us . . . This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” The logic of Douglass’s assessment led blacks to celebrate not the Fourth but the Fifth of July. Nevertheless, Douglass continued “drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence”—and from the thought that the Constitution was a pliable document, open to a reading that would exclude “slavery,” the word unuttered in its pages.15 The Abolitionists, believing the Constitution beyond redemption, seized upon the Declaration to justify ending the Union. William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips called upon “every citizen . . . to devote himself to the destruction of the Union and the Constitution”; their hope was that from the wreckage would arise a nation dedicated to “the principles of the Declaration of Independence, whose promises made us once the admiration of the world.” Garrison announced that he was ashamed of his country, ashamed “of our unmeaning declamations in praise of liberty and equality—of our hypocritical cant about the inalienable rights of man.”16 Unlike the Abolitionists, Lincoln enlisted the Declaration not to burn the Constitution but to perfect it. Every time Stephen A. Douglas attempted to limit the Declaration’s intent to “white men, men of European birth and European descent,” Lincoln fought back with the assertion that “the entire records . . . , from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence.” In Lincoln’s interpretation the Declaration was the telos of American and possibly of all human history: “I had thought that the Declaration contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of men everywhere,” he told his audience. The statement that all men are created equal, he added, “was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for

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that, but for future use.” The time for that “future use” was at hand; Lincoln asked his fellow citizens to rededicate themselves to the Declaration and to the fulfillment of the intent of the founding fathers who, in his view, had wanted slavery to be cast out of the Constitution at the earliest possible date.17 For labor groups and even for socialists the Declaration of Independence was, throughout the nineteenth century, the symbol and promise of hope for the future. As early as the 1790s members of fledgling labor unions entered the newly formed Democratic-Republican Societies and drank toasts to “The Fourth of July, may it ever prove a memento to the oppressed to rise and assert their rights.”18 During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, craftsmen liked nothing more than to parade through the streets of New York City on the Fourth of July, proudly advocating “just notions of liberty, founded upon the RIGHTS OF MAN.”19 Time and again, for the rest of the century, one or another labor group promulgated an alternative Declaration of Independence for downtrodden workers.20 What greater proof of the primacy of the Declaration can there be than to see it and the concept of “inalienable rights” repeatedly invoked by Eugene V. Debs, the socialist leader?21 “Unlike the framers of the Declaration of Independence who announced that ‘all men are created equal’ and then basely repudiated their own doctrine, Marx issued the call to all the workers of the globe, regardless of race, sex, creed or any condition whatsoever,” said Debs, who conveniently forgot that Marx had expressly repudiated declarations of rights.22 Anxious to Americanize socialism, Debs firmly ensconced himself within the Jeffersonian tradition. During the Pullman strike he denounced the reactionary judiciary as “a department [of government] which, according to Thomas Jefferson, has menaced the integrity of the Republic from the beginning.” Rather than return to the Democrats the public should, however, look to the socialists, because “Thomas Jefferson would scorn to enter a modern Democratic convention.” For Debs the coming of Labor Day and May Day festivals in no way replaced celebrations of the Fourth of July. It was Debs’s intent to offer a socialism that would appeal to the agrarian heartland as well as to city dwellers, and he could think of no better strategy to achieve his goal than to marry his socialist convictions to the older tradition of natural rights republicanism.23 Unquestionably, it was from the best-selling futuristic novels of Edward Bellamy that many Americans learned the principles of a non-Marxian so-

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cialism. “The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great Trust,”24 he wrote in Looking Backward (1888); by an unstoppable evolutionary force, industry had become nationalized and the world had entered into a new era of equality in cooperative association. In Equality (1897) he proclaimed that “the nationalization of industry” rested on a proposition that “was not new to Americans”: “the true American constitution—the one written on the people’s hearts—had always remained the immortal Declaration with its assertion of the inalienable equality of all men.”25 American natural rights philosophy assumes many forms. Even as Justice Field was writing decisions in the name of natural rights that protected corporations, Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879) was justifying redistribution of wealth in the name of returning to the traditional natural rights philosophy of Jeffersonian America. His book has affinities not only with some of Jefferson’s words and actions, but also with Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1795) and Thomas Skidmore’s The Rights of Man to Property! (1829). Later, adherents of Populism shared with George, Skidmore, and Paine a reluctant willingness to ask government to intervene so that monopoly might be destroyed and the people reinstated in their natural rights—rights variously defined as the right to the fruits of one’s labor, the right to labor upon the land, or the natural right to land. Paine, Skidmore, and George all made radical proposals for a redistribution of wealth without straying for a moment from their original Lockean concepts of a state of nature, natural rights, and minimal government. Upon returning to Europe in 1787, Tom Paine found himself once again face-to-face with the problem of poverty that he had left behind when he sailed to America in 1774. Not as a matter of charity but of justice, he urged, the government is obliged to set things right. Accordingly, he advocated progressive taxation in Rights of Man (1791–92).26 In Agrarian Justice (1795) he went much further, insisting that while the proceeds from work on the land belong to the laborer, the land itself belongs to no one. Each generation must be permitted to enjoy its natural rights, and can only do so if no previous generation is permitted to remove the soil from the original God-given commons. Confiscation of existing property is unnecessary, but Paine demanded that each person, upon reaching the age of twentyone, be financially compensated by property owners for the loss of his or her natural patrimony. An agrarian law dividing existing property can be socially explosive, as the history of ancient Rome indicates; Paine’s agrarian justice, conversely, would be socially binding.27 Confiscation without compensation was daringly proposed in 1829 by

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Thomas Skidmore, who called for a state constitutional convention to sanction his program, and fifty years later by Henry George, who thought a single tax on land would be a less radical but equally effective means of taking natural rights seriously. Like the author of Agrarian Justice, Skidmore and George began with Locke’s notion that land originally belonged to no one or to all, but they expurgated those passages of the Second Treatise in which the master-thinker allowed individuals to appropriate landed property. If rights matter, then no person should be permitted to live off the labor of others, and later generations must be assured of receiving the fruits of their labors by being guaranteed free and equal access to the use of the land.28 Radical though their proposals might be, Skidmore and George insisted that they were merely striving to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence.29 Their efforts, they insisted, would surely have had the blessing of Jefferson who, both as a national and as a state politician, strove to make property available to all.30 Jefferson’s one mistake, in Skidmore’s estimation, was in replacing “property” with “happiness” in Locke’s triad of “life, liberty, and property.” No one can pursue happiness who has been denied access to land. If Americans today turn automatically and sometimes unthinkingly to the language of rights, we should not be surprised. No other political vocabulary has played a role so vital and persistent in our public discourse.

From the Old Rights Talk to the New The communitarian critics of liberalism are wrong to portray rights talk as new; and wrong, again, to conjure up a vision of American history in which an upstart, uncivic liberalism has displaced traditional republican ideals. Rather, the rise of the new rights talk should be understood as the transformation of one form of liberalism into another. What is it that distinguishes recent rights talk from its venerable forebears? One difference is that the old politics of the grand cause has splintered into the lesser politics of a seemingly endless number of causes. Another distinguishing feature is that recent liberal proponents of rights have been as eager to turn public policy over to judges as FDR was to circumvent the judiciary. Lastly, the escalation of rights claims has taken place at the very moment of the demise of the doctrine of natural rights as a defensible intellectual position. Nowadays skeptical doubt is conjoined to

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dogmatic assertiveness in an unhappy union; and we find Americans proclaiming rights because they believe in policies instead of advocating policies because they believe in rights. The 1970s and thereafter mark the high tide of the new politics of rights, but the original hints may be found in the New Deal, especially in FDR’s talk about an economic bill of rights. When Franklin Roosevelt set out to convince his countrymen that they should embrace social programs, he found many obstacles blocking his path. To have a welfare state one presumably first needs a state, but that was exactly what Americans had always rejected: far better the familiar, time-honored, and unthreatening government “of courts and parties” than an American version of the French or German state.31 Nor were labor unions the immediate ally they might have been: the American Federation of Labor was in no rush to discard its strategy of standing relatively aloof from the governmental power structures that had usually sided against the unions.32 Finally, the New Dealers had to contend with the deeply entrenched belief that the poor are poor because they refuse to earn a living.33 Work is all-important in the American ethic, not only because a democratic culture abhors aristocratic leisure, but also because white workers, from Jacksonian times, have insisted upon distinguishing themselves from black slaves and their descendants.34 FDR and his Brains Trust knew how to appeal to both the lower and the higher aspirations of American political culture in order to accomplish their objectives. In the case of “welfare” measures, they accepted legislation that distinguished between deserving and undeserving poor; Social Security, by contrast, they labeled an “insurance” program, and financed it by payroll taxes rather than from general revenues. The prejudices of middleclass Americans were well served by a social support network which permitted them to congratulate themselves that their benefits were earned, unlike those of poor black Americans. The New Deal seemed, then, to sanction the traditional Jacksonian preoccupations with work, personal initiative, and race consciousness. Lurking below the surface, however, was FDR’s deeper strategy of overturning one part of the Jacksonian outlook. In quiet but direct defiance of the fundamental Jacksonian principle of generational autonomy, the Social Security system enabled the older generation to make claims, potentially enormous in scope, upon the younger. Tied to the cost of living, Social Security benefits could easily exceed payments, with the result that the next generation would be forced to pick up the tab. Despite the best efforts of Arthur

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M. Schlesinger, Jr., “the age of Jackson” was less the forerunner of FDR’s presidency than the era that the New Dealers astutely used and ignored as political circumstances dictated.35 New Dealers knew they were making a pact with the devil each time they sought legitimacy by dusting off their busts of Jackson. Whenever it was politically possible, FDR preferred to argue the case for his social programs by appealing to the higher aspirations of American culture enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. The platform of the 1936 Democratic Convention, written by Roosevelt himself, has as its centerpiece the statement “We hold this truth to be self-evident—that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens.”36 Throughout his long reign as chief executive, Roosevelt strove to present his new social program, in the words of political scientist Sidney Milkis, “as an expansion rather than a subversion of the natural rights tradition.”37 On the campaign trail in 1932, delivering his Commonwealth Club address of September 23, Roosevelt first took up his theme of “an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order,” which would include “a right to make a comfortable living.” Just before his death a weary Roosevelt, fearful the war effort might lead Americans to forget his domestic programs, again outlined an “economic bill of rights” in his speeches of January 11 and October 28, 1944. Among the provisions of this “second bill of rights” would be such measures as a “right to adequate medical care.”38 If invoking the language of rights was one way to reassure his audience in the Commonwealth Club address, another was for Roosevelt to sketch an outline of American history showing the timeliness of his proposals. Land, Roosevelt knew, had always been the American answer to economic destitution. Probably the Brain Trusters had heard of George Henry Evans, the man who had captivated the imaginations of New York workers in the 1840s with his politics of westward relocation (eventually the Homestead Act), which was designed to restore the “natural right to the soil.”39 Roosevelt recalled a bygone era when “at the very worst there was always the possibility of climbing into a covered wagon and moving west.” But by the end of the century, he continued, “we were reaching our last frontier; there was no more free land and our industrial combinations had become great uncontrolled and irresponsible units of power.”40 Roosevelt had reached a critical juncture in his Commonwealth Club speech. Should his next move be to dismiss the tradition of what the Pro-

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gressive intellectuals Herbert Croly and John Dewey pejoratively deemed “pioneer democracy” and “pioneer individualism?”41 Would FDR, a product of the Progressive age, side with Croly’s New Nationalist call to collective purpose and repudiation of Jefferson’s individualistic natural rights? Or would he endorse the Jeffersonian natural rights preached by Progressive Woodrow Wilson in his New Freedom speeches?42 New Nationalist Progressive Adolf Berle, who drafted the original version of the Commonwealth Club address, called for a new understanding of individual rights that sounded strikingly similar to Dewey’s essays on “Individualism, Old and New,” which had appeared a few years earlier in the New Republic. Had he followed Berle’s script, FDR would have told his audience that “The word individualism had no content when divorced from society.”43 In the manner of Dewey, Berle would have the candidate turn away from Jefferson and toward rights that are located in history, culture, and experimental science rather than a state of nature. Roosevelt would have none of it. Instead of dropping natural rights from his vocabulary now that their rootedness in the land was gone, he embraced the Jeffersonian tradition all the more warmly: “Even Jefferson realized that the exercise of property rights might so interfere with the rights of the individual that the Government, without whose assistance the property rights could not exist, must intervene, not to destroy individualism, but to protect it.”44 If each age has its image of Jefferson, then FDR in his Commonwealth Club address would contribute a Jefferson who was not only a natural rights philosopher but also a New Freedom Progressive and a New Dealer.45 No doubt Roosevelt’s intentions were admirable. By placing social programs under the rubric of rights, he could ask that all Americans eventually be included. “Earned” rights (the Social Security Act) are only for some; natural rights are for everyone. What better way to coax a reluctant America to cozy up to comprehensive social welfare legislation than to speak in the traditional natural rights language of Jefferson? Despite his good intentions, the legacy of FDR’s Commonwealth Club address was highly ambiguous. Roosevelt had begun his speech with a quest for seemingly timeless “universal principles,” but what he actually offered his audience turned out to be, by his own account, a timely “redefinition of . . . rights in terms of a changing and growing social order.”46 Locke and Jefferson notwithstanding, rights could no longer have land as their foundation, Roosevelt realized, even though it was precisely their em-

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bodiment in the soil that had long given natural rights their immediacy and “self-evidence.” “In the beginning all the World was America,”47 said Locke, and nineteenth-century Americans agreed with the author of the Second Treatise that the western territories remained in the “state of nature”; they also gladly seconded Locke’s contention that when pioneers “mixed” their labor with the land,48 the territories would in consequence be transformed into civil societies divided into plots of personal property, each such plot held by natural right. Land was the centerpiece of the American imagination; the dream of land Americanized Locke and made his doctrine of natural rights second nature. And yet, by Roosevelt’s own admission, the frontier was gone and land no longer available. After Roosevelt had finished his address, Americans were, so to speak, uprooted from the land in public theory as well as in workaday fact, and would in consequence soon lose their immunity to the currents of thought that had driven old-fashioned natural rights doctrines out of European thought long before the Commonwealth Club address. Cut off from the transcendental sanction of nature and nature’s God, reduced to a Jeffersonian cultural heritage, rights would increasingly seem to be invented rather than discovered, their majesty would wane, and a suspiciously open-ended number of rights might be added to the once limited list. The danger was that a nation given to rights talk would henceforth find itself asking the old vocabulary of rights to assume many new tasks at the same time that the will to believe was on the wane. Cynicism, irresponsibility, mutual unmaskings, cross-talk, and disgust with politics might follow, as became evident during the 1970s, when America moved into a new age of rights talk. Everyone agrees that America witnessed a “rights revolution” in the 1970s, an explosion of new rights proclaimed and demanded by groups competing with one another for recognition of their heretofore thwarted claims—and competing, also, for the enactment of remedial governmental programs. Rights of women, of gays and lesbians, of the handicapped, of consumers; rights to drink clean water and breathe clean air; welfare rights—these are a few of the rights unknown to Jefferson but which regularly figure on lists drawn up by the advocates of the New Politics. This New Politics, so conspicuous at the Democratic National Convention of 1972, was itself a transfiguration of the student politics of the 1960s. Only in appearance had the New Left of the Vietnam era disappeared as the war wound down and an exhausted nation soured on reform

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politics. In reality the onetime student movement had gone mainstream, moving into the Democratic party after years of taunting Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic president. Tom Hayden, the student leader, pointed the way to the future when in 1968 he took time off from his activities of protest against the Democratic National Convention to open a line of communication with Senator Robert Kennedy.49 One searches in vain for sustained rights talk in Hayden’s 1962 student manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. Possibly he thought the rhetoric of rights old hat, but since he had been a civil rights activist, he chose to ignore rather than repudiate rights talk.50 That left the door open for the old terminology of rights to re-emerge in the guise of a mainstream rationale for the liberation politics of the 1960s. Many former student radicals walked through that door in the 1970s, embracing the Democratic party and carrying into it their many “causes,” restated in the old language of rights. Rights talk, it seems, is the default language of American politics. The left-leaning liberal architects of the New Politics turned resolutely against the executive and toward the courts, reversing the New Deal pattern. The reason for this transformation is not difficult to find: come the 1970s and later, it was no longer a Republican victory in a presidential race that had to be explained; rather, the measure of a political pundit was whether he or she could tell the public why the Republican candidate had lost. The conservative presidents, especially Reagan, sought to undo reform, which made Democratic congressmen as eager to block the chief executive as previously they had been to follow his lead. Playing a game of political role reversal, reformers forged an alliance with the courts at the same time that conservatives joined forces with the President. Under the new dispensation, reformers applauded and conservatives denounced judicial activism. Much of the reform legislation passed by a Democratic Congress established new rights—of the handicapped, racial minorities, consumers, and so on—which activist judges were willing to protect and expand through statutory interpretation, no matter how opposed the President might be.51 Within the topsy-turvy world of the New Politics, the courts were the spearhead of reform rather than, as for FDR, the major obstacle to programs expanding the scope of government. The courts received unqualified praise from the reformers because the judges did more than serve the substantive ends of the reformers; equally satisfying were the participatory means employed by the judiciary. The rights sanctioned by the courts included the claims of minorities and pub-

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lic-interest groups to be heard on a regular and repeated basis. Ordinary citizens, the persons most affected by housing and urban development programs, for example, were asked to participate in administering federal programs—often by testifying before congressional subcommittees, bureaucratic agencies, and the courts. Most of all, citizens were encouraged to file legal suits against the government. One scholar, commenting on environmental and consumer statutes passed in the 1970s, notes that they included “elaborate hearing requirements and liberal citizen suit provisions designed to push laggard agencies into action.” Another scholar writes that “this alliance between the judiciary and the reform activists produced a unique phenomenon in the history of American reform—a litigation-oriented reform movement.”52 A conservative reaction was inevitable, but what form would it take? If legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon had her way, persons on the left and right would join hands in embracing a more civilized and less combative mode of discourse; theirs would be a language which contains the word “duty” as well as “right,” and which fosters accommodation and compromise. To her mind Roe v. Wade was just one of many instances in which rights talk had unnecessarily inflicted deep harm. “The judicially announced abortion right in 1973 brought to a virtual halt the process of legislative abortion reform that was already well on the way to producing in the United States, as it did all over Europe, compromise statutes.”53 Inspired by her Catholic faith, Glendon would rub the healing ointment of something resembling European Christian democracy on the wounded American body politic. Alas, America is not Europe, and rights talk in the United States refuses to take a holiday. By the time Glendon published her book (1991), liberal rights talk was already being answered by conservative rights talk, and the battle over abortion had become irrevocably defined as a contest between the rights of the pregnant woman and the rights of the fetus. Three years later (1994) conservative Republicans swept the elections and controlled both houses of Congress. When Newt Gingrich, their leader, took up the issue of handguns in To Renew America (1995), he argued that citizens must not be denied the means of exercising their right of rebelling against the government. Like John Locke’s or Andrew Jackson’s, the world of Gingrich and the congressional Republicans is one of individual rights, social contract (the “contract with America”), and the right to revolution.54 Rights talk begets not an alternative to itself but, rather, counter-rights talk; the excess of rights talk leads to greater excess, in an escalating cycle

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from which few persons escape. The much maligned thesis of Louis Hartz, that Americans think in terms of a narrow, one-dimensional liberalism, although misleading as an account of the past, may well be a fair assessment of the present. The final irony is that, for all the current interminable talk about rights, we have never believed in them so little. Ours is an age—in Hugh Heclo’s words—of “postmodern policymaking”55 in which each right and each right-sponsoring group goes its own way, with no overall vision to hold things together, and no philosophical foundation upon which to rest the rickety edifice of right piled upon right. A leading moral philosopher of our times has written that “there are no . . . rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.”56 A leading historian of political thought has begun his book with the reflection that, virtually without exception, “no major theorist in the Anglo-Saxon world for almost a century has based his work on the concept of a right.”57 The flavor of our times was effectively captured in the title of Thomas Haskell’s 1987 journal article, “The Curious Persistence of Rights Talk in the ‘Age of Interpretation.’”58 To the many American intellectuals under the spell of the radical historicism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, the theory of natural rights is hopelessly and embarrassingly outmoded. Those same intellectuals, typically, are strong supporters of the “rights revolution.” The less we believe in rights, the more adamantly we assert them. Even the sternest critic of rights talk cannot escape it. From the moment, for instance, that we enter into a discussion of gay rights, we find ourselves talking about what is “natural”; and if we wish to support homosexuals in their search for acceptance, we inevitably turn to the courts rather than to bible-quoting legislators. As in a bad marriage, we hate living with rights talk but cannot bear to live without it.

The General Will and Individual Rights “The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, in contrast to the Declaration of Independence, emphasized that individuals have duties as well as rights.”59 The foregoing words are Mary Ann Glendon’s but could just as easily be Tony Judt’s; yet the difference between the two authors could not be greater, since Glendon writes to praise the French, Judt to bury them. It is Judt’s contention that the French have never taken rights seriously: the shortcomings of French republicanism, in his view, are not a

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matter of failing to live up to principles but rather of the principles themselves, which are manifestly illiberal and hostile to the notion of unencumbered individual rights.60 While Glendon distances herself from liberalism and strives to contribute to the genre of “liberalism and its critics,” Judt writes as a liberal whose essays belong to the older genre of “liberalism and its enemies.” Tony Judt has fought the Cold War and continues to fight it after the tearing down of the Berlin wall. He has taken to task French intellectuals of the post-World War II era, all of whom, with the exceptions of Raymond Aron and Albert Camus, flocked to the Marxist banner and engaged in internal conflicts among Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, and Maoists rather than between liberals and conservatives. Had Judt stopped with denouncing the French Marxist intellectuals for their dismissal of rights as bourgeois nonsense, one could readily rally to his cause. Unfortunately, he does not stop there; he goes on to indict the republican tradition of France as a sinister force that should long ago have remade itself along more or less American lines. “Of all the enemies of liberalism and rights,” he contends, “it was the republicans who were to prove the most conclusive and deadly.”61 For him no commentary on the French republican tradition is complete without at least a passing ominous reference to Brecht or to Soviet ideology.62 In effect, Judt’s essays are a replay of such notorious Cold War tracts as J. L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1951), in which the French republicans were treated as direct forerunners of the Bolsheviks. Even as French-speaking Marxist intellectuals of the 1950s were taking great pride in turning Robespierre into Lenin, English-speaking antiMarxist intellectuals such as Talmon were making the same historical error but expressing their horror of Robespierre, the forerunner of Stalin.63 Although Judt’s arguments are more subtle than Talmon’s, in the end there is no difference of message. Heir to the sometimes frightened, sometimes aggressive, Cold Warriors of the 1950s,64 Judt also explicitly embraces the leading philosopher of that time, Isaiah Berlin, and in particular Berlin’s claim that the only real freedom is “negative freedom,” freedom from coercion as opposed to freedom understood as participation in civic life, or having one’s group recognized by society, or claiming social rights.65 Judt writes as if he did not know that for the last several decades American intellectuals have been taking to task Berlin’s sharp distinction between negative and positive freedom; he does

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not seem to realize how vigorously American liberals have rejected Berlin’s narrow definition of freedom, nor is he aware of the extent to which American “republicans”/communitarians have made careers out of rejecting Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Judt’s case against France rests heavily upon an examination of the declarations of rights issued in 1789, 1793, 1795, and 1848. With each succeeding declaration, he asserts, the French moved further away from natural rights; what remained in rights talk à la française was the concept of rights of the citizen rather than the rights of man. Rights against the community, rights against the state, natural rights were lost along the way. Or so he says, but the documents in question do not appear to verify his conclusions. By his account the Declaration of 1848 should be the most hostile to rights of his four declarations; but what do we make, then, of Article 3, which states that the French republic “recognizes rights and duties existing before and superior to positive laws”? What of the long and acrimonious debates preceding the adoption of the Declaration, during which references to natural rights sometimes unite the delegates of 1848 whereas those to social rights consistently divide them?66 Whenever the question of social rights arises, Judt puts himself in the awkward and clearly unintended position of sounding much like Thiers, that arch-defender of property who saw any concession to the notion of a “right to work” as an attack on civilization itself.67 A closer look at the documents of 1848 would reveal republicans adding social rights to, not substituting them for, the list of natural rights. At a very early date, the French went beyond Judt’s notion that natural rights are purely and simply a matter of placing limits on government. A nation with a vast frontier can refuse to relinquish its preference for minimal government and still attend to the needy simply by honoring natural rights to the ownership or use of land; or so thought Henry George, George Henry Evans, Thomas Skidmore, and Thomas Paine.68 Louis Blanc did not have land at his disposal and was thus forced to substitute an urban-centered “right to work” for the agrarian-minded American “right to the fruits of one’s labors.” There was no way Blanc’s scheme could be put into effect in the absence of an active state. Louis Blanc had no quarrel with rights, but he did contend that they were nothing unless a government made them meaningful. The Constitution of 1793, which was premised on the view that “government is instituted to guarantee to man the enjoyment of his natural and imprescrip-

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tible rights,” contains a noteworthy article that explicitly recognizes social rights.69 Moreover, as Marcel Gauchet has pointed out, “nearly half of the 1789 proposals . . . mentioned relief for the poor and considered guaranteed income to be among the community’s fundamental obligations to its members.”70 So it was not unreasonable for Blanc to maintain that his “social republic,” with its human rights secured by governmental intervention, had always resided in embryo within the French republican tradition. Among the multiple and conflicting republican traditions, Blanc’s was a legitimate contender. No doubt the remarkable differences between the histories of France and the United States account for much of the difficulty American scholars encounter when studying their “sister republic.” Not until Eugene Debs did so in the twentieth century, had an American called for a “social republic,” the regime Blanc aspired to well before the mid-point of the nineteenth; and one can well imagine Blanc’s perplexity were he to learn that the “right to work” in America meant the efforts of Senators Taft and Goldwater to destroy the power of labor unions. Moreover, as early as Jefferson’s period but especially with the coming of the Jacksonians, American natural rights republicanism tied itself to a populist laissez-faire71 ideology that lives on to the present day. In dramatic contrast stands France, the country in which laissez-faire has been, except for economists, virtually no one’s darling. However marked the Third Republic might be by a “non-interventionist” mode of authority,72 the regime repudiated laissez-faire with a vengeance. Social republicanism has been divisive but persistent in France, whereas in America it has not existed. Only with great difficulty can Americans come to understand the French republican tradition. Making matters worse, American (and English) scholars continue to encounter the leading philosopher of the French republican tradition, Jean Jacques Rousseau, through the prism of Cold War ideology—the books written by liberals denouncing Rousseau as a totalitarian. If the French republican tradition is to be appreciated in the Anglophone world, Rousseau must be rehabilitated, his affinities with the Lockeans of the early American republic noted, and his good reasons for sometimes diverging from the likes of Tom Paine brought to light. Rousseau’s point of view is in complete sympathy with natural rights, but he understood, as the American Founders did not, how questionable are all beliefs labeled “self-evident truths.” On the face of it, Paine, Jefferson, and other Americans might have

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found much to their liking in Rousseau’s writings, had they bothered to peruse his pages.73 The overlap is undeniable: contempt for the government and constitution of England; belief in popular sovereignty, the social contract, and a pact of association but not of submission74; insistence that past generations cannot bind the living; the conviction that in the beginning all humans were equal; rejection of original sin—these are just some of the vital matters on which Rousseau’s views coincide with Paine’s and Jefferson’s.75 Great as the similarities are, it is the differences between Rousseau and the Americans which indicate why French and American republicans were bound to go their separate ways. For both Paine and Jefferson, but not for Rousseau, the natural goodness of humankind is just below the surface, waiting to break out at a moment’s notice. Very revealing in this regard is Jefferson’s rapid transition during his years in Paris from despair over the future of the French people to eschatological hope. On August 13, 1786, he wrote: “If all the sovereigns of Europe were to set themselves to work to emancipate the minds of their subjects . . . , and that as zealously as they now endeavor the contrary, a thousand years would not place them on that high ground on which our common people are now setting out.” A mere three years later he dramatically reversed himself: “the [French] nation has made a total resumption of rights . . . The National Assembly have now as clean a canvas to work on as we had in America. . . . I will agree to be stoned as a prophet if all does not end well in this country. Here is but the first chapter of the history of European liberty.”76 Would that it were true, might well be Rousseau’s response. Unfortunately, human nature as it originally was is lost and gone forever, so if we scratch away the surface of present-day society, what we discover is not nature but a previous society. No one remembers what humans were like before the invention of time and language, and everyone decides what should be according to what is; thus natural rights theorists such as Grotius and Pufendorf justify political absolutism and slavery simply because they exist. Only in part does Locke break decisively from previous theorists of natural rights. The freedom he espouses is deeply compromised by his views on property, Rousseau argued, which allow inequality to reassert itself under the protective cover of so-called natural right. Even Tom Paine presumably would not escape Rousseau’s wrath: the functional interdependence and laissez-faire that Paine championed77 are, in Rousseau’s estima-

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tion, less the fulfillment of natural freedom than the depressing social reality of dependence and inequality.78 Sadly, our progressively degraded humanity cannot be saved unless we are forced to be free, which requires that the signing of a proper social contract be supplemented by an education in freedom, which in French experience turns out to mean (the Third Republic) a transformation of “peasants into Frenchmen.” Far more thoroughly than Paine or Jefferson, Rousseau faced up to the implications of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Whereas they wrote as if human nature were eternally given and readily accessible to anyone who wants to know it, Rousseau drew from Locke’s environmental and developmental psychology the conclusion that human nature is exceptionally difficult to unearth because many ages ago it ceased to be whatever it once was. To every fixed principle offered by a philosopher of his day Rousseau applied Locke’s critique of innate ideas, and asked Locke’s question, “How, when, and by what experiences did this supposedly innate idea enter the human mind?” By the same logic he would doubtless be obliged to dismiss Jefferson’s “moral sense” and “self-evident truths” as dogmatism pure and simple. For Rousseau, knowledge of human nature and natural right is what we seek, but how can we have it if “the human soul, altered in the bosom of society by a thousand continually renewed causes, . . . has changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable?”79 Denied the assistance of nature, Rousseau had to rebuild the theory of rights from top to bottom, inside and out. Freedom was his starting point, the freedom that we cannot deny even in the absence of proof, the freedom that—no matter what Grotius says—is inalienable, because “to renounce one’s freedom is to renounce one’s status as a man.”80 Next, Rousseau set out to establish the “principles of political right” agreed upon by free actors seeking to maintain their freedom. Political right is not the same as natural right, but it is the functional equivalent thereof.81 Once we sign the social contract, our rights are safeguarded not by nature but by the general will, which daily renews our commitment to the rights of each and all. This general will, if it is to be something more than a well-meaning abstraction, must be that of a political community rather than Diderot’s will of all humanity.82 Rousseau and the republicans do not turn away from the “rights of man” to the “rights of the citizen,” as Judt suggests. Rather, they realize, much as Diderot himself eventually would, that human rights amount to nothing if denied political embodiment.83 Contrary to Judt, Rousseau’s general will does not signify the demise of individual rights, nor is it the opposite of calculations of individual self-in-

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terest. What Rousseau seeks is a world in which every person has rights, but no person can use his rights against another in a high-sounding but destructive battle of wills. Adding together one rights-bearing person after another, in the manner of Locke, never yields the political culture necessary to sustain rights. Far better is the general will, under the provisions of which each individual has rights because all have them in common. “Why,” asks Rousseau, “do all constantly want the happiness of each, if not because there is no one who does not apply this word each to himself? . . . Which proves that the equality of right, and the concept of justice it produces, are derived from each man’s preference for himself.”84 Through a kind of procedural republicanism, Rousseau hoped citizens would arrive at the general will while agreeing to disagree on some matters. Otto Gierke offered an able summary of Rousseau’s political calculus: “the will of all is the sum of individual wills, including all their actual variations from one another, while the general will is to be found by adding the concordant motives of individual wills, and excluding their dissonances.”85 Although James Madison showed little familiarity with the Social Contract, his words in the Federalist sound remarkably like Rousseau’s: “among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which [America] embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good.”86 When Rousseau denies a natural right to property, he does so to save our rights. Seventy years before Skidmore, Rousseau rejected Locke’s claim that the first generation can legitimately dispossess those persons whose only fault is to be born at a later date. “In vain,” writes Rousseau, “the rich might say, I earned this field with my labor . . . They might be answered . . . Do you not know that a multitude of your brethren die or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you needed express and unanimous consent of the human race to appropriate to yourself anything from common subsistence that exceeded your own?”87 For the sake of the individual, Rousseau takes the position that “the right of each private individual to his own resources is always subordinate to the community’s right to all.” The community, in turn, must control the inequality of distribution such that “no citizen shall be so opulent that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained to sell himself.”88 Once again, we are face to face with the social republic, and at an exceptionally early date. In America and throughout the English-speaking world, a standard argument against Rousseau is that his concept of the “general will” sacrifices the individual to the collectivity. Within the narrow confines of Cold War

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liberal philosophy, which sees the individual and the collectivity as opposites, Rousseau is bound to be the enemy. But if we set aside liberal preconceptions and return to Rousseau’s texts, he sounds rather different. “Is the safety of a citizen any less the common cause than that of the whole State?”, he asks. No doubt we admire the citizen who willingly risks his life for his country; under no circumstances, however, may the government sacrifice an innocent man for the safety of the multitude. “Rather than that one ought to perish for all, all have engaged their goods and their lives for the defense of each one among them.”89 Only a tyrant, Rousseau adds, could think otherwise. Through no fault of his own, Rousseau has been forced to carry the rotting carcass of Robespierre across two centuries of modern history. It is therefore well to remember that De Seze, one of Louis XVI’s lawyers, could think of no better defense of his client, on trial for his life, than to point out that to act against one person is to violate Rousseau’s explicit insistence that “the general will cannot, as a general will, pronounce upon either a man or an act.”90 At the very beginning of the revolution Sieyès tried to set the tone by insisting that the National Assembly “is not set up to regulate the private affairs of individual citizens. It only regards these in the mass and from the point of view of the common interest.”91 Rights talk is integral to the French republican tradition92 but translates poorly into American English. For most of their history Americans have asserted rights against the political community, whereas in France the political community has been charged with the task of providing the common agreement without which rights are meaningless. Of equal importance, from the beginning republican France has held out the promise of modern social rights, whereas FDR was forced to smuggle them into America under cover of old-fashioned natural rights. It has always been easier for Americans to understand their monarchical mother England than their republican sister France.

Rights in France: Liberals versus Republicans Is it possible that in French history the republicans have been stronger advocates of rights than the liberals? Is it thinkable that the best hope for the triumph of liberal values in France has been the very republicans whom we have been trained to dismiss out of hand as Jacobins? Let us set aside for a moment the Cold War rhetoric on which Americans have been reared, and the unthinkable becomes a possibility worth

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considering. Who, after all, if not the French liberals, Tocqueville and Taine most famously, filled our heads with the one-dimensional, stereotypical image of French republicans that has ever been uncritically embraced in the United States? When Americans adopted Tocqueville93 and Taine, they did not realize that they were taking sides in the long French battle between liberals and republicans. Nor did they understand that they were damning the republicans without a hearing. Just as the significance of the Declaration of Independence did not end in 1776, so did the Declaration of the Rights of Man live on after 1789. Even the briefest sketch of the history of the French declaration is enough to prove that it was the republicans, not the liberals, who time and again availed themselves of “rights talk.” When republicans challenged the liberals of the July Monarchy, they did so by gathering together under the banner of the Société des Droits de l’Homme. Shut down in 1834–35 by repressive legislation, the Society officially re-emerged with the advent of the Second Republic. Later, during the Second Empire, it was the republican Eugène Pelletan who published a book entitled Droits de l’homme.94 Again, at the time of the Dreyfus case, when the fate of the Third Republic hung in the balance, republicans rallied to form the Ligue pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme. After hesitating initially, Jean Jaurès decided that socialism is nothing if it is not republican, and the republic is nothing without the (heretofore “bourgeois”) Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.95 Note, too, that when in 1989 public protests forced the government to back away from bills restricting the entry and residence of foreigners, one of the groups that successfully applied pressure was the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, which saw itself as the good conscience of the republican tradition. Detractors of the republican tradition like to point out that the Third Republic did not honor the Declaration of Rights in its constitutional provisions. A less jaundiced observer would presumably conclude that if the Declaration played no official role, that was because the Third Republic did not have a constitution. An accidental republic, more backed into than directly chosen, its Orleanist and republican legislators passed a series of constitutional laws, notably in 1875, rather than risk a constitutional convention. Surely it is significant that even those legal theorists of the Third Republic who were most skeptical about the validity of the philosophy of natural rights eventually came to insist that the constitutional laws of 1875 implicitly sanctioned the Declaration of Rights.96 Inquiring as to the fate of the Declaration under the Fourth and Fifth

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Republics, where republicans had a freer hand than under the Third, is a fair-minded test of republican mettle. Judged by this standard, the republican tradition fares rather well. By consent of both the left and the right, the Constitution of 1946 took the Declaration for its preamble. One problem remained, the question whether the preamble was simply a general statement of intent or an integral feature of the constitution. Given the abhorrence of the right wing for the social provisions of the Declaration, the constitutional status of the Declaration remained a question without an answer. At the outset of the Fifth Republic the valeur constitutionnel of the Declaration still remained in doubt; but in 1971 the Constitutional Council incorporated the Declaration into the constitution. Everywhere one looks across the republican landscape of French history, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen is in plain sight.97 If the rights talk of French republicans somehow never gets a hearing on the American side of the Atlantic, one reason is that Tocqueville’s writings gratify our liberal prejudices. “The democratic character of our Revolution,” he told his countrymen, led to “a distrust of individual rights.”98 His larger claim, repeatedly stated, was that whereas the Americans chose freedom, the French demanded equality at any price. Possibly he has a point, insofar as the French have suffered through the imposition of one political regime after another, some decidedly unfriendly to individual freedom, but all abiding by the antifeudal Napoleonic Code. Be that as it may, Tocqueville’s formulation is unfair when applied to the French republican tradition, which always held that both freedom and equality should be the objects of legislation, “equality [in Rousseau’s words] because freedom cannot last without it.”99 From the standpoint of a good French republican, the American willingness to place freedom above equality is certain to undermine freedom. Outside the general will, the freedom of some is inevitably at the expense of the unfreedom of others.100 Not the French republicans but the liberals were the ones who frequently shied away from singing the praises of the Declaration of Rights. “In the nation-wide debacle of freedom,” Tocqueville bitterly complained in The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856), “we could indulge, almost without restriction, in learned discussions on the origins of society, the nature of government, and the essential rights of man.”101 Tocqueville despised the eighteenth-century philosophes, regarded their thought as hopelessly abstract, and painted himself into the corner of being a liberal who had no respect for the Declaration of Rights. No doubt Mme de Staël thought it impolitic to express disdain for the Declaration of Rights, so she

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simply ignored it in her Considérations sur la Révolution française (1818), the book which became a model for nineteenth-century French liberals. The reason the liberals kept a safe distance from the Declaration is not difficult to unearth. Which Declaration, they might have asked. That of 1789 might be permitted but surely not that of 1793, a document they associated with the Terror. Much of the opposition to a Declaration of Rights in 1848 came from frightened liberals, out to avoid another revolutionary outbreak and well aware that republicans favored the declaration of 1793, which enshrined a right to revolution. The nightmare of the First Republic weighed so heavily on the liberals of 1848 that they remained unimpressed when the republicans, in their eagerness to issue reassurances, constitutionally outlawed capital punishment for political offenses. Alas, nothing could calm the fears of the mid-century liberals, who were in truth as disturbed by the revival and extension of the social rights of 1793 as by memories of the Terror.102 About the only liberals in French history who showed some sympathy for declarations of rights were, tellingly, the liberal republicans of the era of the Directory, the thinkers Napoleon maliciously labeled the Idéologues. Destutt de Tracy was of their number, and although he and his fellows chaffed at the loose and potentially inflammatory language of natural rights,103 de Tracy did not doubt that “laws of nature exist anterior and superior to human laws” or that “justice and injustice had an existence before any positive law.”104 With such a man, a liberal and a republican, Thomas Jefferson could be and was a close friend. De Tracy wrote a hostile commentary on Montesquieu that was really an excuse to repudiate the English model of government, which had frequently received the ardent endorsement of men of letters in France. The generations of French liberals after de Tracy returned to Montesquieu’s style of political thinking: comparative and historical, morally committed to condemn slavery, to foster penal reform, and to uphold all the causes of the Enlightenment, but devoid of notions of a state of nature or a social contract. Epistemological skepticism and what a later age would call a sociological mode of reasoning led Montesquieu away from discussions of the groundwork of natural rights.105 Fear of popular sovereignty and natural rights led nineteenth-century liberals back to Montesquieu’s reasoning. “Right” is the word Mme de Staël can imply but rarely utter, and what is true of her is even more true of Guizot and other liberals of the Restoration, the July Monarchy, and beyond. More and more the liberals turned to historical research and away from

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potentially explosive treatises on the social contract, political obligation, and the right to revolt. Perhaps the absence of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in the constitutional laws of the Third Republic is not simply a matter of the political uncertainty of the early years of that regime. The powerful influence during the early 1870s of left-over Orleanist liberals such as Thiers—fiercely dedicated to the proposition that the Third would be a “conservative republic”—may offer a second explanation. Many Orleanist liberals turned away from the Declaration during the debates of 1848, and few dared return to it in 1875. Questions of political obligation are best left unasked, thought these conservative liberals, and the social republic had best stay buried with the Communards in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. Perhaps there was a moment when the Third Republic was guilty of promoting an ideology which undermined rights. If so, the irony is that the moment in question came when the republicans were struggling most mightily to free themselves of the charge of Jacobinism—when, in their eagerness to be done with revolution and terror, they espoused a doctrine of Solidarity that sounded much like the rhetoric preached by the Orleanist liberals of the unmourned July Monarchy. Probably the republican “sons” of the Third Republic rarely admitted to themselves how closely their intellectual strategies paralleled those of the Orleanist liberals, against whom their republican “fathers” had struggled throughout the nineteenth century. Not least of the unacknowledged repetitions of moves came when the Solidarists, exactly like the old Orleanist thinkers, found a way to display the word “rights” and then to deny any meaningful and dangerous content to it. The juste milieu of François Guizot and the eclectic philosophy of Victor Cousin were treated to something like a second life in the writings of Léon Bourgeois, Emile Durkheim, Alfred Fouillée, and many other Solidarists of the Third Republic. “Neither revolution nor counter-revolution” was the motto of the liberals of 1830–1848; neither republican radicalism nor a return to the Old Regime.106 The Solidarists of the Third Republic voiced the same words, neither left nor right, with the difference that the left had become syndicalists and the right nationalists of the stripe of Barrès. For all practical purposes one might regard Solidarism as the more or less official philosophy of the Third Republic during the two decades preceding World War I, or, at the very least, as the philosophy of the highly influential Radical and Radical-Socialist party, glued together in 1901. Léon Bourgeois was author of Solidarité (1896) and Prime Minister from No-

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vember 1, 1895, to April 21, 1896; Fouillée was one of the most noteworthy philosophers of his day; Durkheim a leading educator and the foremost proponent of Solidarist sociology. Their program, in its inclusion of social legislation and qualified acceptance of universal manhood suffrage,107 differs from that of the Orleanist liberals, but their constant efforts to find a middle way in all matters political and philosophical bring to mind Cousin’s eclecticism and Guizot’s juste milieu.108 For present purposes, it is the prowess of the Solidarists in simultaneously endorsing and enervating the doctrine of rights that calls for discussion. Much like the July Monarchists, the Solidarists dared not reject outright the Declaration of Rights; yet as Radicals in name only, they worried about its radical potential. Substituting duties for rights, as the Catholic and reactionary right wing suggested, was unacceptable because that amounted to rejecting the Republic itself. Léon Bourgeois suggested they do the next best thing: “The Revolution made the Declaration of Rights. We must add to it the Declaration of Duties.” Bourgeois also recommended that the French reverse the order of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” such that liberty henceforth would be rank-ordered last on the list.109 Durkheim’s discussion of the Declaration of Rights is a marvel of now you see it, now you don’t. He begins by agreeing with Taine, one of the most conservative of liberals, that the French suffer from a “Cartesian intellect,” a penchant for thinking in universal and timeless categories. “Hence the Declaration of Rights, valid for all humanity, for which we have been upbraided in the name of the so-called historical method.”110 Along with his fellow Solidarists, Durkheim wants nothing to do with ideas of individuals in a state of nature or individuals signing a social contract. On a more positive note Durkheim suggests that teachers emphasize “how each generation depends upon the previous generations.” In a restatement of Burke, he hails the “marvelous continuity” of history; but unlike Burke, he wants to “secure loyalty to the ideas that found their expression at the end of the last century.” “Are they not clothed with more authority if we show that they were actually the natural product of everything that went before? . . . It is all of society, going back to its most remote reaches, that prepared this emancipation.”111 In common with other Solidarists, Durkheim absorbs the Declaration into an all-embracing organic and historical unity that enabled the Radicals to paper over the deep divisions of France. The individual disappears into the group, rights disappear into duties—and the Radical party can ally, as circumstances dictate, with either the left or the right.

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Several times the ghosts of July Monarchy liberals came back to haunt the Third Republic, and each time one consequence was the demotion of the Declaration of Rights. In the early 1870s, when the Orleanist figures of old, Adolphe Thiers and Duc Albert de Broglie, were given the chance to lead, all their attention was on finding ways to stabilize the new regime: partly by neglect but also by design, these liberals kept the Declaration out of sight and out of mind. The second coming of Orleanist-style liberalism during the Third Republic took place, as we have just seen, with the advent of the turn-of-the-century Solidarist movement, most of whose protagonists deemed it impolitic to admit the inner affinity of their mediating doctrine—against revolution but for the Revolution—with the Orleanist outlook. The third revanche of Orleanism came with the next generation of Solidarists, and in particular with the greatest French legal theorist of the early twentieth century, Léon Duguit.112 In contrast to Bourgeois and Durkheim, Duguit openly embraced Orleanist thought. He expressed the greatest admiration for the writings of Guizot, and hailed Royer-Collard as “the politician, publicist, and philosopher who in the first half of the nineteenth century formulated a realistic doctrine of the State with the most éclat.”113 To the limited extent that Americans know his work, Duguit has been warmly received as a man who could be one of our own. With boldness and skill he cut the state down to size, denying it legal personality, demystifying it by interpreting its function as that of providing such public services as post offices, electrical plants, telephones, telegraphs, rail services, and welfare to the poor. Equally gratifying to Americans, he found in the “objective” fact and norm of social solidarity the basis for something rather like the concept of judicial review.114 All the same, a better informed American audience would surely join many of the French in turning a cold shoulder to Duguit, the foe of natural rights and popular sovereignty. The point of his legal philosophy was to banish the idea of sovereignty, which “has always been, both in theory and practice, an absolutist conception.”115 Monarchical sovereignty was bad enough, but the popular sovereignty of the Convention was worse. To rid legal thought of the idea of popular sovereignty, Duguit threw out the entire theory of the social contract, natural rights included. One could have both popular sovereignty and individual rights or neither, he explained; and then chose the latter option.116 Having fearlessly followed logic where it led him, he was lucky ever to get a hearing on either side of the Atlantic, let alone both.

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How could Duguit eliminate popular sovereignty and natural rights and still repudiate the arch-reactionary forces seeking to undermine the Third Republic? His strategy was to resuscitate Royer-Collard and Guizot, the thinkers of the Restoration and the July Monarchy who had excoriated popular sovereignty and avoided talk of natural rights but remained liberals tried and true.117 The great value of Royer-Collard and Guizot, to Duguit’s mind, was that they were enlightened thinkers who had rendered the idea of sovereignty meaningless through using expressions such as “the sovereignty of reason” or of “justice.”118 What a strange spectacle it was when Duguit, a progressive thinker, sided with the July Monarchy, that notoriously antidemocratic government, the most maligned regime of the nineteenth century. Good legal thinker that he was, Duguit searched for intellectual ancestors and found them in the liberals of the July Monarchy. Good republican though he also was, he inadvertently made his thought incompatible with the political culture he sought to reform. Condemned by his own choices to remain an outsider, Duguit could be the critic of the legal conceptions of the Third Republic, but his failure as a politician was a foregone conclusion. In his hostility to Rousseau, popular sovereignty, and individual rights, Duguit refused to do justice to Benjamin Constant, a great liberal of the early nineteenth century who had learned to tone down his criticisms of the Social Contract. Constant’s astute strategy, rejected by Duguit, was to admit the principle of popular sovereignty and then offset it by institutional mechanisms and notions of rights. Instead of following Constant, Duguit embraced Royer-Collard, thus making himself irrelevant to the Third Republic.119 Those American scholars who blame French republicans for silences in the conversations of rights have their story exactly wrong. It is the republicans, not the liberals, who have sustained the discourse of rights. It is the liberals who have compromised liberalism.

Atlantic Crossings America and France have gone their separate ways in the matter of rights, and yet there is a tale to relate about “rights talk” traveling back and forth across the Atlantic. Some transatlantic voyages succeeded; others were cancelled; and several visits are planned for the future. Mary Ann Glendon has proposed that American legal scholars learn to

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imitate their European counterparts who insist upon studying law in comparative perspective.120 One possible benefit, she believes, is that professors of law in the United States may come to appreciate the French habit of speaking not only of rights but of duties. Given the provincial and excessive nature of rights talk in America, her suggestion merits serious consideration. If Glendon would import a few strands of French legal thinking, Tony Judt would export American political philosophy to France. Marxist thought so completely drove liberal thinking about rights out of France during the decades following World War II, argues Judt, that the French need to look to America for liberal sustenance.121 Perhaps so, but to date French liberals have hurt themselves by turning time and again to Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History (1953), a polemical work which actually condemns modern philosophies of rights and threatens, once more, to align French liberals with the antidemocratic mentality that has cursed liberalism ever since the days of Guizot and the July Monarchy. Strauss’s defense of “natural right” is in reality a call for a return to the premodern natural law of Aristotle and Aquinas, coupled with a resounding rejection of modernity, including all philosophies of individual natural rights. Quite accurately, Strauss pointed out that the conception he admires of a law of nature hinges on a “teleological view of the universe . . . [that] would seem to have been destroyed by modern natural science.”122 Unable to save traditional natural law philosophy, he resorts to accusing its nay-sayers of nihilism.123 The many French thinkers who in recent times have cited Strauss with approval124 do little to advance the cause of rights. Even worse, they are flirting with a thinker who wanted to make liberalism safe from democracy. In Strauss’s view the wise man stands above the masses and hides his message in an esoteric code from all but a select few.125 Not even Guizot was so distrustful of the many. Unless they can do better than Strauss, the French might be well advised to stay at home and revisit the philosophers of their republican tradition, Charles Renouvier for one, who offered nineteenth-century France a philosophy roughly equivalent to T. H. Green’s in England and, later, John Dewey’s in America. Old-fashioned American rights talk crossed the Atlantic with Henry George in the 1880s and met with a mixed reception when he visited England. On the one hand, his London hosts accepted him with open arms because this was the era of Gladstone’s proposals for land reform in Ireland.

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On the other hand, George Bernard Shaw noted how peculiarly out-ofdate was George’s language, filled with pious references to “Liberty, Justice, Truth, Natural Law, and other strange eighteenth-century superstitions.”126 Under the influence of Henry George, Shaw’s politics underwent a transformation—but to new-fangled socialism, not to the natural rights radicalism of days barely remembered. The example of Henry George’s visit to England illustrates how mistaken Tony Judt is to portray the French as peculiar and perverse in their insistence that the rights of the individual must be secured through rather than against the community. In reality it is the American retention of natural rights philosophy that is strange, amounting to a “cultural lag” that could be sustained only so long as the frontier remained open and European philosophies of the social self remained foreign. Presumably Henry George could have brought the thought of T. H. Green and the new liberals of England back to America on his return trip. He did not. Presumably George could have encountered devastating critiques of the “state of nature” and the “social contract” long before traveling to England, in the pages of David Hume and Adam Ferguson.127 Instead, he chose to close his eyes to the Scottish Enlightenment. At the same time that Henry George was visiting England, a great many young Americans were attending German universities. Upon their return to the United States, they brought to higher education and the pulpit the historicist philosophies of the German idealists, according to which the philosophy of natural rights was appropriate for its time but needed to be replaced in a highly industrialized age by a more progressive account of the human self and human rights.128 The Social Gospel movement of Walter Rauschenbusch marks one phase of the new reform movements inspired by European thought. The New Nationalist thought of Croly marks another. In The Promise of American Life (1909) Croly called for reform not as Jacksonian “restoration” but as innovative “reconstruction” requiring an importation of European thought, because “American intelligence has still to issue its Declaration of Independence” from the outworn doctrines of the late eighteenth century.129 What Croly began was completed by Dewey, who reached a considerable audience and influenced many New Dealers with his philosophy, which is an American version of the new liberalism of Green and Hobhouse. Much like Green, Dewey called for state intervention in economic life in order to make the development of free personality a possibility. Philosopher Horace

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Kallen appreciated Dewey’s writings and sought to Americanize them by writing in 1935 that Dewey “restates in the language and under the condition of his times what Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence affirmed in the language and under the conditions of his.”130 Dewey was confident, even over-confident, that history was on his side. As the “pioneer individualism” of natural rights became more irrelevant, its slogans would in the short term be shouted all the more loudly, Dewey predicted, but in the long term the “new individualism” of the social individual would win.131 He was correct on the first count: Herbert Hoover and the Republican party did reassert the old individualism with a vengeance after the New Deal steered America onto a new path. But he was wrong on the second count: wrong to think that the new philosophy would eventually win a decisive battle over the old. Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich prove that in America the old individualism never dies. FDR’s speeches attest to his fear that the innovations he sponsored could not succeed if New Dealers abandoned the old, familiar language of rights. Nearly every theme of FDR’s Commonwealth Club address had been sounded by Teddy Roosevelt during his Bull Moose candidacy and later in his Autobiography: the closing of the frontier, the end of westward movement as a solution to the problems of wage-earners, the need for “human rights” to override property rights.132 One might almost think of FDR as editing and reissuing TR’s speeches and writings. The one change is that Franklin interpolates the name of Jefferson into Teddy’s text, by which means FDR could claim the heritage of natural rights that TR, following Croly’s lead, was willing to forgo. Theodore Roosevelt may well have had the more sound intellectual position, but it was Franklin Roosevelt who dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in 1943 and had the better understanding of American politics. Nothing ever dies in the history of American rights talk. New conceptions do not drive out the old.133 Instead, one type of rights theory from a new historical era is deposited beside another from a previous age; foreign imports are blended with domestic theories of rights until the product is bland enough for all tastes. The more things change, the more rights talk threatens to monopolize political speech in America. In their accounts of the sister republics, Anglophone scholars have twice misled us. Addressing American experience, they have looked for a republican tradition to praise at the expense of the liberal, and not finding it,

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they have written bad history; the communitarians, in particular, have been guilty of inventing the republican roots they wish to nourish.134 Apparently the last thing they want to know is that in America, as Hartz would say, an honest search for one’s roots inevitably leads to self-recognition in the mirror of the liberal tradition. Any critique of liberalism must begin by taking it seriously and acknowledging its longevity and pervasiveness. In the case of the French republic, American scholars of a liberal orientation have invited us to condemn the republican tradition that has in truth been the best hope for a liberal France. Our attention would be much better directed to finding ways to help the republic “one and indivisible” deal with the new problems presented by multiculturalism and the civic status of Muslims. In France as in America the most pressing contemporary problem of rights and citizenship continues to be what it so frequently was in the past: the issue of inclusion.135 The greatest glories of rights talk have always been in opening the doors shut to one or another group— blacks, women, laborers, immigrants.

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Nearly all discussions of liberalism and republicanism in America or in France begin with a warning that contemporary democracies are undergoing a “crisis of citizenship.” A sign of our times is the remarkable stir Robert Putnam has caused with “Bowling Alone,” the 1995 essay in which he sounded the alarm that civic involvement has declined precipitously in present-day democracies.1 The point of the liberalism/republicanism debate is to discover the historical cause of this contemporary malady, so that a suitable remedy may be found. In their quest for insight and inspiration, the champions of American civic life inevitably turn, as does Putnam, to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. When France is the focus of similar investigations, scholars just as instinctively leaf through the pages of Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution. For the last several decades Stanley Hoffmann has diagnosed the ills of France by updating Tocqueville, and has carried his findings across the Atlantic to France. In France Michel Crozier has likewise embraced Tocqueville, and has gained access to an American audience both through translations of his writings and personal visits.2 Indebtedness to Tocqueville is, then, what American investigators of liberalism and republicanism share: whether writing about the United States or its sister republic, American scholars are as concerned in our day as was Tocqueville in his with the regeneration of civil (or is it civic?) society. The situation to be avoided—the pitfall which threatens us—is the demise of secondary groups, the isolation of individuals, and the rise of an overmighty state. Only the revival of associational life in America, and the rise in France of the voluntary associations that Tocqueville found lacking in his nation, can resolve the crisis of citizenship. So say all the contemporary progeny of Alexis de Tocqueville. 56

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On closer inspection, however, significant differences appear within the ranks of the Tocquevillians of our times. Although all such scholars write about the need to nurture a civic ethos in modern democracies, the intellectuals concerned with America have a habit of paying little or no attention to political institutions, whereas those whose subject matter is France scrupulously divide their time between studies of the institutions and the ethos of freedom. Hoffmann, for instance, has published an essay offering an astute analysis of the institutions of the Fifth Republic,3 and Crozier made his reputation by writing a book that diagnoses the trials and tribulations of bureaucratic politics in France. Why the difference? One reason, no doubt, is that students of France are faced with a history containing at least thirteen and plausibly as many as fifteen constitutions since the Revolution; and then there are the five republics, the two empires, the Bourbon and Orleanist monarchies, and the Vichy regime. For students of France, moreover, the founding of the current Republic is a recent memory and is still an ongoing project. Instead of such relatively distant founding dates as 1776 or 1787, scholars studying the Fifth Republic have 1958 as the founding moment, 1965 as the first direct election of the President, 1971 as the beginning of something like judicial review, and the Socialist accession to the Presidency in 1981 as the equivalent of 1800 in America: would the Gaullists step down after losing to Mitterrand, commentators asked, as the Federalists reluctantly had when Jefferson won?4 Historians of America can be lulled into taking their country’s institutions for granted; historians of France have no such luxury. The ideological predisposition of the investigators provides a second explanation for how much attention they pay to institutions. Hoffmann and Crozier write as liberals seeking liberal correctives to the chronic ailments of the French political tradition. As good liberals, they recognize the important role political institutions play as mediators of conflict and providers of the framework that makes civic life possible. Again, as good liberals, they looked for a concrete example to draw upon and found it in the imperfect but acceptable American polity. When they first set forth their findings in the early 1960s, some fifteen years before the French were willing to accept François Furet’s Tocqueville-inspired writings, Hoffmann and Crozier were applauded by the Americans and hissed or ignored by the French. Tocquevillians who write about the United States rather than France come to their intellectual explorations bearing an entirely different set of predispositions. These American scholars are critics of liberalism and ad-

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vance their cause by stressing the ethos and neglecting the institutions of freedom. Heirs of the late 1960s, some New Left in outlook, others neoconservative, they do their best to divert us from studies of institutions to investigations of participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, and the like. All the chapters of Democracy in America dealing with institutions have been expurgated from their editions of Tocqueville’s classic. For instance, we are repeatedly asked to devote our attention to James Madison’s speech of June 20, 1788, the one in which he states that not even the most ingenious scheme of checks and balances will suffice in the absence of an enlightened citizenry.5 By the time our seekers for a civic ethos have finished making their case, no one readily recalls that Madison wrote Federalist 10 and 51, or that his calling card was virtuosity in constructing political institutions. Vanished into thin air is Madison the disciple of Harrington and Hume, both of whom counted on institutionalized self-interest to sustain constitutional order. Gone, too, is the Madison who presumably would agree with John Adams’s statement that “the virtues have been the effect of the well ordered constitution rather than the cause.”6 An occasional comment by Madison means everything to researchers who are out to banish institutions from the center to the margins of discussion.7 Nowhere, perhaps, is the gap between Americans of bygone times and the present-day scholars who study them more noticeable than when the topic of discussion is political institutions. On the one side are the many publicists of previous eras who cannot say too much about institutions; on the other the professors of today who prefer to speak about political culture, civil society, deliberative democracy, and the like. In this chapter one of our objectives will be to discern why the social scientists involved in the liberalism/republicanism debate ignore a matter that was of vital concern to the persons who are the subject of their research. Our other objective will be to take the actors of the past on their own terms—terms specifying that the ethos cannot be understood apart from the institutions of freedom, nor the institutions apart from the ethos.

Political Institutions, Liberal and Republican Although our primary emphasis is on America, the best place to begin our discussion of institutions is France. American scholars have often overlooked historical debates about institutions (except for the unavoidable Federalist/Antifederalist episode), but their French counterparts have felt

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obliged to pay attention to their nation’s intense and prolonged discussions of alternative institutional arrangements. More important, the division of nineteenth-century France into warring ideological camps enables us to see in retrospect a very clear difference between liberal and republican visions of proper institutional arrangements. We shall therefore begin with France and then return to America. Institutions meant everything to French liberals, the name of the regime nothing.8 Mme de Staël and Benjamin Constant are willing to accept almost any regime—monarchy, republic, or empire—so long as it is accompanied by institutions safeguarding what Adolphe Thiers would later call “the necessary liberties”: a free press, free elections, freedom from arbitrary arrest, protection of property.9 “In the matter of government,” wrote Constant, “it is necessary to start from where we are. Liberty is possible under all forms: it is the end, and the forms of government are the means. There are individual rights, sacred rights, indispensable guarantees that one must have under either a republic or a monarchy: without these, monarchy and republic are equally intolerable, but with them each is good. Thus, it is never the form that I dispute; there is none that I proscribe, none that I exclusively demand. That which exists has the advantage of existing.”10 To the French liberals one measure of the unfitness of republicans for roles of leadership in public life was the unwillingness of Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, and their kind to be agnostic about regimes.11 Caring too much about names, foolishly convinced that the republic-to-be was the telos of modern history and the repository of the hopes of humanity, republicans were bound to be bitterly disillusioned within a few years of grasping power. Under the Third Republic they would soon be heard sighing, “Que la République était belle sous l’Empire!” Never would Charles Péguy and his circle be at home in a republic whose inspiring mystique had degenerated so quickly into an ordinary politique. Unlike the republicans, the French liberals deliberately diverted the attention of the public away from polarizing rhetoric about political regimes to less emotional discussions of institutions. By design, liberals substituted means for ends, the better to serve the end of securing political stability. Caught up in negotiations concerning institutional arrangements, preoccupied with processes and procedures, obliged to politick within a set of rules, politicians blissfully forget to be uncompromising ideologues. Whatever the regime—be it Napoleon’s Empire or Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire, a restored Bourbon monarchy or its Orleanist successor, the Sec-

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ond Republic or the Third—liberals sought through institutional means to transform the regime into a liberal empire, monarchy, or republic. In America there was no struggle between distinct liberal and republican parties; yet in the person of John Adams, particularly in his use of the word “republic,” one encounters an evolution to a position quite similar to that of French liberals. At first Adams put republican rhetoric to potentially ideological uses: in January of 1776, at the same time that Paine was writing Common Sense, Adams dared assert that “there is no good government but what is republican.”12 Soon, however, he grew wary of revolution and of potentially incendiary words, and devoted the rest of his days to draining the word “republic” of all dangerous content. As the threat presented by revolutionary politics made itself felt in Europe, Adams countered with his wonderfully meaningless 1789 definition of a republic as “A government whose sovereignty is vested in more than one person.”13 Finally, in 1819, his thought culminated in the proclamation that “the word republic, as it is used, may signify anything, everything, or nothing.”14 John Adams, Francophobe, unknowingly shared with the French liberals an effort to make “republic” mean nothing or anything. Along with Benjamin Constant and company, Adams would deradicalize and disinfect political language. “Our countrymen will never run delirious after a word or a name,” wrote Adams, not if he could help it.15 Once the French Revolution ended, Americans began to lose interest in the meaning of the word “republic.” In France, on the other hand, the Revolution and memories of the First Republic did not end, no matter that each new regime began with an official announcement that “La Révolution est finie.”16 As a consequence of continuing instability, Mme de Staël and Benjamin Constant remained influential long after their deaths. “Institutions first,” their motto, became the slogan uttered by generations of liberals. Toward the close of the Second Empire, Lucien Anatole Prévost-Paradol published La France nouvelle (1868), the book which proved to be the bible of the liberals during the early years of the Third Republic.17 Adolphe Thiers, Édouard Laboulaye, Albert de Broglie—the liberals in general—applauded Prévost-Paradol, whose program of substituting calm discussions of institutions for shouting matches over republics versus monarchies echoed Constant’s political thought. Prévost-Paradol declared himself “incapable of hatred or enthusiasm for the words monarchy or republic.” One measure of the “good citizen,” in his estimation, is that he is “neither intox-

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icated nor repulsed by the words republic or monarchy.” All of PrévostParadol’s research was aimed at one objective, that of finding “institutions that can with equal ease accommodate the monarchical or the republican form.” Two years before the advent of the Third Republic, he was already prepared to rally the liberals to its defense: “To crown the institutions that we have sketched in the preceding pages with the republican form cannot be repugnant to sensible minds.”18 French liberals put institutions first and arrived at an institutional formula they found congenial. Theirs would be a legislature composed of two chambers, the indirectly elected upper house serving to prevent a repeat of the Revolution, not necessarily to represent an official aristocracy. An independent judiciary was also central to their plans;19 and they demanded a reversal of the laws that permitted administrators to escape prosecution in ordinary courts.20 Under their scheme nothing was more important than to avoid a recurrence of the Convention and the Terror; hence their insistence that legislative and executive powers must not be permitted to coalesce in one political body. So great was the fear of fusion of powers that, despite their Anglophilia, the liberals did not always yearn for parliamentary government. Thiers might hold that “le roi règne et ne gouverne pas”; others were not so certain. Both Pierre Royer-Collard and François Guizot wanted a king who did govern,21 and never did the liberals agree, in their speeches supporting “ministerial responsibility,” on whether the ministers would answer to the king or to parliament.22 What is clear, despite their disagreements, is that the liberals wanted a relatively strong executive, more often than not in the form of a king, or a president if necessary, rather than a system of cabinet government. French republicans had their own institutional formula—the exact opposite of the one the liberals advocated—consisting of a unicameral legislature, a circumscribed and popular judiciary, and a weak executive beholden to the legislative branch. Servants of the will of the people, republicans put all their emphasis on the legislature, to the point of refusing to grant the executive an independent existence. The one exception was the Second Republic with its directly elected president, which—republicans would never forget—led to the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon. Hence it is not surprising to find François Mitterrand accusing de Gaulle of conducting a “permanent coup d’état” when the General introduced a strong, popularly elected executive into the Fifth Republic.23 Republicans also called for a democratically elected judiciary and re-

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fused the American practice of judicial review, for the negative reason that the judges of the Old Regime were reactionary, and for the positive that judges must never be permitted to overrule the laws passed by the duly elected representatives of the sovereign people. All the hopes of the republicans were placed in a unicameral legislature that would be the fulfillment of democracy, just as surely as the bicameralism of the liberals was its deliberate frustration. If republicans time and again were backed into accepting a two-house legislature (the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics), that was because French republics were not founded by republicans. In general, Montesquieu was the hero of the French liberals; Rousseau of the republicans. Mme de Staël, Guizot, Royer-Collard, and nearly all the liberals admired the scheme of checks and balances set forth in The Spirit of Laws. On those rare occasions when liberals criticized Montesquieu, they did so to improve upon his formulations, not to reject them—as when Charles de Rémusat suggested that the separation of legislative and executive powers, taken too literally, would make government unworkable.24 For Rousseau, by contrast, liberals had one use and one use only, that of blaming him for the actions of Robespierre, the Convention, and the Terror. Down with Rousseau, up with Montesquieu, was (and still is) the battle cry of liberals. Up with Rousseau, down with Montesquieu, was the republican rejoinder. The liberals Mounier, Malouet, Clermont-Tonnerre, Lally-Tolendal might know their Montesquieu, but they lost out from 1789 to 1791 to other members of the Constituent Assembly who quoted their Rousseau both to support unicameralism and to cut the King politically down to size, long before anyone thought of cutting off his head.25 At best Montesquieu was silent about popular sovereignty, at worst he was the enemy of the people, whereas Rousseau was of the people and for them. To Louis Blanc it was enough to point out that Ledru-Rollin had borrowed an epigraph from Montesquieu to prove that his republican competitor could not possibly be a true spokesperson for the good cause.26 Even the most cursory comparison with France is enough to demonstrate that American institutions have been inspired by liberal ideology. Montesquieu belonged both to the Federalists and the Antifederalists in America, whereas in France he was the darling of the liberals but was repeatedly rejected by the republicans. Checks and balances, the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and an independent executive are common and rarely contested themes in American history. Once Ameri-

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cans got hold of Montesquieu, they would not let go. Remarkably different was the fate of Rousseau, whose Social Contract, writes Paul Spurlin, “exerted no perceptible influence in American political thought.”27 The primacy of liberal ideology in American institutional life is especially evident in the victory of the doctrine of judicial review. Both the American and the French revolutions were based on the notion of popular sovereignty; but whereas Americans accepted the notion of a higher law which cannot be breached by anyone, not even by the people’s elected representatives, the French repudiated judicial review as an affront to popular sovereignty. American republicans, being liberal republicans, were simply unwilling to detect a contradiction between the two doctrines they cherished, judicial review and popular sovereignty. Nothing is more revealing of the differences between American and French understandings of political institutions than the reception accorded John Adams’s A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States.28 Written in 1786–87, Adams’s three-volume study of American state constitutions was to play a role in both American and French constitutional debates. By attacking Turgot’s newfangled ideas of a unicameral legislature and weak executive, and retrieving the old theory of mixed and balanced government at the moment the Federalists were about to abandon it, Adams made himself a lightning rod on both sides of the Atlantic. Others defined themselves by citing him. When former reform minister Turgot wrote a letter to Richard Price expressing dismay that the American states, despite their belief in popular sovereignty, were copying the bicameralism of the English constitution, Adams swung into action. Quite rightly, Adams spied in Turgot’s letter the emergence of a radical political theory embracing three countries. Richard Price and Joseph Priestley in England, Turgot and Condorcet in France, Franklin and Paine in Philadelphia and Paris, championed the combination of a unicameral legislature and weak executive as the institutional formula befitting a dawning democratic age. In 1787 Adams continued to believe, as he had throughout his career, in frequent elections and a wide franchise, as well as in popularly elected representatives, senators, and governors; he continued to speak of “the rights of the people” and “the rights of mankind”; and he took pride that the American constitutions were founded not through a pretence of divine intervention, as Machiavelli and even Rousseau recommended, but through “the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery.”29 Where Adams

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differed from the radicals was in his conviction that their institutional scheme was certain to destroy popular government. On his diplomatic missions Adams saw at first hand, in the Netherlands, how the absence of a powerful executive emboldened an oligarchy to serve itself rather than the public. The same lesson could be drawn, he believed, from the pages of history. “If there is one certain truth to be collected from the history of all ages, it is this: that the people’s rights and liberties . . . can never be preserved without a strong executive.”30 The irony of unicameral legislatures, Adams thought, is that they were the most certain means of establishing the oligarchical rule that they were created to prevent.31 Of all forms of government, a sovereignty in one assembly, successively chosen by the people, is perhaps the best calculated to facilitate the . . . pursuit of the private interest of a few individuals; a few eminent conspicuous characters will be continued in their seats . . . from one election to another . . . ; by superior art, address, and opulence, by more splendid birth, reputations, and connections they will be able to intrigue . . . until they worm out their opposers and introduce their friends.32

Adams complained, with cause, that his book was the most misunderstood ever written.33 Despite his longstanding commitment to popular government, both the old and new of his argument in the Defence invited the incorrect conclusion that he had converted to aristocracy. The old was his recourse to the ancient theory of mixed and balanced government, which spoke of a twofold balance, first, between three forms of government, that is, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy; second, between two social classes, one aristocratic, the other popular. This was a theory many Americans thought inappropriate for their country, blessed as it was by the absence of a feudal tradition. It also happened to be a theory that hailed from an era preceding the rise of the concept of the sovereignty of the people. Suspicions that Adams had become the apologist of aristocracy deepened when readers encountered what was new in his book. As virtually no one had done before him, Adams spelled out all the ways elites come to the fore in even the most democratic polities. Well over a century before Robert Michels spoke of an “iron law of oligarchy,”34 Adams was grappling with the frustrating realization that in every society persons boasting such gifts as talents, birth, wealth, and beauty demand and receive recognition,

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which they then pass on to their children. No matter what the name of the regime, eventually a few families rule. “Natural aristocracy” threatens democracies and can only be offset by “ostracizing” the emerging elite to the Senate, thereby permitting the lower house to remain a democratic chamber in fact as well as in name.35 Considering that the French cared enough about the American state constitutions to publish them no less than five times between 1776 and 1786, Adams was bound to become embroiled in a lively Parisian debate. Quickly, the Turgotists responded to the Defence by issuing an annotated version of an American attack on Adams, John Stevens’s Observations on Government. Much to the liking of his translators, Stevens held that Adams was guilty of fostering aristocracy; unfortunately, from their point of view, Stevens forgot to advocate unicameralism,36 so his French editors interpolated passages making the politics of the “New Jersey gentleman” indistinguishable from that of the Turgotists. To the surprise of both Adams and his French detractors, their rather ethereal debate became a matter of grave practical consequence in 1789, when a Constituent Assembly met at Versailles and then in Paris. Throughout the proceedings the delegates continued to refer to the American constitutions and to Mr. Adams. Sometimes citing Adams, at other times paraphrasing him, those delegates whom the heirs of Turgot disparagingly called anglomanes or monarchiens argued for bicameralism and an absolute royal veto. Lally-Tollendal spiced his plea for a bicameral legislature with a hit at Stevens, “the unjust and inconsistent censor of Mr. Adams.”37 Mounier seemed to be paraphrasing the Defence when he contended that an enfeebled monarchy had led to feudal tyranny; and again when he argued against unicameralism, not by invoking the classical warnings of democratic anarchy, but rather by offering an Adams-like assertion that the few would dominate such an assembly.38 The monarchiens lost overwhelmingly when their constitutional proposals were brought to a vote. Nevertheless, their elegant speeches and the equally eloquent rejoinders coming from the likes of Sieyès39 set the stage for the quarrel of liberals and republicans which would last throughout the nineteenth century. Before the advent of the First Republic, Turgot and Sieyès had already established the institutional agenda of republicanism: a unicameral legislature and an executive denied the veto. For their part, Lally-Tollendal and Mounier had stated the case for what would eventually be known as the “liberal” position: bicameralism and a strong executive.

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Present at this historic moment, by virtue of his three unwieldy but influential volumes, was John Adams. As the nineteenth century unfolded, the split in France between republicans and liberals deepened into a chasm separating democrats (the republicans) from anti-democrats (the liberals). Restoration and July Monarchy liberals rejected their monarchien forebears, who had sanctioned popular sovereignty and rejected the aristocratic principle.40 Royer-Collard, Thiers, and Victor de Broglie—in contrast to Lally-Tollendal and Mounier— wanted to preserve the hereditary peerage41; and Guizot would utter his epoch-defining and infamous words, “Il n’y aura pas de jour pour le suffrage universel.” The theory of mixed and balanced government staged a vigorous comeback during the Restoration and July Monarchy; and it returned in its original, pre-modern guise of denying sovereignty to one and (especially) to all. How could France become a liberal democracy, when its liberals not only fought its democrats (the republicans) but rejected the very idea of democracy? The typical nineteenth-century French liberal became exactly what John Stevens, John Taylor,42 and various other Americans falsely accused Adams of being: an architect of political institutions whose sole purpose was to thwart the movement toward democracy. In America, by contrast, the Defence elicited the democratic potential of both Federalist and Antifederalist thought. From the sometimes hostile reception given Adams’s ideas, the Federalists learned to criticize fiscally irresponsible state legislatures without portraying themselves as the foes of popular government. After witnessing the fate of Adams, the Federalists likewise learned to suppress Hamilton’s speech at the Constitutional Convention, in which he praised the House of Lords as “a most noble institution” and argued that Senators and President should hold office for life.43 If Adams got into trouble in 1787 without advocating lifetime or hereditary appointments,44 what would happen to the Federalists if they were to endorse a program that seemingly reversed the outcome of the Revolution? Five months after Hamilton’s speech, James Wilson delivered an address at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention that offered a completely different Federalist rationale for the proposed federal constitution. Unlike Hamilton, Wilson argued that the British constitution was not a model fit for America. Perhaps England’s mixed and balanced government was acceptable in a society based on the existence of “different orders of men.” Perhaps the English were willing to abide by Blackstone’s notion of parlia-

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mentary sovereignty. But in America, argued Wilson, “the supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power remains in the people. As our constitutions are superior to our legislatures, so the people are superior to our constitutions.” Americans will have a balance of powers, but it will be between governmental institutions, not social classes. The proposed executive, both houses of the new legislature, and the judiciary are all—some more directly than others—the representatives of the sovereign people. The “principle” of the Constitution is strictly popular: “but that principle is applied in different forms, in order to obtain the advantages, and exclude the inconveniences of the simple modes of government.”45 John Adams inadvertently taught the Federalists to run away as fast as their legs could carry them from anything that smacked of aristocracy or contempt for the people. To a significant number of Antifederalists, Adams provided arguments charging that the proposed constitution would make a mockery of popular government. Not every Antifederalist embraced Adams, it is true, but many did. Against him was Centinel, who admired the unicameral legislature of Pennsylvania and regarded the institutional formulas of the Defence as fit for England, unfit for America.46 For Adams were Brutus (New York), Cato (New York), Cincinnatus (New York), Melancton Smith (New York), Richard Henry Lee (Virginia), Federal Farmer (Pennsylvania), and A Farmer (Maryland): applying the conceptual categories of Adams, they construed the proposed federal constitution as a scheme of mixed and balanced government and complained that the democratic element was underdeveloped and subject to usurpations at the hands of “natural aristocrats.”47 Most Federalists dissociated themselves from Adams’s book; many Antifederalists made it into their political bible. And yet Federalists and Antifederalists shared far more than they realized. Both sides in the constitutional debate sought the full complement of checks and balances characteristic of liberal institutions; both deemed such institutions legitimate only when they answer to the will of “the people.” In principle, the struggle for liberal democracy was won in America as early as the Founding, because Federalists and Antifederalists shared an idiom that was simultaneously liberal and democratic. In France the outcome was far more problematic. There, the liberal monarchiens—sounding like American Federalists—called for bicameralism, a strong executive, and a strong central government, all understood as

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emanations of popular sovereignty. By September of 1789, their liberal cause lost in the Constituent Assembly; and when given another chance at the time of the Restoration and the July Monarchy, the new generation of liberals decided to retain the idea of balance while permitting their adversaries, the republicans, to have a monopoly on the idea of popular sovereignty. Liberal democracy would not come easily in France, where the nineteenth-century public was constantly asked to choose between liberals and democrats, liberalism and democracy.

Mainstream versus Backwater Republicanism Over the last two centuries the French were repeatedly asked to choose between Montesquieu and Rousseau; that is, between liberal and republican patterns of institutional arrangements. In America, by contrast, Montesquieu’s heirs won without ever having to engage in a pitched battle with polemicists advocating unicameral legislatures, elected judges, and weak executives. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that from time to time public figures in America have articulated a political position strongly resembling that of French republicans. Off the beaten track, frequently forgotten, rarely lamented, one finds an occasional American intimation of what in France was a coherent republican ideal. The mainstream republicanism of France has been the backwater republicanism of America. The first noteworthy counter-current in American thought is Paine’s Common Sense, published in January of 1776. England’s mixed and balanced government, Paine charged, was nothing more than a compound made of “two ancient tyrannies,” the monarchical and the aristocratic, plus a “republican” lower house that had been corrupted by the crown. “It is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey.” Beyond his bitter denunciation of “the so much boasted constitution of England,” there is in Paine’s pamphlet an attack on “complex” institutional checks and balances of any kind, which presumably would put him at odds, eleven years later, with the new federal constitution. A “simple” unicameral legislature, popularly elected and frequently re-elected, he believed, was the way to lend meaning to the phrase “the sovereignty of the people.”48 Paine’s ideas gained fame both in America and Europe when he and other Philadelphia radicals succeeded in passing the Pennsylvania Con-

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stitution of 1776, which featured elected judges appointed for specified terms; a unicameral legislature, annually elected; legislative sessions constantly open to the public; and a weak, veto-less, plural executive dominated by the legislative branch. Kept abreast by ambassador Benjamin Franklin of events in Pennsylvania, Turgot and his circle were excited to see ideas similar to their own put into practice. Before long, Turgot, Condorcet, Du Pont de Nemours, and their cohort were known as the américanistes. Any story that begins with evidence of an alternative to the standard American institutional scheme ends with major disclaimers, and the case of Paine and the Pennsylvania constitution is not an exception to the rule. Only two other states, Georgia and Vermont, established unicameral legislatures, and in 1790 even Pennsylvania adopted a standard constitution. Moreover, when Paine returned to America in 1802, he was shunned by most of the Jeffersonians, who did not want to be reminded of their initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution. The truth is, Americans read Common Sense selectively in 1776: they were moved by Paine’s bold demand of independence and relished his deflation of the corrupt English constitution, but they passed over the passages implicitly recommending a unicameral legislature. Throughout his life, the American readers of Paine used and ignored him as they saw fit. Nor should we take seriously the claims of the Turgotists that the overlap between their views and Paine’s made them américanistes. Turgot, Condorcet, Sieyès knew perfectly well that the state constitutions of America established bicameral legislatures. Their claim to be américanistes was simply a maneuver to pin the label of anglomanes on Lally-Tollendal, Mounier, and Malouet, the better to benefit from the vein of Anglophobia in French culture.49 Imagery and symbols crossed the ocean between Paris and Philadelphia, but the Americans and French continued to evolve in distinctively different ways. Former President Thomas Jefferson invited Americans to read a book written by a mainstream French republican when he translated Destutt de Tracy’s Commentaire sur l’Esprit des Lois de Montesquieu. Hating all things English, contemptuous of the Anglophile High Federalists, Jefferson needed to make a clean break with the love of his youth, Montesquieu. As a young man, Jefferson had cited Montesquieu more frequently than any other writer in his notebooks; now, with de Tracy’s help, he would be done once and for all with The Spirit of Laws, the book known for its praise of

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the English constitution. De Tracy told Jefferson exactly what he wanted to hear, that the historical chapters of Montesquieu’s treatise were beside the point, that the good Baron’s omission of the principle of popular sovereignty was a fatal flaw, that a natural aristocracy is infinitely preferable to the hereditary principle, and that a separation of powers is superior to a social balance.50 Jefferson and de Tracy respected one another as fellow liberal republicans. Alas, their transatlantic embrace would last but a fleeting moment, because in France liberalism and republicanism were about to become sworn enemies. After the fall of the Directory, things would never again be the same for de Tracy; the liberals of the Restoration would reject his Idéologues and return with a vengeance to Montesquieu, history, balance, and, in some cases, even to a hereditary upper house. Jefferson was never genuinely at home in Paris, not when ambassador in the 1780s, not later in his life when he could find his political principles neither in the Restoration liberals nor the republicans of France.51 There is no difficulty in finding early nineteenth-century Americans who sound much the same as French republicans. But these American radicals invariably surrendered to mainstream moderates, usually without putting up much of a fight. Throughout the age of Jefferson, radical Republicans in many states cited Paine in order to argue for a unicameral legislature, manhood suffrage, the election of virtually all local and state officials, and the replacement of the common law with a simple code of laws accessible to ordinary citizens untrained in legal niceties. In state after state these radical Jeffersonians went down to defeat in contests with moderates of their own party. Not only in Kentucky or Massachusetts but even in Paine’s Pennsylvania, the moderate Republicans triumphed over the radical challengers. The program of these moderates was one that did not oppose judicial review, did oppose over-mighty legislatures, and favored a relatively independent executive, two houses, and judges named by the executive for lifetime appointments.52 With Republicans such as these, who needed Federalists? “We are all republicans—we are all federalists,” Thomas Jefferson assured the public in his first inaugural address. His record in office proved that, although he deemed it essential to defeat the Federalists, he had no intention of overturning their institutions. Under Jefferson’s rule no federal appointments were handed out to those Republicans who were radicals in state and local politics; nor did any fundamental change occur in

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the federal judiciary during his presidency; all judges appointed to the Supreme Court by Jefferson and Madison were from the moderate wing of the party. It was a court consisting of five moderate Republicans and only two Federalists that interpreted commercial and constitutional law along nationalist lines.53 Obviously, it was not the Alien and Sedition Acts of the Adams administration that prevented a French-style republicanism from coming into its own. Rather, the republicans of America were doomed from the start because they lacked the courage of their own convictions. When the Jeffersonians came to power, liberalism remained the mainstream, republicanism the backwater. Analogues to French republicanism in antebellum America are much easier to come by when we look, not at political institutions, but at the doctrine of popular sovereignty underlying and justifying them. When French liberals fled in horror from the social contract, government by the consent of the governed, and the philosophy of 1789, the republicans made it their business to remind the public that constitutions are less important than the constitutive power of the people, who can always undo and redo what they have done. Republicans remembered Rousseau’s words: “there is no fundamental law that cannot be revoked, not even the social compact.”54 Even more to the point are the final words of Turgot’s Encyclopédie article of 1757 on “Foundations”: “If a tombstone had been erected for everyone who ever lived, it would have been necessary, in order to find land to cultivate, to overthrow these sterile monuments and to turn over the ashes of the dead to nourish the living.”55 The American counterpart is, of course, Jefferson’s “the world belongs to the living,” a line he first tried out on Madison in a letter written in 1789, and which he would repeat down to the end of his life.56 Paine, too, insisted that “It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.”57 Loyal Jeffersonians John Taylor and St. George Tucker added their voices to the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian chorus singing the praises of generational autonomy.58 As late as 1850, Herman Melville would write that “The past is dead, and has no resurrection . . . In the past is no hope; the Future is hope and fruition.”59 After struggling so valiantly, and against the odds, to create the federal constitution, Madison was in no mood to accept Jefferson’s suggestion in his letter of September 6, 1789, that each generation should write anew the founding document. Ever tactful, Madison responded by quoting the Sec-

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ond Treatise of Government back to his Locke-intoxicated friend: since Jefferson had sounded the themes of contract and consent in their most radical form, Madison would answer by citing the conservative Lockean notion of “tacit consent”: only if Americans explicitly and repeatedly call for it will there be another constitutional convention. Ordinarily, the cumbersome process of amendment should suffice.60 Madison’s great fear, expressed best in The Federalist, was that calls for more constitutional conventions would “deprive the government of that veneration which time bestows on everything, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability.”61 His view predominated at the federal level but not in the states, where from the 1820s through Reconstruction appeals to “the people” led to endless constitutional conventions. Within a single decade, from 1844 to 1853, more than half the states summoned conventions. “Between 1829 and 1880,” writes historian Daniel T. Rodgers, “it was an unusual year which did not witness the calling of a revisory state constitutional convention somewhere in the United States.”62 Antebellum Americans, it seems undeniable, could be as radical as French republicans; yet after all the dust of the conventions had settled and the constituent power of the people had been satiated, little had changed in the world of political institutions. Despite the brave claims of some Americans that constitutional conventions were revolutions or substitutes thereof, the institutional structures of state governments remained much the same: bicameral legislatures held their ground, checks and balances escaped serious challenge. Americans had forced their institutions to be more responsive to “the people,” but the liberal institutional formula remained intact. Political institutions of the liberal variety became more democratic as a consequence of the mania for conventions, not more “republican” in the French sense of unicameralism and diminished executive and judicial powers. With few exceptions, the trickle of backwater republicanism virtually runs dry in postbellum America. One fleeting exception is Reconstruction, which an overly enthusiastic Georges Clemenceau, acting as an “on the spot” reporter for a Parisian newspaper, hailed as “the second American Revolution.”63 It was Clemenceau’s hope and expectation that Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans were about to build a republic one and indivisible that would assimilate the freed slaves. Especially during the phase of Congressional Reconstruction, when the Radical legislature

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was in command and the federal government appeared willing to force the states to abide by new national legislation guaranteeing the rights of blacks, Clemenceau saw in America all that French republicans wanted their nation to be. Little did he understand how quickly Americans would relapse into their familiar pattern of states’ rights, laissez-faire,64 and legally sanctioned racism.65 Clemenceau was perfectly correct to think Reconstruction had much in common with French republicanism; his mistake was to believe there was no turning back for Americans, when in fact they could not abandon Reconstruction too early. The oratory of Teddy Roosevelt constitutes a second postbellum moment that bears at least a vague resemblance to the ideology of French republicanism. From 1899 to 1901, Roosevelt delivered a set of speeches collected as a book under the title The Strenuous Life. America had just won a war with Spain, the upshot of which was that the United States had emerged as an imperial power. Previously, Americans had sought their Manifest Destiny in continental expansion, justified by the request of territories to enter the Union as new states. The inhabitants of these territories spoke the same language and belonged to the same culture as the citizens of established states. To take Mexico in the 1840s had been ruled unacceptable, because no people could be forced into the Union, nor, it was widely believed, would Mexicans ever become Americans. The doctrine of government by the consent of the governed both justified and limited American expansion.66 Upon defeating Spain in 1898, America entered a new stage of its history, an imperialist period of willingness to incorporate island peoples without their consent. Roosevelt could not abide faint-hearted humanitarians who expressed doubts about the new course of action. Their insistence upon consent, he fumed, “would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation.” The United States, he insisted, had brought civilization to the “Red Indians,” much as the Third Republic has dedicated itself to its mission civilisatrice. Thanks to the French, “Algiers has thriven as never before in its history,” and the same will be true of the Filipinos under American tutelage.67 The culmination of Roosevelt’s appreciation of French republicanism came on the occasion of his speech at the Sorbonne, April 23, 1910. “You and we are citizens of great democratic republics,” Roosevelt told his Parisian audience; ours are “the only two republics among the great powers of

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the world.” “The success of republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind.”68 But here once again we encounter the familiar story: even when we occasionally find an example of an American republicanism similar to that of France, the consequences for political institutions are close to nil. Roosevelt was as committed to keeping and indeed enhancing a powerful executive as the French republicans were determined to avoid the same. On October 1, 1911, looking back at his Parisian speech, Roosevelt dismissed the French who, “unlike the English and Americans, . . . do not dare trust any one man with a temporary exercise of large power for fear they will be weak enough to let him assume it permanently.”69 On the verge of running as Bull Moose candidate, Roosevelt was more determined than ever that the President should not only be independent of the legislature, but that American politics should be presidential rather than congressional.70 The French republican model meant nothing to him, except as a lesson in what to avoid. Perhaps Roosevelt’s proposal in 1912 for the “recall” of the decisions of state courts is a partial counterpart to the French republican program of forcing the judiciary to answer to “the people.” If so, the response to his proposal, overwhelmingly hostile, provides another lesson in the tenacity of the standard liberal institutional formula. Even Henry Cabot Lodge, beholden to Roosevelt for his reelection to the Senate in 1911, broke with TR and wrote essays defending the independence of the judiciary. “All history,” wrote Lodge, “and especially the history and tradition of their own race taught [the English peoples] that the strongest bulwark of individual freedom and of human rights was to be found ultimately in an independent court, the corner-stone of all liberty.” Why, he asks, should Americans tempt fate with judicial recall, a notion the French were foolish enough to try in 1848?71 How feeble the republican model has been in the United States, how powerful the liberal, is perhaps best seen in the American tradition of settling many of the most important political issues through the courts. Not under the auspices of a republic one and indivisible, as Clemenceau hoped, not through congressional laws expressing the general will, but rather by decisions of the Supreme Court did African Americans eventually achieve some measure of inclusion in the American polity. Judicial review, a liberal institution long abhorred by French republicans, has been the means of granting national citizenship and guarantees of civil rights. The Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) provided the Supreme

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Court with a rationale for extending the application of the Bill of Rights from the federal government to the states. The nationalization of the Bill of Rights is unthinkable without the Supreme Court and judicial review. Fully a century would have to pass before the Court completed the task of transforming Due Process into the defense of individual rights against state governments. Justice Samuel Miller used the Slaughter House cases of 1873 to vindicate the antebellum understanding that the most important individual rights were for the states to decide. Justice John Marshall Harlan in the early twentieth century failed in his efforts to turn the Constitution, via the Fourteenth Amendment, into a color-blind document. Not until 1925 did the Supreme Court begin to reverse course and stress the rights inherent in United States citizenship. Finally, during the 1960s, the Court completed the process of sanctioning what is sometimes called the Second Bill of Rights.72 Declarations of rights are integral to the French republican tradition, but before the 1970s it was unthinkable that a politics of the extension and enforcement of rights could have anything to do with judges. The American contrast could not be sharper, and serves to prove that the mainstream political institutions of the United States have been steadfastly liberal.

France: The Search for a Liberal Ethos “Centralization sprang forth from a society ground down into dust,” remarked Royer-Collard, who lamented the consequences: “Where there are only individuals, all affairs which are not theirs are governmental affairs . . . Thus it is that we have become a people d’administrés.”73 In his speech of 1820 Royer-Collard asked the question that would prove endemic to nineteenth-century French liberals: how can the pernicious effects of excessive centralization be offset? French liberals were as concerned with the ethos as with the institutions of freedom, and they drew an explicit link between the two: an extremely centralized government is destructive of citizenship. Royer-Collard’s thought, cramped by his fear of entrusting public life to any but the smallest of elites, contained the seeds of the richer liberalism developed by Tocqueville—a liberalism critical of narrow individualism, open to democracy, and civic in message. In the last third of the twentieth century, the program of regenerating French citizenship through political decentralization has been that of Tocqueville’s heirs, Raymond Aron, Michel Crozier, Stanley Hoffmann. Strange things happen to Tocqueville’s understanding of French polit-

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ical culture when it crosses the ocean to America: here The Old Regime and the French Revolution often becomes another excuse to denounce the French republican tradition. The key word in this campaign of vituperation is “Jacobin.” Sometimes in France but especially in the English-speaking world, the epithet is employed to reduce the several republican traditions to a single one, the most pernicious variation, and to create the false impression that French republicanism is always the same, no matter what the century or issue. At its most extreme, the word “Jacobin” has been a convenient way for American Cold Warriors to lay the blame for totalitarian politics at the door of the French republican tradition.74 Royer-Collard was more complex: “Centralization did not arrive like so many other no less pernicious doctrines . . . with the authority of an [ideological] principle; it penetrated modestly, as a consequence, as a necessity.”75 Nor did Tocqueville usually blame the First and Second Republics for the rise of a polity in which all decisions emanated from the center. At their best, the liberals understood that the malaise of French politics pertained not to this or that regime but to all, because each new regime inherited the old administrative structure and none could survive without it. “When people say that we have nothing that is safe from revolutions,” wrote Tocqueville in 1848, “I tell them that they are wrong, that centralization is [the] one thing. In France there is only one thing we cannot make: a free government; and only one we cannot destroy: centralization.” Whatever the regime, republican, monarchical, or Bonapartist, “whoever reigns in Paris controls France.”76 Not this or that passing regime but the ever-present administrative system foreshadowed under the Old Regime and instituted by Napoleon is responsible, according to Prosper de Barante, for the want of “civic virtues,” the absence of citizens, the lack of “public spirit.” Because of Napoleon, France finds itself under la tutelle de l’État, whereas in England “one sees a nation which administers itself.”77 Barante’s Des Communes et de l’Aristocratie (1821) is one of the liberal tracts preparing the way for Tocqueville. The French liberals were excellent at diagnosing what we may call the “Tocqueville problem” of their political culture, its impoverished civic life; and they knew how to turn images of local government in England and America to account when bemoaning their country’s unfortunate history. Had they been true to their ideals, liberals would have been among the first to demand repeal of the Le Chapelier law of 1791, which forbade workers

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to combine and strike; instead, they were among the last, with the consequence that the law was not rescinded until 1884. The great fault of the liberals, eloquent champions of associations in their speeches, was that their actions belied their words. Liberals stood in the way of a more liberal France. Royer-Collard spoke for many another liberal when he indicated that his highest priority was “the definitive and absolute proscription of the revolutionary monster.” “We wish to end the Revolution,”78 he asserted, but failed to add that evidently any means would do, no matter how illiberal. All through the July Monarchy, whenever the government feared a republican uprising was in the offing, the liberals shut down the freedom of groups to associate. They passed a law during April of 1831, for example, in an attempt to ban large meetings. Brought to trial, republican Godfrey Cavaignac proclaimed that association is a fundamental natural right. Later, toward the end of the July Monarchy, it would be the republican leader Ledru-Rollin’s turn to invoke the doctrine of a natural right of assembly against the reigning liberals, which he did by quoting the Declaration of Rights of 1793.79 One would expect liberals to oppose with all their might Article 291 of the Penal Code, which required official sanction for the convening of any group with more than twenty members. Instead, they turned the Code against the republicans, unwittingly inviting them to become the conspirators they feared. In short, Orleanist liberals were forever acting illiberally and contradicting their own program, whether the issue was association, rights, or the right of association. It was the oppressed republicans who learned to speak the language of liberalism. If the actions of the liberals were constrained and compromised by their situation, so were their thoughts. Perhaps it is not surprising that liberals in power were in no hurry to dismantle the state; nor should we express dismay that they were wary of pursuing decentralization through the federalism that everyone but the Legitimists80 (and later the anarchists) saw as a threat to national unity. Who is not struck, however, by the inability of the liberals to understand American federalism? Édouard Laboulaye, editor of Tocqueville’s works, expert on the United States, never comments on the powers of the several American states.81 Tocqueville himself did of course discuss American federalism at some length in the first volume of Democracy in America; yet even he falls short when he suggests that Americans have a highly centralized government combined with a decentralized administration. His formula might hold for the American states, but he is

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on very shaky ground when he applies it to the national government of the 1830s.82 In effect, Tocqueville momentarily read into America precisely what French liberals wanted for their country: enough concentration of power at the center to prevent devolution of power to local governments from degenerating into disunion. French liberals understood and admired English localism; they misunderstood and feared American federalism. The plain truth of the matter is that the liberals were more than a little frightened by thoughts of the chaos which might ensue following decentralization, and a few went so far as to reject outright the program of devolution. As a historian, Adolphe Thiers chose to rehabilitate Napoleon, architect of administrative centralization and national glory. As a political actor, Thiers distinguished himself by brutally suppressing the Communards of 1871, lest their reputed ideas of municipal autonomy and federalism stir anyone else to like-minded action. The liberal who most systematically argued the case for centralization was Dupont-White. Good liberal that he was, Dupont-White translated John Stuart Mill; new liberal that he also was, he wrote a series of books in the 1860s pointing out that the image of English local government so dear to French liberals—the picture of a Justice of the Peace holding forth instead of a Prefect—no longer had any basis in fact. “The State is very powerful in England,” where progress increasingly flows outward from the center. Localism in America does exist, he noted, but at the price of keeping blacks in chains. If liberals care most of all for the individual human being, then they should be the first to recognize that the rise of the individual in European history has taken place as a direct result of the rise of the state.83 Before decentralization could be enacted, the French had to make certain that devolution would not compromise the capacity of the central governing authority to ensure the rights of individuals and minorities. Perhaps what Dupont-White’s ideas signify, most of all, is that the liberals and republicans could carry on civil discussions of the issue of decentralization because their hopes and fears overlapped.84 If Dupont-White was a liberal of the Second Empire who reached out to republicans, then Jules Simon was a republican of the same period who returned the favor by conversing amiably with liberals. In writings on political liberty, civil liberty, and liberty of conscience, Simon prepared the way during the Second Empire for a possible merger of former adversaries, republican and liberal.85 His first step was to dissociate himself from the word “Jacobin,”86 a label that might be appropriate for a few fanatics but

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not, he insisted, for most republicans. Next, he reminded his readers that “liberal doctrines have been those of all my life.” The right of association, in his view, was “a natural right, anterior and superior to political rights”; it was “the most sacred of all rights.”87 Throughout his writings Simon repeatedly praised the galaxy of liberal publicists, Royer-Collard, Thiers, Rémusat, Victor de Broglie, among others. Guizot he admired not only for his writings but for his sponsorship of the law of 1833, which created a primary school system—the first step, thought Simon, in the direction of the republican goal of free public education for all.88 By inviting the Orleanist liberals to enter republican ranks, Simon hoped to pave the way for a Third Republic that would be a liberal republic. To prove he meant what he said, Simon joined with liberals when they wrote manifestoes on behalf of decentralization.89 One measure of his success may be found in the pages of Rémusat, who was effusive in his praise of Simon’s work.90 The accord between Simon and Rémusat at the end of the Second Empire was part of a much larger pattern in which many liberals and many republicans alike called for decentralization, especially at the municipal level.91 Yet when the Third Republic arrived, little changed in the administrative regime. As before, the Prefect reigned, and any concessions to localities were the result of connivance rather than of principle. So it was a matter of some import that the Solidarists, with Emile Durkheim in the forefront, decided at the turn of the century to revisit the question of decentralization. Unfortunately, Durkheim’s writings on the need for “intermediary bodies” and decentralization demonstrate, yet again, what a steep price republicanism paid for its sometime partnership with Orleanist-style liberalism. We have previously seen how in his age Guizot compromised the notion of rights, and how the Solidarist Duguit later compromised republicanism when he tried to incorporate Orleanist notions into his legal philosophy (above, ch. 2). Much the same was true of Durkheim: when he replayed the themes of Guizot’s belated program of decentralization, he repeated its faults rather than correcting them. The recurring pattern is that republican thought turns illiberal whenever it attempts a compromise with the outlook of the Orleanists, those fearful liberals who were constantly compromising their principles. Durkheim’s talk of reconstituting “intermediary bodies” and diminishing the reach of the state comes explicitly and self-consciously from the

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liberal thinker Montesquieu.92 His real affinity, however, is with the conservative liberal Guizot. Both Guizot and Durkheim rhetorically override the deep social and political divisions of France by speaking in the name of science about organic unity (below, ch. 5), the continuity of generations, and the need to regenerate the body politic through political decentralization. Finally, and for present purposes most importantly, both men were actually far less interested in local self-government than in social control. In the wake of 1848, Guizot belatedly came to the realization that “the struggle is no longer confined to the center; it agitates the whole nation.” Therefore “landed proprietors and heads of families, who are the natural guardians of society, must all be enjoined and empowered to maintain its security by conducting its affairs: they must have an active share in the management of its local as well as its general interests; in the administration as well as the government of the country.” Unless the conservative elites act quickly, the Social Republic will destroy organic unity and reduce society to a mere “series of individuals.”93 Durkheim, too, would decentralize, but through the occupational groups of a society slowly edging toward industrialization. Leaning in the direction of a social republic, Durkheim could not accept Guizot’s refusal of poor laws. He was, however, as eager as Guizot to educate citizens to stay where they were rather than yearn for more; to that end the famous sociologist eulogized poverty: “[Poverty] is actually the best school for teaching self-restraint. Forcing us to constant self-discipline, it prepares us to accept collective discipline with equanimity, while wealth, exalting the individual, may always arouse the spirit of rebellion which is the source of immorality.”94 For the guilds that the Revolution had rightly repressed, Durkheim would substitute national corporations uniting management and labor. In order to dispose of the anarchist threat emanating from the syndicalist movement, the workers would have to be indoctrinated every day with “professional ethics” stressing duty to the group. The purpose of the new occupational groups is far less economic than moral: their calling is to promulgate a French version of the ethics of “my station and its duties.” Exactly a century after Burke lauded attachment to the “little platoon”95 one belongs to in local life as the necessary condition of all ethical existence, Durkheim wrote that “it is impossible for men to live together, associating in industry, without acquiring a sentiment of the whole . . . This attachment has in it something surpassing the individual.”96

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Durkheim has frequently been called a liberal,97 and perhaps he was; but if so, then of a type so conservative as to remind one of Guizot. Both men spent their days fending off enemies massed on both left and right flanks of struggling liberal regimes; both yielded to the temptation to place order at the top of the scale of values and to forget about the rest. Their thoughts on decentralization attracted relatively few of their countrymen, who perhaps understood that it was less active citizenship that they were being offered than self-immolation in a blaze of organic unity. Of all France’s regimes, it is the Fifth Republic that has most successfully developed the institutions and ethos of freedom. The institutions arrived before the ethos, although not all at once, nor necessarily as the result of a self-consciously liberal design. In his War Memoirs General de Gaulle had spelled out his contempt for the multiplicity and irresponsibility of the political parties of the Third Republic, and he was especially determined to provide postwar France with strong executive authority, the absence of which undid the prewar regime.98 Whether de Gaulle realized it or not, his proposals for a powerful executive made him into a possible ally of the liberal tradition. General de Gaulle’s enemies accused him of Bonapartism. Such claims were difficult to sustain, however, given that some leading republicans, including Léon Blum, had themselves expressed second thoughts during World War II about the traditional republican animus against an assertive executive.99 In any case, why assume that Bonapartism is necessarily and everlastingly authoritarian? Napoleon tried to portray himself as the founder of a liberal order during the Hundred Days and, again, in his memoirs written in exile on St. Helena. His nephew Louis Napoleon, better known as Napoleon III, would repeat this fanciful account in Des Idées Napoléoniennes,100 and would permit the final years of his own reign to be known as the “Liberal Empire.”101 Every now and then Bonapartists proclaimed that the regime was the “means,” and a liberal political order the “end.” On the liberal side, Benjamin Constant felt obliged to cooperate when asked by Napoleon to write a new constitution in 1815. De Gaulle availed himself too often of the Napoleonic device of the plebiscite, but we must not forget that he used it to bring into being a political order consisting of a strong executive, a Senate, and a lower house— the institutional machinery of liberalism. If General de Gaulle was a Bonapartist, then he was arguably the one who finally delivered on the longstanding Bonapartist promise to establish a constitutional government.

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Liberals such as Barante had longed for another Marquis d’Argenson or Turgot, those enlightened administrators of the eighteenth century who wanted to provide France with the constitution it lacked.102 Belatedly, the liberals got what they asked for when Michel Debré and other members of the Napoleonic Council of State acted as authors and founding fathers of the constitution of the Fifth Republic.103 Judicial review was the one ingredient still missing from the liberal institutional formula. To everyone’s surprise, the Constitutional Council that had been created to help Gaullists control the legislature provided the missing element when it ruled in 1971 that a statute prepared by the executive was unconstitutional. Throughout the 1980s the Constitutional Council was especially active, striking down first Socialist and then conservative legislation. By ruling before legislation was passed, its members were able to undercut the claim that they violated the republican principle of the sovereignty of the people. In search of legal sources upon which to base its decisions, the Constitutional Council drew heavily upon the work of the Council of State, the highest administrative court. Legacy of Napoleon, the Council of State has overseen the birth and the subsequent development of the liberal constitution of the Fifth Republic.104 There was one last problem. How could the Fifth Republic evolve a liberal ethos to match its liberal institutions? De Gaulle forgot that after the Great Legislator came down from the mountain to deliver a constitution, he was obliged to leave town.105 Liberals had stood for desacralization of the state, decentralization of political decision-making, and a more active civic life for some if not for all. The Fifth Republic, however, arrived under the auspices of an august state; and so many of its top ministerial posts have been filled by civil servants that it has rightly been called la République des fonctionnaires. The persistence of the politics of protest against the government has provided the French with one form of civic activism. When provoked, citizens take to the streets against their Republic. No people is more experienced than the French in the rituals of public disturbance, nor has any produced a philosophical journalist as adept as Alain was in justifying perpetual protest. In many respects his early twentieth-century thought is the functional equivalent of Jacksonian democracy: he warns that power corrupts, indicts the bureaucrats, wants to remove public affairs from the capital city, and claims to have uncovered “a permanent conspiracy of the rich, . . . the parasites, and the flatterers against the electoral masses.”106 His spe-

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cialty is vigilant oversight of our never-to-be-trusted parliamentary representatives. Rousseau would avoid having representatives if at all possible; Alain reluctantly concedes their necessity but assumes they will betray the people the moment he closes his eyes.107 For Alain as for Camus several decades later, eternal protest is the price of liberty.108 Alain’s politics were useful as a way of fending off the state but did little to promote decentralization. Although his ardent individualism was a stiletto cutting through the overblown organic imagery of the Solidarists,109 he offered no basis for any group cohesion beyond spontaneous demonstrations against the authorities. The empirical truth—expressed neither by the Radical Alain nor the Radical Socialist Solidarists—was that in France individuals commonly adhered to a group simply to gain protection from other groups; the point of protests was to force the government to resolve the conflicts between labor and management (or other contestants) that they were unwilling or unable to settle amongst themselves. Under such circumstances the state, while hardly omnipotent, could not be dispensed with, nor could a civil and civic society arise until the politics of protest and resistance were supplemented by a more positive form of group politics.110 Some of France’s most astute commentators believe that the uprising of May ’68 marked a transition to a new French political culture, one more conducive to the formation of voluntary associations, more open to communication between groups at the workplace, less authoritarian in teaching techniques, and in general more “liberal” culturally. No one, of course, gave a thought at the time to the liberalization of the Republic, certainly not the anarchist students who initiated “the events” of May, nor the millions of workers who joined them, nor the doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists, actors, film directors, museum curators, or soccer players who took to the streets. Autogestion, self-management, power to make decisions at the local level, was the demand not only of anarchist students but of individuals from every possible calling. Within research laboratories, hospitals, business organizations, and the university, the cry went up against the authoritarian rule of the patron. Bureaucratic rigidity everywhere came under sharp attack.111 “Act with others, not for them” was a typical slogan of May ’68.112 Aron and Crozier, writing as the events of May unfolded, saw in them little more than a repeat of the old politics of protest.113 Henri Mendras, writing twenty years later, viewed them as the beginning of a more liberal

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France.114 One sign of the new possibilities emerging from 1968 was the success in the 1970s of the Union Fédérale des Consommateurs, an organ of grassroots democracy. Then came the ecology movement and along with it a great deal of enthusiastic talk about la vie associative. The finishing touch in the marriage of the institutions and ethos of liberalism came in 1982, with the legislation on decentralization passed by the newly elected Socialist government. Whatever the imperfections of the reforms, there is no question that the newly created regional governments have become a permanent feature of the political landscape. Local territorial units—the departments and municipalities—have achieved a significant measure of autonomy. Block grants from the central government, power at the local level to tax and spend, authority placed in the hands of an elected regional council, are among the features that contrast strikingly with the old system of Napoleonic Prefects, clad in military uniform, rigging elections, taking orders from Paris, and barking them out to the rest of the nation.115 Not just Jules Simon but many republicans of the late Second Empire, tired of being accused of Jacobinism, wrote pamphlets calling for decentralization.116 Arch-republican and Socialist Léon Blum went so far during World War II as to endorse federalism in the American manner.117 Upon coming to power in 1981, the Socialists yearned for a memorable reform, one that would leave a lasting mark, and found it in the decentralization legislation. The promise of liberalism which was frustrated under each of France’s officially liberal regimes was finally fulfilled under a republican regime. This outcome will not surprise us if we recall how illiberal the liberal regimes were, and how early in consequence the persecuted republicans learned to appreciate the liberal norms of rights and free association.

America: The Search for a Civic Ethos Contemporary claims that America suffers from a crisis of citizenship echo the words of the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the New Left. Tom Hayden in 1962 introduced the theme of “participatory democracy” that has found its most recent home in Robert Putnam’s essays. It was Hayden, again, who foreshadowed present day communitarians when he wrote that “politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community.”118 The student leader likewise set the tone

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of subsequent decades by devoting most of his essay to a critique of liberalism, especially of the varieties called “interest group,” “corporate,” or “establishment liberalism”—the New Deal legacy. Hayden was quite adept at attacking Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and other Cold War intellectuals who feared communism abroad and Joe McCarthy at home, gloried in the “end of ideology,” took comfort in political apathy, and rationalized the rule of elites—a program so antidemocratic that it might have pleased Guizot (below, ch. 6). The weak spot in Hayden’s education was history: although he wanted his radicalism to sound American, he never moved beyond paraphrases of C. Wright Mills and John Dewey to a larger examination of democracy in American history.119 His writings evoke regret for something, we know not what, that has been lost and must be recovered. American historians came to his rescue, so to speak, when they claimed to have discovered an age of “classical republicanism” that preceded the liberal era. Participation and virtue were one and the same in early America, said the historians, and made it their business to collect comments on civic virtue, the more extravagantly stated the better. What a peculiar sight it is to see American scholars who cannot denounce Robespierre too often taking pleasure in Samuel Adams’s dream of creating a “Christian Sparta” in Massachusetts. No less frightening, one might think, are Benjamin Rush’s frequently praised words about training a republican citizenry (1786): “Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property.” Rush’s goal was “to convert men into republican machines,” an objective which could be accomplished, he believed, if youngsters were denied wills of their own prior to the age of twenty-one.120 So eager have scholars been for an alternative to liberalism that they have applauded the very rhetoric they would have denounced as totalitarian if uttered by Robespierre.121 In a mood of interpretive charity one might ignore the double standard about civic virtue—good for America, bad for France. What cannot be forgiven is that the scholarly search for civic virtue in American history is an undertaking that actually has led us away from the historical sources of citizen involvement in public affairs. The Gilded Age is not known as an exemplar of civic virtue, and yet voting in the 1870s and 1880s was at or near an all-time high. “The electorate voted with passion as well as in numbers,” notes one historian. “Great campaign parades, the excitement of national contests . . . , elaborate rites of victory and defeat—all testified to the com-

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pelling quality of the electoral process.”122 Parties turned out the vote, parties run by the likes of Boss Tweed and Plunkett of Tammany Hall, whose immigrant constituents laughed all the way to the ballot box at the virtuous Mugwump reformers and their schemes for doing away with machine politics. Even in the absence of great national issues during the final third of the nineteenth century, voters of all social, economic, and ethnic backgrounds could not get enough of campaigns and elections. Union and disunion, slavery and antislavery were the issues facing antebellum America, and their enormous significance was one reason why public engagement in politics was extraordinarily high. Another reason was the bread and circus ingeniously provided by managers of political parties. It was not the pursuit of civic virtue but the desire to see the best show in town that “packed ’em in” when Lincoln and Douglas debated. Only an open air evangelical revival or the coming of the circus to town could compete with the show put on by “Long Abe” and “Little Dug.”123 There is every reason to suspect that the decline of political parties in our time is one of the causes of the waning of civic life.124 When Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination for President in 1968 without contesting a single primary election, liberals countered with new regulations undermining the power of party professionals. Political amateurs would henceforth be represented at the Convention, and the candidates would be forced to run the gauntlet of a long succession of primary elections. This was the New Politics, an invention of the Democrats but a fact of life for both parties after enactment into state laws. By now we know the price that has been paid for this “reform”: the unlimited influence of money, vicious personal attacks instead of a discussion of issues, and public boredom. Steps taken to reform political parties have hastened their decomposition, and weakened parties have spelled a new low in public life. Scholars who search for republican virtue usually ignore parties, repeating the errors of the past rather than learning from them. To the extent that republican ideas were present at the Founding, they stood in the way of accepting parties. George Washington’s Farewell Address was, above all, a warning against the development of two parties, the Federalist and the Jeffersonian. Educated in the classics, Washington shared with his contemporaries the view Sallust had expounded, that parties are destructive of the unity essential to the well-being of any republic. In reality, however, as we realize in hindsight, the extra-constitutional parties saved the Constitution by involving ordinary citizens in political activity. America’s early republi-

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cans were blind to the proper uses of party, and so are the scholars of our time who overlook whatever does not fit within the theme of civic virtue. Parties have little to do with ancient civic virtue, but they have everything to do with modern civic life.125 Civic virtue has rarely been the concern of activist Americans. More often than not, when the citizens spring to action, they do so because they fear government and wish to resist it. Not the desire to devote themselves to public life but to be protected from it is their motive. “Where annual elections end, tyranny begins” was the radical Whig adage that Americans of the early republic eagerly embraced. Politics and elections were unending because government was not to be trusted. Jefferson went further in his 1816 proposals for “ward-republics”: every man, he held, should be “a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day.” Even so, Jefferson did not set forth his suggestion on the grounds that civic life is uplifting; rather, his intention was to counteract the tendency for government to become “more and more oligarchical.”126 Distrust of government was Jefferson’s theme; “participation” was a means rather than an end. The Antifederalists, too, are bound to disappoint contemporary social scientists who ransack the past to find protagonists whose overriding concerns were civic virtue and civic participation.127 For the most part the Antifederalists accepted the mixed and balanced government of Adams, insisting only that the lower House—the democratic element in the proposed federal constitution—be substantially strengthened. More participation was not their theme; their emphasis, instead, was on passing a bill of rights to limit government. From the Antifederalist perspective, anyone who counted on civic virtue to secure the well-being of the republic was making a fundamental mistake. “Virtue will slumber,” warned Patrick Henry; “the real rock of political salvation is self-love.”128 Consequently he simply could not have too many checks and balances. Antifederalists trusted more in state than in federal government because it was closer at hand; but under normal circumstances, when their liberties were unthreatened, preferred to keep their distance from both. Their farms and businesses beckoned.129 In the radical Whig maxim of 1776, “where annual elections end, tyranny begins”; in the Antifederalist polemics of 1787 against the “natural aristocracy”; and in the Jacksonian insistence upon rotation in office, we learn what it means to “return the government to the people.” Not at all

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did Americans intend to enter politics; they simply wanted to throw the rascals out of office with enough fanfare to make an impression upon the next representatives of “the people.” A recent example of the same principle came in 1994, when Newt Gingrich’s Republicans ran for Congress on a platform of term limits. Appropriately, Gingrich claimed that he was the spokesperson for a revival of Jacksonian politics.130 In general, distrust of their representatives periodically brings Americans into public life for the few moments necessary to rid themselves of their current governors, after which they return to their everyday concerns.131 Admittedly, virtue-talk has been no stranger to American politics, but the virtue in question has not been “republican.” Virtue in America, when publicly pursued, has typically been evangelical virtue, whether in the struggle to purge oneself of the sin of slavery, or in the long-lived temperance movement, or in the recent crusade of Christians against abortion. Any chance that republican civic virtue would emerge from the Revolution was squashed by the Second Great Awakening.132 For better and for worse, virtue in American public life has been and still is Christian virtue. Too frequently the ironic result of the efforts of scholars to uncover a republican past has been to blind us to the sources of American civic life. The quest for civic virtue leads us to invent what did not exist, namely classical citizens in modern dress, and to ignore what did exist: plain and simple party politics, episodic popular upsurges against public office holders, and evangelical preachers riding from village to village. Compounding the error is the unwillingness of “republican” scholars to recognize how the quest for rights has often mobilized citizens, most notably when women, blacks, abolitionists, and laborers struggled to rewrite the Declaration of Independence (above, ch. 2). Scholars hell-bent on substituting a republican tradition for Hartz’s liberal America have been willfully blind to the role of rights in spurring citizens to action. Making matters worse, the advocates of New Left and neoconservative viewpoints alike have distorted for ideological purposes the historical record of the Declaration of Independence. Historians sympathetic to the New Left have been critical of liberalism and therefore have neglected the role of the Declaration in American history. John Locke is no more welcome in their world than is the Supreme Court of the late nineteenth century, which called upon the doctrine of natural rights to vindicate the robber barons.

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If neoconservatives address the Declaration of Independence at all, then it is solely for the purpose of transforming an icon of radicalism into a weapon to be used against the New Left. In 1976 Martin Diamond joined with Irving Kristol and other neoconservatives in issuing a bicentennial set of essays entitled The American Commonwealth. “The Declaration and the Constitution: Liberty, Democracy, and the Founders” was the title of Diamond’s contribution to the volume. The burden of his argument is to show that “the social contract theory upon which the Declaration is based teaches not equality as such but equal political liberty.” Nothing, he assures us, could be less radical than the Declaration, which “does not say that consent is the means by which government is to operate; it says that consent is necessary only to institute or establish government.”133 The Declaration that emerges from Diamond’s pages has lost its radical fangs. Taming the Declaration was the design of Daniel Boorstin as early as 1953. Prior to their turn to the right in response to the rise of the 1960s counterculture, the new conservatives had been Cold War liberals fearful of the power of ideology. Boorstin’s The Genius of American Politics pleased his conservative liberal cohort with its comforting message that there was no need to debate “the end of ideology” since in America ideology had never begun. Thanks to “the amazing poverty and inarticulateness of our theorizing about politics,” we may rest assured that the “marvelous success and vitality of our institutions” cannot be threatened. In keeping with his general outlook, Boorstin downplays the Declaration, which to his mind was a mere legal brief, “a document of imperial legal regulations,” “a bill of indictment against the king, written in the language of British constitutionalism.” By the time Boorstin has finished gutting it, no one would suspect that the Declaration contained a revolutionary theory of rights, radical in its day, and repeatedly invoked in subsequent ages by reforming or radical groups.134 Fittingly, Boorstin sided in 1969 with the neocons against the New Lefters, whose proper appellation, he assures us, is the “New Barbarians.”135 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the participants in the debate over liberalism/republicanism frequently tell us less about the past than about the ideological quarrels of the present. Perhaps we should therefore examine the present forthrightly, with a copy of Tocqueville in hand. Aron, Crozier, and Hoffmann have succeeded in using Tocqueville to illuminate the problems and prospects of citizenship in France. What about

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the American social scientists who have been calling upon Tocqueville to do the same for the United States? Unfortunately, many of the American followers of Tocqueville have lost the political focus that characterized the master’s work. Strip Tocqueville of his Norman aristocratic clothing and manners, outfit him with American tastes, and he would still be baffled by the proposition that the study of bowling leagues can yield political results. Whether we bowl alone or with others, we are only bowling. Tocqueville did not say that association leads to political association; he said just the opposite: “It is through political associations that Americans . . . acquire a general taste for association . . . Then they carry these conceptions with them into the affairs of civil life and put them to a thousand uses.”136 Tocqueville is omnipresent in recent accounts of civil society in America, but he frequently figures as little more than a symbol to be manipulated in ideological contests. Perhaps his most striking use in recent years has been to serve as facilitator for the merger of the New Left and the neoconservatives, those once bitter enemies who now find common ground in their opposition to “corporate” or “interest group liberalism.” Left and right have united against the politics proposed by the Progressives and fulfilled by the New Deal, a national politics administered through an alliance of the federal government with the leading industrial, labor, and financial institutions. One of the turning points in the merger of the political right and left came in 1976, with the publication of Richard John Neuhaus and Peter Berger’s pamphlet To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy, a work regularly cited in conservative circles, which accuses liberals of blindness to the moral significance of neighborhood, family, church, and voluntary association. The wording “to empower people” sounds New Left, and amounts to an appeal for leftist support on the part of the conservative publishers of the American Enterprise Institute. On the one hand, Neuhaus and Berger affectionately quote Burke’s well-known maxim that “to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.” On the other hand, the authors, looking to forge an alliance, commend the New Left for making an initial effort to find and sustain mediating structures “between the individual in his private life and the large institutions of public life.” In the pages of Neuhaus and Berger, a democratic Burke, oxymoron or not, was born.137 Conservative polemicist Wil-

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liam Bennett has followed their lead by naming the organization he co-directs “Empower America.” Burke, of course, is not the ideal author to cite if one wishes to marry the New Left to the New Right. Far better is Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America has proven to be a book for all seasons—and all ideologies. Neuhaus and Berger, delighted that Tocqueville’s appeal is to the left as well as the right, went out of their way to quote the famous Frenchman when calling for a return to strong local communities. Ever since the publication of To Empower People, the opposite ends of the political spectrum have been converging somewhere between the covers of Democracy in America. The fusion of right and left has led to some bipartisan undertakings. When in the spring of 1997 Colin Powell and representatives of the Clinton administration sponsored a rally in favor of local volunteerism in America, the Republicans and Democrats worked side by side. The occasion was festive, but as local black leaders remarked, at the end of the day the volunteers would go home, leaving the ghettoes behind. Like Hayden before him, the left-leaning Putnam pays little attention to the question of how to reconfigure political institutions so as to keep civic spirit alive after the volunteers go back to the suburbs. Nor has he explained how to keep the social gains of the New Deal alive when all the emphasis is on “civil society” and the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy. The right-leaning devotees of Tocqueville are silent on the same subjects, perhaps with better reason. Neoconservatives of the Irving Kristol variety have abandoned their one-time commitment to the welfare state and redefined themselves as the defenders of the Republican party’s combination of laissez-faire economics and aggressive, interventionist Christian moralism. Like any great writer, Tocqueville has been claimed by everyone; he has been used and abused, appropriated and misappropriated, applied and misapplied. It is one thing to emancipate civil society in France, a nation with an overblown state; it is quite another matter to do the same in America, where the battle fought by the New Dealers was an uphill struggle against a powerful tradition of populist laissez-faire and anti-government rhetoric. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, the failure of many American Tocquevillians to link the study of the ethos of freedom with complementary institutions favors the politics of the dismantlers of New Deal liberalism.

The Uses of Republican Rhetoric in America

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4

The Uses of Republican Rhetoric in America

Is there a republican tradition in America? On the basis of our findings up to this point one might well agree with John Adams that the word “republic,” as it is used, may mean anything, everything, or nothing. Most of all, “republic” seems to mean whatever contemporary investigators have in mind before undertaking their research, which is usually dedicated to enlisting a “world we have lost” on the side of their ideological commitments. For their differing purposes, both the left wing of academia and the right have conjured up pseudo-histories wherein American republicans once upon a time tilted at liberals. Right debate, wrong country. How else can anyone familiar with French history characterize the American debate over republicanism and liberalism? It was in France, not in America, that a battle raged throughout the nineteenth century between republicans and liberals; in France liberals governing the July Monarchy outlawed the republicans, and the republicans plotted to overthrow the supposedly liberal regime. Again, it was in France, not in America, that republicans championed and liberals distanced themselves from “civic virtue.” Why should Benjamin Constant, Mme de Staël, or other liberals want anything to do with a second Republic of Virtue when the first had led to a Reign of Terror? An American simply cannot mentally visit nineteenth-century France, where endless battles were fought between republicans and liberals, without returning home convinced of the unreality of the scholarly debate pitting republicanism against liberalism in the history of the United States. If in France struggles with liberals provoked a full-blooded republican response, then the absence of a liberal/republican split in America has made for an anemic development of republican ideals and a shortage of 92

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eminent republican spokespersons. Convincing American counterparts to Rousseau, Michelet, Blanc, and Jaurès are difficult to find. As for “civic virtue,” in all likelihood that ideal was less the obsession of Americans in times past than of New Lefters in times present, out to enhance citizen participation; or of neoconservatives, ever on the lookout for opportunities to rein in a permissive society; or of communitarians, many of whom are simultaneously left and right, antiliberal above all, and who yearn for “roots” and a usable past. Yet one must admit that republican expressions, terminology, and vocabulary do, indeed, have a long history in the United States. But what stands out from a comparative viewpoint is that whereas in France the images, symbols, and catch phrases of republicanism have sometimes served the positive goal of championing a dream to be fulfilled,1 in America the rhetoric of republicanism has been overwhelmingly negative and accusatory in thrust. Citizens of the United States rarely speak of “civic virtue” but never tire of lodging charges of political “corruption.” At least one fragment of republican ideology has led a rich life in America, where public figures indulging in exchanges of insults have persistently availed themselves of the resources of the republican tradition. Against the republican background, one’s opponents are nothing less than monarchists, aristocrats, corrupters, and conspirators. At the beginning of the republic the colonists leveled the charge of corruption against the English; and then, a few years later, with independence assured and the new constitution in place, they began to spy degenerates within their own ranks. James Madison and Fisher Ames had worked in harmony as members of the House of Representatives during the First Congress. Soon, however, each was accusing the other of corrupting the fledgling republic, Madison suggesting the Federalists were craven monarchists, Ames denouncing the Jeffersonians as “antifederalists, democrats, anarchists, and jacobins.”2 The conflict between Madison and Jefferson on the one side, Hamilton and Ames on the other, tells us much about the manner in which republican rhetoric would live on in America. From the moment the battle was joined between the first political parties—the Federalists and Jeffersonians—republican rhetoric figured prominently as the provider of a vocabulary of vilification. All through the nineteenth century and beyond, the uses of republican rhetoric in denouncing the other party would continue to be evident.

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The story of republican rhetoric in America is a tale of paradox. Republican ideology both outfitted parties with vocabularies of combat and prevented Americans from accepting the legitimacy of political parties. Much like Rousseau, the English Commonwealthmen Trenchard and Gordon condemned parties as divisive and corrupting forces that threatened republican well-being.3 Even as Madison took the bold step of legitimizing faction in the Federalist, he refrained from an endorsement of political parties. If he and Jefferson eventually agreed to form a party, it would be a party to end parties, one that would re-unite America. “We are all republicans—we are all federalists,” said Jefferson in his First Inaugural address.4 In fact, however, both before and after the election of 1800, many Americans either were Federalists or Jeffersonian Republicans, one or the other, not both. Two parties had emerged, neither recognizing the legitimacy of the other, each accusing the other of treason, both reared on Sallust and other Roman republican authors who had decried parties. The last thing the Americans wanted was a modern-day equivalent of the struggle between Marius and Sulla or the conspiracy of Catiline. Part of the ideological pattern of the American Revolution repeated itself when parties were born in the early 1790s; for a second time in American history republican thought heightened tensions by uncovering nonexistent conspiracies. Americans, who only a few years previously had wrongly accused the English of plotting to destroy their freedom, found themselves in the 1790s divided into two groups, each convinced the other was full of conspirators. The belief that freedom itself was at issue, the conviction that the existence of parties was proof of corruption, the fear that the Federalists were the toadies of English monarchists and the Jeffersonians of French Jacobins, guaranteed that partisan rhetoric would be passionate and inflammatory.5 Each side condemned the other for destroying unity and threatening the republic. It was republican concepts that stood in the way of a frank recognition of the need for political parties; and it was republican rhetoric that fueled the fires of partisan charges and counter-charges.

Down with the Monarchists Americans of the nineteenth century would find unintelligible the battle lines scholars of our day have drawn between republicans and liberals. But speak to them about righteous republicans and corrupt monarchists and

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they might invite you to stay awhile. In America as in Europe, republican thought originally defined itself against a monarchical opponent. Nothing could be more obvious, nor more overlooked in our scramble to find our present-day selves in the past.6 Attacks on supposed monarchists have been remarkably long-lived in America, lasting well into the twentieth century, up to the New Deal and FDR’s attack on “economic royalists.” It is worth remarking, however, that Americans took their time in coming to their love of republics and hatred of monarchies. Insofar as the Americans were the offspring of the English Commonwealthmen, they were reared on an education that made them think of the king as the monarchical element in a Polybian republic. Monarchy and republic in the Commonwealthman scheme were mutually reinforcing elements of a free government rather than bitter antagonists. The Commonwealthmen accepted the Restoration and tried to make the most of it by reading their ideals into the constitutional balance of 1688. Not for them a return to the horrors of the mid-seventeenth century. Only when they had to, in order to break away from England, did the American colonists declare themselves republicans. Whatever misgivings they might have had about monarchy in 1774 and 1775 had to be overlooked, because Adams in the Novanglus papers, Jefferson in A Summary View of the Rights of British America, and James Wilson in Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament sought to avoid war by requesting a new status for America within the British Empire. In their proposed scheme, the colonists would gladly bow politely to the King if they were freed from the legislative reach of Parliament. For their own strategic and tactical purposes, Adams, Jefferson, and Wilson needed to keep the monarch. In 1776, when the colonists decided to declare for independence, they found themselves in a radically altered situation, and Jefferson accordingly proceeded to issue his famous document that included a point by point indictment of the misdeeds of George III. The Declaration of Independence does not, however, discuss forms of government and is, indeed, completely silent on the question of republics and monarchies. All the radicalism of the Declaration comes from its notions of natural rights and equality, not from describing how those rights should be institutionally secured. Tom Paine’s firebrand rhetoric in Common Sense, expressing hate not of this or that monarch but of monarchy itself, was far from typical of American thought and sentiments in 1776. Looking backward from the vantage

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point of 1789, Jefferson confided to Madison that “we were educated in royalism; no wonder if some of us retain that idolatry still.”7 Why should the Americans of the revolutionary and founding period have borne monarchy a particular animus when even the Loyalists had not been especially shrill or offensive in their advocacy of monarchy? Jonathan Boucher, it is true, spoke some words reminiscent of Robert Filmer’s, but his position was not typical of the Loyalists. Most of the colonists who remained faithful to England were firm devotees of mixed and balanced government and asked only that the powers of the governors and upper houses be enhanced.8 Their ideas differed from those of the patriots more in degree than in kind. The great difficulty of the Loyalists was that they understood nothing about the new politics taking place in the streets of Boston, and consequently they mistook for headless mobs the organized groups led by local notables. Monarchy was agreeable to the Loyalists not so much as monarchy but as the government under which the colonists had prospered in the past and under which they might continue to thrive in the future, if only Englishmen on both sides of the ocean would show a modicum of restraint. With enemies such as the Loyalists, the patriots had no cause to work themselves up into an antimonarchical frenzy. Until the advent of political parties in the 1790s, antimonarchical rhetoric remained tame and relatively insignificant. When the framers of the Constitution met in 1787, their hankering for a powerful executive made the English monarchy look downright enticing, especially to Hamilton. Both Federalists and Antifederalists, moreover, accepted Montesquieu’s conclusion that a large nation required a one-person executive. Antifederalist Patrick Henry’s complaint that the proposed constitution “squints toward monarchy”9 probably should be understood less as a diatribe against kingship per se than as an argument against “consolidation” and in favor of state governments. Benjamin Franklin went so far as to inform the members of the Philadelphia convention that the day would eventually come when America would be a monarchy: “There is a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government. It sometimes relieves them from Aristocratic domination . . . It gives more of the appearance of equality among Citizens, and that they like.”10 Neither Federalists nor Antifederalists led ideological crusades against monarchy. Their arguments for and against one-person rule were predominantly pragmatic in nature.

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“Despite the vehemence with which Patriots had rejected the monarchy,” observes historian Forrest McDonald, “the monarchical habit died hard, for thorough conditioning had left its mark.” Sometimes Americans displayed a fascination with royalty suggesting that the republicanism of the revolutionary years was only skin deep. Quite striking are the regular contemporary newspaper accounts of the comings and goings of the French royal family, the celebrations of birthdays of Louis XVI and of the birth of the dauphin, and the insistence of the Congress upon displaying a portrait of Louis and Marie Antoinette in its meeting hall.11 The peak of pro-monarchical sentiment was reached with the adulation Americans heaped upon George Washington—their repeated references to him as a regal figure, and their not infrequent expressions of hope that the first President might become a monarch. Although John Adams did not want a monarch, he did want a strong government, and to that end he proposed to the Senate that the chief executive be addressed as “His Highness the President of the United States.” Madison worried in earnest that titles “dangerous to republicanism” were receiving consideration, while other Americans more lightheartedly disposed of the proposal by suggesting the title of “His Rotundity” for the portly Adams.12 All in all, the proposals for something resembling monarchy were not a laughing matter, or only seem so in retrospect due to the sharp rebuff they met from George Washington. No less than Hamilton, the first President longed for fame and immortality, but as an admirer of Addison’s Cato he knew better than to seek such goals through monarchical pretensions. Gaining a deathless name through founding and serving a republic was his goal,13 so he self-consciously played the role of Cincinnatus, the Roman who reluctantly left his plow to lead his country and humbly returned to the farm when his political task was completed.14 A dedicated republican, Washington realized that ambition was acceptable only if channeled to serve the public good. It is doubtful that he ever had any monarchical thoughts, and if he did, they were along the lines of Bolingbroke’s Patriot King15 who would save his country from party divisions.16 Once Washington refused a throne, no one else could ever sit on one. Antimonarchical rhetoric came into its own when Jefferson and Madison accused Hamilton of wishing to usurp power. How quickly Jeffersonians resorted to the charge that Hamilton was a modern-day Caesar, out to corrupt the republic, may be seen in the early debates over strict versus loose construction of the Constitution. When President Washington asked

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his secretaries of the Treasury and of State for their opinions on the question of the constitutionality of a national bank, Hamilton argued in favor, Jefferson against. Their debate in this 1791 encounter was still reasonably cordial and was kept contained within the inner circles of government. By 1793 England and revolutionary France were at war, and when the President moved toward a Proclamation of Neutrality, Hamilton defended the constitutionality of the President’s decision in the Gazette of the United States, a newspaper that reached an audience outside the ranks of public officialdom. Jefferson insisted that Hamilton must be answered, and when Madison did so, the battle between Federalist and Jeffersonian parties became an open and heated struggle. In his rejoinder Madison questioned Hamilton’s loyalty and his commitment to the principles of republican government. “Several pieces with the signature of Pacificus [Hamilton] were lately published, which have been read with singular pleasure and applause by the foreigners and degenerate citizens among us, who hate our republican government and the French revolution.”17 Madison made full use of Hamilton’s vulnerability to the charge that he yearned for monarchy. At the Constitutional Convention Hamilton had suggested that the executive and upper house hold office for life, to his mind a proposal that was compatible with republicanism since he had not sanctioned the hereditary principle, but to the minds of Madison and Jefferson certain proof that Hamilton was living in the wrong country. In the eyes of the Jeffersonians, the division of the country between supporters and opponents of Hamilton was a fight to the finish between monarchists and republicans.18 To Hamilton’s argument that the power to make treaties naturally inheres in the executive, Madison responded with the vehement statement that “in theory this is an absurdity—in practice a tyranny.”19 Only on the assumption that Hamilton was a monarchist could one make sense of his position. “The power of making treaties and the power of declaring war are royal prerogatives in the British government,” Madison observed, “and are accordingly treated as executive prerogatives by British commentators.”20 In England even the most enlightened of writers, John Locke, was mentally corrupted by the monarchical environment he inhabited: “The chapter [of the Second Treatise] on [royal] prerogative shows how much the reason of the philosopher was clouded by the royalism of the Englishman,”21 complained Madison. “Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption,” wrote an outraged Jefferson.22 Neither Jefferson nor Madison

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could see anything but villainy in the Secretary of the Treasury’s efforts to become a Prime Minister directing the legislature; neither remembered that Hume had preceded Hamilton in suggesting that executive “influence” was needed to govern in a system of checks and balances.23 The Jeffersonian insistence upon strict separation of powers reached a fulfillment when the new capital on the Potomac was so constructed that members of the different branches of government lived and were buried in total segregation.24 From a Jeffersonian viewpoint, Hamilton’s program of a national bank, executive influence over the legislature, and a standing army was a repetition, on American soil, of the corruption that had overtaken the British government and which necessitated the War of Independence. It was not enough, then, to call Hamilton a monarchist; Jefferson liked nothing better than to relate the story of a dinner at which Hamilton supposedly chose Caesar as “the greatest man that ever lived.”25 Madison publicly hung the label of a modern-day Caesar on Hamilton as early as 1793, when he answered Hamilton’s Pacificus essays by writing under the name of Helvidius, a Roman senator willing to risk his life in order to stop the machinations of a despotic emperor.26 Madison had come very far, indeed, in the six years since he and Hamilton in the Federalist shared the name of Publius, scourge of the tyrant Tarquin and founder of the Roman republic. From Plutarch’s lives of the noble Romans in 1787, Madison had moved in 1793 to Tacitus’s lives of the ignoble Roman monarchs and of the few brave souls who dared stand in opposition to the gravediggers of the Republic. Overnight, and as a direct consequence of the growth of the party divisions inspired by Hamilton’s program, antimonarchical rhetoric had come of age. To the end of his days Jefferson viewed the conflict between his Republicans and the Federalists as a contest “between the advocates of republican and kingly government.” Hamilton was high on his list of those who were out to “monarchise” America, and many years would have to pass before Jefferson agreed to erase the name of John Adams from the scroll of infamy. Never did he budge from his original assessment that the Federalists were “monocrats.” In 1818 he still held that the Federalists had been “monarchists in principle,” and in 1819 he wrote that “the revolution of 1800 . . . was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.”27 Reading Jefferson is the best way to learn the antimonarchical idiom that became standard usage in American politics.28 All through the nineteenth century, caustic antimonarchical language

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continued to be voiced, and could be heard as late (at least) as FDR’s tirade against the “economic royalists,” “the privileged princes of [the] new economic dynasties,” the rulers of the “new kingdoms” who stood in the way of his New Deal.29 To hear his speech of 1936 one would think that Roosevelt was spokesperson of the French Third Republic, the regime born in defiance of two royal houses (Bourbon and Orleanist), and which contended throughout its history with the menace of the monarchy-loving Action française. Obviously the images conjured up by political rhetoric, especially when energized by party politics, have a life of their own. The absence of a monarchical regime or party in American history has not prevented antiroyalist discourse from attaining life everlasting in the repertoire of insults and accusations. The life of the second-party system was never livelier than when Whigs and Democrats took turns accusing one another of harboring monarchist tendencies. In the public statements of the Whigs, Jackson was not the President but King Andrew the First. Democrats retaliated by drawing a parallel between the Whigs’ national bank and England’s bank, the latter denounced by Commonwealthmen as source and symbol of monarchical “corruption.” Later, when Jacksonians ran afoul of the British during Polk’s pursuit of Manifest Destiny, Congressman John S. Chipman declared that “if conflict should come between republican and monarchical systems, he would be glad to see it in his day.” Jacksonians announced to their countrymen that the antiexpansionary Whigs were the tools of the English monarchy.30 Monarchy-bashing continued when the modern Republican party replaced the Whigs as the opponents of the Jacksonian Democrats. One of the less noticed but far from insignificant features of the Lincoln-Douglas debates was the alacrity with which each candidate tried to pin the monarchical epithet on the other. In Douglas’s view, Lincoln was guilty of trying “to govern the Territories . . . without their consent and against their will. Thus, he asserts for his party the identical principle asserted by George III and the Tories of the Revolution.” Not to be outdone, Lincoln defined the issue of his day as a choice between “the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time . . . The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”31 At the turn of the twentieth century, both the Populists and the Robber Barons they attacked made use of the American disdain for monarchy. In a passionate speech of 1883, Colorado Populist Davis H. Waite aroused his audience by inviting them to join with him in fighting a war “which must

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always be waged against oppression and tyranny to preserve the liberties of man—that eternal warfare of monarchy and monopoly against the rights of the people to self-government.”32 A decade later, the editors of the Farmers’ Alliance charged that “Railroad kings have . . . risen with power under present law to exact slavish and impoverishing tribute from all.”33 William Jennings Bryan, kicking off his bid for the Presidency in 1900, denounced the imperialism of the Republicans as proof that their party adhered to “monarchical” rather than “republican” principles; Bryan charged that the Republicans were duplicating “the position taken by the English government in 1776,” and that they were trying to “imitate European empires.”34 Andrew Carnegie, a man Populists loved to hate, deflected criticism from his deeds through projecting an image of himself as an arch-enemy of the reign of monarchical and aristocratic privilege.35 Usually Americans have employed antimonarchical rhetoric to attack the other political party. Occasionally the same vocabulary has served to foster one or another policy proposal that cuts across party lines. President John Quincy Adams called for the establishment of a national university, justifying his initiative by proclaiming that the American republic must demonstrate its willingness to compete with European monarchies.36 As late as the Progressive era, C. R. Van Hise, classmate of La Follette and President of the University of Wisconsin, argued that the time had come for a republic to prove it was willing to support higher education as generously as any monarchy.37 Of course, educational debates did sometimes divide Americans along party lines, notably when Whigs argued for control of common schools by the states, and Jacksonians countered with warnings against antirepublican schemes of consolidation. Not infrequently, the Democrats contrasted their defense of local control with the “Prussian”38 and monarchical proposals of the Whigs. Sometime in the twentieth century antimonarchical rhetoric quietly died, and no one attended the funeral or wrote its obituary because it had outlived its usefulness. With no monarchies left to combat, forms of political speech that lived by attacking kings and courts became pointless. Antimonarchical rhetoric had always flourished despite the absence of a credible internal monarchical threat; but it could not survive in the absence of viable external monarchies to fear and hate. At most, nowadays one encounters an occasional quaint reminder of the speech of times past, as in the racially inspired epithet “welfare queen.” More importantly, as the twentieth century unfolded and new evils

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came to the fore, personified by Stalin and Hitler, a new vocabulary came into being, in which words such as “dictatorship” and “totalitarianism” decisively overrode the old language which dealt with princes, kings, monarchs, and courts.

Down with the Aristocrats “He who attempts to set up a republic in a place where there are many [feudal lords] cannot do so unless he first wipes them all out,” remarked Machiavelli.39 There were no nobles to purge, at the most only Loyalists to ship off to Canada, in a country that lacked First and Second Estates. Americans boasted that, unlike Europeans, they had no feudal past to overcome40; yet the pages of American history overflow with examples of politicians determined to unmask the “aristocrats” reputedly seeking sanctuary within the opposing party. The test of true republicans has been their record in exposing an inexhaustible number of stealthy aristocrats surrounding an invisible throne. An early indication of how hostile Americans would be to the slightest hint of a noble caste may be seen in their strong reaction against the Order of the Cincinnati, whose proud military officers, French and American, victorious in the Revolutionary war, wanted to pass membership on to their sons by hereditary succession. Jefferson in 1784 summarized for George Washington the objections of many citizens to the Order: “They urge that it is . . . against the letter of some of our constitutions, against the spirit of them all; that the foundation on which these are built is the natural equality of man, the denial of every preeminence but that annexed to legal office, and particularly the denial of a preeminence by birth.”41 General Washington wasted no time before insisting that the Order be based on other than hereditary principles.42 One might think the formal outlawing of titles of nobility in the Constitution would have ended the campaign against aristocracy. In truth the battle had just begun. Jeffersonians would fight one campaign after another against “aristocrats” and “nobles,” and the cause was taken up with a vengeance by the Jacksonians, who provided what was probably the most strident and relentless opposition in American history to anything resembling privilege or preferential treatment. Populists were adept in their day at reissuing the old Jacksonian message, and to their voices we may add those of the immensely influential land reformer Henry George, the Pro-

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gressive historian J. Allen Smith, and the socialist agitator Eugene Debs. All the major parties, some minor ones, many reformers, and even some conservatives liked nothing better than to lambast would-be American “aristocrats.” The fruitful aristocracy-bashing of the Jacksonians grew on fields cleared and ploughed by their Jeffersonian predecessors, John Taylor, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, and Jefferson himself, to name but a few. Among the accomplishments of an arch-Republican planter from Virginia, John Taylor of Caroline, was his considerable success at removing the onus of aristocracy from the South and placing it on a man who was Northern and Eastern to the core, Federalist John Adams. Turnabout is fair play, thought Taylor, who filed the charge of aristocracy-lover against the same Adams who in 1776 had wondered out loud whether the “Barons of the South” would support the Revolution.43 In 1814 Taylor published a long-winded harangue accusing the ex-President—much as John Stevens had in 1787 (above, ch. 3)—of advocating aristocracy. Taylor does not always deal with Adams evenhandedly in An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States. It is unfair to liken the views of Adams in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States to those of Filmer and misleading to say that the crusty New Englander wished that the President, the Senators, and the “natural aristocrats” would become hereditary rulers. Nor is it accurate to imply that Adams consciously intended his proposals of 1787 for mixed and balanced government to undermine popular sovereignty.44 Taylor was quite effective, on the other hand, in using Jeffersonian premises to deflate the historical method that Adams had employed when arguing the inevitability of aristocracy. An excited Thomas Jefferson had written to radical Joseph Priestley in 1801 that “We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of our Republic is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new.”45 Taylor was as uninterested as Jefferson in studying the historical record of crime and folly; but he knew even better than his master how to free political thought from the burden of the past that weighed down Adams’s thought and threatened to condemn humanity to perpetual aristocratic rule. Time and again Taylor challenged Adams to prove his underlying assumption, that examples drawn from every age and culture were pertinent to Americans living in the early nineteenth century. “Do the Americans

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recognize themselves in a group of Goths, Vandals, Italians, Turks and Chinese?” If Adams wished to make use of ancient Greece, was it not “incumbent upon him to have proved . . . that our state of manners and knowledge is . . . exactly similar to theirs?” Why appeal to Athens when its democracy and America’s “were founded in principles exactly opposite to each other?” In general, one may say that Adams’s “whole political system [of orders and balances] is built with materials which have vanished.”46 Having demolished the foundations of Adams’s thought, Taylor went on to offer a new “political science” fit for the new age begun by the American revolution. “Mr. Adam’s political system deduces government from a natural fate; the policy of the United States deduces it from moral liberty.” For the modern age, theories of government by the consent of the governed are not baseless abstractions but well-grounded inferences derived from the spread of education to the general body of the citizenry. All the old aristocracies are hopelessly outmoded and out of place on American soil. Their day is gone forever.47 Taylor built a bridge to the Jacksonians who followed him when he insisted that Adams had ignored the true threat of aristocracy in the modern age, which came from “the aristocracy of patronage and paper,” the “monied aristocracy,” the “pecuniary aristocracy.” In modern history Prime Minister Robert Walpole and the Bank of England had sponsored the growth of a completely new aristocracy; and now America, with its national bank, was in danger of duplicating English corruption.48 Taylor was an “Old Republican,” faithful to the good old cause and contemptuous of the Jeffersonian presidents who failed to destroy the aristocracy-breeding bank. One final form of aristocracy which Jeffersonians combated was what Joel Barlow and John Taylor called the “judicial nobility.” Jefferson himself objected to a branch of government “unelected by and independent of the nation,” a judiciary which is guilty of “driving us into consolidation” and must be stopped from usurping the power of “exclusively explaining the Constitution.”49 Many Jeffersonians agreed that in its lifetime offices, its exemption from accountability, and its abuse of power, the judiciary—especially the Supreme Court—closely resembled an aristocracy. Whenever Taylor, Jefferson, Barlow, or others set out to expose the aristocrats, they did so in the name of reinvigorating the American commitment to the republican creed. Exactly what they meant by a “republic” may not be clear, but we may rest assured that they were talking about mod-

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ern republics grounded in notions of social contract, consent, and popular sovereignty. Had they been speaking as “classical” republicans, their denunciations of nonfeudal aristocracy would be incomprehensible, for nothing mattered more to Aristotle and Cicero than that the natural aristocrats should rule. Much of American history is about finding ways to transform popular sovereignty from an abstract doctrine into a living reality; this could not happen, believed the Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and later democrats, until all aristocratic tendencies were weeded out of the political culture of the United States. There was one crucial, formative moment that set the pattern for the many subsequent efforts to root out the aristocrats and safeguard the sovereignty of the people. If Hamilton inadvertently crystallized antimonarchical sentiment, then Adams did the same for aristocracy. His discussion of “natural aristocracy” and the responses to it constitute a pivotal turn in American history. Before Hamilton supposedly lauded the monarchical principle,50 Americans did not know that they despised monarchy; similarly, before Adams sought to demonstrate the inevitability of aristocracy, they did not know how much they hated aristocracy. Even after Adams published his Defence of the Constitutions, many Americans took their time before abandoning the idea of a natural aristocracy. None other than Thomas Jefferson responded to Adams with the query, “May we not even say, that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?”51 That Jefferson the democratic republican should speak favorably of the natural aristocracy sounds strange only if we forget the words of Harrington in his Oceana: “the wisdom of the commonwealth is in the aristocracy”; “a nobility or gentry in a popular government . . . is the very life and soul of it.”52 Lord Bolingbroke, whose works were well known to the colonists, strongly seconded Harrington’s views on the need for a landed ruling elite.53 Many a Virginia plantation owner, raised from childhood to believe he was born to rule, must have concluded that Harrington and Bolingbroke were brilliantly insightful authors.54 The outstanding characteristic of Adams’s political treatise was that he showed both the inevitability and the undesirability of a natural aristocracy. The early Adams who repeated the radical Whig maxim “Where annual elections end, tyranny begins,” who was unenthusiastic about the

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“barons of the South,” and who opposed the Order of the Cincinnati55 did not disappear completely. He continued to believe in popular sovereignty, but thought nothing could be more precarious, or more contrary to the normal course of things, than genuinely popular government.56 The contention of the Defence, that the aristocrats must be “ostracized” to the upper chamber, was cribbed from the Genevan democrat de Lolme’s The Constitution of England (1775).57 De Lolme, in turn, may have borrowed the part of his argument dealing with the vulnerability of popular governments to aristocratic takeover from another Genevan democrat, Jean Jacques Rousseau. For Plato’s cycle of governments, which devolves from the heights of aristocracy to the depths of anarchical, tyrant-breeding democracy, Rousseau substituted a scheme of degeneration in the Social Contract wherein each new regime is further removed than its predecessor from the simple decency of a democratic world.58 Rousseau, de Lolme, and Adams were three democrats who bemoaned the fate of democratic regimes, which were condemned to yield sooner or later to self-perpetuating aristocracies. The lesson Adams passed on to his fellow citizens was that only eternal vigilance could keep the aristocrats at bay; anything less, and popular sovereignty would surely slip away. During the 1787 debates over ratification of the Constitution, Hamilton and Madison yearned for a natural aristocracy, and the Antifederalists warned against the same. Publius (Madison) expressed his ardent hope that the new regime would be governed by rulers who would “refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.” Publius (Hamilton) believed that “the idea of an actual representation of all classes of the people by persons of each class is altogether visionary.” Artisans, mechanics, and tenant farmers, Hamilton was certain, knew their commercial and agricultural interests would best be served by electing educated merchants and landlords.59 One might well argue, however, that the future of American politics was implicit in what Publius did not dare say. Nowhere do Hamilton and Madison refer to Adams, nor does the expression “natural aristocracy” appear in the Federalist, even though that was precisely what its authors recommended. Unwillingness to utter Adams’s words indicates that Hamilton and Madison suspected their views might prove embarrassing if explicitly stated. The Antifederalists, by contrast, were forever citing Adams and repeat-

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ing his admonitions that a new aristocracy was in the making. To keep office holders under surveillance, the Antifederalists insisted that representatives “mirror” the public, recording rather than shaping public opinion, replicating rather than improving upon “the people.” Ordinary traders, farmers, mechanics, fishermen should sit in Congress, argued George Mason, the Federal Farmer, Brutus, Melancton Smith, and other Antifederalists. In demeanor, comportment, manners, speech, dress, education, and occupation, representatives must be indistinguishable from the persons they represent.60 The distrust of the Antifederalists for political elites was destined to gain a new and enduring life during the Jacksonian era. Not for Old Hickory the idea of his presidential predecessor—that a national university should be created which would train the natural aristocrats of the next generation. Ordinary folk were good enough for just about any governmental position. In his first annual message, Jackson maintained that “the duties of all public officers are . . . so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance; and I can not but believe that more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience.” Rotation in administrative as well as elective office, Jackson assured the public, “constitutes a leading principle of the republican creed.”61 So self-evident was “the republican creed” that neither Jackson nor any Jacksonian bothered to spell out its most basic tenets. We are unlikely to be mistaken, however, if we assume that the Jacksonians were thinking of the opposition Whig ideology of Trenchard and Gordon, dear to the rebels of 1776, which held that the rulers are always apt to abuse power. Another fairly safe inference is that, since the Jacksonians spoke so frequently of reform as “restoration,” they were under the spell of Machiavelli’s famous notion that regimes must be periodically renewed by a return to first principles.62 Those first principles consisted, morally, of a philosophy of the sovereignty of the people, as inferred from the writings of Locke. Empirically, Jacksonians inferred from Adams that each generation must strike down its rising aristocrats. The many later political movements beholden to the Jacksonian moment would continue to ferret out the everregenerating supply and variety of aristocrats who strive to rule America. Cries for equal rights, the end of monopoly and privilege, and the suppression of aristocracy were the stock in trade of Jacksonians. Hereditary nobility, admittedly, was not the threat; but the world as seen through Jack-

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sonian eyes continued to be divided into two groups: the nonproductive and parasitical order of financiers, bankers, speculators, and corporate managers on the one side, and on the other the productive, hard-working farmers and artisans. Jacksonian politicians made careers out of saving the people from the schemes hatched by the leisured and corrupt few who would live off the labor of the many. In Jacksonian America, anyone who made money without working with his hands was an aristocrat whose very existence demeaned the great many laborers and common folk with dirt under their nails. The editorials written by William Leggett during the 1830s offer a good sampling of how Jacksonian antiaristocratic rhetoric became especially hyperbolic whenever the topic of discussion was “banking incorporations.” Page after page is sprinkled with hits at “Bank Tories,” the “Paper Dynasty,” “the noble order of the money-changers.” “Our aristocracy, our scrip nobility” is reducing free Americans to “serfs”; under its auspices a new feudalism threatens to arise on the free soil of the United States. The ranks of the American Whig party, which supports the Bank of the United States, are full of “consumers, the rich, the proud, the privileged—of those who, if our Government were converted into an aristocracy, would become our dukes, lords, marquises and baronets.” At this rate the day may come when “Henry Clay [will be] crowned King, and the opposition members of the Senate made peers of the realm,”63 warned Leggett. The bank was not the only aristocratic enemy. Jacksonians found another hatchery of aristocrats in the military academies which train the officer corps. Indeed, to Jacksonians the academies represented the worst of all possible worlds, because they were monarchical as well as aristocratic. As late as 1881, a professor at West Point felt compelled to defend his institution against the charge that it was monarchical and aristocratic rather than republican: “Of late,” wrote Emory Upton, “no argument has been used more effectively to prevent military legislation than the assertion that the principles of military organization abroad are designed to support monarchies, and that, if not dangerous, they are at least incompatible with free institutions. No delusion could be greater. The student of modern history cannot fail to discover that the principles of organization, like those of strategy, are of universal application.”64 After the Civil War, the Democrats had a new aristocratic dragon to slay: the Civil Service Commission that threatened to eliminate the spoils of office. Joining them on their quest to save spoils from the reformers were the

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Stalwart Republicans, who were indifferent to ideologies and eager for patronage and emoluments. “The commission defended itself against charges of creating an intellectual aristocracy,” notes Stephen Skowronek, “by proclaiming that a grammar school education was all that was needed to pass in most cases.”65 Obviously the Commission was cowed by the tradition of hostility to anything that smacked in the least of rule by elites. Compounding the difficulties of civil service reformers were the claims of the political bosses that the proposals of the reformers were “Prussian” and thus monarchical as well as aristocratic.66 Mugwump reformer E. L. Godkin wanted nothing more than for civil service reform to usher in the day of an American-style aristocracy which would instill civility and the sense of a civilizing mission into the social circles of capitalist tycoons.67 Sadly for him, Godkin could not fend off forever the recognition of the futility of his goals, so he eventually purchased a one-way ticket on a ship to England. What chance did Godkin have against Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, ever on the lookout for those “name-parted-inthe-middle aristocrats” who would inflict “the curse of Civil Service reform” upon an unsuspecting public?68 Plunkitt’s focus was on the city; Henry George and the Populists looked to the countryside. George himself was no Populist, voted for Cleveland in 1892, and advocated a single tax on land that did not appeal to farmers. Nevertheless his stress on the maldistribution of land and the attendant threat of aristocracy encouraged some of his followers to ally with the Populists.69 “Is there not growing up among us a class who have all the power without any of the virtues of aristocracy?”, asked George in Progress and Poverty (1879). “The development of manufactures and exchange, acting in a social organization in which land is made private property,” he continued, “threatens to compel every worker to seek a master, as the insecurity which followed the final break-up of the Roman Empire compelled every freeman to seek a lord.”70 The Populists endlessly reiterated the theme of George (and the Jacksonians before him) of a new feudalism that was threatening to overtake America. Thomas E. Watson warned of the advent of “a more brutal and godless and rapacious nobility than ever rode, lance in rest, over the peasantry of Feudal Europe.” Other Populists concluded that “we are living in a state of modern feudalism under a Commercial despotism more powerful than those other despotisms of the past.” The constant complaint of the Populists was that railroad magnates and bankers constituted an “over-

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bearing, despotic, insulting monied aristocracy” which intended to “reduce the sovereign people to a state of vassalage.”71 One might anticipate that the relationship between the old-fashioned agrarian Populists and the modern-style Marxian socialist Eugene Debs would be marked by displays of mutual animosity. As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. For its part, the agrarian press treated Debs sympathetically, especially after his brave stand during the Pullman strike (1894) and despite his decision to become a socialist. Debs returned the favor by sometimes endorsing the Populist movement.72 Undoubtedly, the willingness of Debs to borrow the old language of aristocracy-bashing formed one of the lasting links between his socialists and the Populists. Because of the indifference of the American Federation of Labor to the plight of unskilled workers, Debs attacked Gompers’s organization as a “craft union aristocracy.” Nativists, in Debs’s speeches, figure as persons “entertain[ing] . . . aristocratic notions of their own assumed superiority.”73 Generally speaking, the Progressives were too progressive to devote their energies to a rehash of the old language of aristocracy-baiting. Yet when J. Allen Smith, a Progressive historian, set out in The Spirit of American Government (1907) to discredit the reactionary justices of the Supreme Court, he did so by rejuvenating the old themes. In his opinion, the vaunted Constitution amounted to little more than a betrayal in 1787 of the democratic principles of 1776. The framers substituted a “reactionary” system of checks and judicial review, suitable to monarchy and aristocracy, for the democratic aspirations of the revolutionaries. Hiding behind those checks and benefiting from an antidemocratic judiciary is an “industrial aristocracy.” Neither France nor any modern democracy permits a handful of judges or an antiquated polity to frustrate the popular will. Why, demands Smith, should the American democrat, alone among modern democrats, continue to lose out to the aristocrat?74 When Woodrow Wilson offered the country his New Freedom version of Progressivism, he too took up the old democratic rhetoric. In an earlier incarnation, the instinctively conservative Wilson had shied away from Jefferson the dangerous radical: “we must pronounce [Jefferson], though a great man, not a great American,”75 Wilson had declared in 1894, because he uncritically accepted the old Federalist charge that Jefferson adhered to “the abstract French democratic philosophy.”76 Now, in 1912, he changed his tune and announced that Jefferson needed to be reinvigorated, not re-

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jected. Speaking in the names of his illustrious Democratic predecessors, Jefferson and Jackson, Wilson denounced the “deadening aristocracy of privilege” and called for “setting the little men of America free” from overmighty, monopolistic corporations.77 Thorstein Veblen may have been the most off-beat thinker of the Progressive era, eccentric in style, iconoclastic in message, but his books had deep roots in the Jacksonian past. Especially in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Veblen displayed an uncanny knack for revitalizing the old attacks on incipient aristocracy. The business leaders, in his view, were setting themselves up as a new “leisure class,” and, like all previous aristocracies, they were fast becoming “parasites” whose lifestyle was one of “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste.” For labor they had nothing but disdain, and one of the greatest threats they posed was that the productive engineers, technicians, and workers might be tempted to emulate rather than replace the pridefully useless captains of industry. A more Jacksonian harangue is difficult to imagine. Also in common with his Jacksonian predecessors, Veblen indicted the universities as “corporations of the aristocracy of learning.” Within the ivycovered walls, learning is a matter of flaunting class prowess; hence the more useless the learning, the better, which is why liberal arts rather than engineering constitute the core of the curriculum. Higher education, in short, is simply another form of “conspicuous waste.”78 Whenever Veblen stated his positive goals for the society of the future, he did so in the new voice of the technocrats. When he poured scorn on existing society, he instinctively returned to the old idiom of aristocracybashing. Restoration is the theme common to many of the stories of Americans conducting peaceful purges of rising aristocracies. “Reform” and “restoration” have so often been one and the same in American history that Progressive thinker Herbert Croly concluded that the reform tradition was a major obstacle to genuine reform.79 Much may be said for Croly’s argument, but not everything. Jeffersonian and Jacksonian efforts to eradicate aristocracy, insofar as they were attempts to “complete the American Revolution,” were far from reactionary. Everyone knows that the republicans of nineteenth-century France were constantly on the prowl for ways to “complete the French revolution”; less well known but equally important is the corresponding movement in the United States.

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“The Revolution of 1776 . . . is not yet fully accomplished,” contended Jacksonian Stephen Simpson in 1831. The very hour we established the principle of equality and the fact of nominal political independence, we submitted to all the forms, usages, and trappings of the old gothic monarchies . . . We opened our arms wide to receive the laws, customs, manners, fashions, morals, literature, arts, science, and manufactures of our defeated enemy . . . Governments, to be sustained and perpetuated, must be followed up by manners, fashions, customs, and laws congenial to their peculiar principles, or they become degenerated, perverted, and turned from their original end and spirit.

Simpson and other Jacksonians were strong advocates of a democratic cultural revolution. “Teach those who toil how to think, and toil will no longer be degrading,” wrote Simpson. Good public primary schools are therefore as essential as private higher education is pernicious. “The feudal forms of all colleges and universities place an insuperable barrier between the unlettered mechanic and the [upper classes] . . . The Doctor of Laws, the Master of Arts, and other similar unmeaning titles betray the aristocracy of the revival of learning under popes, kings, emperors, princes.” Another Jacksonian complained that “it is well known that a very large proportion of the young men who annually leave our colleges carry with them a decided anti-popular bias.”80 In 1837 an editor of the Democratic Review, probably John O’Sullivan, noted that “we are cowed by the mind of England. We follow feebly and afar in the splendid track of a literature molded on the whole . . . by ideas and feelings of an utterly anti-democratic social system . . . Our ‘better educated classes’ drink in an anti-democratic habit of feeling and thinking from the copious, and it must be confessed delicious, fountain of the literature of England, . . . poisoning at the spring the young mind of our people.” One Jacksonian after another called for a new literature, American in its physical setting, democratic in its preoccupations. “We have a principle, an informing soul, of our own, our democracy . . . This must be the animating spirit of our literature.”81 When Herman Melville decided to add his voice to the Jacksonian chorus calling for a democratic literature, he took direct aim at the greatest of English writers. “Unconditional adoration of Shakespeare has grown to be a part of our Anglo Saxon superstitions . . . What sort of a belief is this for

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an American, a man who is bound to carry republican progressiveness into Literature, as well as into Life?” Melville would prefer mediocrity in American letters to excellence obtained through aping foreign literature. “Let us away with this Bostonian leaven of literary flunkeyism towards England.”82 The Jacksonians were determined to leave no stone unturned in their program for completing the Revolution. “All history has to be rewritten; political science and the whole scope of all moral truth to be considered and illustrated in the light of the democratic principle.” Instead of the history of great men, the Jacksonians would relate the chronicle of the inventions of workers engaged in the mechanical and “useful” arts. Knowing how to make a shoe was, in their estimation, more important than being able to deliver a speech. Benjamin Franklin, “once an obscure journeyman printer,” was their hero if a hero they were willing to have.83 Frederick Robinson was among the Jacksonians who regarded the judiciary as “the headquarters of the aristocracy.” Judges must therefore be made accountable to the electorate. Also objectionable is the common law, because it is an import from aristocratic England and because judges interpret it as they please, though always in favor of the wealthy. “Instead of living under British laws after we had thrown off the government which produced those laws,” wrote Robinson, “we should have adopted republican laws, enacted in codes, written with the greatest simplicity and conciseness, alphabetically arranged in a single book, so that every one could read and understand them for himself.”84 Both in Jacksonian America and in Jacobin France there were ideologues who attempted an egalitarian cultural revolution. On both sides of the Atlantic, aristocrats of every imaginable variety (elitists in updated parlance) were subjected to ridicule and humiliation. The difference between the two countries is that the egalitarian offensive established deep and lasting roots in America but not in France. Thus, although the Academies in France, symbols of intellectual aristocracy, were closed during the Revolution, they were soon reopened; the elitist grandes écoles remain formidable down to our own times. Strikingly different was the outcome in America: Jacksonians berated professors of (aristocratic) English literature in the nineteenth century, and today’s antielitist (and Jacksonian?) professors of literature employ postmodern jargon to deny that Shakespeare is superior to Madonna or Bach to Rap. Outside the university, when Republican congressmen of our age attack liberal intellectuals, they frequently do so in the name of popular culture.

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Newt Gingrich declared that the Republicans of the 1994 elections were the true heirs of, in his words, “the Jacksonian revolution—a populist uprising of the increasing middle class that bears an uncanny resemblance to the upheavals we are undergoing today.” Applauding Jacksonian America, “where mass tastes and a common popular culture prevailed,” Gingrich hails radio “talk shows” of the Rush Limbaugh type as boons to democracy because “they give people a place to ventilate and to have a public dialogue rather than simply being lectured by the elite commentators.”85 Republican rhetoric addressed what never did, never would, and never could exist in America: monarchy and aristocracy. It prevented Americans from discussing what did exist, the remarkable political phenomenon they invented, modern democratic parties. Yet it served parties well. No one understood that better than Martin Van Buren, master practitioner and unblushing defender of partisan politics. When Van Buren offered his written appreciation of parties, theory belatedly caught up with practice.86 Democracy won every time the imaginary monarchists and aristocrats were laid low.

Republics and Democracies Throughout modern French history the words “republic” and “democracy” have been so tightly fused that neither has been able to upstage the other, nor has one known how to live without the other. In America, by contrast, the same two terms were originally understood as oppositional expressions, the word “republic” designating an admirable polity, “democracy” a degenerate political regime; then, with the rapid extension of the franchise and the demise of the politics of deference, the word “democracy” gained the upper hand and the term “republic” started to fade from the vocabulary. Every so often, however, the word “republic” has staged a brief comeback in American history at the expense of the word “democracy,” and each time this has happened, persons with black skins or foreign accents have come under attack. It was the French Revolution, not the American, which was officially not just a republican but a democratic affair. “Democratic or republican government—these two words are synonyms,” said Robespierre in one of his most famous speeches. Like every educated person in France, Robespierre knew that the Americans had espoused a republican ideology during their fight for independence. But they had shied away from embracing democ-

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racy—a mistake the Jacobins were determined not to repeat: “the French people,” continued Robespierre, “are the first people of the world who have established real democracy, by calling all men to equality and full rights of citizenship.”87 The American Founders were as careful to distance themselves from the word “democracy” as Robespierre was to cherish it. Writing in the Federalist, Madison lamented that “Under the confusion of names, it has been an easy task to transfer to a republic observations applicable to a democracy only.” Madison was for “popular government” but not democracy, because the latter regime “can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction . . . Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.” Altogether different is the modern republic that Madison champions: “A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking.” While a republic must derive its powers from “the body of the people,” it need not and should not do so directly. Constitutional machinery and able leaders who filter and refine public opinion are charged with the task of preventing the innovative new republic from degenerating into an old-style democracy.88 Antifederalists, perhaps surprisingly, show little more interest than the Federalists in praising democracy. No matter how much New Lefters of our age may want to discover their precursors in the Antifederalists, they have yet to offer a compelling case. Small was beautiful to the Antifederalists, and centralized government a worry, but a reasonable facsimile of the theme of “participatory democracy” is rather difficult to come by in the essays of the opponents to the Constitution. The “democracy” the Antifederalists stood for was the democratic element of mixed and balanced government—not democratic government per se, which to them as to the Federalists was a dangerously unstable regime.89 One of the few thinkers who praised the democratic principle at the time of the Founding was James Wilson. A leading advocate of the proposed Constitution, Wilson realized that it was one thing for Antifederalists to speak the language of mixed and balanced government, the better to call the Constitution into question, but quite another for his Federalists to praise a doctrine espousing monarchical and aristocratic elements. Much like Madison, Wilson called for institutions ultimately derived from “the people” but which featured enough checks and balances to guarantee that the will of the many will never be directly expressed in political life. Wil-

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son, however, in his speech to the Pennsylvania ratifying convention, was more daring than Madison in the Federalist: “In its principle, [the Constitution] is purely democratical: but that principle is applied in different forms, in order to obtain the advantages, and exclude the inconveniences of the simple modes of government.”90 Already in Wilson’s speech of 1787 the word “democratic” was beginning to show signs of evolving into the great legitimizing term of American politics. Old Federalist Fisher Ames’s polemical writings after the election of 1800 feature a determined renewal, at a late date, of Madison’s praise of republics and dismissal of democracies. The key to the ill-tempered rhetoric of Ames is his conviction that he speaks for the many Federalists convinced that “a violent jacobin [Jeffersonian] administration is begun.” Instead of virtue, property, and intelligence, the nation will henceforth be in the hands of vice, poverty, and ambition. “The turnpike road of history is white with the tombstones of such republics,” wrote Ames in 1801. Three years later he would conclude that “We are sliding down into the mire of a democracy.” Arts and letters will suffer, because “in democracies writers will be more afraid of the people than afraid for them.” Liberty is the masterpiece of a proper republic, but “democratic liberty is utterly untenable.”91 Ames’s effort to forestall the movement toward democracy is the forerunner of several later chapters of American history during which reactionaries of one kind or another would tout the virtues of republics in order to denounce the vices of democracies. The limits of Ames’s antidemocratic rant also prefigure the future. In spite of himself, he makes so many concessions to popular government as to give early evidence of how Americans, whenever forced to choose between a national identity as republican or democratic, repeatedly side with the latter term. After accusing the Jeffersonians of demagoguery, Ames turns around and asserts that “the body of the federalists were always, and yet are, essentially democratic in their political notions.” He readily admits that “our materials for a government were all democratic”; “in America no plan of government, without a large and preponderating commixture of democracy, can for a moment possess our confidence and attachment.” Reading Ames helps to understand how so many Federalists, after a few years of sounding the themes of arch-reaction, managed to find new homes in either the Whig or, in some cases, the Democratic party.92 When the Whig party arose to challenge Jackson, its members had to decide whether to resist or succumb to the old Federalist temptation to di-

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vide the country into good republicans (the Whigs) and bad democrats (the Democrats). Some antebellum Americans did in fact think that the issue which divided the Whigs from the Democrats was whether the nation was to be a republic or a democracy.93 The confusion of the public is understandable: at every possible opportunity, the Jacksonians lodged the charge that their opponents were nothing more than warmed over antidemocratic Federalists. And the Whigs, at times, were their own worst enemies. Repeatedly, and well into the 1840s, various Whig ideologists wrote glowing tributes to mixed and balanced government, seemingly without recognizing that they were inviting the electorate to question their commitment to democracy. One Whig characterized the Constitution as “a government distributed, balanced, checked, guarded, and accommodated to the actual state of society.” Another more bluntly identified the Senate as the “aristocratic” and the House as the “democratic” element of a mixed government.94 Add to the foregoing considerations numerous examples of overt Whig Anglophilia, and one has built a case for the Jacksonian charge that the Whigs were aristocrats who hid their hostility to democracy behind rhetorical dedications to the American “republic.” As portrayed by the Jacksonians, the Whigs were indistinguishable from the hopelessly antidemocratic French liberals. By and large, however, the Whigs chose overwhelmingly and vigorously to be as democratic, or more so, than the Democratic party. Instead of fostering a dichotomy between republics and democracies, they chose to compete with the Jacksonians for the legacy of the Jeffersonian democrats. “The Whigs stand emphatically upon the Madisonian platform,” wrote Whig pamphleteer John Pendleton Kennedy, who noted that their program of a tariff, National Bank, and internal improvements initially was the handiwork of a nationalist (as opposed to states’ rights) branch of the Jeffersonian party.95 Fellow Whig journalist Calvin Colton agreed, adding the claim common to all the Whigs that their party had adamantly rejected “the most obnoxious principle of the old Federal party,” its assumption that the government should center on the executive branch.96 Siding with the legislature was yet another link between the Jeffersonians of yesteryear and the Whigs of a later era. All in all, the Whigs held their own in the competition of the parties to claim the legacy of Jefferson the democrat. John Quincy Adams’s speech celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution (1839) shows how determined the Whigs became to avoid the Federalist mistake of siding with republics over de-

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mocracies. A man who personally embodied an evolution from Federalism to the national Republicanism of Madison to a final resting place in Whiggery, John Quincy Adams repeatedly insisted that the Constitution was democratic as well as republican.97 No doubt he was convinced that his father, too, having renewed his friendship with Jefferson during his later years, would eventually have shared the Whiggish convictions of his son.98 Tired of losing Presidential elections, by 1840 many Whigs were sympathetic with the Kentucky party member who vowed that “no fellow shall out democrat me.”99 Accordingly, in imitation of the Democrats, the Whigs nominated their own war hero, William Henry Harrison, and strove mightily to distinguish him from General Jackson by repeatedly comparing their man to Cincinnatus, Jackson to Caesar. Far better than classical allusions, however, and better even than nominating a man on a white charger, was a sustained Whig effort to outdo the Democrats in every strategy of democratic campaigning. When in 1840 the high-toned Whigs finally won the Presidency, they did so by beating the Jacksonians at their own game of hard cider, delightfully silly slogans (“Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!”), and false boasts about a candidate growing up in a log cabin. Democrat Martin Van Buren, as depicted by the Whigs, was an aristocratic dandy who perfumed his ample whiskers with “Double Extract of Queen Victoria.”100 The Whigs had come far indeed from the days when John Quincy Adams unblushingly proclaimed that elected representatives must never be “palsied by the will of our constituents.”101 During the election of 1844, Whig journalist Calvin Colton accomplished at the theoretical level what his party’s campaign four years earlier had achieved at the practical: he published an article proclaiming that since everyone in America was a democrat, no party should claim the name, and the only question was which party will better succeed in living up to democratic principles. In his view, it was the Whigs who were the “true Democrats,” whereas the monarchically predisposed Democrats were undemocratic. Along the way he commented in passing that although the words “republic” and “republican” may be of some significance in France, they were not, nor had they ever been, of much use to Americans.102 Colton’s words mark the triumph of democratic ideology and the recessional of its republican predecessor. Yet there was an exception in antebellum America to the generalization that “democracy” trumped “republic” in the political vocabulary. Although the word “democracy” swept the country everywhere else, it encountered

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formidable resistance in the South. John C. Calhoun, fearing that numerical majorities would vote slavery into oblivion, turned his animus against democracy and political parties, the latter because they are devices for calling a majority into being.103 Calhoun hated the very word “democracy” and did his best to restore “republic” to its former prominence. “We call our State a Republic, . . . not a democracy,” he said of South Carolina. The United States was also a republic rather than a democracy, he insisted, and should remain steadfastly republican. To his dying day Calhoun referred to the Democratic party as the Republican party.104 In search of republican ancestors, he cited Jefferson and Madison of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, which floated nullification as a possible response of states to an overbearing federal government.105 Attempts to make America safe from democracy by declaring it a republic did not come to a definitive close when the South lost the Civil War. William Graham Sumner is a case in point. Mention Sumner’s name, and the conversation inevitably turns to the subject of Social Darwinism. Far less appreciated is his campaign to suppress the nation’s democratic mores while accentuating its republican identity. “[Although] the outlook on the twentieth century from the industrial standpoint is in the highest degree encouraging, the outlook from the political standpoint is of the opposite character.” America’s “most urgent task” was “the purification of political institutions.” Disgusted with democratic politics in the Gilded Age, wary of plebiscites, majority rule, political machines, and parties, Sumner called for a restoration of “republican government,” by which he meant a regime dedicated solely to maintaining civil liberty.106 Sumner always had a deep aversion to “the people,” that vague entity worshipped by democratic politicians. “The ignorant, idle, and shiftless have been taught that they are ‘the people’,” he ruefully observed. Under democratic conditions the constant tendency of politicians is to capitulate to the many, with the result that future generations will fall prey to “socialism, communism, and nihilism.” Immigrants are undesirable because they are ignorant, clamor for a right to work, and have a negative effect on “the ratio of population to land.” With an eye on the influx of workers from southern and eastern Europe, Sumner decided that democracy had to be stopped at the workplace no less than in politics: “Our age is befooled by ‘democracy’ . . . Industry may be republican; it never can be democratic.” Concentration of wealth in the hands of a few corporate managers and captains of industry who will make decisions for others is the path to social

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well-being,107 just as in politics all will be well if a select few are permitted to govern the unkempt many. Like Sumner, the formidable New Englander Henry Cabot Lodge feared the new immigrants, who seemed to him the perfect audience for demagogues, anarchists, and socialists. Unlike Sumner, Lodge could trace his lineage back to the early years of the Republic. If ever someone was likely in the early twentieth century to revive the old Federalist refrain of America-the-republic, that person was surely Henry Cabot Lodge. It tells us much about the limited appeal of the old antidemocratic rhetoric, which praised republics in order to damn democracies, that the rabidly nativist Lodge always claimed to advocate “true democracy.”108 “Let us lay aside first the word republic,” wrote Lodge in 1911, because it is no longer of any use in distinguishing one political regime from another. America is and has always been a democracy. “The makers of the Constitution called their government a republic . . . But they knew that what they were establishing was a democracy.”109 The Federalists that Lodge admired were not the ultra-Federalists “in their last and worst days” who came to love England more than their own country.110 His Federalists were Washington and Adams; and Old Federalist Gouverneur Morris, too, who in Lodge’s estimation was wrongly accused of royalist and aristocratic sympathies. “He was sorry for the King and Queen, he disliked and distrusted utterly the methods of the Revolution, but despised the French royalty and nobility.” Never let it be forgotten, urges Lodge, that when the election of 1800 came down to a choice between Jefferson and Burr, Morris chose Jefferson as President.111 Neither Populists nor radicals of any kind frightened Lodge into abandoning democratic for republican rhetoric. And when his good friend and fellow patrician Theodore Roosevelt bolted the Republican party in 1912, Lodge continued to insist that it was the Grand Old Party’s political stance, not TR’s, which represented the best of American democracy. To such proposed Progressive reforms as the initiative, the referendum, and the recall of judicial decisions, Lodge responded with a eulogy of “due deliberation” in a representative assembly. Roosevelt’s stress on the executive and on plebiscites was, in Lodge’s appraisal, the very opposite of democracy.112 Party, legislature, and judiciary defined Lodge’s democracy; personal charisma, presidential government, and direct appeal to the electorate defined Roosevelt’s. Neither hyphen-hating man called for a return to the old days of republic first and democracy last.113

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Animosity against immigrants would, however, inspire another rebirth of ultra-Federalist rhetoric in the 1920s. The step Lodge avoided was taken by the advocates of the National Origins Act of 1924, who explicitly aimed at inoculating the old racial stock against further contamination. Looking for an ideological rationale to bolster their stand, the lawyers and businessmen who sponsored the bill proclaimed the United States a representative republic instead of a democracy.114 As late as 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, defender of immigrants and African Americans, urged his readers to “note the assertions of the conservative right that ours is a republic, not a democracy.”115 Possibly Moynihan was thinking of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 presidential candidate who had attempted to resurrect the anti-democracy, pro-republic theme in The Conscience of a Conservative (1960).116 The most recent act of the drama over whether America is a republic or a democracy came during the showdown between New Lefters and neoconservatives. The New Left split on the issue or was simply inconsistent. Hayden was quoted as remarking caustically that the United States “is a republic, not a democracy, and nearly everyone wants to keep it that way.”117 Unlike Hayden, many other New Lefters wanted to find in the early republic a tradition of democratic participation that was lost when the Constitution was ratified. Democratic republicanism had preceded the liberalism that betrayed it; or so leftists have wanted to believe, which is why the final chapter of Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic (1969) remains dear to their hearts. It was Wood who bemoaned “the end of classical politics” in 1787—the demise of the politics that was civic and participatory, republican and democratic. After the publication of Wood’s book, the French no longer had a monopoly on the fusion of the words “republic” and “democracy.” “Let us retrieve our republican past and all will be democratic” was the lesson the New Left lifted from the pages of Wood’s massive treatise. Although Wood did not officially withdraw the last chapter of his first book, its argument discreetly disappeared during the years leading up to his second volume, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991). Even as younger historians tried desperately to sustain and enlarge his original argument, Wood dropped his talk about “classical republicanism” and found a new outlet for his democratic faith by concentrating on the ways in which Jeffersonian and Jacksonian America completed the promise of 1776. Apparently he had come to agree with Calvin Colton’s statement

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of 1844 that “democracy” is the indispensable word of American political culture, “republic” an expendable linguistic nicety. Discussions of the decline of deference and the rise of democratic politics became the sole preoccupation of Wood’s historical labors. Gordon Wood is simply too good a historian to reduce himself to a New Left ideologue. Leading neoconservative journalist Irving Kristol rang in the 1970s by taking out of mothballs the old “America the republic rather than a democracy” argument. “The egalitarian, ‘democratic,’ temper of the American people [has] remorselessly destroyed the last vestiges of the . . . ‘republican’ cast of mind,” he wrote in On the Democratic Idea in America (1972).118 Elsewhere he held that “a republic is what we would call ‘moralistic’ in its approach to both public and private affairs; a democracy is more easygoing, more ‘permissive’ as we now say, even more cynical.”119 The course of American history, according to Kristol, may be summarized as follows: “From having been a capitalist, republican community, with shared values and a quite unambiguous claim to the title of a just order, the United States became a free, democratic society where the will to success and privilege was severed from its moral bearings.”120 Had Kristol been more of a historian, he would have recognized from the outset that in reality he was reiterating ideas the democratic Whigs had argued against democratic Jacksonians, rather than making a case for republics over democracies. His reference points were fundamentally to antebellum America, not to the Revolution or the Founding. The one thing Kristol did garner from the past was that he was the sworn enemy of “the Jacksonian-egalitarian-populist transcendental faith in the common man.”121 He also knew that his sympathies lay with the high-minded antebellum capitalists, self-controlled, dutiful, God-fearing, and devoted to public causes. Kristol’s unnamed and unknown (to him) heroes were the American Whigs.122 The effort of Irving Kristol to reanimate the old language elevating republics over democracies was an exercise in futility. By hook or by crook, American politics is always about democracy, as attested by the ability of the neoconservatives to designate the Jacksonians as the godfathers of the egalitarian and libertarian New Left, combined with their inability to name the Whigs as their own intellectual forefathers. Neoconservative Daniel Bell, like Kristol, bemoaned “the Age of Jackson,” the era during which “thought was replaced by sentiment and feeling, and each man’s sentiments were held to be as good as any others.”123 The Jacksonians were de-

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nounced by the neoconservatives one and all, but neither Bell, nor Kristol, nor any neoconservative showed the slightest awareness of the Whigs. It speaks many volumes about the triumph of democratic rhetoric that antebellum America has been named after Jackson, and that the Whigs, until recently, have not even received second billing. The neoconservative intellectuals have proved to be an ever-evolving group in their ideological identity. At the outset they were establishment liberals angry with the New Left of the 1960s and the New Politics of the 1970s. The Democratic party remained their home, and they opposed not only the New Left but the old right of the Republican party, which advocated laissez-faire in economics but Christian intervention in moral matters. The ranks of the neoconservatives included Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, and other leading social scientists who had fought against the right-wing fanaticism of Joe McCarthy and the conservative politics of Barry Goldwater. No one was better situated to criticize both right-wing and left-wing radicalism than the neocon intelligentsia of the 1970s. What these neoconservatives feared most of all was populism, whether of the right-wing variety known as McCarthyism or the left-wing kind known as the New Left. Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Bell, Lipset, and other future neoconservatives, distraught by the rise of a “radical right,”124 availed themselves of European social theories warning that “mass society” threatened to undermine the liberal elites which sustained constitutional government. Populism was the nightmare of the future neoconservatives; indirect government and the rule of competing elites was their solution. To them the counter-culture and direct democracy of the New Left was left-wing McCarthyism,125 and they responded accordingly. In the end, however, Kristol could not bear to stand aloof from America’s democratic faith. After many years spent denouncing populism, he reversed himself and wrote an essay in 1985 entitled “The New Populism: Not to Worry.” The so-called rights revolution of the New Politics (above, ch. 2) led Kristol to embrace the conservative populism of Ronald Reagan. “We have, since the 1960s, witnessed a veritable revolution in social policy in this country, a revolution-from-above, a revolution imposed on the people. That this imposition has largely been the work of a nonelected judiciary is especially exasperating.” Kristol approved of the new populism because it was “an effort to bring our governing elites to their senses. That is why so many people—and I include myself among them—who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic

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to this new populism.”126 Irving Kristol had learned to embrace democratic rhetoric. Whenever conservatives have hitched their wagons to a revival of the old praise of republics and denunciation of democracies, they have usually gained little and lost much—witness the ultra-Federalists, Calhoun, and Sumner. Time and again, the American democrat has risen up to repudiate the snobs, aristocrats, and elitists. At the beginning of the 1970s Kristol was fighting a losing battle against democracy and for a republic, against the people and for the elites. By the mid-1980s he was a born-again apologist for the Republican party, which, as Newt Gingrich has explicitly noted, is Jacksonian in its faith in the common man. On the face of it, Kristol’s has been a strange odyssey. There is something to be said, however, for the proposition that he has personally recapitulated much of American history and inadvertently testified to the omnipotence of the democratic faith and the futility of efforts to operate outside it.

Corruption and Conspiracy One more usage of republican rhetoric merits at least brief notice: the recurring theme of corruption and the remarkable American obsession with conspiracies. Virtue in America has rarely been civic virtue, but that has not prevented the republican themes of corruption and conspiracy from being sounded on many occasions. Who among the English Commonwealthmen and the American colonists was not familiar with Sallust’s The Conspiracy of Catiline? No doubt some Americans also had enough familiarity with Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy to know that its longest chapter was devoted to a study of conspiracies.127 When citizens of the United States turn against their rulers, they accuse them of conspiring to corrupt the republic. William Leggett’s antebellum editorials display a typical American outlook in particularly sharp relief. Quoting with approval Jackson’s final address to Congress, Leggett repeats the President’s warning against politicians who speak in the name of the “public good,” a vague expression permitting them to favor the interests of some groups over those of others. One part of Leggett’s “sound republican system”128 consists of denunciations of the rhetoric of the public good. The other is his worry lest bankers and politicians combine in a “conspiracy” to “corrupt” the republic. Not civic virtue but civic corruption is his concern.

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References to Roman history in the speeches of prominent Americans continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, gentlemen and scholars in politics, did not hesitate to pepper their speeches with classical references. Rather more surprisingly, such self-educated and ungentlemanly figures as Henry George and some Populists frequently sounded their alarms against the onset of corruption by drawing parallels between Roman and American history. “It was the struggle between the idea of equal right to the soil and the tendency to monopolize it in individual possession, that caused the internal conflicts of Greece and Rome,” wrote Henry George. With the growth of great landed estates, “the hardy virtues born of personal independence died out.” The poison of corruption spread throughout the body politic, and the Roman republic succumbed. A trustworthy general rule is that “a corrupt democratic government must finally corrupt the people, and when a people become corrupt there is no resurrection.”129 Americans need land reform now, he concluded, before it is too late. Not many years later various Populists argued, with Lorenzo D. Lewelling, that “we are in the same condition . . . as that of ancient Rome.” James B. Weaver agreed with Lewelling that the passage of “fourteen hundred years” had not diminished ancient Rome’s capacity to teach Americans lessons about the threat of corruption, because “like causes will produce like effects in all ages and among all peoples.”130 William Jennings Bryan believed that “Cicero only did for Rome what Jackson did for us when he destroyed the bank conspiracy and saved America.”131 So long as the fate of rural America hung in the balance, the classical theory of corruption seemed to have explanatory and hortatory value. It was not unreasonable for land reformers and agrarians to believe that the growth of luxury and the demise of freeholders spelled disaster. Henry George and the Populists managed to convince themselves that the classics were a repository of timeless wisdom about republican decline. They could not know that the ballyhooed closing of the frontier was the last moment of the Commonwealthmen and their land-centered world view. Once industrial society arrived, the old theory became a museum piece. A new age was at hand and so was a new philosophy, Progressivism, whose proponents worried that the politically defined vocabulary of classical thought stood in the way of their efforts to come to terms with the economic problems of industrial society. Conspiracy theories, deeply ingrained, were even more worthless than

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classical utterances about corruption when consulted as guides to understanding the complexities of public affairs. Rather than dig below the surface to understand why something has gone wrong, frustrated Americans personalize politics, spying conspirators who weave their evil designs behind the scenes. The most that can be said for conspiracy-mongering is that occasionally it leads to accidental good results. Looking under one’s bed for a Mason in antebellum America132 or for a Communist in more recent times is conspiracy-mongering at its worst. Less pernicious but equally unhelpful were Antifederalist charges that the proposed constitution was the handiwork of “conspirators.”133 Breaking away from England’s supposedly “conspiratorial” government was one of the more fortunate examples; best was Lincoln’s claim that Northerners had to rally to stop a “conspiracy” to spread slavery.134 Whatever the reason that Americans conjure up nonexistent conspiracies, the end results are a reaffirmation of their democratic faith and a refusal to embrace change. Not the democracy but its rulers are at fault. Not reconstruction but restoration of the good old ways is necessary. Many Jacksonian Democrats in antebellum America yearned for a restoration of times past135; after the Civil War they again demanded restoration and the repeal of Reconstruction. Progressive Herbert Croly argued in 1909 that “reform does not and cannot mean restoration”; “it is bound to mean reconstruction.”136 Within a few years Croly’s was a voice crying in the wilderness. The underlying assumption of conspiracy theories is that restoration is called for because “the people” are good but their leaders are evil. From Sallust on, conspiracy theorists have postulated that corruption and conspiracy come from above, decency and integrity from below.137 Even after the government turns rotten, the country does not degenerate until the venom seeps down from above to poison “the people” below. There is, however, one major difference between Sallust’s notions of corruption and conspiracy and those of the Commonwealthmen of America. Sallust believed that all that was best in Roman character as well as worst trickled down from above. Romans were great and virtuous when their rulers were such; Romans inevitably became corrupted once their rulers conspired to abuse the public trust. If the Roman populace was not ruined overnight, that was because ordinary citizens mindlessly heeded the old ways for some time after their betters had abandoned Roman mores. In short, the classical view of the world is from top down.

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The American and Commonwealthman view, by contrast, has been from bottom up. The people are always better than their rulers, even in good times. And when a conspiracy is afoot, it rarely is seen as a threat to the American character. The bulk of the American republic consists not of Sallust’s mindless populace but of Paine’s persons of common sense. Bad governments have been “presumptuously working to un-make man,”138 said Paine, but in democratic America they fail. Conspiracy theories, American-style, reaffirm the notion of the sovereignty of the people: sooner or later, the citizenry will lay low the conspiratorial governmental elite. Republican rhetoric is no more. It has died out because there is no longer anything for it to do. There are no monarchies left for it to defy, nor does anyone want to add another pitiful chapter to the tale of past attempts at elevating republics above democracies. Abhorrence of aristocracy lives on both in right-wing and left-wing utterances, but our contemporary attacks on elites have their historical roots in Jacksonian democracy, not in memories of a republican beginning. The contribution of republican rhetoric to partisan politics was noteworthy but ended long ago. Fears of conspiracies still abound but no longer have a direct connection with Commonwealthman ideology. Republican rhetoric has rarely been called upon to define the positive content of American political aspirations. Its uses have been overwhelmingly negative, accusatory, polemical, and partisan rather than idealistic. And never during its rather second-hand existence has it defined itself in opposition to a liberal alternative. In France, not in America, republicans confronted liberals. France, not America, is the country where a republican tradition has mattered profoundly and still matters today.

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Chapter



5

The Strange Career of Liberalism in France

The prolific writings of French nineteenth-century liberals were aesthetically pleasing, always worth reading, and frequently brilliant. As journalists and professors, historians and sociologists, literary figures and literary critics, members of academies and members of parliament, the liberals occupied the centers of intellectual influence. The finest newspapers, publishing houses, and journals were at their disposal, and the many talented liberal authors made full use of these resources. “From 1814 to 1875,” concludes André Jardin, “liberalism dominated French life.”1 Yet, more often than not, the liberals played a sorry role in public affairs and inflicted deep harm upon the liberal cause. Ultimately, it would fall to the republicans they hated to redeem the promise of liberalism in France. Not only the notorious Orleanist liberals of the July Monarchy, but also the excessively appreciated Solidarists of the turn of the twentieth century proved that liberals in power can be so conservative as to forfeit their liberal identity. What harm they did not inflict upon themselves by reacting with fear and trembling at the prospect of a democratic age, the liberals completed by squandering their energies on ever more fruitless quests for one or another mystique that would save the modern world from its mediocrity. Lost during these searches of liberals for a higher meaning were the very principles of liberalism.

From Liberal to Conservative Within the first four months of their eighteen-year reign starting in 1830, the July Monarchy liberals chose to be a “party of resistance” rather than a “party of movement.”2 Typical of the liberals was François Guizot, who 128

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vigorously defended liberal principles before the advent of a liberal regime3 but moved steadily to the right after his group assumed power. Long before the demise of the July Monarchy, he was in effect preparing himself to write his desperate electoral manifesto of April 1849, in which he sought to rally “all the elements of the party of order—Bonapartists, Legitimists, Orleanists—conservatives of all dates and nuances.”4 Order figured first on the liberals’ list of priorities, the fulfillment of liberal values last. The downfall of the liberals was their inability to come to terms with the dawning democratic age, as may be seen in the speeches and writings of RoyerCollard, Guizot, and even of Tocqueville. The word “democracy” led a double life in the thought of Pierre RoyerCollard. In the first instance he maintained that the advance of “democracy” was one and the same as the progress of civilization through the centuries, and that the Revolution of July was simply the latest installment in the old democratic story of the retreat of the nobility in the face of a rising and enlightened middle class.5 By 1837, however, a troubled Royer-Collard was ready to conclude that representative government had “lost its energy . . . in the superabundance of our democratic spirit, and in the declared preponderance of the material over the moral order, which is the life of nations.” Fearing the future, Royer-Collard declared that the day when civil equality becomes political equality, all will be lost.6 If for Royer-Collard the word “democracy” had lost its luster by 1837, then for Guizot in January of 1849, immediately following the fall of the July Monarchy, “democracy” was evil incarnate. “I am convinced,” he wrote in De la démocratie en France, “that the evil which lies at the root of all France’s evils . . . is the idolatry of democracy.” The democratic Second Republic will destroy the country unless “all the conservative forces in the country unite closely and act constantly together.” In pursuit of stability, Guizot the liberal supplied his readers with one slogan after another borrowed from the extreme right-wing reactionaries. France, he suggested, is “a great organic body” that democrats wish to tear asunder. Democratic republicans want to start the world all over again, which is impossible and destructive; they would reduce society to “a series of individuals” and demolish the links between the generations. Democrats forget that without family, property, and inheritance we are left with “nothing but individuals who appear and then vanish.” Under democracy, progress will cease and humans descend “to the level of the lower animals.”7 Guizot’s polemical tract of January 1849 might have been written by

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Bonald or de Maistre, so ardent is its conservative attack upon the relatively mild and compromising republicans of the newly emerging regime. The right-wing reactionaries might also have supplied Guizot with his proposed remedy of religious faith, Christian humility, and repentance.8 More than the other liberals, Tocqueville strove to make his peace with democracy. Whereas Royer-Collard and Guizot would halt democracy with the enfranchisement of a small percentage of the middle class, Tocqueville recognized that the triumph of universal manhood suffrage was inevitable; he knew, too, that the advent of democracy would inevitably alter all social and cultural arrangements. Knowing this, Tocqueville elected to visit America, which, despite its youth, represented Europe’s future. Perhaps Americans could afford to ignore Europe; but Europeans, thought Tocqueville, ignored America at their own peril. Born into a Legitimist family, Tocqueville effortlessly developed his defense of decentralized administration. Born a Norman noble, he had to struggle mightily to overcome his instinctive disdain for democracy in politics and society. His statement at the outset of De la démocratie en Amérique, that the coming of democracy was willed by Providence and that his book was “written under the impulse of a kind of religious dread,”9 should probably be understood as the fatalistic coating that enabled him to swallow a bitter democratic pill. Resignation rather than hope was his starting point when he set out to investigate the possibilities of democratic societies. Flirtation with despair was the closing point of his two volumes. In the final chapters of Democracy in America he speculated on the growing danger that a new form of despotism will spring forth from modern democracy—an “orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery” that, he predicted, will haunt the modern world during the ages to come. “Working back through the centuries . . . I see nothing at all similar to what is taking place before our eyes. The past throws no light on the future,” he ominously concluded, “and the spirit of man walks through the night.”10 Unlike other aristocratic liberals who assumed that one could have either democracy or culture, not both, Tocqueville tried to take seriously the possibility that America was giving birth to a democratic culture. At his best, he expressed appreciation that science in a democratic age was put to practical uses, whereas in the aristocratic past scientists “confined themselves to the proud and sterile search for abstract truths.”11 Also noteworthy was Tocqueville’s speculation that historical writing in a democratic

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age will be sociological in its reasoning and dwell upon discerning underlying causes explaining events, instead of highlighting the intentions and actions of a few persons.12 At his worst, Tocqueville simply argued deductively about culture from his model of “democratic society,” rather than making an effort to immerse himself in American art and literature. Without any references to American writings, Tocqueville concluded that the frenetic pace of a democratic society is incompatible with poetry or philosophy.13 Worse, despite the efforts of James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and other Jacksonians to create a distinctively national and democratic literature,14 Tocqueville repeated without proof the old French contention that “the Americans do not yet have, properly speaking, any literature.”15 Try as he might, Tocqueville could not rid himself of the assumption that democratic culture was inherently inferior to its aristocratic predecessor. Tocqueville’s unwillingness to acknowledge the newly emerging democratic literature of America was part of his larger refusal to understand the significance of the Jacksonians. “General Jackson is the majority’s slave,” Tocqueville wrongly asserted, and compounded the error by proclaiming that Jackson’s legacy was bound to be an enfeebled Presidency.16 Like Guizot, who admired the leadership of George Washington, “the model of all democratic chiefs,”17 Tocqueville was fond of the early American republic. He approved of the “great” party debate of Federalists and Jeffersonians but found nothing worthwhile in the “small parties” of antebellum America.18 The great issues, grand debates, and powerful oratory of the second party system, Democrats and Whigs, meant nothing to Tocqueville, perhaps because he spent so much time in the company of the antiparty Whigs, or possibly because he could not overcome his aristocratic bias against the democratic politics invented by Americans. Democracy in America is a great book but not without serious flaws, resulting from Tocqueville’s deep disdain for political, social, and cultural democracy. The slow but steady rightward drift of the French liberals under the July Monarchy became a stampede under the Second Republic. Tocqueville spoke for all the liberals when he noted, with horror, that “socialism will always remain the most essential feature of the [1848] February Revolution.” Class struggle, he suggested, was not new; unprecedented, however, were the “socialist theories, which in the shape of greedy, envious desires continued to spread among the people, sowing the seeds of future revolutions.” The doorkeeper at Tocqueville’s Parisian residence was “a slightly

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daft, drunken, good-for-nothing old soldier who spent the time he could spare from beating his wife, at the house of prostitution. One might say that this man was a socialist by birth, or rather by temperament.”19 Tocqueville’s blind reaction against the socialists should prepare us to expect even less of his liberal compatriots. Adolphe Thiers responded to 1848 with De la propriété, a treatise denouncing Louis Blanc’s “right to work” and all socialist ideas as threats to the foundations of the family, civilization, and everything that is sacred. Published in the fall of 1848, Thiers’s book hypothetically traced the development of inegalitarian property from its origins in “personal faculties,” to accumulation through labor, to hereditary transmission of wealth. Essentially, his argument was an inadvertent and unacknowledged repetition of the Discourse on Inequality, except that each historical stage which Rousseau saw as a further loss of freedom and autonomy was viewed by Thiers as indisputable progress.20 Similarly, Guizot’s Democracy in France was rushed into translation by the Tory John Wilson Croker, because he deemed it the finest defense of property since Burke. “The Social Republic,” Guizot lamented, “is at once odious and impossible. It is the most absurd, and at the same time the most perverse, of all chimeras.”21 Not just Guizot but all the liberals treated the fairly innocuous socialism of 1848 as the end of the world—or at least as the end of the intelligibility of history. Their strategy since the Restoration had been to interpret 1789 as the inevitable outcome of the rise of the Third Estate, from the earliest times to their own era. In his History of European Civilization (1828–1830) Guizot had asserted that “there can be no doubt but that the commons, the Third Estate of 1789, politically speaking, are the descendants, the heirs of the free towns of the twelfth century.”22 Arguing along similar lines, Augustin Thierry wrote that the history of the Third Estate is that of “the development and progress of civil society, since the chaos of mores, laws, and conditions that followed the fall of the Roman Empire, up to the regime of order, unity, and liberty of our days.”23 When 1848 arrived, a badly shaken Thierry conceded that the time had come to suspend his research, which no longer mattered: “the history of France appears to have been overturned as much as France herself.”24 To be abandoned by history was for the liberals the most painful of blows. Ever since Mme de Staël’s Considerations on the French Revolution appeared in 1818, their strategy had been to steal historical argumentation

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from the counter-revolutionaries. Doctrines of natural rights were not the concern of Restoration or July Monarchy liberals; what mattered was the claim that the abolition of feudal laws in 1789 had been the effect of a historical cause that could not be denied.25 Before 1848, liberals thrived on the belief that history was on their side; after 1848, the same liberals were suddenly confused and uncertain. Some, such as Fustel de Coulanges, tried to revive old arguments that were clearly out of date; others, such as Tocqueville after the coup of Louis Napoleon, changed the historical focus of liberalism from the old theme of inevitable historical triumph to the new motif of inevitable historical defeat. Finally, there were the followers of Gustave Le Bon, who transformed embittered liberalism into the illiberalism of mob psychology and racial theory. Along the way stood Renan and Taine, offspring of 1848; these two exceptionally influential writers led liberalism away from its grounding in the Enlightenment and flirted with nihilism and racism. Embattled liberals became conservative, reactionary, and illiberal. Fustel’s gambit in The Ancient City was to reissue in 1864 Benjamin Constant’s early nineteenth-century condemnation of revolutionaries who would resurrect ancient liberty on modern soil.26 Our problem, wrote Fustel, was that “in our system of education, we live from infancy in the midst of the Greeks and Romans.” The moral of Fustel’s book was that “nothing in modern times resembles [the ancients]; nothing can resemble them”—so different is modern from ancient culture, modern from ancient freedom.27 Without question, Constant’s repudiation of the Republic of Virtue and the Reign of Terror was called for in his day. To make the same argument in 1864, however, was boldly to address a Jacobin threat that did not exist. Fustel hated socialists, but instead of engaging them forthrightly, he used his study of the classical world to reinforce the liberal myth of an eternal Jacobinism. Unlike most liberals, Tocqueville despised the July Monarchy and regretted its fall only out of worry about what would follow.28 His worst fears came true when Louis Napoleon overthrew the fledgling Second Republic and instituted rule through plebiscites. The dreaded day of modern democratic dictatorship had arrived, concluded Tocqueville, as he withdrew from public life and wrote The Old Regime and the French Revolution. When his book appeared in 1856, the reader was confronted with a

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depressing and fatalistic theme. Not only was the liberal cause lost, Tocqueville seemed to say, but its fate had been sealed long before the French Revolution. In Democracy in America Tocqueville granted little leeway to the thesis of outright historical determinism. There is always causality and always freedom, even if “general causes explain more, and particular influences less, in democratic than in aristocratic ages.”29 As the events of 1848 unfolded, he kept to his previous view of causality: he rejected the “literary men” who see general causes everywhere, thus “banishing men from history,” and he likewise repudiated the views of politicians who “attribute everything to particular incidents.” The correct view is that “the February revolution was born of general causes fertilized . . . by accidents.”30 The Old Regime of 1856 marks the moment when historical determinism gained the upper hand in his thought: “Chance played no part whatever in the outbreak of the Revolution.”31 The decline of the aristocracy, which he recorded, was inevitably that of France as well. Social classes are “the historian’s proper study,”32 wrote Tocqueville. Other liberal historians had said exactly the same, but while they had cheerfully charted the rise of the middle class, Tocqueville mourned the decline of the aristocracy. Under the Old Regime, Tocqueville remarked, the Third Estate had been guilty of allowing the central government to intervene in the most trivial local affairs: “Thus it was that the middle class prepared itself for governing, and the French people for liberty!”33 Not the middle class but the aristocrats had been the source of local self-governance in Europe; in England the continuing political prowess of the aristocracy accounted for that country’s freedom, just as in France the political decline of the aristocrats had resulted in the rise of deadening bureaucratic centralization. Exactly when had centralization defeated freedom in France? In Democracy in America, written before he had abandoned hope, Tocqueville observed that “under Louis XIV there was much less administrative centralization than there is now.”34 Two decades later, when he wrote the Old Regime, Tocqueville significantly revised his earlier stance: under the Old Regime, he held in 1856, “the government of France was already highly centralized and all-powerful.”35 Although he was aware of the practice of selling offices, Tocqueville slighted the King’s consequential inability to control his own officialdom. Against Tocqueville, one might well argue that the weakness rather than

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the strength of government—or an odd combination of the two—was the chief characteristic of the Old Regime, and that Napoleon’s bureaucratic apparatus marked a new beginning, not a continuation of the old organization. Tocqueville, however, would not be denied his despair. He was determined to offer posterity the fatalistic message that the liberal cause had been lost not recently but fully a century and more before the Revolution. Tocqueville was also the liberal who initiated the process that Taine completed, of cutting liberalism off from its vital moorings in the Enlightenment. In 1775 Tocqueville’s great-grandfather Malesherbes credited the “men of letters” with being, “in the midst of a dispersed people, what the orators of Rome and Athens were in the midst of a people assembled.”36 Tocqueville ignored Malesherbes and disparaged the philosophes at every opportunity. Rather than address the writings of the philosophes in their richness and complexity, Tocqueville emphasized the Physiocrats because they gave him the target he wanted: their atypical calls for enlightened despotism became the standard doctrine of the philosophes in Tocqueville’s highly distorted reading of eighteenth-century sources. Similarly, Voltaire’s defense of the royal attack on the parlements in the early 1770s attracted Tocqueville’s attention, whereas the struggle of the overwhelming majority of the philosophes to reverse Maupeou’s “despotic” assault on the judicial bodies escaped Tocqueville’s notice.37 Disgusted that intellectuals rather than aristocrats were the leaders of “public opinion” from the middle of the eighteenth century, Tocqueville flailed against the philosophes as wildly and unfairly as Burke. Tocqueville managed to hold the philosophes in contempt without abandoning the Enlightenment or liberalism. Hippolyte Taine did reject the Enlightenment in his exceptionally influential, multi-volume Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1875–1893), with results that were devastating for his thought and for French liberalism in general: rightwing ideology spread through his books like a potent virus and, by the time the illness had run its course, very little of his initial liberalism remained intact. Taine began his career as a man equipped with impeccable liberal credentials. His childhood and lifelong friend was Lucien-Anatole PrévostParadol, perhaps the leading liberal of the Second Empire. More importantly, Taine, in common with other liberals, admired Protestant England, liberal but not democratic. Almost all of his liberal compatriots shared Taine’s longing for “the man of leisure, who has no trade, who is concerned

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with broad views, who takes the lead, like the English aristocracy of our days.”38 The turning point for Taine was the humiliating French loss of AlsaceLorraine to Prussia in 1870, followed in 1871 by the Paris Commune. Whether Taine supported the Third Republic was never clear, although he did concede that universal manhood suffrage need not spell disaster, if complemented by offsetting electoral devices preventing direct expression of the will of the majority.39 His hostility to socialism knew no bounds, however, and he acted on his convictions in 1891 by joining an antisocialist league. Although he posed, in the best positivist manner, as a detached scientific investigator, Taine in reality was the most biased of historians. It is difficult to imagine a more inaccurate account of the Enlightenment or Jacobinism than Taine’s contention that both were products of the classical literature of the seventeenth century. All of Taine’s findings were borrowed either from the Romantics who rejected Racine, or from the reactionaries who rejected the Enlightenment. Following in the footsteps of de Maistre and Bonald, he dismissed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as both foolish and dangerous.40 He missed the empiricism of the philosophes, their innovations in the life sciences, and their search for the mores that would anchor their political ideals in everyday reality.41 His volumes on the old and new regimes are filled with the very a priori reasoning that he falsely attributed to the philosophes. As if it were not enough that Taine led liberals away from the Enlightenment, he also dabbled in racial theory. Sometimes he contrasted a Latin with a German race, the former more sensual, unstable, and analytical, the latter more poetic, inward, and devoted to duty. Perhaps no harm would have come from such notions if he had discussed national character as historical and changing. Too often, however, he opened the door to racism. “If you consider in turn the leading races from their first appearance up to the present time you will find in them a class of instincts and of aptitudes over which revolutions, decadences, civilization have passed without having affected them. These aptitudes and these instincts are in the blood and are transmitted with it.”42 Is there any wonder that Maurras sometimes had good things to say about Taine? Ernest Renan was as influential as Taine, possibly more so. Skeptical where Taine was dogmatic, supple where Taine was rigid, Renan nevertheless added his authority on occasion to the growing chorus of late nine-

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teenth-century racism. When he originally wrote L’Avenir de la science: Pensées de 1848, Renan was a liberal troubled by the fall of the constitutional monarchy and apprehensive about the future. Despite his doubts, he continued to cherish the belief that “the future of science” would redeem the French and eventually all of humanity. Later, in 1890, when he finally published the book, Renan inserted a new preface in which he criticized his earlier views. One mistake in particular he wished to correct: “At that period . . . I did not have a sufficiently clear idea of the inequality of races.” By 1890 Renan took for granted that “the inferiority of certain races to others is proved.”43 Renan’s thought was as multilayered, indirect, complex, and ambiguous as Taine’s was one-dimensionally conservative. On the one hand, The Future of Science contains the liberal themes that would never completely disappear from Renan’s writings. Frequently, in this book written in 1848–49, he spoke respectfully of the Enlightenment: “Our glory lies in always appealing to light; . . . The eighteenth century must, in this respect, always remain our model.” He also gave the philosophes credit for arriving at their results “much more by criticism, history, and positive science than by metaphysical abstraction.”44 The theme of humanity bettering itself through the ages permeates The Future of Science, and Renan periodically reiterated his youthful beliefs in his mature writings, notably in Caliban (1878), a sequel inspired by Shakespeare’s Tempest in which Prospero’s slave rises up against his master in the names of progress and democracy.45 On the other hand, one can find in The Future of Science the germs of the proto-racism that crops up now and again in his later thought. Already in 1848 Renan made references to “peoples doomed to remain stationary” and to “the everlasting infancy of the non-perfectible races.”46 Eventually the hints dropped in 1848 of racial inequality would develop into the fullscale racism of the 1890 preface and much of his mature work. Beginning with fairly harmless linguistic distinctions between Aryan and Semitic, Renan almost imperceptibly transformed linguistic into racial distinctions. “Renan’s work gives [racism] a new footing,” Tzvetan Todorov has noted, “since it is with Renan that the terms ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semite’ cease to designate linguistic families and begin to apply to ‘races.’”47 When Renan arbitrarily suggested in The Future of Science that “the Semitic peoples have neither philosophy, nor mythology, nor epic,”48 he foreshadowed the worst elements of his mature reflections.49 Renan demanded that he never be judged by a single page or even by a

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single work.50 Thriving on his own ambivalence, hiding behind nuance and irony, he left both a liberal and an illiberal legacy to the heirs of the Orleanist tradition. Gustave Le Bon harvested the illiberal strain in Renan, combined it with the incipient racism of Taine, and reshaped their late nineteenth-century writings in accordance with the needs of the new right wing that emerged from the Dreyfus case and continued to dog the Third Republic to its miserable end. Le Bon’s writings are so illiberal in message that it is easy to forget that he began within the liberal and Orleanist camp. Liberty he valued more than equality and fraternity, as is true of most liberals. The liberal demand for a decrease in the powers of the state was ever his theme, to which end he spoke approvingly of Herbert Spencer. It was individuals he believed in, not crowds. And despite his worry that legislative bodies readily degenerate into mobs, Le Bon did not doubt that “parliamentary assemblies are the best form of government mankind has as yet discovered.”51 In his fear of democratic despotism and in his solution of rule by qualified elites, Le Bon was Orleanist to the core. Embellishing Taine’s tirades against mobs with analogies drawn from medical research on hypnosis and infection, Le Bon maintained that democrats and socialists acting in groups were humans reduced to the lowest level. “By the mere fact that he forms part of a crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization.”52 Individuals in groups rarely act rationally: suggestibility, the resurgence of atavistic instincts, and the search for faith explain the behavior of persons in groups, especially when the groups in question are the Jacobins of yesterday or the socialists of today.53 The modern world, especially, is the age of crowds. Mob psychology was one of Le Bon’s two favorite ways of disseminating his right-wing prejudices under cover of pseudo-science. The other was racial theory, by which means he could encourage readers to treat cultures as if they were frozen and atemporal, while affording himself an excuse for passing off his biased stereotypes as scientific discoveries. “Each race possesses a mental constitution as unvarying as its anatomical constitution,” he wrote in The Psychology of Peoples.54 For the Latin races, the French people included, he expressed disgust: “the Latin peoples care very little for liberty, but a great deal for equality, and put up with all despotisms without difficulty provided they be impersonal.”55 In the wake of the victory of the Dreyfusards, the Latin race was more

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threatened than ever before by a condition of growing “decadence.” Rehabilitation of the pillars of order, the church and the army, was essential; it was also important to learn what racial theory teaches about the foolishness of the republican ideal of “assimilation.”56 Moving further and further to the right, Le Bon eventually went so far as to praise Mussolini, the foe of Bolsheviks.57 In his early writings Le Bon voiced the old Orleanist refrain that “civilizations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy.”58 In his later writings he continued to look to the precious few for salvation, but the elites in question were no longer the old Orleanist notables, the landed leisure class. His new candidates for the role of leaders of France were the “industrialists, farmers, and commercial men who understand the realities of life.”59 After the Dreyfus affair, the ideological battle lines of the Third Republic were redrawn. As David Thomson has noted, “the forces of conservatism were represented less by the classes of Church, Army, and Aristocracy, and more by the commercial and financial oligarchy and semi-fascist movements.”60 The accomplishment of Le Bon was that he refashioned the Orleanist tradition to answer the challenge of the new political situation. Specifically, he insisted that the time had come to rewrite The Prince, infusing its pages with the lessons of mob psychology, then place copies in the hands of the wealthiest members of society, so that they might use his proposed neo-Machiavellian methods to manipulate the masses.61 Insofar as possible, the Orleanists had kept their distance from the vulgarities of popular uprisings and electoral politics. Le Bon’s remedial project was to teach them how to win at the polls and, if necessary, in the streets. Liberalism he neglected in favor of order, much like his Orleanist predecessors. The largely pernicious influence of Taine and Le Bon has been felt on both sides of the Atlantic, in both of the modern republics. Not only did Taine and Le Bon figure prominently in deforming the liberal tradition in France; their works, immediately translated into English, also exercised enormous influence in the United States, where their extremely biased accounts of the “Jacobin” tradition strongly reinforced existing prejudice. Partly because of Taine and Le Bon, one generation of American readers after another has failed to appreciate the evolution of the French republican tradition and has remained unaware of the liberalization of republican

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ideals over the course of the nineteenth century. Echoes of Taine occasionally can be heard down to the present day in the works of American historians of France.

From Solidarist to Conservative The story of American responses to France is not without its unexpected twists and turns. Usually Americans have seen France through the jaundiced eyes of Taine; so it comes as something of a surprise to find that English-speaking scholars have been unduly generous when studying one group of French thinkers, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Solidarists (above, chs. 2 & 3). Historians and other social scientists writing in English, especially those sympathetic to T. H. Green and John Dewey, have mistakenly discovered in the Solidarists the French counterparts they crave to the progressive liberals of England and America.62 The Solidarists have been labeled liberals,63 and not without reason, but for every one of their number who might plausibly be called a progressive liberal (for example, Alfred Fouillée), there were at least two (for example, Léon Bourgeois, Emile Durkheim) who came closer to being reincarnations of the July Monarchy liberals. Following in the footsteps of their Orleanist predecessors, the Solidarists frequently smothered their liberal principles under multiple layers of conservative ideology. Not the new liberal T. H. Green but the old-style conservative F. H. Bradley was the English-speaking counterpart to the Solidarists. The objective of Bradley’s “My Station and Its Duties” was to convince his readers to “give up the harboring of theories of what should be and is not”; Durkheim’s similar aim was to teach his countrymen that “the spirit of rebellion is the very source of immorality.”64 There was no need for Durkheim and the Solidarists to cross the Channel in order to find their conservative liberalism, not when they could readily update the familiar doctrines of the July Monarchy liberals. The lesson Guizot had wanted the public schools to impart to pupils was that the individual is not important65; Durkheim, seventy years later in his lectures on “moral education,” urged the teachers of the Third Republic to inculcate that very same lesson. The goal of classroom instruction in history, Durkheim suggested, should be to rein in individualism by showing students that society makes the individual rather than the other way around.

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Properly taught, history lessons can and should humble the individual by stressing “impersonal life—feudalism, the crusades, the Renaissance.”66 Durkheim also shared Guizot’s and Cousin’s views that education should train children to accept rather than question their lot in life: instead of fostering social climbing, the schools and occupational groups should encourage citizens to embrace the social role assigned them in the division of labor. The categorical imperative, Durkheim suggested, should be sociologically restated to read “Equip yourself to fulfill usefully a specific function.”67 The Solidarist intellectuals duplicated many of the conservative themes and strategies of their Orleanist predecessors, doubtless because the Solidarists, like the July Monarchy liberals before them, had to fend off attacks from both the left and the right. Duties over rights, the group over the individual, evolution over revolution were among the recycled themes; the renewed strategies included efforts to paste over deep social and political divisions with organic metaphors, eclecticism, and specious claims that political views can be grounded in indisputable scientific wisdom. Only the name of the master science had changed, from history in the days of the July Monarchy to sociology under the Third Republic. By such means the Orleanists had hoped to hold at bay the republicans and the Legitimists; the Solidarists to appease the workers and the right-wing nationalists. Léon Bourgeois spoke for all the Solidarists, if with unusual candor, when he admitted that his was “a truly conservative politique.”68 Along with Durkheim and the other Solidarists, Bourgeois contended that “economic and social phenomena obey . . . ineluctable laws” and are subject to “causal necessity.”69 Borrowing from Comte, Bourgeois argued that biology has made possible the development of a genuinely scientific sociology.70 Henceforth society shall be regarded as an organism, its health shall be our foremost concern, and the individual human constituents of society shall be taught that they matter primarily as members of the body politic. The organic metaphor, so dear to European conservatives, spread like wildfire through the pages of the Solidarists. Among the worst offenders were Alfred Espinas and Jean Izoulet, who agreed that the nation is a social organism, disagreeing only over whether the intellectual elite or the state is its brain. To his credit, Fouillée warned that arguing by analogy “is a means of supporting all theses and giving them a pseudo-scientific appearance.”71

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Nevertheless, Fouillée’s own writings abound with the very abuse of analogies that he criticized in other thinkers: “The nation is an organism endowed with a kind of collective consciousness,” he wrote. “I therefore regard everything in a nation that maintains continuity of character . . . as a form of organic heredity persisting from age to age.”72 As a philosopher, Fouillée criticized the positivists; as a political thinker, he frequently joined their ranks. The Solidarists constantly spoke as if the solidarity they desperately sought were something already given, once and for all, by organic nature. All societies are organic but modern society, based on the division of labor, is more organic than traditional society, argued Durkheim. The division of labor was ever the example of Solidarists when they wanted a social analogue to the functional differentiation of an organic body. Durkheim’s Division of Labor in Society (1893) added a new dimension to the usual Solidarist argument by reversing the argument of Ferdinand Tönnies (1887). In contrast to the right-wing claim that modernity marks the end of community, the loss of Gemeinschaft, the destruction of organic ties, Durkheim contended that the progressive advance of the division of labor made for a society more functionally interdependent and thus more organic than anything previously known. Writing in an antiseptic and seemingly neutral social scientific vocabulary, Durkheim in fact was out to steal the organic metaphor from the traditionalists and to attribute it to modern society. In doing so, he reprised the labors of the July Monarchy liberals, who likewise sided with modernity and covered it with the protective coating of the organic metaphor theretofore the property of the right wing.73 Again, the Solidarists resembled the Orleanists in that they showed the flag of individualism but packed it away at the earliest possible opportunity. Rousseau the supposed collectivist tormented them less than—in Léon Duguit’s words—“Rousseau, the high priest of individualism.”74 The dilemma of the Solidarists was that they did not want the social contract, popular sovereignty, individual will, and consent, but could not reject the theory outright without seeming to side with the right-wing reactionaries. Fouillée and Bourgeois met the challenge by speaking of political society as a “contractual organism” or as a “quasi-contract.”75 Each time the Solidarists invoked these unlikely hybrids, it was the organic part that thrived. Bourgeois made certain the contractual aspect would amount to nothing

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through the device of stressing the “retroactive” and presumptive character of consent.76 Lest individualism somehow escape from the Solidarist onslaught, Bourgeois buried the individual under a burden of “social debt.”77 Fouillée, too, insisted on the primacy of our obligations to our country, “to which we are directly indebted for the better part of what we are.”78 The Solidarists did not call a halt after establishing that the individual is socially constituted; they went on to reproduce much of the extreme right-wing argument that society is everything, the individual nothing, and they loaded the present generation with so great a debt to the dead that Barrès might have rejoiced. Durkheim, especially, was an expert in the fine art of praising individualism while making individuals disappear into a bottomless pit of organic solidarity. Probably his true feelings about individualism were best portrayed in Suicide (1897), where—shades of the counter-revolutionaries and Comte—he contended that Protestant individualism undermines social cohesion.79 In Suicide his overall position was that “individualism is of course not necessarily egotism, but it comes close to it.”80 A year later he published his Dreyfusard essay “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” which some recent commentators have mistaken for a tribute to individualism.81 An answer to traditionalists who condemned Dreyfus, Durkheim’s 1898 essay did not genuinely side with an individualist morality. Not the individual per se but the collective belief in individualism was what Durkheim defended. Durkheim the Dreyfusard did little more than repeat the argument he had made in 1893 in the Division of Labor: “As all the other beliefs and practices assume less and less religious a character, the individual becomes the object of a sort of religion. We carry on the worship of the dignity of the human person, which . . . has already acquired its superstitions. If you like, therefore, it is indeed a common faith.”82 Both in 1893 and 1898 Durkheim primarily cared about individualism as a collective faith, hence a source not of disruption but of solidarity. “Individualism thus understood is the glorification, not of the self,” he explained, “but of the individual in general.”83 The difference between the earlier and the later Durkheim was that in 1893 he counted primarily on the division of labor to supply the necessary social glue,84 while by 1898 he had begun his retreat to the traditionalist view that, without religion, the social fabric is bound to unravel. In his essay of 1898 he repeatedly took up

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the theme of the religion of individualism, and continued to search for a useful religion for the rest of his days. Durkheim recapitulated the intellectual trajectory of his positivist forebears Saint-Simon and Comte, both of whom began as scientific prophets of a postreligious age and ended as the high priests of a new industrial religion. “The anarchist, the aesthete, the mystic, the socialist revolutionary” disturbed Durkheim, much as they had worried his positivist predecessors, because—he argued—they shared “a single sentiment of hatred and distrust for the existing order, a single craving to destroy or to escape from reality.”85 The division of labor may never finish its task of providing a modern form of social solidarity, Durkheim more and more feared, unless assisted by a commonly accepted code of beliefs. Many years earlier, SaintSimon had similarly voiced the opinion that “the crisis in which European peoples are involved is due to the incoherence of general ideas”; Comte agreed that “the world is governed and overturned by ideas.”86 Hence Saint-Simon’s New Christianity and Comte’s Religion of Humanity, both faiths dedicated to consoling the lower classes and all potential social malcontents87; hence, too, the emphasis on religion in Durkheim’s later thought. Early in his career, when he wrote The Division of Labor, Durkheim took the position that it was premodern societies that were held together by religion. The newly emerging world, by contrast, was one in which each corporate group would have its particular set of beliefs, but never again would there be one inclusive faith embracing every member of the nation. As time passed, continuing social strife led Durkheim to revisit the question of religion. Eventually, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), he argued that “the most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need . . . In reality . . . there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion.” Rather than continue thinking along the evolutionary lines that had earlier led him to dismiss religion, he now searched for “the elements which constitute that which is permanent and human in religion.”88 At the outset of his career Durkheim had concentrated his greatest energies on the most developed societies, the ones with the most advanced division of labor. In his final book he spent his time studying the most primitive societies, the least developed of tribes, in order to discover the undiluted essence of religion. The evolutionary sociologist had metamorphosed into a structural anthropologist. Upon completing his journey into

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the Australian outback, Durkheim announced his culminating finding— or was it his preordained conclusion?—that “the idea of society is the soul of religion.” To him, “a society is not made up merely of the mass of individuals who compose it . . . but above all is the idea which it forms of itself.” Religion is the best such idea, because it is society worshipping itself and adoring its members’ shared existence. By whatever means, modern societies must encourage religious rituals that will redirect the gaze of individuals away from themselves to what really matters, the collectivity.89 Durkheim criticized Saint-Simon and Comte for being insufficiently positivistic. Yet, for all his scientific pretensions, he did little more than duplicate their efforts to steal the organic metaphor from the nostalgic traditionalists. Nor did Durkheim rise above the limitations of Saint-Simon and Comte when he sought in religion the lessons in obedience and discipline that the division of labor, to his dismay, failed to teach. Loyal to the Third Republic, Durkheim was surely less authoritarian than Comte, but his imagined republic fit perfectly with Thiers’s peremptory proclamation that the republic would be conservative or would not be. Positivism, Orleanism, Solidarism congealed in Durkheim’s thought into a staunch conservatism. The all-consuming desire of the Solidarists to end social conflict had a way of seriously compromising their most worthy reforms. Although Fouillée wanted the individual to move in many social circles “without being imprisoned in any,”90 Durkheim seemed quite willing to lock workers within their professional associations and then throw away the key. Also troubling, the educational reforms of the Solidarists were incompatible with their supposedly liberal aims: the truths enunciated by positivist teachers were authoritarian, and the lessons taught in the classroom often had no purpose other than to discredit social critics. Who cannot see that Durkheim’s lecture on aesthetics is nothing more than an effort to defuse the radicalism of the anarchist-artists of Montmartre? Art is a “world of dreams, of untrammeled mental play”—and play is occasionally acceptable, he admits, provided we never forget that tomorrow it’s back to work. Insofar as art depends on leisure and is not bound by the laws of nature or morality, it is always potentially dangerous.91 In Fouillée’s thinking, the liberal possibilities of Solidarism are never entirely absent; the advocacy of “justice” and “right” [droit] never completely disappears,92 not even when his organicism threatens to gobble up everything that crosses its path. Durkheim’s career, by sharp contrast, begins

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with the demand for justice but soon degenerates into the claim that whatever is, is right. “Just as ancient peoples needed, above all, a common faith to live by, so we need justice,”93 wrote the early Durkheim. But as time passed and justice seemed more unlikely, as the anarchist-syndicalists failed to heed his advice to ally with management, and managers failed to accept the tasks of statesmen, Durkheim decided that what already is, is what ought to be. Like any good conservative, Durkheim posited a morality that defined radicalism as immoral and acceptance of the status quo as proof of virtue. “Every society is a moral society,”94 he asserted, no matter whether the social order in question is based on the traditional solidarity of common belief or on the modern division of labor. The only society that merits criticism, then, is the non-society of the transitional period between the demise of the old social hierarchy and the advent of the new. Only an “anomic” society fails to be moral, because it lacks cohesion and is not a society. Whatever is is right, in Durkheim’s view, so long as it is socialized. Not for one moment did Durkheim ever suspect that he spoke as a conservative ideologue. Science was the true author of his books, he merely the mouthpiece. His values were those dictated by science, the new “science of ethics” which was devoted to combating social illness. “For societies as for individuals, health is good and desirable; disease, on the contrary, is bad and to be avoided.”95 The disease that plagues modernizing societies is anomie, the breakdown of social roles, standards, and expectations. During the transitional era, desires outstrip the possibility of fulfillment, and individualism runs rampant. Luckily there is sociology to shepherd students through the schools and workers into occupational groups, where society can heal until the crisis passes. The social scientist should be the doctor,96 not the critic, of the body politic. This much must be granted the Solidarists: when racism and anti-Semitism gained scores of ardent advocates, Durkheim and his cohort stepped forth and renewed the French republican commitment to the ideal of assimilation. Édouard Drumont, author of the viciously anti-Semitic La France juive (1886), sought a respectable intellectual pedigree for his prejudices in the remarks of Renan and Taine on the incompatibility of the Aryan and Semitic races.97 To their credit, the Solidarists strongly rejected such racist thinking: Durkheim, for instance, was at his best in Suicide when demonstrating the incoherence and scientific uselessness of the categories of race.98 His whole conception of the modern division of labor,

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moreover, was incompatible with the notions of enracinement in the land that were used by the right wing to stir up anti-Semitic passions.99 French liberalism became implicated in racism; republicanism did not, and on the issue of race the Solidarists were faithful republicans. The weakness of the Solidarists came not from a temptation to compromise with racists but from their failure to break free from the suffocating embrace of the conservative Orleanists. Although Fouillée was willing to support modest social legislation, he accused socialists, as had Guizot, of promoting an “absolute individualism” incompatible with family. Trapped between socialism, on the one side, and the electoral democracy of counting votes one by one, on the other, we are left, wrote Fouillée, with “the anonymous individual, asexual, without ancestors, tradition, or milieu, without any sort of ties. There, as Taine foresaw, is the man of false democracy.”100 True democracy Fouillée defined by quoting, in effect, from the political dictionary of Orleanism. Borrowing the most defensible of the political ideas of the July Monarchy liberals, Fouillée argued for a reversal of what he believed was the increasing danger that the lower house of the Third Republic would undercut the authority of the executive and the independence of the judiciary. Empowering the Senate was important because the upper house could embody the organic bonds of the nation, as opposed to the mere strength of numbers for which the Chamber stood.101 The executive, too, must be strengthened to offset the individualisme outré102 of the age. Fouillée’s institutional proposals were as worth considering as their antidemocratic, anti-individualist logic was futile. In his writings he returned, whether consciously or not, to the Orleanist notion that voting is a function rather than a right. Not just Fouillée but the Solidarists in general favored schemes of functional representation that permitted them to recognize the economic groups of modern society while refusing the electoral democracy of voting one by one. Most of all, Fouillée demanded rule by a natural aristocracy, the product of “a certain mode of hierarchical education, having for its end the selection of elites which can support the different organs of national life . . . and assure the triumph of the organic conception of society over the purely contractual and atomistic, preventing the universal pulverization of the great body that is the patrie.”103 It was as if Guizot had never died and modern democracy never been born.

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All in all, the Solidarists did far less to reach out to the socialists than to resurrect the ideology of the July Monarchy; less to accentuate the “social debt” of the rich to the poor than the debt of each person to society. Forward looking in form but backward looking in substance, the Solidarist doctrine was hopelessly irrelevant to the difficult and trying times following the end of the First World War.

From Politique to Mystique All was well with French liberalism during the early days, when its spokespersons feared mystique in politics and countered its baleful influence with politique. Everything changed when later liberals, losing faith in the modern world, began searching for ways to inject some sort of mystique into public life. Each time liberals sought transcendence, they lost their moral bearings and inadvertently gave aid and comfort to the enemy. Montaigne wanted an end to the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth century, an end to persecution and fanaticism. Private life was what he valued—friendship, intimacy, conversation, cultivating one’s garden, exploring at leisure the inner world of one’s being. For Cicero’s humanist ideal of the vita activa, Montaigne had not the least use: “as for that fine statement under which ambition and avarice take cover—that we are not born for our private selves, but for the public—let us boldly appeal to those who are in the midst of the dance . . . The evil means men use in our day to push themselves show clearly that the end is not worth much.”104 It was less ordinary corruption that he feared than horrible acts undertaken in the name of ideological righteousness: “two things I have observed to be in singular accord, supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct . . . They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves.” Even in our quest of virtue, moderation must come first: “We can grasp virtue in such a way that it will become vicious, if we embrace it with too sharp and violent a desire.”105 For good reasons Montaigne has been deemed a forerunner of liberalism. He condemned the Spaniards for slaughtering the Indians of the Americas in the name of converting them; and in his own country he abhorred both the fanatical Catholic League and the Protestant Huguenots. Much like Bodin and the politiques, he sought a political regime dedicated to peace and toleration. Taking the argument one step beyond Bodin and

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towards modern liberalism, Montaigne proposed that “since philosophy has not been able to find a way to tranquility that is suitable to all, everyone should be permitted to seek it individually.”106 Montaigne admired but ultimately rejected Cicero’s Stoic admonition that the “honorable” should never yield to the “useful”; regretfully, he could not agree that in politics honesty and integrity are always superior to dissimulation. Having read Machiavelli’s Prince, Montaigne reluctantly conceded that “no private utility is worthy of our doing this violence to our conscience; the public utility, yes, when it is very apparent and very important.” In effect, Montaigne concluded that the private life he cherished required the protection of a political order, the maintenance of which could only be assured by a politique.107 Although he yearned for the private life, Montaigne accepted public service on those occasions when he was called to active duty as mayor or diplomat. Montesquieu was a full-fledged liberal because he made Montaigne’s concerns his own and added a demand for constitutional government. In keeping with Montaigne’s outlook, Montesquieu advocated moderation in public life and believed there could be too much of almost anything. “Who would think it? Even virtue has need of limits.”108 The Romans in particular had more than enough virtue and in consequence made themselves the scourge of the ancient world. Rather than preach sermons against Machiavelli’s eulogy of the imperialism of the Roman republic, Montesquieu accepted the premises of the Discourses on Livy and then drew out the devastating consequences. Not only had the Roman Senate’s schemes of power politics ended in the demise of all foreign republics; inevitably, Roman success spelled failure for Rome itself, because an expanded republic could not maintain its cultural unity or the dedication of its citizens to the public good.109 Montesquieu could have damned Rome overtly for the injustice of its conquests. His preference, however, was always for showing that injustice is a bad politique inasmuch as it eventuates in the undoing of its perpetrator. The purpose of his little book on the Romans (1734) was to demonstrate that the best politique recognizes its own limits. Restraint and moderation, in his writings, are as much the lessons taught by raison d’état as they are the dictates of the humanitarian morality of the Enlightenment. Therefore, even the most shortsighted policy makers should learn to think twice before fomenting war. Montesquieu loved to dress his liberalism in Machiavellian disguise.

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Mystique rather than politique upset Montesquieu and the philosophes. The memory that haunted the lumières was the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, a dreadful decision on the part of Louis XIV which convinced the philosophes that everything which begins as politique runs the risk of ending as mystique. Unfortunately, the disciples of Richelieu proved to be no match at court for Bossuet, reason of state no match for resurgent divine right. The walls of the Protestant cities had long been torn down; the Huguenots were not a state within the state but a major source of trade, productivity, and national prosperity. Louis XIV had nothing to gain and everything to lose from the expulsion of the Huguenots; yet he drove them out. With terrible consequences, the mystique of divine right emerged victorious in 1685 over the politique of raison d’état. The deepest fear of Montesquieu was that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the continuing royal quest for glory meant that France was on the verge of duplicating the appalling historical record of the Spaniards, brutal perpetrators of Inquisition at home and bloody conquest in the Americas. Picking up where Montaigne left off, Montesquieu constantly returned to the theme that the Spanish destroyed their own economy with the fool’s gold they acquired in the Americas. “Men should stay where they are,” he argued in his early Lettres persanes (1721); later, admitting that an era of Western imperialism was at hand, he altered his argument to read, economic trade and productivity are power. Most plans of colonization should be scrapped and only those saved which enable the mother country “to trade on more advantageous conditions than could otherwise be done.” Nations engaging in colonization should realize that its proper goal is “the extension of commerce, not the founding of . . . empire.”110 On every possible occasion, Montesquieu drove home the lesson that toleration and trade are the most effective politique. During and after the French Revolution the political thought of Montesquieu found an able exponent in the person of Benjamin Constant. Or perhaps it was from his education in Scotland that Constant learned how to argue that would-be Catos (Robespierre) and Caesars (Napoleon) in the modern age were not only anachronisms but wreckers responsible for wanton devastation. Provoked by Napoleon’s ill-fated Russian campaign, Constant penned his De l’Esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation (1814). Much like Montesquieu, Constant focused his writings on demonstrating the impolitic and self-defeating quality of the politics of militant aggrandizement.

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“We have finally reached the age of commerce, an age which must necessarily replace that of war,” wrote Constant. From David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, he had learned to speak of history as a progression from hunting to agricultural to commercial society. In the modern age the path to greatness is trade rather than military might. Calculations of monetary profit are the lowly stuff from which the most noble treasures of Enlightenment are manufactured, because out of sheer self-interest governments will soon come to the realization that “even a successful war always costs more than it brings in.” “Any government that wished today to goad a European people to war and conquest would commit a gross and disastrous anachronism.”111 In one respect Montesquieu’s social science was superior to Constant’s. De l’Esprit des lois (1748) treats progress as possible, not inevitable, and Montesquieu never made the mistake of believing that rulers will understand or care about the interests of their countries.112 The king of Spain failed conspicuously to attend to Spanish interests; why should anyone expect the French king to surpass his fellow monarch in political wisdom? Where Montesquieu and Constant do converge is in their joint belief that the case for liberal humanism cannot be hurt, and may actually be enhanced, if stated as a politique. So long as liberals felt they were working with, or at least not against, the march of history, they remained faithful to politique and escaped the temptations of mystique. Mme de Staël rejected the despotic politique of Robespierre or Napoleon,113 but she ardently desired a more worthy politique that would transform subjects into citizens capable of actively willing the Charter (1814) rather than passively accepting it as a royal grant.114 Apparently, Rousseau’s famous and infamous sentence about forcing citizens to be free did not necessarily earn her condemnation. In the judgment of Mme de Staël, the Revolution had been caused by the contradiction between the growing progress of the public’s enlightenment, on the one hand, and an authoritarian, insufficiently enlightened government, on the other.115 Completing the project of education and Enlightenment was therefore necessary, for the sake of both governors and governed, with or without their consent, so that one day they might be able to give their consent. Hers was a politique of furthering the progressive march of history. Mme de Staël was still fighting the good fight at the outset of the Restoration, confident that victory was at last within her grasp. Tocqueville in 1848 dutifully participated in the proceedings of the new republic, but his

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notebooks contain the musings of a man who had long suspected that France might well be a country without a future. Never far removed from despair, Tocqueville was increasingly receptive to the siren song of whatever mystique crossed his path, and occasionally forgot to ask himself whether the beckoning music portended the safe passage or the shipwreck of liberal principles. Tocqueville’s attack on the July Monarchy in his Souvenirs is so belligerent that one would never know that Guizot was an extraordinarily highminded political leader or that his fellow Orleanists constituted a remarkably cultured and dedicated group of intellectuals and public figures. To Tocqueville, the July Monarchy was purely and simply the reign of the vulgar, selfish, and greedy middle class: “In 1830 the triumph of the middle class was decisive . . . It settled into every office . . . and made a habit of living off the public Treasury almost as much as from its own industry . . . The middle class treated government like a private business . . . Towards the end, the government of that time took on the features of a trading company.” Not even Marx’s pamphlets of 1848 surpass Tocqueville’s in venting bitter ridicule at the very sight of the middle-class liberals of the July Monarchy.116 Mourning the loss of aristocracy, Tocqueville failed to comprehend that the Orleanist liberals were, in fact, refashioning the triumphant bourgeoisie in the image of the fallen nobility. “Moveable property, or capital,” declared Guizot, “may procure a man all the advantages of wealth; but property in land gives him much more than this.”117 It was true enough that Orleanist officialdom had ties to mining firms and infant railroad companies; it was even truer, however, that the family firm, run not for maximum profits but for social prestige, for the production of qualitative rather than quantitative goods, was the calling card of the Orleanists. Laissez-faire appealed to the July Monarchy liberals little more than to their foes on the left and right. For them the highest vocation was public service, whether as local notables, Parisian journalists, or masters of parliamentary debate. All this Tocqueville missed, and in his blindness he never caught the slightest glimpse of the pathos of the July Monarchy, led by exceptionally distinguished men but doomed to collapse by its pathological fear of democracy. In later years Tocqueville continued to praise freedom, but less to free his countrymen from oppression than to elevate their souls—by means of nationalist passions. “Freedom alone,” he wrote in 1856, “is capable of lifting men’s minds above mere mammon worship and the petty personal woes that crop up in the course of everyday life, and of making them aware

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at every moment that they belong each and all to a vaster entity, above and around them, their native land.”118 On a much earlier occasion [1841] he had expressed to John Stuart Mill his disdain for the July Monarchy’s peaceful foreign policy: “I could not approve the revolutionary and propagandistic language of the partisans of war, but to chime in with those who were loudly asking for peace at any price, was even more dangerous . . . The greatest malady that threatens a people organized as we are is the gradual softening of mores, the abasement of the mind, the mediocrity of tastes; that is where the great dangers of the future lie. One cannot let a country that is governed democratically like ours . . . take up the habit of sacrificing its grandeur to its repose, great matters to petty ones.”119 That same year, 1841, Tocqueville asserted that “I do not believe that France can think seriously of leaving Algeria. Abandoning it would be in the eyes of the world the proclamation of our decadence.”120 Longing for a mystique, Tocqueville found one in nationalist passions and dreams of colonial greatness. Montesquieu and Constant had hoped that France might desist from colonial expansion, if they could make their case that such adventures were commercial liabilities. Tocqueville, however, cared little about vile economic calculations; what mattered was the “sense of grandeur and power” which France stood to gain from building a colonial empire: “It is not always by financial and commercial considerations,” asserted Tocqueville, “that a people should judge the value of a conquest.”121 Montesquieu and Constant wanted to lead the French away from violence; Tocqueville accepted it: “Once we have committed that great violence of conquest, I believe we must not shrink from the smaller violences that are absolutely necessary to consolidate it.”122 There are moments when the venerable Tocqueville we admire seems to come alive in his comments on Algeria: “It is inconceivable that in our day and springing from a nation that calls itself liberal there should be established, near France and in the name of France, a government . . . so profoundly illiberal.”123 On closer inspection, however, the liberalism that Tocqueville continues to espouse is for the French in Algeria, not the Arabs. At the same time that he issues his usual condemnation of bureaucratic control from Paris and the lack of civil liberties in Algeria, Tocqueville treats the Arabs, increasingly, as peoples too backward, too harmed by their Muslim faith, to be worthy of assimilation.124 He then takes refuge in the comforting thought that the mystique of France overrides all other considerations. Tocqueville’s remarks on the poor of France are as disappointing as his

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stance on the Arabs of Algeria. His Memoir on Pauperism might have been written by Thiers or any other liberal of the July Monarchy, so ungenerous is it to the less fortunate members of society. Here, in 1835, Tocqueville has not yet abandoned the theory of historical progress—but he uses it to urge acceptance of the unemployment and misery that accompany the development of a modern economy. Charity he values because it establishes a “moral tie” between the rich and the poor. “Any permanent, regular, administrative system whose aim will be to provide for the needs of the poor, . . . will in time reduce the rich to being no more than the tenant-farmers of the poor, . . . will stop the accumulation of capital . . . , and will culminate in bringing about a violent revolution.”125 We expect mean-spirited and self-serving comments about the poor from other liberals, but not from Tocqueville. From such a brilliant and magnanimous thinker we anticipate more. It is not unreasonable to expect that his very search for a lofty cause in modern times would have enticed him to adopt a more worthy position on the “social problem.” But he apparently could not see in the quest for social justice anything beyond another upsurge of mammon worship in an already far too materialistic civilization. Welfare legislation and rights to social provision are not the stuff from which a mystique is created. Gobineau’s vile theories of racial inequality provoked a liberal response from Tocqueville during the last and most despairing years of his life. “Your doctrines . . . are probably quite false,” Tocqueville told Gobineau; “I know that they are certainly very pernicious.” Tempted himself to capitulate to dreary forecasts of inevitable historical failure, Tocqueville marshaled his will one last time and charged that Gobineau’s theories were simply the reversal of Condorcet’s naïve notions of inevitable human perfection. “The weary aftermath of revolutions, . . . the miscarriage of so many generous ideas and of so many great hopes have now led us to the opposite extreme. After having felt ourselves capable of transforming ourselves, we now feel incapable of reforming ourselves . . . This is really the great sickness of our age . . . [Your fatalistic book] promotes the spiritual lassitude of your already weakening contemporaries.”126 Tocqueville’s response to Gobineau proves that he never stopped being a liberal. Still, he was a troubled and troubling liberal, more willing to face the democratic prospect than his comrades, but also more desperate for temporal salvation, more apt to sacrifice liberal principles to a mystique of greatness. Alexis de Tocqueville, the most famous of French liberals,

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asked for more than liberalism can give, and, in the process, risked liberalism itself. The career of Daniel Halévy (1872–1962) offers a fitting finale to our survey of the descent of liberalism from politique to mystique. Daniel was an Orleanist by birth, by association with the leading Orleanist journals, and by his own lifelong admission. Prévost-Paradol was his uncle, the Journal des Débats and Revue des Deux Mondes his milieu, and he wrote in the graceful and elegant conversational style he learned growing up in the ambiance of the most sophisticated Parisian salons.127 From the Orleanists Daniel might have learned respect for politique, but he chose instead to join his friend Charles Péguy on a never-ending quest for some sort of mesmerizing mystique. Indeed, it was in direct response to Daniel Halévy that Péguy uttered his memorable “Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique.”128 From the beginning to the end of the Third Republic, Daniel Halévy embodied in his own person the luster, ambiguity, and longevity of the Orleanist tradition. He was born in 1872 and—give or take a year or two— so was the most long-lived of French republics, the Third. During the 1930s, as the Republic approached the moment when it would succumb to pressures from without and within, Halévy recorded the history of its birth in two of his greatest works, La Fin des notables (1930) and La République des ducs (1937). Also during the 1930s, Halévy engaged in the kind of sharp polemics against the regime that left his loyalty to the Republic in doubt. More disturbing, his ideological twists and turns to the left and the right raised questions as to whether he remained faithful to the liberalism of the Orleanist tradition. Certainly he understood full well the liberal slogan “institutions first”;129 but the modesty of the liberal program never satisfied him. Only a mystique would do, only the temporal salvation that he and Péguy longed for—a quest that can lead anywhere ideologically, and is least at home within the confines of liberalism. No one can deny that Daniel Halévy was an able and biting critic of the Radicals, the party ever at the center of the Third Republic. The Radicals, he charged, talked much but did little; they were a “party without doctrine, without courage, a school of baseness.” Léon Bourgeois “lived off equivocation and put it into the form of a doctrine”; predictably, when the time came to rally for or against Dreyfus, Bourgeois was nowhere to be seen. Rather than lead the nation, the Radicals sought to win elections by placating the voters; their slogan continued to be the one uttered by Ledru-

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Rollin in 1849: “I am their leader; I must follow them.” And although the Radicals understood little about the state, they did learn how to damage and pillage it.130 Halévy’s acid criticisms of the Radicals are as plentiful as his constructive proposals for the reform of parliamentary government are scarce. Explicitly or implicitly, Halévy’s overriding objective is to invite his readers to contrast the pettiness of the latter day rulers of the Third Republic with the grandeur of Albert de Broglie and the other Orleanist founders of the regime. The republican leader Gambetta, in his famous speech of September 26, 1872, proclaimed that a “new generation of democracy, a new political and electoral personnel born of universal suffrage” had emerged and was about to make its influence felt. Actually it took some additional years before the voters removed the Orleanists from office, replacing them with Gambetta’s “new social stratum,” the schoolteachers, shopkeepers, and doctors of the villages.131 Once in place, Halévy contended, the new republican leaders proved the validity of the old Orleanist assumption that in politics few things matter more than the quality of the elites. If the Duc de Broglie, grandson of Mme de Staël, temporarily elevated the nation, the succeeding Radicals permanently debased it. Forever defending the “little people,”132 the Radicals made the French people little, petty, vile; honorable young aristocrats and gentlemen between 1880 and 1895 were left with no other outlets for their noble energies than support of colonial undertakings. “In the boring politics of the Third Republic, only [colonial adventure] was not boring.”133 Halévy himself was bored with the France that emerged after “the masses, choosing the republicans, had voted against the upper classes.” In the new order of things, little remained of what historically had made France great. “In the place of the glory that had been taken away, there was nothing at all . . . French politics entered decidedly into the era of anonymity.”134 The only hope for saving the country from “decadence” was that the circle of friends surrounding Péguy might somehow unearth previously neglected sources of heroism, vitality, myth, and mystique. Halévy turned to Nietzsche for heroism, to Sorel for myth, and to Péguy for mystique.135 Sorel provided Halévy with welcome attacks on the shallow positivism that had become the more or less official philosophy of the Third Republic. “The sociological historian,” Sorel observed, “who wishes to reveal to us where society must naturally go, is obliged to introduce occult and supreme forces: the progress of the human spirit, democratic evolution, the

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tendency to equality, immanent justice, etc. All these marionettes are destined to replace the ancient providence of Bossuet.”136 No one appreciated more than Halévy the effectiveness of Sorel’s unmasking of the pseudo-science of officialdom.137 Sorel was also of inestimable value to Halévy in his reading of Renan, to whom both men were deeply indebted. Renan’s elegant skepticism, his continuous flirtations with nihilism, came naturally to Halévy and might have enervated his thought, had not Sorel taught his friend how to find in Renan the path to myth and mystique in the modern world. Before publishing his Reflections on Violence, Sorel had written a book on The Historical System of Renan, the focus of which was the master’s volumes on the history of early Christianity. Dismissing the passages in which Renan had identified too closely with Marcus Aurelius, expurgating the pages skeptical of religion, Sorel cherished every utterance showing that religion “contains something mysterious and incommunicable.” Christianity was a myth that prepared the masses for battle; modern syndicalists could learn much from the history of a religion that “had the remarkable destiny to rejuvenate itself a great number of times.”138 Halévy’s search for a mystique led him away from his liberal past. The mark of good Orleanist liberals was that they were experimental about political regimes (above, ch. 3) but morally committed to liberal institutions and values. In contrast, Daniel Halévy experimented with every variety of morality, taking seriously anything which promised roots and a faith to live by: peasants and craftsmen fascinated him, for instance, precisely because they belonged to a tradition-bound world that was passing away. Nietzsche’s will to power and Sorel’s cult of syndicalist violence did not trouble him; indeed, he played an active role in introducing the French to Nietzsche’s thought139 and assisted in the publication of Reflections on Violence. Halévy peered wistfully to the extreme right and the extreme left; he allowed his revulsion for the modern world and his contempt for the Republic to compromise his liberal heritage. Or perhaps we should say that Halévy rejected all that was best and most liberal in the Orleanist tradition, while keeping all that was worst and most illiberal. The best were the “necessary liberties” of Thiers, the refusal to attach oneself fanatically to a particular kind of regime, the cultivation of a supple politique serving liberal ends. The worst was the tendency of the Orleanists, during the darkest hours, to place their social conservatism above their political liberalism. Whenever Orleanists feared socialists in

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the nineteenth century or communists in the twentieth, they stopped being liberal—and Daniel Halévy was no exception. Two defining moments in Halévy’s life came during the 1930s, the first on February 6, 1934, when the Action française, veterans’ groups, and farright nationalists took to the streets, threatened to march to the Chamber of Deputies, and shouted the slogan “throw the deputies in the Seine.” The police responded by shooting into the crowd, killing 16 and wounding 655. One can well understand Halévy’s angry reaction, but not his declaration that he would henceforth be “a man of the extreme right.”140 The second moment came in 1936, when Halévy greeted the formation of the Popular Front with the warning that Bolsheviks were about to storm the gates. In effect, Halévy called for a reactivation of the party of order of the Second Republic, to thwart what he called “the revolutionary Chamber of 1936.”141 “France is too penetrated by, too saturated with democratic ideas and prejudices for fascism to succeed here,”142 Halévy wrote approvingly in the early 1930s. Fascism he abhorred, but Pétain and Vichy were quite another matter. Not only did Pétain’s initial regime meet his demand for order; the Vichy government also answered his communitarian yearning for a return to traditional, rural, organic society. From 1880 to 1940 France had been “denatured,” wrote Halévy, and had lost “the sentiment of its past along with that of its future.”143 Despite his identity as a Jew, Halévy saw in Pétain’s government a return to truths buried “under the ashes of wreckage and defeat.”144 In his own career Daniel Halévy recapitulated the career of liberalism in France. Fearing the left wing, he moved further and further to the right and became so conservative that he lost sight of his liberal origins. Wanting roots, organic unity, and tradition, he abandoned the politique of liberals for a mystique that led him to adopt an illiberal politics. Péguy, Halévy’s ideological mentor, combined his denunciation of politique with the claim that his hands were “clean” because he kept aloof from the fray of parliamentary politics.145 Since he died during World War I, Péguy never had to face up to the consequences of a politics of “clean hands” and mystique. Daniel Halévy was not so fortunate. Born in 1872 he did not die till 1962, burdened for many years with memories of what he had and had not done during the course of his long pursuit of “clean hands” and mystique. The sadness of his life and that of French liberalism are one and the same: a tale of brilliance, refinement, culture, and abject political failure.

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Throughout French history the combination of political liberalism and social conservatism repeatedly proved to be an unstable compound. Whenever the tension between the two elements became unbearable, it was the liberalism that the liberals sacrificed. Politique succumbed to mystique; Orléanism and Solidarism degenerated into conservatism and liberalism. The failure of the French liberals did not spell the failure of liberalism in France, not when the republicans were willing and able to make the liberal cause their own. The liberalism of the liberals was doomed to failure because it was divorced from democracy. The republicans began with democracy, retained it as their cardinal faith, and only needed to realize the liberal potential of their thought to become tenacious advocates of liberal democracy. From its inception in Rousseau, the republican tradition was appreciative of doctrines of natural rights, government by the consent of the governed, and government by rule of impersonal law. As for the famous “necessary liberties” of Thiers, who could care more for their enforcement than the republicans, constantly denied their rights by the Orleanist liberals? Repressive legislation against the republican and radical press was enacted in 1835 and not finally removed until 1881. Liberals went so far as to forbid newspapers to print the word “republic.”146 Much of the liberalism of the republicans stemmed from the illiberalism they endured for many years at the hands of a supposedly liberal regime. Fighting for their rights to freedom of speech and association, the republicans constantly appealed to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. For them the Declaration became the most sacred of documents, even as the liberals did their best to ignore it (above, ch. 2). The English-speaking world has taken its images of the French republican tradition from Taine and Tocqueville, two liberals who hated the republicans. Americans have listened intently to the voices of the enemies of French republicanism; they have ignored the writings of its champions and neglected the history of the liberal evolution of republican political culture. As a result, the Anglophone world has disdained the true source of liberalism in modern France.

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Chapter



6

Liberal, Illiberal, and Antiliberal Republics

What begins in the United States as a discussion of either the American or the French republic soon develops into a conversation about liberalism. When France is the focus, the frequent aim of American scholars of liberal orientation is to accuse the sister republic of deep-seated illiberalism. Switch the focus to America, and you are surrounded by critics of liberalism determined to invent a republican tradition, if need be, in order to decry the American liberal tradition. Liberalism, not republicanism, is the master word in our political vocabulary; liberalism is the overriding concern, the magnet attracting devotees and detractors, friends and enemies, supporters and nay-sayers. Americans turn to the French republic to indulge their taste for arguments along the lines of “liberalism and its enemies” and to the American republic to contribute to the debate over “liberalism and its critics.” New Lefters, neoconservatives, and communitarians are forever speaking about liberalism, not least when they are ostensibly talking about republicanism. As a finale to our study of modern republics, we too shall turn our attention to liberalism. Have the American and French republics been liberal, illiberal, or antiliberal?

The Illiberal Republic The defining characteristic of an illiberal republic is that it fails, not only in practice but even in principle, to abide by the liberal injunction to include one and all and to treat all groups and persons respectfully, showing no partiality for one, no animus against another. The illiberal republic actively fosters discrimination, sanctions prejudice, and sometimes expresses deep and abiding contempt for humanitarian values and causes. 160

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Both in America and France there is never an absence of illiberal acts and practices. The meaningful difference between the two modern republics is that whereas in France illiberalism has largely functioned outside and in opposition to the republic, in America the republican tradition itself has been known to sanction illiberalism. When immigrants or Jews have come under attack in French history, someone such as the republichating Charles Maurras was likely to be the ideologue spewing hatred and intolerance. Unlike France, the thinkers in America who abused blacks, Indians, or immigrants from southern or eastern Europe were likely to be republic-supporting Jacksonians or some of the supposedly high-minded Progressives of a later era. Georges Sorel’s brief borrowings from the writings of Theodore Roosevelt, and Roosevelt’s from Gustave Le Bon, are Atlantic crossings that point to a larger moral. Contemptuous of the Third Republic and nauseated by its humanist underpinnings, Sorel interrupted his apology for violence to praise Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West, which in the Frenchman’s opinion proved that Homer’s heroes and Nietzsche’s supermen live on in America on the Western frontier, where they do noble battle with Indians.1 Would that French proletarians rose up in similar heroic combat against the respectable classes, mused Sorel, instead of settling for the embourgeoisement of a republican welfare state. For his part Roosevelt avidly read the works of Le Bon, who had little use for the Third Republic or democracy, and who spoke of nationalities as races and of races as primal forces. Roosevelt rejected the gloom and doom of The Psychology of Peoples, its despair over the future of democratic governments, “but what LeBon says of race is very fine and true,” he told his friend Henry Cabot Lodge.2 Neither Lodge nor Roosevelt looked for any reason to question Le Bon’s contention3 that the white, English-speaking race is especially gifted. From across the ocean, Georges Sorel could bolster his illiberal argument by cribbing a few lines from the American republican Roosevelt; looking to France for ideas, Roosevelt could only feed his illiberal sentiments by ignoring republican authors and citing the antirepublican Le Bon. What is true of Sorel and Roosevelt is true in general of France and America: whereas illiberalism in the United States has enjoyed the sanction of republican thought, French illiberalism has lived by launching left and right wing assaults upon the very life of the republic. Contemporary French liberals are well advised to criticize and revise but not to abandon the republican tradition of their country. As we have seen,

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the liberals of nineteenth-century France frequently fell into illiberal attitudes and practices (above, chs. 2, 3, 5); to the republicans, in consequence, fell the task of defending the core values of liberalism that Maurras, Barrès, and Sorel repudiated. Constantly bombarded by illiberal enemies, French republicans have had compelling reasons to build and safeguard a liberal republican fortress. In America, by contrast, liberals are equally well advised to face up to the frequently illiberal role that republican thought has played throughout the course of American history. Less than France, America is the country that has, sometimes officially, embraced an illiberal republicanism. French republicans have rarely succumbed to the temptation to legislate the exclusionary policies they associate with their enemies. Victims of the illiberalism of the supposedly liberal July Monarchy, challenged throughout the Third Republic by rabidly illiberal right- and left-wing forces, the republicans learned to respect liberal values. The fundamental question in France has not been “Will the republic reject illiberalism?”; rather, the question was and still is “How liberal will the republic be?” The one and indivisible republic is a symbol of inclusion; can it also learn to be a pluralistic and divisible republic? That the French republican tradition is inclusionary is proven by its record on immigration. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, France established its reputation as the “melting pot” of Europe, the nation which, more than any of its neighbors, has supported liberal naturalization policies.4 At times France has outdone the United States in its openness to newcomers, notably in the 1920s. Restrictive legislation halted the flow of immigrants to America during the third decade of the century; in dramatic contrast stood France, the country that in 1930 had “the highest rate of foreign population growth in the world.”5 As in America, the great influx of foreigners into France has had as much to do with the self-interest of the business classes as with the cosmopolitan ideals of Enlightenment and Revolution. “It is the interest of the United States to open every possible avenue to emigration from abroad,”6 wrote Alexander Hamilton, whose Report on Manufactures (1791) foreshadowed the position that would be taken by many a later American manufacturer. Entrepreneurs in France have likewise been on the lookout for an adequate supply of cheap labor, and had to overcome the twin obstacles of low population growth and a peasantry unwilling to leave the

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land. Whenever business prospects were promising, French entrepreneurs lobbied vigorously for the admission of immigrants. In good economic times no one worried about the strange ethnic ways of newcomers to France. The Third Republic had transformed peasants into Frenchmen and would surely meet with similar success in its efforts to turn immigrants into French citizens. In bad times there were, as in America, repeated efforts to organize an end to immigration; even so, the vicious attacks of Maurras and Barrès on Jews, Freemasons, Protestants, resident foreigners, and recently naturalized citizens forced republicans to remember their basic moral commitments. Republican nationalism had always been proudly universal, open, welcoming, and assimilationist in thrust, never narrowly ethnic in the German manner. Education in the republican schools and service in the military could be counted on to produce citizens who might as well have been born in France, no matter what their country of origin.7 Any temptation of French intellectuals to flirt with ethnic definitions of nationality ended as a result of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Renan’s “What Is a Nation?” is the best known of the post-1870 addresses which rededicated France to the proposition that it is not “race” (the German view) but “will” which constitutes a nation. A rich heritage of memories is one factor that accounts for a nation’s soul, Renan told his audience; the other is “consent, the clearly expressed desire to live a common life.” Renan rededicated the Third Republic to liberal principles when he suggested that the theory of the social contract was not entirely wrong. In Rousseau-like fashion, Renan announced that “A nation’s existence is—if you will pardon the metaphor—a daily plebiscite.”8 Ethnic background excludes no one from citizenship who consents to be French and who wills the union of the French people.9 Inclusion, a central principle of republican France, pertains to the world of intellect no less than to that of immigrants. One proof of the vitality of French republicanism lies in its demonstrated ability to revamp along liberal republican lines the very ideas that might otherwise have become antirepublican. “Decadence” was a word constantly on the lips of Sorel and Barrès when they attacked the Republic. Liberal republicans responded by affirming that decadence was indeed a threat—not because the Third Republic is decadent but because Europe is menaced by America, the land of mass production, mass culture, and mass advertising. Around 1930 the French could not get enough of books such as Robert Aron and Arnaud

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Dandieu’s Décadence de la nation française (1931) and Le Cancer américain (1931), which lambasted modern American “anti-individualism” and mourned the passing of Jeffersonian America.10 In the course of ritualistically denouncing American influence, loyal republicans both stole the language of the reactionaries and reiterated their commitment to liberal individualism. French republican thought did not capitulate, even in the most trying days, to illiberalism; rather, it was some of the illiberal French intellectuals, most notably Maurice Barrès, who capitulated to republicanism. “That Dreyfus is capable of treason I conclude from his race,” wrote Barrès in one of his typical anti-Semitic tirades.11 Yet Barrès never joined the Action française, and in his Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (1902) he opened the door to a possible modification of his views: “Let us say once and for all that, strictly speaking, it is inexact to talk of a French race. We are not a race but a nation.”12 Elsewhere he stated, “There is a French type, an English type, a German type but not a race. Peoples are products of history.”13 When World War I came, and persons of all backgrounds fought and died, Barrès counted Jews among “the diverse spiritual families of France.” “Many Israelites, fixtures among us for generations and centuries, are natural members of the national body.”14 Without abandoning his ultra-nationalism, Barrès had made his peace with the Republic. Barrès actually enriched the republican tradition insofar as his writings were among the many sources influencing Charles de Gaulle.15 Both men despised the petty parliamentary machinations of political parties and yearned for a man on horseback. De Gaulle’s ideal strong man, however, would be a dedicated republican. “Deliberation is the work of many men. Action, of one alone,”16 de Gaulle announced from on high, but in complete consistency with Machiavelli’s chapter entitled “To found a new republic, or to reform entirely the old institutions of an existing one, must be the work of one man only.”17 Obviously Barrès had chosen the wrong general in backing Boulanger; de Gaulle knew he had only to look in the mirror to see the perfect prince who would finally give France the stable and great republic that was her due. Most of all, de Gaulle echoed Barrès when he stressed that the republic is or should be a manifestation of the never ending renewal of eternal France. Barrès had effaced his early “cult of the self ” by subordinating his romantic ego to “the earth and the dead.” In the same manner, de Gaulle championed a France that “responds to the call of the centuries, yet re-

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mains herself through time.” France, de Gaulle wrote, “has taken on an enduring character which makes each generation of Frenchmen dependent on their forefathers and pledged to their descendants.” Together, the French people have forged “a past, a present, and a future that are indissoluble.” As leader, de Gaulle’s objective was “to endow France with a republic capable of matching up to its destiny.” De Gaulle’s words are reminiscent of the language of Barrès, and his nationalism is as ardent as that of his rightwing predecessor; but the General’s republicanism is infinitely more dedicated to constitutional government and the Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen.18 We may conclude that the French have succeeded, not perfectly19 but reasonably well, in preventing illiberal forces from infiltrating the republican heritage. When de Gaulle and other republicans arrived at an understanding with illiberal thought, it was usually on terms dictated by the republicans, not the forces of illiberalism. Beyond combating illiberalism, the Republic has also moved toward establishing a stronger positive liberal identity in recent decades, especially by inching away from its long-standing position that anything less than a “one and indivisible” regime will lead to chaos. Signs of a more pluralist republic were clearly in evidence throughout the 1980s, despite the threat to republican stability posed by the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s racist and anti-Semitic National Front. One moment of truth came in June of 1984, when street demonstrations forced the Socialist government to back away from its attack on subsidized private education. Once again the Socialists were about to do battle with the Catholic Church, which had historically competed with republicans for access to the minds of French children. In the past, the church could not have been more illiberal, nor were the republicans any better in response to clerical provocations. “The local schoolmaster is France; the teaching brother is Rome, the stranger and enemy,” wrote Michelet, whose viewpoint echoed Rousseau’s attacks upon divided loyalties in the Social Contract.20 During the Third Republic, Jules Ferry sounded much like Rousseau when he sought a republican public education that would “penetrate the heart and mind of the child.”21 To its credit, the public in 1984 ignored the old clerical/anticlerical debate; French mothers and fathers simply wanted more choice of school systems and voiced their concerns in the streets.22 Neither church nor republic would henceforth claim children, body and soul. The parents had their way and so did liberalism.

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A second moment of truth came in September of 1989, when three girls came to public secondary school wearing Muslim headscarves. For republican schoolteachers, the action of the girls constituted a direct violation of the French understanding of the separation of church and state. Unlike America, where the obligation to refrain from religious displays in public schools falls squarely upon the teachers, in France the students are bound by a similar duty. The parents of the girls were successful in stirring up a major controversy over the issue of whether the republican tradition could bend without breaking. The schoolteachers, one of the primary constituencies of the Socialist party, met the challenge by refusing to compromise their time-honored republican concept of laïcité. Socialist Minister of Education Lionel Jospin, however, was in the mood for an accommodation. And so was the Council of State, which advised that the girls be allowed to wear their scarves, so long as they did not actively seek to proselytize on school grounds. Ultimately, the decision of what to do was left not to the state but to the local school principal. Thus did the Republic take another step in a more liberal direction, despite feeling the heat from Le Pen. As the year 2000 approached, French republicans wrestled with the issue of the status of Corsica. In the past, any provisions in favor of the local traditions of the Corsicans would have been regarded as an unthinkable offense against the republic one and indivisible. During the 1990s some republicans reiterated the old faith with a vengeance, but Jospin again sought an accommodation. Minister of the Interior Jean-Pierre Chevènement opposed compromise with the Corsicans in the name of Rousseau, the general will, and indivisible sovereignty; Prime Minister Jospin looked for a compromise, just as he had as Minister of Education during the 1989 affair of the headscarves.23 Probably France is not headed towards federalism, but there is reason to believe that the republic may one day become more divisible, pluralist, and liberal in its political arrangements. Liberal France is still a work in progress. What makes the steps taken in recent years toward a more liberal republic especially impressive is that they have come at the same time as economic reverses, mass unemployment, and the rise of the xenophobic and anti-Semitic National Front. Le Pen has not stopped the movement toward a more pluralistic France; he has, however, complicated the lives of liberals. Should liberals embrace a multicultural agenda, should they seek to vindicate a droit à la différence? Many thought so, until the respectable con-

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servative parties in the 1980s began to steal Le Pen’s thunder by advocating restrictions on immigrants. Then the left wing’s arguments in favor of retaining ethnic identity were cited by the right wing as proofs that the newcomers could not be assimilated. Hence many leftists felt forced to return to the old republican philosophy, which prohibits ethnicity from playing a role in public affairs. The twentieth century closed with a great deal of confusion as to what was “left” and “right” in the country that invented the distinction.24 More importantly, it closed with a dilemma for French liberals: how could they break up the one-and-indivisible character of the republic without giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Liberalism as the goal was faring quite well. The means to the goal were far less clear. In the United States we find no equivalent of such illiberal and antirepublican thinkers as Sorel and Maurras, but the American variant of the republican doctrine has itself been, at times, manifestly illiberal, never more so than in the antebellum writings of the brilliant and perverse George Fitzhugh. His two noteworthy books, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All; or Slaves Without Masters (1856), could not be more “republican” in their ideology, nor more illiberal. Fitzhugh gives us reason to rejoice that “classical republicanism” has been virtually absent from American thought. George Fitzhugh, almost alone in America, is classical in his republicanism; he alone is a true Aristotelian and a figure whose republicanism takes direct aim at liberalism. “We found that our theory of the origin of society was identical with [Aristotle’s] . . . We saw at once that the true vindication of slavery must be founded on his theory of man’s social nature, as opposed to Locke’s theory of the Social Contract, on which latter Free Society rests for support.”25 In the South Fitzhugh spied a happy polity governed, as the ancient polis was, by a landed aristocracy whose leisure was provided by the sweat of slaves. In the North he saw a world of misery, discontent, and “free labor” that was anything but free. To Fitzhugh, the plantation was the polis of the modern age, a model for the North to copy in America; a model for Europe as well, torn apart by the revolutions of 1848, grappling with socialist ideologies that were as profound in their portrayals of the horrors of industrialism as they were foolish in resisting the solution of paternalistic slavery. Fitzhugh’s republicanism was classical, antiliberal, and illiberal.

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Not perhaps the most typical of Southern thinkers, Fitzhugh was nonetheless a polemicist who struck fear into the hearts of Northerners. For if Jacksonians sometimes spoke of the dignity of labor to express their self-assured contempt of aristocrats, more frequently they did so to calm their own fears that the distance between the status of white workers and that of slaves was closing. Denouncing “wage slavery,” Northern advocates of labor sometimes sounded much like Southern ideologues, and on occasion they warmed to the political ambitions of John C. Calhoun. Orestes Brownson, the radical Boston author of The Laboring Classes, corresponded with John C. Calhoun in the early 1840s.26 Stridently racist Mike Walsh, a New York Democrat associated with labor, anticipated Fitzhugh’s rhetoric and supported Calhoun’s bid for the Presidency in 1844.27 The Jacksonian republic of producers was far removed from the classical republic of leisured gentlemen, but in its fashion the Jacksonian persuasion was fully as illiberal as Fitzhugh’s. When Democrat David Wilmot opposed extension of slavery into the territories, he explained that he was advocating “the rights of white free men.” His aim, he told Congress, was to avoid “the disgrace which association with Negro slavery brings upon free labor.”28 Ending slavery never was a goal of the Jacksonians; instead, all their efforts went into maintaining the distinction between white laborers and black slaves. Unlike Fitzhugh’s conception of the republic, that of the Jacksonians was very modern in its doctrines of free labor, equal rights, and populist laissez faire. Racism, however, was integral to the free-labor ideology, ever haunted by the Southern claim that all labor is unfree. Fear that white wage-earners might be reduced to a status equivalent to that of blacks was what energized many Jacksonians, whose very notion of liberty was rooted in racial prejudice.29 Southern republicanism was racist first and last; Jacksonian republicanism was a compound of liberal natural rights and illiberal racism. Anglo-Saxonism, another type of republicanism, began—in John Higham’s words—“as a liberal doctrine . . . [but] ended as a slogan for reaction.”30 To Jefferson as to the Levellers before him, the Saxons were freeholders who carried simple uncorrupted republican mores from the forests of Germany to England; Americans, in Jefferson’s view, duplicated the Saxon feat when they brought freedom to the New World.31 Sadly, after the Norman invasion, the unfreedom of feudalism had descended upon England; if Virginians were to enjoy Saxon freedom in the modern age, they

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must heed the lessons of English history and take special pains to eliminate all feudal vestiges.32 Then the rude but admirable republic of Tacitus’s Germania might be reborn on American soil, thought Jefferson. The Saxons lost in feudal and Norman England but could yet emerge victorious in the American republic of small freeholders. Jefferson would not have recognized the revived Anglo-Saxonism of the late nineteenth century. In place of his radical criticism of English history post-1066, the new Germanists substituted a reactionary, illiberal, Anglophilic doctrine, aimed primarily at fostering their program of curbing non-English immigration. Under the new reading of history, the Saxons had never been broken by the Norman yoke: far from it, their ancient institutions of local government lived on forever in England and America. From Tacitus to England to the New England town meeting, history was a record of the uninterrupted transmission of free Saxon-inspired government across the many intervening centuries. At the turn of the twentieth century, a revisionist Anglo-Saxonism sprang forth that was as conservative and in love with England as Jefferson’s had been Anglophobic and radical. In the new Anglo-Saxonism, the only good change was glacier-like in its slow pace, the only rights those sanctioned by history. A theory propounded in Eastern states by men from old families, the revived Germanism served to distinguish Americans of Anglo-Saxon background from the “lesser” ethnic groups: the Irish, French Canadians, and the latest wave of immigrants from southern Europe. The modern Saxons were, by their own admission, natural leaders and carriers of culture; the others were drunks, anarchists, strikers, and machine politicians. Jefferson’s expansive and optimistic Saxonism had become the weapon of blue-blooded nativists, worried that America was about to leave them behind.33 More than anyone else, it was Herbert Baxter Adams of Johns Hopkins who taught historians that the “seeds of [local] self-government,” the “germs of our state and national life,” could be traced back to Germanic tribesmen. Freedom was a direct inheritance passed from ancient to modern Germanic peoples, the English especially and the Americans of English extraction.34 Economist Francis A. Walker, who was President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agreed with Adams and spelled out the implications of Anglo-Saxonism for non-English immigrants: the newcomers were “beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence . . . They have none of the ideas and apti-

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tudes which . . . belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak trees of old Germany.”35 Anglo-Saxonists united their practice with their theory when one of their leading spokespersons, John Fiske, was elected President of the Immigration Restriction League, an organization expressly dedicated to curtailing the flow from southern and eastern Europe into the United States. Henry Cabot Lodge carried the thesis of Germanic and English superiority into the chambers of Congress, where his attacks on non-English immigrants were curtailed only by his desire to be re-elected.36 Talk of the destiny of Anglo-Saxons was typical, also, of Senator Albert Beveridge and Secretary of State John Hay, who served under Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt himself could not resist the temptation to write his Winning of the West as a final chapter of the story that began in ancient German forests.37 Nor was the future President free from Lodge’s obsession with immigrants; but TR tempered his outlook by seeing the frontier, in advance of Frederick Jackson Turner, as the ultimate melting pot.38 Whereas the Anglo-Saxonists used the category of “English” to degrade just about everyone but themselves, Roosevelt expanded the definition to include all but the most recent immigrants. Of all figures in American history, Teddy Roosevelt was one of the most “republican,” one of the few who was even in some sense classically republican, a Roman in the modern age, who could not too often extol the “virile virtues,” the manly, heroic, masterful code of the Roman warrior and statesman. Women who were not mothers would have trouble gaining admission to citizenship in his republic, no matter how Progressive it might be, and his welfare state would bear a markedly maternalistic imprint.39 Indians were justly defeated by whites, in his estimation, because it is “the warlike power of a civilized people” that “leaves heirs and a glorious memory.”40 Hence it was Livy’s civilized, self-masterful, and aggressive Romans that won Roosevelt’s admiration, more than Tacitus’s primitive, anarchic, proto-republican Germanic tribesmen. Liberal confronted republican when Grover Cleveland, a liberal in the manner of Gladstone,41 opposed imperialism at the same time that Roosevelt took pride that “our whole national history has been one of expansion.”42 Cleveland upheld the view that any further expansion must proceed, as in the past, by ensuring that the governed had given their consent.43 Roosevelt pushed aside the old theory of the social contract, so important to the nineteenth-century advocates of Manifest Destiny, favor-

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ing instead classical analogies which permitted him to see continental expansion as a combination of Greek self-rule for new states combined with Roman centralization for the Union.44 In the case of newly conquered island peoples, Roosevelt made a republican argument for forcing them to be free. Anyone who objected to annexation on humanitarian grounds was added to Roosevelt’s list of soft, enervated, effeminate Americans. The ancient Romans had their epic of founding and expansion, celebrated by Virgil and Livy; in modern times the Americans had completed “the great epic of wilderness conquest,”45 celebrated by Roosevelt. Yet another epic was about to begin, Roosevelt hoped, that of American expansion across the seas. By placing all his emphasis on building a navy, Roosevelt could avoid the traditional American animus against standing armies. Had he wished, he could even have claimed the authority of James Harrington, who predicted that the first country to retrieve Roman ways would, with the help of a well-equipped navy, spread Protestant civilization across the world.46 Calls for England to be “the new Rome of the West” were common in the circles of English Commonwealthmen, just as in Renaissance Italy Machiavelli had longed for a leader who would remake Florence in the likeness of the ancient, expansionary Roman republic.47 Roosevelt’s candidate for Rome reborn was America, “the mightiest of republics.”48 And woe to squeamish liberals at home or enemies abroad who would obstruct the road to American greatness. Only in America did republican thinkers officially advocate illiberal doctrines. Fitzhugh, the Jacksonians, the Anglo-Saxons, and Theodore Roosevelt set forth republican ideals illiberal in nature, ideals which in France—with the possible exception of Roosevelt’s imperialism—could only be formulated outside the republican tradition. One other difference between the French and American republican traditions should be noted. Whereas the French republic condemned the racism of Gobineau, the American republic neither sanctioned nor denounced his vicious doctrine. Hence Southerners who wanted Gobineau or a homegrown equivalent of Gobineau’s writings, such as J. C. Nott and George Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854),49 could have their racism without abandoning the Republic. This failure to condemn antebellum racial doctrines resulted in their continuing vitality long after slavery ended. Racial theories were omnipresent in fin de siècle America because of mounting fear of the new immigrants. Lodge turned to Le Bon for arguments that Americans of English extraction were born to rule those of

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non-English ancestry. Roosevelt’s Winning of the West was written, in part, as a tale of the triumph of the superior white race over the inferior race of Indians.50 To his credit, Roosevelt freed himself from notions of an Aryan race and eventually took some care to note the dangers of “biological analogies in history.”51 But he, too, was worried about the new wave of immigrants, because there no longer was a frontier to serve as melting pot. Obsessed with repudiating “hyphenated Americans,”52 TR could never entirely free himself from the web of racial theories.53 Even the most “advanced” thinkers of the turn of the century, the Progressives, indulged in racial theorizing without being accused of hypocrisy. Races and Immigrants in America (1907), by John R. Commons of the University of Wisconsin, is an excellent example of the tenacity of racial thinking within the ranks of the Progressives. An enlightened, socially conscious thinker, Commons blamed employers for using racial divisions to undermine labor unions, and praised unions for overcoming differences of race and religion.54 Still, Commons did not doubt that “race differences are established in the very blood and physical constitution,” and he placed the blame for the failure of Reconstruction on the shoulders of “the negro,” who had failed despite being given opportunities and educational advantages “not only on equal terms, but actually on terms of preference over whites.”55 On the questions of “race suicide” and Chinese immigration, Commons again spoke an illiberal language. He did not denounce the fears of “race suicide” voiced by spokespersons for the upper classes—their worry that the Irish, for instance, had a high birth rate, the blue bloods a low rate. Instead, he lent a Progressive twist to the conventional prejudice by suggesting the problem might be especially serious among skilled workers.56 Addressing the question of Chinese immigration, Commons had an opportunity to rise above prejudice by taking advantage of his claim that “it is civilization, not race evolution, that has transformed the primitive warrior into the philosopher, scientist, artisan, and business man.” Instead, he delighted his fellow Wisconsin Progressive and racist Edward A. Ross by suggesting that the very antiquity of their civilization meant that the older generation of Chinese could not be assimilated.57 The solution Commons advocated to the problems presented by the new immigration was twofold. For those immigrants already in the United States, piled on top of one another in big cities, he proposed what

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amounted to relocation in rural areas and small towns, those reliable strongholds of conservative Americanizing mores. For the immigrants of the future, he would use literary tests or other devices to monitor if not to close the gates. With no show of embarrassment, he described his policy as an “improvement” rather than a “restriction” of immigration.58 As the example of Progressives Ross and Commons illustrates, much of American political thought has been neither liberal nor republican in its vocabulary and conceptualization. Especially in matters pertaining to race, both liberal and republican thinkers have yielded to so-called “scientific” theories of racial inequality. Central rather than peripheral, respectable rather than shameful, the powerful presence and frequent recurrence of scientific racism in public life suggests that America has been and sometimes still is an illiberal republic.59

The Antiliberal Republic Neither in America nor in France does an antiliberal republic exist, except as a figment of the ideologically agitated scholarly imagination. Never, prior to the battle of the books of the last several decades, was there a republican tradition in America that took polemical issue with liberalism. And on the other side of the Atlantic, French republicans battling liberals chose to invoke rather than repudiate liberal principles—initially as a strategy of survival, perhaps, but later as a matter of principle. The modern political world has seen many ideological formations, but never a republican tradition that lived to criticize liberalism. The statement that an antiliberal republic exists or has existed may not be historically accurate, but it does have consequences. In the years to come, the American vision of an irreparably antiliberal French republican tradition threatens to enter more and more into the works of French scholars,60 who would be better served by efforts to recover the liberal possibilities of their republic. The statement that a republican tradition in America has been betrayed by liberalism also has consequences. Attacks on what was once called “establishment liberalism” unite the New Left and neoconservatives, who have projected their disdain for liberalism into the past. Ostensibly enemies, left and right frequently overlap (above, ch. 3), especially in the writings of communitarians. At a time when the New Deal legacy is under duress in

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public life, the “republican” scholars, whether wittingly or unwittingly, have been lending a helping hand to the dismantlers of the New Deal. Denouncing the French Revolution(s) has been a perennially favorite activity of Americans. Whatever sympathy they once had for the French Revolution came to an end when Jefferson, to free himself from the Federalist charge that he was a Jacobin, turned his back on France. Jacksonians momentarily took delight in the advent of the Second Republic, but the Whigs smiled when the upheaval of 1848 ended in failure. The most recent round of diatribes claiming that the French republican tradition has been Jacobin, antiliberal, and proto-totalitarian, amounts to a recycling for the millennium of the Cold War rhetoric of the mid-twentieth century. J. L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1951) was the prime example of the determination of Cold War liberals to see the French Revolution as the precursor of the Russian Revolution, the Jacobins as the forerunners of the Bolsheviks. Walter Lippmann’s The Public Philosophy (1955) gave wide currency in America to Talmon’s attack on French republicans. Writing in response to the McCarthy period, Lippmann, like many another liberal intellectual of his time, feared “the ever-expanding masses who are losing contact with the traditions of Western society.”61 Because of McCarthy, intellectuals in America suffered from a failure of democratic nerve, and chose to blame the people, renamed the masses, rather than the elites.62 During the 1950s, the writings of such frightened antidemocratic European liberals as José Ortega y Gasset and Jacob Burckhardt resurfaced and gained appreciation in the circles of the liberal American intelligentsia. Hostility towards the democratic French republicans became second nature for American liberals faced with totalitarian Russians abroad and potentially totalitarian “masses” at home. It was as if the intellectuals of the July Monarchy were treated to a second life on the condition that they reside in the United States. Lippmann’s insistence that the world was torn between “liberalism and Jacobinism”63 was typical of the age. So was the popularity of Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 lecture “Two Concepts of Freedom,” which drew a sharp contrast between freedom from coercion, or “negative freedom,” and “positive freedom,” understood as self-mastery, living in accordance with one’s higher self, finding fulfillment through belonging to a group and having one’s group recognized by the larger society. Berlin argued that only negative

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freedom was genuine—positive freedom being an excuse for the state or a totalitarian party to force us to be free. Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia hung ominously over the pages of Berlin’s essay. His was a defensive, bunker-style liberalism, fearful for its very life. Repeatedly, Berlin cited Benjamin Constant’s speech, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns” (1819), as an earlier statement of his own liberal philosophy.64 What Berlin failed to note was Constant’s insistence that without civic participation, negative freedom is endangered.65 Cold War liberalism was so obsessive in its repudiation of revolutionary politics that it could not do justice to its own civic possibilities, much less to those of the French republican tradition. Throughout the Cold War, American liberals were locked in a symbiotic relationship with the French Marxists they hated. After World War II, the right wing in France, compromised by Vichy and Collaboration, disappeared from French intellectual life, as did representatives of liberalism, perhaps for the same reason. To be intellectually respectable one had to be on the left, the Marxist and revolutionary left. To succeed as a historian one had to rewrite the French Revolution as a precursor of the Russian, which made for bad history on both sides of the Atlantic, because Americans accepted with horror the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of the French Revolution. Lenin and other Bolsheviks frequently consulted the French Revolution for justification. Accused by the Mensheviks of being a Jacobin, Lenin accepted the label and made it his pride and joy. A Jacobin, he explained, is a selfless member of an organized revolutionary party; a Menshevik, he continued, is a Girondist, disorganized and opportunistic.66 In post-World War II France, Albert Soboul and other Marxist-Leninist historians took Lenin’s analogies literally and transformed the French Revolution into a dress rehearsal for the Russian.67 Although American liberals despised the French Marxists, they uncritically accepted Soboul’s reading of the French Revolution. How could they resist an interpretation that satisfied their Cold War obsessions and vindicated the age-old American disdain for French revolutionaries? The American liberals fed off the historical errors of the Marxist-Leninist historians instead of correcting them, and in the process the French republican tradition was the loser: the Americans could see in it nothing more than pre-Leninist Jacobinism. Everywhere the American liberals looked

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when they turned to France, they spied an antiliberal republic that existed only in their imagination. One might think that by the end of the twentieth century American liberals would have shown some signs of willingness to revise their long-held views. In principle they should have been able, with the Cold War behind them, to separate the French republican tradition from Bolshevism. They should have learned that to blame French Marxist intellectuals for exculpating even the worst acts of the Soviet regime is one thing; to blame French republicanism quite another. Unfortunately, the old attitudes persist. Liberal scholars, dancing on the grave of the Soviet empire, still indiscriminately confuse republicanism with Bolshevism.68 Perhaps the prominence of revolutionary intellectuals and the absence of liberal intellectuals in post-World War II France misled Americans into believing that the republic itself was antiliberal. Leading intellectuals were existentialists or Marxists or existential Marxists, virtually never liberals. It was a sign of the times that Albert Camus could not call himself a liberal. Moderation, gradualism, opposition to political violence, a campaign against capital punishment, stress on private life, may be counted among the many strands of liberalism in the thought of Camus. But the idiom in which he spoke was that of metaphysical alienation in the face of a universe that did not answer the human call for coherence and meaning; only with difficulty could he theorize about politics. By far his finest hour as a political thinker was his novel The Plague (1947), which, in its depiction of sanitary squads organized to combat the plague, offered a parable of Resistance to Fascism. Four years later, when Camus attempted to write a formal philosophical treatise condemning Marxist revolutionary violence in Man in Revolt, the results satisfied no one. To justify political moderation, Camus tried awkwardly and unconvincingly to adapt his old notion of revolting against the “absurdity” of human existence into a new notion of revolting against political extremes. Camus knew how to act like a liberal but not how to think like one, and he never dared utter the word except to criticize liberal humanists, those supposedly naïve believers in progress who were unprepared for another outbreak of plague.69 While straightforwardly liberal thinkers were scarce in postwar France, liberal causes were frequently advanced under other labels. The popularity of Camus’s antirevolutionary writings shows that liberal writings could thrive if issued as existentialism. Strangely, liberal causes could also be advanced if packaged as revolutionary anarchism. Daniel Cohn-Bendit and

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his fellow student rebels of May ’68 spoke the language of Bakunin, but in fact they advanced the cause of liberalizing the Fifth Republic. Their politics was, by their own account, far more revolutionary than that of the Communists; yet, only a few years later, these ex-students were reformers, members of the Socialist party, or participants in the Green or feminist movements. The transition from anarchist revolutionary to liberal reformer was not as paradoxical as it might seem. Overwhelmingly, the student movement of 1968 belonged not to Marxist groups intent on salvaging the Russian revolution, but to young anarchists and anarcho-Marxists who remembered the martyrdom of their forebears at the blood-stained hands of the brutal Bolsheviks.70 In common with their anarchist predecessors, the students yearned for a “nonauthoritarian and nonhierarchal socialist society” based on “horizontal relationships” and the self-governance of workers’ control.71 Opposed to violence, opposed to any means contradicting the end of a free society, the students pursued a politics of liberation that overlapped with the liberalism they ignored. French students draped in black flags expressed their frustration in 1968 that their supposedly radical American counterparts were more interested in reform than revolution.72 Soon, however, the French students would themselves be liberal reformers. Liberalism without the name may also be found in the postmodernism of Foucault, Derrida, and company. The attack on the referential theory of language, the claim that the “real” world outside the text is itself a text, the assertion that texts belong to the critics rather than the authors, and that all interpretations are misinterpretations, have in practice been used to foster cultural pluralism. In the postmodern world all master narratives must be rejected, Marxism included. Also on the chopping block is the oneness and indivisibility of the republic, which has lost its justification for imposing a single culture on persons of differing ethnicity, sexual preferences, and the like. Many postmodern writings remind one of the literature of exposure dear to liberal hearts—the graphic portrayals of the exploitative nature of one or another cultural practice or institution. All the talk about power is about the powerless; every discussion of marginal writings becomes a discussion of marginalized social groups. Behind the avant-garde mask is the old liberal agenda.73 Marxist revolutionaries of the postwar era were antiliberal. Postwar republicans, by contrast, would not permit their revolutionary origins in the First Republic to rob them of the progressive liberal gains of the Second,

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Third, and Fourth Republics. Eventually, during the course of the Fifth Republic, intellectual life began to catch up with the great advances that had been made during the 1960s and 1970s in the realm of building liberal political institutions (above, ch. 3). Beginning with the writings of François Furet, hosts of historians, essayists, and journalists in the 1980s openly embraced the liberal republicanism from which Camus, the students of May ’68, and the postmodernists had stood aloof, even while conducting themselves as liberals. Throughout French history, liberals have been known as “89ers,” because they accepted the Declaration of Rights and the outlawing of feudalism but not the rest of the Revolution. Republicans, having made the Revolution into an icon, insisted that the Revolution is a bloc; one must take all or nothing. How different, then, were the republicans of 1989, the bicentennial year, from their forebears! The fervently republican Socialist government celebrated the Revolution all through 1989 but showed little interest in remembering the revolutionary events following 1789. Like the liberals of old, the modern republicans are 89ers. “Finish the Revolution!” had always been the republican slogan; in understated fashion, the Socialists of 1989 signaled that it was finished. No longer would the Revolution serve as the primary emblem of the republican tradition. That honor, presumably, would pass to a more inclusive and liberal symbol of republican aspirations, the Declaration of Rights. To the best of their ability, the Socialists placed the focus of the bicentennial celebrations on the Declaration of 1789.74 France is a liberal republic. If to American liberals it appears antiliberal, that is because they cannot let go of their Cold War mentality.75 The temptation to slide from condemning Sartre to condemning the republic remains irresistible, because the American intellectuals of the 1950s have left an indelible imprint upon us. They reinvented the antiliberal French republic of Taine (above, ch. 5), and we are living on the inheritance. The American antiliberal republic was born in the imagination of historians in the late 1960s, at the height of the student New Left and in reaction against the antidemocratic, Cold War, liberal establishment. One of the impulses for the first wave of the “republican” scholarship was Tom Hayden’s call for “participatory democracy” and his critique of the antidemocratic liberalism preached by the finest minds in the academic and journalistic worlds.

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Hayden’s Port Huron statement (1962), the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, is a precocious and telling critique of the 1950s establishment liberals: Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, among others. Down with their efforts to qualify democracy out of existence was Hayden’s cry. Down with their politics devoid of aspirations, shielded from the public, guilty of transforming the citizenry into the very “masses” that the liberal intelligentsia feared.76 The liberals wanted an end to the totalitarian threats posed by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Closer to home, there was Senator Joseph McCarthy to contend with—less than totalitarian in his right wing extremism, but an inexhaustible source of hysteria, and a man willing to compromise civil liberties in the name of saving the country from subversives.77 Nothing mattered more to the liberal intellectuals than to find elites that would stand up to the populist barbarians at the gate. The liberal intelligentsia of the 1950s welcomed with open arms Ortega y Gasset and other European thinkers who believed the origins of totalitarianism were to be found in “the revolt of the masses.”78 Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter were careful, however, to modify the theory of mass society in accordance with American circumstances:79 rather than predict the coming of a totalitarian movement, they warned that throughout the past, “from anti-Masonry to Populism,” America had suffered periodically from a “paranoid style” in its public life. The United States was vulnerable to McCarthy, wrote Hofstadter, because “a populistic culture like ours . . . seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy.”80 Hayden recognized that the so-called “elitist theory of democracy” was in fact a liberal theory of restraining democracy. What the liberals wanted, above all, was for most persons to stay out of politics, and to that end they went so far as to praise apathy. Typical of the liberals was the claim of one political scientist that “many of the ideas connected with the general theme of a Duty to Vote belong properly to the totalitarian camp and are out of place in the vocabulary of liberal democracy.”81 The belief was that the prevalence of elites, far from being an embarrassment to liberal democracy, was a positive good because they could save the country from populism. No danger followed from their existence, so long as each elite had to compete with all the others and different elites dictated the outcome on different issues.82 Hayden accepted none of the ploys of the liberals, least of all their talk about “the end of ideology.”83 Bell, Lipset, and others favored a revised ver-

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sion of Karl Mannheim’s 1929 thesis, that with the admission of the laboring classes to full industrial citizenship, the age of ideologies had come to a close. The revision was that whereas Mannheim gloomily concluded that history had thereby lost its motor,84 the American liberals rejoiced that politics would henceforth be more about “means” than “ends.” They had had their fill of the ideological politics of totalitarian regimes. For his part Hayden could find little to admire in a labor movement that had lost its reforming zeal, tolerated racism, and suffered from autocratic rule.85 Nor did he see any reason why the advancement of the working class should necessarily entail the death of utopian visions.86 Put the Cold War out of mind for a moment, and the old democratic dreams may return to their rightful place in American public life. Who knows? fraternity, community, quality of life, and public interest may yet have their best days ahead of them. Beyond the small politics of interest-group bargaining, Hayden contended, lies the promised land of a politics of civic engagement and public purpose. Except for a few laudatory comments about Jefferson and Paine that he cribbed from the pages of C. Wright Mills,87 Hayden apparently knew little history. Enter the newborn “republican” historiography that provided the New Left with the usable past it sorely needed. In common with Hayden, the historians were intent on indicting liberalism, which explains why they paid so little attention to the first six hundred pages of Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, so much attention to the final ten pages on “the end of classical politics.” Hayden had written against the institutionalized liberalism of the updated New Deal; the republican historians, following in Wood’s steps, wrote against the institutionalized liberalism of the Constitution. Left-leaning historians were irresistibly drawn to Wood’s claim that concern for civic virtue and the public good waned at the Constitutional Convention. Their left-wing republic came into imaginary existence to criticize “establishment liberalism.” The newly invented republican tradition gave additional comfort to the left when Sean Wilentz claimed he had discovered working-class republicanism in early nineteenth-century New York City. On the face of it, however, he marshaled less evidence of “artisan republicanism” than of hunger for land. George Henry Evans and Mike Walsh, he noted, called for land reform as an answer to the problem of “white [wage] slavery.” Abandoning the ranks of the artisans, relocating on a western plot of land, was the dream of the workers.88 Wilentz’s sympathizers, hard put to save the arti-

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san republican hypothesis, contended that the desire of the workers for landed independence made them good Aristotelian citizens.89 To convince themselves, they had to overlook that even Kant’s notoriously uncivic republic was premised on the conviction that “to be fit to vote, a person must have an independent position.”90 With or without suitable evidence, leftwing republicanism would not be denied. Where a left-wing republicanism came into being, a right-wing variation was certain to follow. Challenged by a new left and convinced that the counterculture of the 1960s was the road to ruin, the establishment liberals underwent a metamorphosis into neoconservatives. It did not take long for the “neocons” to realize that the “republican” historiography could be enlisted on their side in the ideological battles of the 1970s. The “virtue talk” of the republican scholarship was always anomalous in the ranks of the New Lefters but right at home among the neoconservatives. Whereas the political left called for liberation, the political right issued appeals for self-restraint and a return to the old values. It is no accident that whereas Robert Putnam, heir of the New Left, speaks of the depletion of “social capital,” neoconservative Irving Kristol worries about the depletion of “moral capital.”91 Neoconservatives simply cannot speak too often of virtue, whether in the form of William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, Kristol’s essays on the “republican virtues,” or James Q. Wilson’s theme of “the rediscovery of character: private virtue and public policy.”92 By conflating private virtue with classical civic virtue, the neoconservatives had an easy time reading a republican tradition into American history. Their other trump card was the absence through most of the past of the word “liberal” from the political vocabulary. The Liberal Republicans of 1872 came and went without notice93; possibly, not until Hoover and FDR fought over it did the term “liberal” come to play a significant role in the American lexicon.94 The ubiquity of the word “virtue” and the absence of “liberal” were the stuff from which the right-wing “republican” commentators spun their tale of a once vibrant republic laid low by an upstart liberalism. At first the neoconservatives were as hostile to the conservatives of the Republican party as to the New Left. In Barry Goldwater they saw a Senator who had abandoned the cause of racial justice and who represented the anti-intellectualism of popular culture.95 By the 1980s, however, some of the neocons were expressing “great sympathy . . . for the general and settled convictions of the average American”96 and had evolved into apologists of

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the Republican party. One of the intellectual resources they drew upon to justify their journey to the Ronald Reagan right was the republican scholarship. George Will is a good example, especially his Restoration: Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (1992). In his earlier writings, Will identified himself as a “Tory,” a disciple of Burke and Disraeli who despised both liberal individualism and American conservatism. “The United States acutely needs a real conservatism, characterized by a concern to cultivate the best persons and the best in persons,”97 he wrote in 1983. Later he reversed himself, assuming the role of apologist for the Republican party despite its populist individualism and his complaint that “American conservatives are caught in the web of their careless antigovernment rhetoric.”98 The “classical republicanism” of Restoration served as the unlikely middle term in his transformation from neoto ordinary American conservative. At the time that Will was writing Restoration, the Republican party was gathering its forces under the banner of Congressional term limits. Will’s Burkean theory of representation and the Republicans’ Jacksonian view were polar opposites. Burke had urged representatives to act as statesmen, voting their wisdom and conscience rather than listening to their constituents; the Jacksonians, by contrast, would rotate representatives out of office in order to prevent them from establishing themselves as a ruling elite. It would take a major feat of prestidigitation for Will to come down on the side of the Republicans. How successful Will was as a conjurer is questionable, but he certainly did not fail for lack of effort. Essentially, what he argues, without admitting it, is that the best way to achieve the “ends” of Burke is through the “means” of Jackson. In the spirit of Burke’s speech to the electors of Bristol, Will laments that “today’s servile government aspires to no higher purposes than those of recording, ratifying, and brokering.” Restoration is a plea for “deliberative democracy through representatives who function at a constitutional distance from the people.” The case for term limits is that members of Congress, freed from worries of re-election, will “reason about policies on their merits rather than their utility in serving the careerism of legislators.”99 To gain acceptance for his bizarre, unstable, and unacknowledged Burke/Jackson compound, Will felt he had to find a way to ground it in American history. That was the point of his chapter on “the revival of classical republicanism.” In it Will conveniently forgot to speak of Jackson,

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suggested that the American tradition “arises from . . . ancient republicanism” no less than from the rights-talk of Locke, and warmly embraced Jefferson’s praise of the “natural aristocracy.”100 With the help of the literature on “civic humanism,” Will had succeeded—or so he thought—in placing at his disposal the past he desired: Jeffersonian and democratic, yet traditionalist and high-toned. Jefferson’s republican sentiments, especially his praise of natural aristocrats, enabled Will to hold on to some remnants of his original Tory conservatism even as he passed over into the Republican party. The fundamental problem that would not go away was Jefferson’s antiBurkean and anticlassical “the world belongs to the living.” Try as he might, Will could not explain away Jefferson’s words and turn him into a classical republican.101 Nor could he succeed in hiding the contemporary Republican party’s Jacksonian contempt for natural aristocrats. George Will’s is a transparently mythological republic, invented as a halfway house to the populist, laissez-faire, antigovernment Republicans whom George Will the Tory should vehemently repudiate. Antiliberalism is all that holds together the various moments of his manipulative thought. The “communitarian” republic is likewise antiliberal in inspiration, its mark of distinction being that it attacks the liberal middle from both left and right, in a pincers move. Hayden’s search for a sense of community that would cure “loneliness, estrangement, isolation” was expressed in an existential vocabulary of “authenticity”102 that lent itself to either conservatives or radicals—and to thinkers whose antiliberal preoccupations led them to be simultaneously left and right. Thus Paul Goodman, godfather of the New Left, explicitly noted at the beginning of the 1960s the affinity of his thought with that of European conservatives.103 And just as Goodman’s writings exemplified the willingness of a radical to ally with the proper kind of conservative, so did Robert Nisbet’s conservative tract The Quest for Community (1953) contain proposals that would later find their way into the camp of the New Left. Burke and Durkheim were the heroes of Nisbet; conservation of natural resources was one of his causes long before New Lefters made it one of theirs.104 Hints of how communitarianism could project itself into the past under the pretext of a “republican” reading of American history were already present in Paul Goodman’s 1960 essay, “In Search of Community,” where, under the subheading “The Republic,” he conjured up images of an early civic America destroyed by “a deadening centralism.”105 More recently, Mi-

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chael Sandel in Democracy’s Discontents (1996) praised the virtue-talk of conservatives William Bennett, James Q. Wilson, and George Will, on the one hand, while endorsing the left-leaning labor history of Eric Foner, on the other. Having embraced both right and left, Sandel proceeded to claim all of the past for his antiliberal communitarian philosophy. By omitting the role of the Declaration of Independence in American history and labeling “republican” any thinker who invokes the notion of a “higher self,” Sandel had no trouble calling into existence a moralistic republican tradition betrayed by amoral liberals. Open to debate is the long-term significance of the antiliberal republic invented by New Leftists and neoconservatives. Louis Hartz would undoubtedly point out that the underlying liberalism of reverence for constitutional government has remained untouched by the ideological conflicts of the last several decades. But what kind of liberalism will emerge from the attacks on liberalism? One possibility is that the scholarly and journalistic antiliberal republic will be of most service to the political forces leading the country away from the New Deal and its quest for social justice. Both the New Left and the neoconservatives want to “empower America,” that is, to revitalize local neighborhoods, churches, and schools (above ch. 3). Both cite Tocqueville’s antipathy to an overmighty state and his insistence upon cultivating an enlightened citizenry. By a strange twist of fate, the standard image of Tocqueville today is that of a man who would think that it matters whether people bowl alone, or who would believe that organizing local resistance to the installation of another Wal-Mart106 can be counted as a great civic triumph. No one remembers Tocqueville’s insistence that political associations must come first if “general association” is to follow. The larger issue is that New Left and neoconservative intellectuals have been neglecting institutional structures in their thinking, at the same time that the Republican party has been seeking to dismantle New Deal institutions and programs. Although Hayden actually wanted to expand the New Deal to include a war on poverty, national health care, and regulation of industries,107 his only interest in institutions was to speak against the liberal establishment; his overriding concern was with fostering citizen participation outside the normal institutional channels. Most of the neoconservatives initially retained their support of the welfare state after abandoning their previous identity as establishment liberals. Eventually, however, some from their ranks began to talk more about in-

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stilling “character” and “virtue” than about safeguarding the New Deal legacy. Their language increasingly smacked—sometimes self-consciously— of the Victorian era,108 especially Samuel Smiles’s homilies, Self-Help (1859), Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880).109 More and more their rhetoric, like that of the Republican party, was directed against the federal government; and they seemed indifferent to the prospect that to place welfare programs in the hands of the states might lead to a competition to see which state could do least for the poor. Ultimately, it was Newt Gingrich and his Republicans who benefited from the New Left and neoconservative criticisms of the New Deal. State and local governments are better than the federal government, wrote Gingrich, but best of all is as little government as possible: accordingly, he would replace government with volunteers and charity. Gingrich’s call for a “devolution of power all the way out of government [to] . . . the hands of individuals”110 probably went beyond the intentions of the intellectuals. To his mind, however, some of the intellectuals were on his side, and he insisted in To Renew America (1995) upon explicitly acknowledging a debt to the “republican” historians for clearing obstacles from his path.111 The antiliberal republic has in practice proved to be hostile only to New Deal liberalism. The politicians engaged in a revival of nineteenth-century liberalism rarely come under its critical scrutiny.

The Liberal Republic The liberal republic is more aspiration than reality. It is the hope that, despite the deeply ingrained illiberalism of the American tradition, social and racial justice may yet triumph because there exists a countervailing liberal tradition of respect for each and all. Both in its procedural and in its substantive ethic, liberalism offers a public philosophy of inclusion. Essential to the vitality of the liberal republic is the “proceduralism” abhorred by the communitarians. Formal and impersonal rules, applied dispassionately and fairly through the medium of public institutions, rules that seemingly do not side with one set of principles over another, are central to liberal thought—and a constant source of communitarian disapproval. Critics of liberalism hold that what they call the “procedural republic” is devoid of moral purpose, that it is neutral when a stand must be taken, that it is unrooted in local culture and tradition, and that it cannot arouse the public to lend it the support without which no political regime

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can flourish. In the writings of the communitarians, the “rise of the procedural republic” entails the death of the civic republic.112 Liberals reply that they object not to local tradition but to those forms of rootedness and “participation” that are distinctively illiberal in nature, or which undermine the stability of the liberal order. The lynch mobs that persisted well into the twentieth century are a form of participatory democracy and local tradition that cannot be tolerated. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s spoke a rich language of community,113 but its actions are not on that account any the less abhorrent. Liberals also reject the claim that theirs is a politics of uprooting persons from their most cherished identities—ethnic, religious, or otherwise. The individualism of liberal philosophy is methodological, “procedural,” and political rather than substantive and cultural. John Rawls, the liberal whom the communitarians love to attack, does not deny that humans are socially constituted; he does not believe that the individualistic state of nature of Hobbes or Locke exists. Rawls does insist, however, particularly in Political Liberalism (1993), that the enormous strength of ethnicity and religion in the contemporary world must not be permitted to unsettle constitutional government and the liberal ideal of toleration. What common conviction is possible, asks Rawls, in a society composed of a myriad of groups professing different and sometimes sharply conflicting convictions? How can a liberal order be sustained in modern societies, some of whose members profess beliefs making it difficult for them to accept the primacy of the restraints imposed by a constitutional government? Rawls reminds his readers at the outset of Political Liberalism that Western societies during the early modern period were in a similar fix. Deep religious conflicts threatened to tear nations apart, yet reconciliation was eventually achieved through a constitutional agreement to disagree. Much the same idea can be applied to our circumstances. No longer does Rawls espouse the “comprehensive” liberalism of A Theory of Justice (1971), because to do so would be to exclude persons holding other comprehensive doctrines. Now he settles for a lesser, a strictly “political” liberalism, an agreement to play by the public rules so that, at the end of each contest between parties pursuing fundamentally different ends, the next debate can be scheduled by opponents who respect one another. To arrive at those rules—Rawls is convinced—there is no better way than temporarily to divest ourselves of our ethnic garbs while attending a hypothetical convention conducting its meetings behind a “veil of igno-

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rance.” All participants being ignorant of their social, ethnic, and religious circumstances, no one will have an interest in being unfair to anyone else; on the contrary, everyone will want to maintain the constitutional regime that emerges from the proceedings. Ethnicity and religious faith will not be endangered by this procedure, the point of which is to ensure the emergence of a society that treats justly persons of all social identities.114 Rawls’s device of divesting us, for a hypothetical moment, of our socially constituted selves is a form of proceduralism that bears a certain likeness to the strategy of the authors of the Federalist. Madison and Hamilton believed that the Constitution was a lost cause unless it could “carry its agency to the persons of the citizens. It must stand in need of no intermediate legislations.” Convinced they must find a way to break down the barriers erected by the states, they argued that “a legislation for communities, as contradistinguished from individuals, . . . is subversive of the order and ends of civil polity.”115 Hamilton, Madison, and Rawls use a procedural individualism not to describe the world but to establish a constitutional order within which robust, socially constituted persons will argue for their conflicting points of view. Madison also preceded Rawls in drawing from the religious wars his procedural strategy of transforming faction from problem to solution. Reared on Voltaire among other authors, Madison could find the inspiration for Federalist 10 and 51 in the philosophe’s comment that “if there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two they would cut each other’s throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.”116 Madison generalized Voltaire’s argument beyond religion to the many types of factions that he discusses in the Federalist, and from which he fashioned his formula for a pluralistic republic.117 For both Madison and Rawls the Wars of Religion teach the virtues of procedural, institutionalized liberalism. In response to the instability created by religious persecution, the politiques of the sixteenth century decided the time had come for the state to sanction toleration of differing faiths. The first step toward what would eventually become principled toleration was pragmatic, political toleration. Similarly, Madison and Rawls envision procedures that begin with deal-making and self-interest but end with a principled culture of persuasion.118 Liberalism cannot tell citizens which ends they ought to choose, but it is not neutral about the need for struggles over ends to be fought within the confines of a liberal republic.

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Madison’s thought proves that the distinction frequently drawn between “procedure” and “substance” is misleading, because the procedural republic actively teaches its citizens the substantive arts of civility, dialogue, and mutual respect. Checks and balances by themselves, Madison acknowledged, are an incomplete formula of republican vigor.119 Yet it remains true that for him, as for John Adams, institutions and procedures come first, and an enlightened public follows. Liberals do not insist on a single institutional formula. The lack of checks and balances in Great Britain’s parliamentary regime does not place the English outside the liberal fold. A good liberal insists that the best institutional arrangements depend upon circumstances which differ from country to country and change over time, so that what is best for one era and nation may not be for another. Perhaps the French did initially need a strong central government: unlike the American Declaration of Independence which celebrated rights already present, the French Declaration of Rights had to struggle to establish a nation in its rights despite opposition from king, clergy, nobility, and an illiterate peasantry.120 Nowadays the French can afford to proceed with the devolution that in the past was always discussed but never implemented. America’s situation is the opposite of France’s. Rights from the outset enjoyed the status of self-evident truths, but many persons, especially those of African heritage, were denied their rights. To free the slaves and to fulfill the promise of the Civil War amendments, the United States sorely needed the strong central government that was second nature in France but an uphill battle in America. Not coincidentally, religious toleration and the state were born together in early modern Europe; likewise, it is no accident that the enhancement of power of the federal government under the New Deal was necessary to advance—at a later date—the cause of civil rights. As John Roche commented decades ago, “under the New Deal there occurred a basic shift . . . toward universalizing due process.” On the judicial front, the Supreme Court “expanded the protection of the Constitution to individuals and groups theretofore left to the tender mercies of their neighbors.” Within the executive and legislative branches, “the President and Congress welcomed into the community as equal participants segments of the population which . . . were at best considered marginal elements in American life.” The New Dealers could not agree within their own ranks on substantive principles, but they cherished the ideal of a procedural republic. “The concept of procedural due process is central to the

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development of civil liberties in modern America,” Roche concluded, “and it also supplies the lubrication for decent intergroup relationships.”121 Provided one condition is met, liberals can salute the efforts of New Lefters, neoconservatives, and communitarians to revitalize local community and enhance citizen involvement in public affairs. The one condition is that the critics of the New Deal legacy must commit themselves to maintaining the federal institutions essential to prevent decentralization from degenerating into what it has so often been in American history: the rule of prejudice in local and state governments, and the triumph of mindless antigovernment rhetoric over the pursuit of social justice. Small is not always beautiful. Quite characteristic of New Leftists, neoconservatives, and communitarians is their shared enthusiasm for the direct participation of local citizens in the administration of the Tennessee Valley Authority, in fulfillment of director David Lilienthal’s promise to honor the tradition of “grass roots democracy.”122 Unfortunately, no one bothers to remember Philip Selznick’s classic 1949 study showing that it was the well-to-do farmers who participated, the poor and black who were left out.123 Nor does anyone explain how the enhancement of the powers of the states under repeated Republican proposals for a “new federalism” will free their governments from their histories of prejudice and corruption.124 Tom Hayden wrongly assumed that the accomplishments of the New Deal could not be undone, and did not recognize how readily his New Left attacks on corporate liberalism could be put to use by the admirers of Ronald Reagan.125 Clever catch phrases, denunciations of liberalism, and moralistic rhetoric all too frequently constitute the entire program of the New Left, the neoconservatives, and the communitarians. Missing are insightful studies of ways to reconfigure institutions so as to keep citizenship and public programs alive at the end of the day, after the volunteers have returned home. In the past, political parties were the means through which citizens could act in public affairs, local and national. Can parties be revived? Is a better federalism possible? The critics of liberalism rarely ask let alone answer such questions.126 Their contempt for the procedural republic permits them to sidestep the most important investigations. However vital its procedural ethic, liberalism does not lack an equally vigorous substantive morality. There may well be no better way to appreciate the moral calling of liberalism than to revisit the role of the Declaration of

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Independence in American history (above, ch. 2). If there is one beacon of hope to which Americans have turned time and again in their quest for an inclusionary and just society, it is surely the Declaration. One of the greatest deficiencies of the “republican” scholarship of recent decades is that it has, in effect, written the Declaration out of American history. References to the Declaration have been few and far between, indexes barren of citations to the Declaration in the publications of the leading republican scholars. The Locke-inspired rights-talk of the Declaration had to be overlooked, forgotten, forced to endure the indignity of benign neglect, so that the path could be opened to the image of an original, pristine, republican tradition uncontaminated by liberalism. Neglect of the history of the Declaration of Independence has been an effective method of denying the moral force of liberalism. Americans have been at their best when they have invoked the Declaration and at their worst when they have chosen to ignore or repudiate it. It is a sign of the centrality of the Declaration that proslavery Southerners felt obliged to refute Jefferson’s words. William Harper of South Carolina, a member of the state constitutional convention that voted to nullify the tariff of 1832, published Slavery in the Light of Social Ethics in 1837. All the South cheered when Harper explained that the best way to advance civilization and protect property rights was to bow in reverence to the institution of slavery. As for the Declaration, it is nonsense pure and simple. “Is it not palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was ever born free, and that no two men were ever born equal?”127 Why the Southerners ever agreed to the Declaration is something of a mystery, but it is no secret that the presence of Jefferson’s document tormented them.128 Perhaps, as J. Allen Smith suggested, the Declaration’s “specification of grievances and its vigorous arraignment of the colonial policy of the English government appealed to many who had little sympathy with its express and implied advocacy of democracy.”129 However that may be, once in place, the Declaration was a growing nuisance to the South as the issue of slavery came more and more to dominate American public life. Hence John C. Calhoun, the greatest of Southern statesmen/writers, assumed the burden of purging the mature South of the pro-Declaration indiscretions of its Jeffersonian youth. Calhoun found the Declaration wanting politically, philosophically, morally. The statement that “all men are created equal” was foreign to the document’s original purpose and invited trouble at a later date: “It was in-

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serted in our Declaration of Independence without any necessity. It made no necessary part of our justification in separating from the parent country.” Philosophically, the Declaration was false: a state of nature never existed; we are “born subject” rather than free. Politically, the belief in natural freedom and equality is “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.” Morally, liberty is “a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike.”130 Silences regarding the Declaration were quite as deafening as the loud refutations coming from the South. The Democratic platform of 1840 contained the following statement: “Resolved, That the liberal principles embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence . . . have ever been cardinal principles in the Democratic faith.” But when it became evident that such sentiments were incompatible with the proslavery and racist views of Southerners, the Democrats discreetly dropped the Declaration from their platforms after 1856. Fortunately, the silence of the Democrats was broken by the newly formed Republican party, which in 1856 put forth a platform asserting that “the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence . . . is essential to the preservation of our republican institutions.”131 Not all the Whigs were willing to join the new Republican party if the price of admission was allegiance to the Declaration. Rather than accept the “glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence,”132 the conservative Whig Rufus Choate bolted the party and joined the Buchanan Democrats. Choate was one of the Whigs who belatedly imported the thought of Edmund Burke, from whom he learned how to ridicule Rousseau, Locke, the social contract, natural rights, and any political doctrine that was not firmly anchored in duty, order, tradition. As was to be expected from a Burkean, Choate’s American Revolution was the work of conservatives rather than revolutionaries. Better the racist and rooted Democrats, he concluded, than a Republican party which dared reaffirm the revolutionary Declaration.133 The example of the Whig Rufus Choate underscores the greatness of the oratory of the Whig Abraham Lincoln. Where Choate had rejected the Declaration as too revolutionary, Lincoln upheld its worth as the ideal embodiment of the American impulse for reform and betterment. By choosing to speak at Gettysburg, Lincoln hit upon a way to banish Jefferson’s radical “the world belongs to the living” without uttering a word against the iconic Virginian: at the graveside of the fallen soldiers, Lincoln knew,

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Jefferson’s famous line would be forgotten because obscene. Then, in the opening words of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln renewed the moral mission of the Jefferson he loved, the author of the Declaration: “Four score and seven years ago [1776] our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” All of American history, for Lincoln, was a drama of the fulfillment of the promise of the Declaration, a task that linked the generations and placed a particular burden upon the living. “It is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”134 Obviously Lincoln knew a thing or two about how to blend Jefferson and Burke into a high and noble synthesis. He knew, too, how to use Jefferson to challenge his countrymen to put human rights above property rights. In 1859, on the occasion of Jefferson’s birthday, Lincoln chided the Democrats for forgetting and applauded the Republicans for remembering that the author of the Declaration of Independence held “the rights of property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior”135 to the fundamental human rights of blacks, laborers, and immigrants. Lincoln deliberately ignored Jefferson’s disturbing comments on race, and chose to draw from his illustrious predecessor’s Declaration all the moral prestige it could yield. Lincoln’s Jefferson and his Declaration could be and frequently were ignored in subsequent ages. Still, their recovery was always a possibility, and Martin Luther King, Jr. infused them with a special religious fervor when on August 28, 1963, he delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed—we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”136 The Declaration of Independence hovers over all of American history, often neglected but ever a reminder of the ideal of inclusion and justice for all. In French history the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen enjoys a similar if somewhat more complicated history. Feared by the liberals who formulated it, the French Declaration was saved by the republicans, and serves today as the banner of the republicans who side with the immigrants. The Americans and the French spoke to each other about their respec-

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tive Declarations in the late eighteenth century. Perhaps today they should hold another transatlantic conversation about the histories and presentday significance of their Declarations. During the course of their exchanges the Americans and the French will surely come to the realization that they are talking about the trials and tribulations, the hopes and dreams, of sister liberal republics.

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Preface 1. Probably the best known exception is Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). More recently, Susan Dunn has published Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light (New York: Faber & Faber, 1999). 2. For an overview see Daniel T. Rogers, “Republicanism: the Career of a Concept,” The Journal of American History (June 1992), pp. 11–38. 3. E.g., Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). I have commented on these three books in my essay “Republicanism, Liberalism, Illiberalism: An American Debate in French Translation,” The Tocqueville Review, 21 (2000), pp. 109–132. 4. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, third essay, section 12. 5. Liberty Classics has recently made Taine available at a low price. 6. See Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 858–861. 7. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860– 1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1978) [originally published in 1955]. 8. Usually the hits at the New Deal legacy are by implication; sometimes, however, the attack is direct. E.g., Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents, ch. 8, and the final page of George Will, Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1992).

1. Republicanism and/or Liberalism? 1. Jefferson to John Taylor, 28 May 1816; John Adams to J. H. Tiffany, 30 April 1819. 195

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2. Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), pp. 473, 485. 3. J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971); The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955). 4. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). Michael Sandel offered a communitarian critique of Rawls in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Later, in Democracy’s Discontents: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), he attempted to read his communitarian philosophy into American history by calling upon the writings of the republican historians. 5. Herbert Hoover, The Challenge to Liberty (New York: Charles Scribner, 1934), ch. 11, explained that he was for “true Liberalism” and against “false Liberalism.” 6. William Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 142. 7. On the New Left see Irwin Unger, The Movement: A History of the American New Left, 1959–1972 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974); Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic Books, 1977); James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987). For the neoconservatives see Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979). 8. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 606–615. Tom Hayden et al., The Port Huron Statement (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990). 9. Paul Goodman, “In Search of Community,” Commentary (Feb. 1960), pp. 315–23. 10. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976, 1978), p. xxvii. Bell regards religion as “the fulcrum” of his book (p. xxviii); he believes that a “return . . . of some conception of religion” is essential in our age of “spiritual crisis” (pp. 28–29). 11. See for instance the essays collected by Mark A. Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 12. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945). 13. For Irving Kristol’s position on republicanism see chapters 3 and 4 of the present study.

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14. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Howe, Making of the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), for an account of the Whig/Jacksonian debate. 15. The classic warning against reading the present back into the past is Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965). Originally published in 1931. 16. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 85. 17. E.g., Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 960, 962, 963, 1402. 18. Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontents, in my opinion, is a particularly glaring example of a willful communitarian misreading of American history. But the prize for the most disingenuous treatment of Jefferson on the question of generations should surely go to George Will for his Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1992). See ch. 6 of the present study. 19. Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”, p. 54. 20. See, for instance, Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 57, for criticism of Sean Wilentz’s widely recognized study, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 21. See Philip S. Foner, ed., We, the Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence by Labor Groups, Farmers, Woman’s Rights Advocates, Socialists, and Blacks, 1829–1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976). 22. Cf. Nietzsche’s comments on the kind of history found in the “land of little by little.” On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980). p. 59. 23. J. G. A. Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3 (1972), p. 122. The Machiavellian Moment, p. 509. 24. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, p. 59. 25. Alfred von Martin, Sociology of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 13. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), passim. 26. Mannheim’s penchant for reading the nineteenth century into early modern times is especially evident in his treatment of the Anabaptists. While conceding that they had not yet achieved proletarian self-consciousness, Mannheim found in their ideas “the starting point of the process gradually leading to it.” Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), p. 212. Notes to Pages 5–7

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27. E.g., J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History: New Views on History and Society in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1961). 28. Peter Laslett’s appreciation of Filmer’s historical significance was one indication of the new turn in historical research. See his “Introduction” to Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949). A further development of Laslett’s style of argumentation may be found in Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 29. Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 30. Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 317. 31. Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). McCoy believes (p. 10) that “American republicanism must be understood as an ideology in transition, for it reflected an attempt to cling to the traditional republican spirit of classical antiquity without disregarding the new imperatives of a more modern commercial society.” 32. James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 2. 33. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 120. 34. Jefferson to Doctor Joseph Priestley, 21 March 1801. 35. Jefferson to John Adams, 1 August 1816. 36. John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. 12, 346. 37. Federalist, no. 14. 38. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: the Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), ch. 4. Cf. Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: the First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 39. The most comprehensive study is Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 40. George Will, for instance, somehow convinced himself in 1992 that the proposal of the Republican party for Congressional term limits was admirable because by such means civic virtue could be revived. Restoration, ch. 3 (“The Revival of Classical Republicanism”). 41. E.g., Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion, pp. 93n, 274; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, p. 95. Kloppenberg perceptively suggests at one point that we should “abandon the increasingly fruitless debates about liberalism and republicanism and turn instead toward democracy” but compromises his insight by finding classical republicanism in today’s Republican party. The Virtues of Liberalism, pp. 67, 103.

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42. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). 43. Even Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 121, is forced to concede this point, despite his general effort to place the greatest possible stress on the significance of classical thought in early America. 44. Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman, p. 133. 45. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), p. 114. 46. Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 47, 246–72. 47. Burke, “Speech to the Electors of Bristol [3 November 1774],” in Works (Boston: Little, Brown, 1866), vol. 2, pp. 89–98. 48. Cato’s Letters, p. 140. 49. For an excellent study of Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, and other English natural-rights radicals, see Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 50. See Michael Zuckert’s fine study, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). In this book and in The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996) Zuckert offers excellent criticisms of the concept of “classical republicanism.” 51. Hence the vigorous attacks of Montesquieu and Rousseau upon Grotius. Lettres persanes, xciv, De l’Esprit des Lois, Bk. X, ch. 3; Du Contract Social, Bk. I, chs. 2, 4. For some glaring examples of the willingness of Grotius to rationalize the most brutal practices see De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Bk. III, chs. 4–10. 52. Dated, perhaps, but still worth reading is Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Random House, 1922). The most recent study is Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage, 1997). 53. Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), pp. 465–87. See also Patrick Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 54. Cato’s Letters, pp. 405–413. 55. As has been proven by Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, and Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism. Notes to Pages 10–13

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56. Note Howe’s awkward attempts to salvage something of the notion of “classical republicanism” in Making the American Self. 57. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, pp. 14–15, 94, 96. 58. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (New York: De Capo Press, 1971), vol. 3, p. 505. 59. Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 178, 218. 60. Douglass Adair, “‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science’: David Hume, James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist,” in Fame and the Founding Fathers (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), ch. 4. 61. Hume, “Of the Independency of Parliament,” in Essays, p. 42. 62. John Adams to Samuel Adams, 18 October 1790. 63. Cato’s Letters, p. 643. 64. Federalist, no. 51. 65. Taylor, Inquiry, pp. 377, 380–382, 455. Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: the Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), p. 75, offers the generalization that “in the southern scheme of things, private virtue, in the rigorous sense in which it was defined by the Yankees, was unnecessary to the maintenance of republican liberty.” Pauline Maier, in her study of the making of the Declaration of Independence, found that “concern for American ‘virtue,’ so much emphasized by recent historians, was a distinctly minor theme.” American Scripture, p. 91. 66. Sandel especially. 67. Wood, Creation, pp. 114–18. 68. Isaiah Berlin argued for “negative” liberty and against “positive” liberty in his well-known essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). Berlin wrongly, in my opinion, finds in Constant a forerunner of his views. 69. Biancamaria Fontana, ed., Benjamin Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 324–328. 70. More accurately translated “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.” 71. A thorough list of French scholars and their works on liberalism and republicanism would take up far too much space. Let me simply name a few of the French scholars from whom I have benefited: Maurice Agulhon, François Furet, Marcel Gauchet, Louis Girard, Ran Halévi, André Jardin, Blandine Kriegel, Denis Lacorne, Pierre Mannent, Henri Mendras, Claude Nicolet, Gérard Noiriel, Mona Ozouf, Pierre Rosanvallon. 72. Pocock refers to the “Atlantic Republican Tradition” in the subtitle of his Machiavellian Moment. 73. One of the few exceptions is Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of

Notes to Pages 14–16

Notes to Pages 17–21

74.

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French and American Republicanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone,” Journal of Democracy 6:1 (January 1995), pp. 65–77. Robert Bellah et. al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of Calfornia Press, 1985). Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents, pp. 320, 347. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism, ch. 5. This essay contains many astute comments on how Americans have used Tocqueville throughout their history. E.g., Renan, Mill, Bagehot, Burckhardt, Ortega y Gasset. Tocqueville to Louis de Kergorlay, 18 October 1847. Ibid. Democracy in America, p. 12. Tocqueville did not write a handbook on method but he did drop relevant comments here and there in his works. E.g., Recollections (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995), pp. 61–62. Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine: Le régime moderne (Paris: Hachette, 1894), vol. 2, p. 181. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford University Press, 1976). Bernard Bailyn, “The Origins of the American Bill of Rights,” The Tocqueville Review, 14 (1993), p. 41. Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Bk. III, ch. 7. Rousseau, Du Contract Social, Bk. I, ch. 4. Locke believed we could not alienate our rights because they are God-given; Rousseau because to do so is incompatible with our humanity. These words are taken from the opening lines of the Constitution of the Year I (June 24, 1793). Robespierre, “Report on the Principles of Political Morality [5 February 1794],” in Keith Baker, ed., University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), vol. 7, p. 374. See Articles 28 and 35 of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which serves as preamble to the Constitution of Year I. Samuel Huntington’s study of the reform tradition, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), does not do it justice; his view is simply too close to Hartz’s. Far better, in my opinion, is J. David Greenstone, The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Another fine book on the reform tradition is Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1997). On illiberalism in America see John Higham, Notes to Pages 17–21

75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

90. 91.

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Notes to Pages 22–26

Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955); Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U. S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

2. “Rights Talk” 1. Tony Judt, “Rights in France: Reflections on the Etiolation of a Political Language,” The Tocqueville Review, XIV (1993), pp. 67–108; Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), ch. 12. 2. Note, for instance, that one of the themes of Roger Soltau, French Political Thought in the 19th Century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), is the absence of a rights tradition. Soltau’s book continues to be cited, if only for lack of a suitable alternative. 3. Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 14. 4. Ibid., p. 176. 5. Carl Becker charts the evolution of the colonists from claiming rights as Englishmen to universal natural rights in The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Knopf, 1922), ch. 3 (“Historical Antecedents of the Declaration: Theory of the British Empire”). 6. C. Bradley Thompson, ed., The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), p. 240. 7. Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin, 1975), p. 20. 8. On the various declarations, English and American, see Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 9. Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 10. Paine, Common Sense (New York: Penguin, 1986), pp. 66, 67, 94, 98. 11. Robert G. McCloskey, American Conservatism in an Age of Enterprise: A Study of William Graham Sumner, Stephen J. Field and Andrew Carnegie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), ch. 5. See also his study The American Supreme Court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 12. Philip S. Foner, ed., We, the Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence by Labor Groups, Farmers, Woman’s Rights Advocates, Socialists, and Blacks, 1829–1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976).

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13. The history of the Declaration has yet to be written. A good start is Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Indendence (New York: Vintage, 1997). 14. “Declaration of Sentiments,” in Foner, We, the Other People, pp. 78–83. Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 74. 15. William L. Andrews, ed., The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 116, 128. For examples of other antebellum African Americans who invoked the Declaration see David Brion Davis, ed., Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1979), pp. 294, 297, 301. 16. Quoted by Maier, American Scripture, pp. 198–99. 17. Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 128, 215, 219, 249, 299. Richard N. Current, ed., The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 89–90. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), offers a noteworthy account of Lincoln and the Declaration, as does Harry V. Jaffa in Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the LincolnDouglas Debates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), ch. 14. 18. Eugene P. Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), p. 151. See Foner’s introduction to We, the Other People for a lucid summary of the uses to which the Declaration was put by labor groups. 19. Quoted by Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 91. 20. Foner, We, the Other People, pp. 47–55, 64–76, 84–104, 115–62. 21. E.g., Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948), pp. 9, 15, 38, 65, 386, 416. 22. Ibid., p. 65. Marx’s most famous attack on declarations of rights is found in his essay “On the Jewish Question,” which was unavailable to Debs. 23. Ibid., pp. 15, 74. 24. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: Modern Library, 1982), p. 38. 25. Edward Bellamy, Equality (New York: AMS Press, 1970), p. 332. Cf. pp. 16, 18, 311, 372. 26. Paine, Rights of Man (New York: Penguin, 1984), part 2, ch. 5. 27. Paine, Agrarian Justice, in Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), pp. 396–413. 28. Radical Lockeanism is briefly but well treated in Richard J. Ellis, American Political Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 2. The most comprehensive examination is Brad Clarke, “‘The True Prosperity of Our Notes to Pages 27–30

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Notes to Pages 30–33

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

Notes to Pages 30–33

Past’: The Communitarian Context of American Natural Rights Republicanism,” Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1997. One can refuse Clarke’s communitarian glosses, as I do, and still admire his contribution to our understanding of the pervasiveness of the natural rights tradition in America. Skidmore, The Rights of Man to Property! (New York: Burt Franklin, 1964), title page and pp. 158, 242. George, Progress and Poverty (New York: Robert Schalken Foundation, 1966), pp. 394, 545. For an early example of Jefferson’s concern to democratize land ownership, see his letter to James Madison, 28 October 1785. For an historical overview of the “state of courts and parties” and the regime that succeeded it see Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). On labor and the New Deal see J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1969). Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), ch. 8. Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945). Donald Bruce Johnson, ed., National Party Platforms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), vol. I, p. 360. Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 43. In my discussion of the Commonwealth Club address, I draw heavily upon Milkis’s important book. His interpretation of the significance of FDR’s 1932 speech should be compared to Richard Hofstadter’s in The American Political Tradition (New York: Knopf, 1948), ch. 12. Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 13 vols. (New York: Random House, 1938–1950), vol. I, pp. 752; vol. 13, p. 41. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, pp. 335–343. Clarke, “True Prosperity,” ch. 9. Rosenman, Papers of FDR, vol. 1, p. 749. Croly spoke of “pioneer democracy” in Progressive Democracy (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998), ch. 2. Dewey spoke of “pioneer individualism” in Individualism, Old and New (New York: Capricorn Books, 1962), p. 36. Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961), pp. 159, 164. Croly attacked Jefferson both in The Promise of American Life (1909) and in Progressive Democracy (1914). Quoted by Milkis, The President and the Parties, p. 40.

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44. Rosenman, Papers of FDR, vol. 1, p. 746. 45. On the changing face of Jefferson see Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). 46. Papers of FDR, vol. 1, p. 742. 47. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, paragraph 49. 48. Ibid., paragraph 27. 49. James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 286–89. 50. Hayden did, briefly, champion human over property rights in The Port Huron Statement (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990), and he bemoaned the racism that made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence. Medical care, he argued, should be regarded as a “right,” pp. 8, 63, 67. 51. R. Shep Melnick, Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights (Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1994). 52. The first quote is from Melnick, “The Courts, Congress, and Programmatic Rights,” the second from Donald Brand, “Reformers of the 1960s and 1970s: Modern Anti-Federalists?,” both in Richard Harris and Sidney Milkis, eds., Remaking American Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 34, 196. 53. Glendon, Rights Talk, p. 58. 54. Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), chs. 13, 22. 55. Hugh Heclo, “The Sixties’ False Dawn: Awakenings, Movements, and Postmodern Policy-making,” Journal of Policy History, 8 (1996), pp. 34–63. 56. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 67. Cf. Richard Rorty, “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy, 80 (July 1983), pp. 583–589. 57. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 1. 58. Thomas L. Haskell, “The Curious Persistence of Rights Talk in the ‘Age of Interpretation,’” Journal of American History, 74 (1987), pp. 984–1012. 59. Glendon, Rights Talk, pp. 11, 103. 60. Judt’s claims have gone unchallenged. Mark Lilla, for example, congratulates Judt on offering “a very effective critique of republicanism as fundamentally illiberal.” Lilla, ed., New French Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 27, n. 11. Susan Dunn endorses Judt’s essays in Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light (New York: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 153. 61. Judt, Past Imperfect, p. 238. 62. Judt, “Rights in France,” pp. 73, 77. 63. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1951). François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) Notes to Pages 33–38

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Notes to Pages 38–41

64. 65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

Notes to Pages 38–41

marks the transition in French historiography from the Marxist to the liberal (Tocqueville) interpretation of the French Revolution. Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1991). Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), ch. 3 (originally published in 1958). Judt sides with Berlin and “negative liberty” in Past Imperfect, p. 231, and “Rights in France,” p. 67. The constitutional debates of 1848 concerning the question of rights may be found in Compte-rendu des Séances de l’Assemblée Nationale, 1848–1849 (Paris: 1849), vol. 1. I wish to thank Charles Mckinley for lending me his xerox copy of these documents, of which Harvard University library has a copy. For a summary of the constitutional debates of 1848 see Paul Bastid, Doctrines et institutions politiques de la Seconde République (Paris: Hachette, 1945), vol. 1, pp. 234–79. Elsewhere Judt has spoken eloquently in favor of social welfare programs. See his essay “The Social Question Redivivus,” Foreign Affairs, 76 (1997), pp. 95– 117. Note, for instance, Henry George’s claim that under his scheme “great simplicity would become possible in government,” and the “horde” of tax collectors would be significantly reduced. Progress and Poverty, pp. 454, 415. Article 21: “Les secours publics sont une dette sacrée. La société doit la subsistance aux citoyens malheureux, soit en leur procurant du travail, soit en assurant les moyens d’exister à ceux qui sont hors d’état de travailler.” Marcel Gauchet, “The Rights of Man,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 818–28. His full-scale study is La Révolution des droits de l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). E.g., the writings of William Leggett, Democratick Editorials (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1984). On the French pattern of authority see Stanley Hoffmann, “Paradoxes of the French Political Community,” in In Search of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 1–117. Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). On Rousseau’s influence in America, or lack thereof, see Paul M. Spurlin, Rousseau in America, 1760–1809 (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1969). On the difference between the pact of association (the social contract) and the pact of submission (between the rulers and the ruled) see Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris: J. Vrin, 1974). See, especially, Paine’s Rights of Man.

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76. Jefferson to George Wythe, 13 August, 1786; Jefferson to Diodati, 3 August 1789. 77. Particularly in his early writings, Paine comes close to regarding society as self-regulating. Common Sense, p. 65. 78. E.g., Rousseau’s refutation of Diderot’s essay on “Natural Right.” “Nos besoins nous rapprochent à mesure que nos passions nous divisent, et plus nous devenons ennemis de nos semblables moins nous pouvons nous passer d’eux.” Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Pléiade, 1966), p. 282. 79. Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, p. 122. 80. Du Contract social, Bk. I, ch. 4. 81. See Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), ch. 2. 82. For Diderot’s initial conception of the “general will,” see his essay “Droit naturel” in Oeuvres (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1995), vol. 3, pp. 43–47. For Rousseau’s refutation see Du Contract social (première version) in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, pp. 281–89. 83. Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment, pp. 135, 171–72. 84. Du Contract social, Bk. II, ch. 4. 85. Ibid., Bk. II, ch. 3; Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. 129. 86. Federalist, no. 51. 87. Inégalité, pp. 176–177. 88. Du Contract social, Bk. I, ch. 9; Bk. II, ch. 11. 89. Discours sur l’économie politique, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Pléiade, 1966), p. 256. 90. Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 180. 91. Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), p. 161. 92. Consider two more examples taken from the era of 1848: republicans maintained that popular sovereignty and universal male suffrage were natural rights; and Ledru-Rollin quoted the Declaration of Rights of 1793 to defend the right of assembly. Pamela M. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 1814–1871 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 153, 194. 93. Tocqueville’s hostility to the republicans is especially evident in the Souvenirs, his notebooks on the events of 1848, which have been translated into English under the title Recollections (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987). 94. Eugène Pelletan, Droits de l’homme (Paris: Pagnerre, 1858). 95. E.g., Jean Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la révolution française (Paris: Librairie de l’humanité, 1927), vol. 1, pp. 341–48. See, in general, Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962). Notes to Pages 41–45

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Notes to Pages 45–49

96. See Claude Nicolet, L’Idée républicaine en France: Essai d’histoire critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), pp. 296–97, 353. 97. On the status of the Declaration of Rights under the Fourth Republic, see Philip M. Williams, Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth Republic (New York: Anchor, 1966), ch. 21. On the change from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic, see Alec Stone, The Birth of Judicial Politics in France: The Constitutional Council in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 98. Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), p. 162. 99. Du Contract social, Bk. II, ch. 11. 100. On the significance of equality in the theory of rights see Alain, Éléments d’une doctrine radicale (Paris: Gallimard, 1933) [4th ed.], pp. 143–144. 101. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), p. 141. 102. How very fearful of socialism the liberals were can be seen in Tocqueville’s Recollections. See also Guizot’s Democracy in France (London: John Murray, 1849). 103. For an overview see Cheryl B. Welch, Liberty and Utility: The French Idéologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 104. Destutt de Tracy, Commentaire sur l’Esprit des lois de Montesquieu (Paris: Henri Feret, Libraire, 1827), pp. 16, 17. 105. Mark Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 106. For an overview of the Orleanists, see Vincent E. Starzinger, Middlingness: Juste Milieu Political Theory in France and England, 1815–1848 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965) and René Rémond, The Right Wing in France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966), ch. 3. 107. The Solidarists wanted to combine universal manhood suffrage with functional representation. See chapter 5 of the present study. 108. For a far more charitable interpretation of the French solidarity movement see James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 109. Léon Bourgeois, Solidarité (Paris: Colin, 1912), 7th ed., pp. 105, 120, 139. See J. E. S. Hayward, “The Official Social Philosophy of the French Third Republic: Léon Bourgeois and Solidarism,” International Review of Social History, 6 (1961), pp. 19–48, for a thoughtful overview. It should be noted that at times Bourgeois’s writings suggest a rather more expansive conception of rights, as in Essai d’une philosophie de la Solidarité (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1902), pp. 17–18.

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Notes to Pages 49–52

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110. Emile Durkheim, Moral Education (New York: Free Press, 1961), p. 279. 111. Ibid., pp. 276, 277. 112. On the transition from Durkheim to Duguit see the two articles written by Jack Hayward in The Sociological Review, 8 (1960), nos. 1 & 2, pp. 17–36, 185– 202, both entitled “Solidarist Syndicalism: Durkheim and Duguit.” 113. Léon Duguit, “The Law and the State,” Harvard Law Review, 31 (1917), p. 165M 114. Alec Stone’s fine study, The Birth of Judicial Politics in France omits, I think, the more problematical aspect of Duguit’s work. Soltau is enthusiastic and uncritical in his discussion of Duguit. French Political Thought in the 19th Century, pp. 473–79. 115. Léon Duguit, Law in the Modern State (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1919), p. 28. 116. Ibid., pp. xxxvii–xli. Duguit regarded Rousseau as “the high priest of individualism.” Law in the Modern State, p. 42. 117. Duguit, “The Law and the State,” pp. 165–70. 118. “I believe in the sovereignty of reason, justice, and law,” wrote Guizot. W. M. Simon, ed., French Liberalism, 1789–1848 (New York: John Wiley, 1972), p. 109. Cf. Guizot, History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), pp. 59–60, 64, 73–75, 263–64, 347, 446. For Royer-Collard’s condemnation of popular sovereignty and advocacy of the sovereignty of reason and justice see A.-G.-P. Brugière, baron de Barante, ed., La Vie politique de M. Royer-Collard: Ses Discours et ses écrits (Paris: Didier, 1861), vol. 1, pp. 271, 290; vol. 2, pp. 18, 32–33, 37, 459, 463, 465. See also Dominique Bagge, Les Idées politiques en France sous la restauration (New York: Arno Press, 1979), pp. 56–60, 102–104. One wonders whether a passing reference by Léon Bourgeois to “la souveraineté de la raison” is mere coincidence or an indication of sympathy with the thought of Royer-Collard and Guizot. Solidarité, p. 35. 119. See “The Law and the State,” pp. 105–114, for Duguit’s view of Constant. It should be noted, however, that Duguit, in spite of his rejection of natural rights, was among the legal theorists who held that the laws of 1875 implicitly recognized the Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen. Nicolet, L’Idée républicaine en France, p. 297. 120. Glendon, Rights Talk, pp. 145–46. Mary Ann Glendon, Michael Gordon, Christopher Osakwe, Comparative Legal Traditions (St. Paul: West, 1985). 121. Judt worries, however, that American liberal thought will remain foreign to French intellectuals. Past Imperfect, p. 314; “Rights in France,” p. 102. 122. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 7–8. 123. Note, in particular, his attack on Max Weber. Notes to Pages 49–52

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124. All that a Frenchless reader needs to do to witness Strauss’s popularity in France is to consult the translated selections in Mark Lilla, ed., New French Political Philosophy, where Strauss’s Natural Right and History is a constant presence. 125. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (New York: Free Press, 1952). 126. Quoted by Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 37. 127. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. III, parts 1 & 2. Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, part 1, sect. 1. 128. Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994). 129. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), p. 421. 130. Quoted by Milkis, The President and the Parties, p. 40. 131. For Dewey’s prediction that the old creed would become more shrill during the period immediately preceding that in which American theory finally catches up with practice see Individualism, Old and New, p. 16. 132. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1914), ch. 13. William H. Harbaugh, ed., The Writings of Theodore Roosevelt (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 170–74, 315–33. 133. Note, for instance, Ronald Reagan’s use of the rhetoric of “unalienable rights” to attack the New Deal legacy. Milkis, The President and the Parties, p. 263. 134. E.g., Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). See my review “The Use and Abuse of History,” The Responsive Community, 7 (Spring 1997), pp. 68–72. 135. Cf. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion.

Notes to Pages 52–57

3. The Institutions and Ethos of Freedom 1. Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone,” Journal of Democracy 6:1 (Jan. 1995), pp. 65–77. 2. Stanley Hoffmann established his reputation when he published his long essay, “Paradoxes of the French Political Community,” in Hoffmann et al., In Search of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); Michel Crozier established his with Le Phénomène bureaucratique: Essai sur les tendances bureaucratiques des systèmes d’organisations modernes et sur leurs relations en France avec le système social et culturel (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963). A year later Crozier’s book was published in English translation by the University of Chicago Press. 3. Stanley Hoffmann, “The Institutions of the Fifth Republic,” in James F.

Notes to Pages 57–61

4.

211

Hollifield and George Ross, eds., Searching for the New France (New York: Routledge, 1991), ch. 2. John A. Rohr, Founding Republics in France and America: A Study in Constitutional Governance (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), has compared 1981 in France to 1800 in America. The Papers of James Madison (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), vol. 11, pp. 158–165, esp. p. 163. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (New York: De Capo Press, 1971), vol. 3, p. 505. E.g., James Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 32–33; Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 132. See Daniel Halévy’s classic study, La Fin des notables (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1930), esp. ch. 9. Thiers spoke of “les libertés nécessaires” in his speech of 11 January 1864. Quoted by Louis Girard, Les Libéraux français, 1814–1875 (Paris: Aubier, 1985), p. 41. Cf. Biancamaria Fontana, ed., Benjamin Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 85–87. See, in general, Claude Nicolet, L’Idée républicaine en France: Essai d’histoire critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). Thoughts on Government, in C. Bradley Thompson, ed., The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), p. 288. Adams’s definition of a republic as (Harrington) “an empire of laws, and not of men” (p. 288) shows that he was not willing to utter a radical-sounding sentence, even at this stage of his career, without softening the meaning. John Adams to Roger Sherman, 17 July 1789. John Adams to J. H. Tiffany, 30 April 1819. Adams, Defence, vol. 1, p. 87. E.g., Proclamation des Consuls de la République du 24 frimaire, an VIII [December 15, 1799]: “Citoyens, la Révolution est fixée aux principes qui l’ont commencée: elle est finie.” Maurice Duverger, ed., Constitutions et documents politiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), p. 78. See Pierre Guiral, Prévost-Paradol: Pensée et action d’un libéral sous le second empire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), esp. ch. 7. Lucien Anatole Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1871, 11th ed.), pp. ix, 107–108, 131, 134, 152–153. Originally published in 1868. Much the same view may be found in Victor de Broglie, Vues sur le gouvernement de la France (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1870). A.-G.-P. Brugière, baron de Barante, ed., La Vie politique de Royer-Collard (Paris: Didier, 1861), vol. 1, pp. 170–172. Fontana, ed., Benjamin Constant, p. 229. Notes to Pages 57–61

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

212

Notes to Pages 61–65

20. E.g., Édouard Laboulaye, Le Parti libéral, son programme et son avenir (Paris: Charpentier, 1863), p. 262. 21. For a brief summary see M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers [2nd ed.] (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), pp. 221–224. 22. For Royer-Collard’s opposition to requiring ministers in France to be responsible to parliament, see La Vie politique de Royer-Collard, vol. 1, p. 217; vol. 2, p. 132. The English case, in his view, was not applicable. Vol. 2, p. 232. As Mary S. Hartman notes, Benjamin Constant was likewise reluctant to follow the English example: “Benjamin Constant and the Question of Ministerial Responsibility in France, 1814–1815,” Journal of European Studies, 6 (1976), pp. 248–261. Constant, Political Writings, pp. 227–242. Charles de Rémusat bemoaned the lack of an adequate discussion of ministerial responsibility: Politique libérale ou fragments pour servir à la défense de la révolution française (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1875), p. 313. Originally published in 1860. 23. François Mitterrand, Le Coup d’État permanent (Paris: Plon, 1964). 24. Rémusat, Politique libérale, p. 310. 25. See Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 11. 26. Louis Blanc, La République une et indivisible (Paris: Naud, 1851), p. 25. 27. Paul M. Spurlin, Rousseau in America, 1760–1809 (Tuskaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1969), p. 106. Cf. Spurlin’s study of Montesquieu in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1940). 28. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), vol. 1, ch. 9. Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), chs. 7 and 8. Denis Lacorne, L’Invention de la république: Le modèle américain (Paris: Hachette, 1991), ch. 4. 29. Adams, Defence, vol. 1, p. xvii. 30. Ibid., vol. 1, p. xii. 31. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 55, 128–129, 380. 32. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 284. 33. John Adams to John Taylor, 15 April 1814. 34. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1962). Originally published in 1911. 35. Adams, Defence, vol. 1, p. xiii. 36. Stevens was a staunch supporter of the proposed federal constitution. At the level of the states he favored an independent judiciary and executive. Each state could decide for itself whether it wanted a unicameral or bicameral legislature. 37. For speeches delivered by members of the Constituent Assembly I have used

Notes to Pages 61–65

Notes to Pages 65–67

213

the appendices of François Furet and Ran Halévi, La Monarchie républicaine (Paris: Fayard, 1996). “Discours de Lally-Tollendal sur l’organisation du pouvoir législatif et la sanction royale” [31 August, 1789], p. 353. The French incorrectly attributed Stevens’s essay to John Livingston. “Discours de Mounier sur la sanction royale” [5 September, 1789], pp. 394, 396. E.g., “Dire de l’abbé Sieyès sur la question du veto royal” [7 September, 1789], pp. 406–417. Both Lally-Tollendal (p. 345) and Mounier (p. 385) take the sovereignty of the nation as a given. See the citations in our previous chapter for the denials issued by Royer-Collard and Guizot. Here we may add two more examples of the Orleanist pattern of attributing sovereignty to reason and justice rather than to the people: Victor Cousin, Cours d’histoire de la philosophie morale (Brussells: Didier, 1841), lecture 8; Charles de Rémusat, Études critiques et littéraires, passé et présent (Paris: Didier, 1859), vol. 1, pp. 399–401. See, especially, La Vie politique de Royer-Collard, vol. 2, pp. 457–470. John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). Originally published in 1814. Alexander Hamilton, “Constitutional Convention Speech on a Plan of Government” [18 June, 1787], in Hollinger and Capper, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition [2nd ed.] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 138–142. Any proper argument that Adams briefly flirted with the idea of hereditary succession for the President and the Senate has to be based on thoughts subsequent to the French Revolution, hence after publication of his Defence of the Constitutions. John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 176, 182, 184. See also Edward Handler, America and Europe in the Political Thought of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964). James Wilson, “Speech Delivered on 26th November, 1787, in the Convention of Pennsylvania,” in The Works of James Wilson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 759–772. Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Antifederalist (University of Chicago Press, 1981), 2.7.7–2.7.10. The Complete Antifederalist, 2.6.43; 2.8.6–2.8.7; 2.8.25; 2.8.39; 2.8.54; 2.8.58; 2.8.97; 2.8.140; 2.8.146; 2.9.42; 5.1.26–32; 5.1.69; 5.6.2; 6.1.35; 6.12.16– 6.12.18; 6.12.22. Gordon Wood is wrong, I think, to suggest that Adams’s Defence was irrelevant to Americans in 1787. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), ch. 14. Notes to Pages 65–67

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

214

Notes to Pages 68–73

48. Tom Paine, Common Sense (New York: Penguin, 1976), pp. 68, 71. For Paine in his American setting see Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 49. Frances Acomb, Anglophobia in France, 1763–1789: An Essay in the History of Constitutionalism and Nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1950). 50. Destutt de Tracy, Commentaire sur l’Esprit des Lois de Montesquieu (Paris: Henri Feret, 1827), pp. 24–25, 155, 175, 181, 381. 51. For information about Jefferson in France see Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), ch. 6, and William Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 52. Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (New York: Norton, 1974). 53. Ibid., pp. 234–242. 54. J. J. Rousseau, Du contract social, Bk. III, ch. 18. 55. Gustave Schelle, ed., Oeuvres de Turgot (Paris: Alcan, 1913–1923), vol. 1, pp. 584–593. 56. Jefferson to Madison, 6 September 1789; Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816; Jefferson to Major John Cartwright, 5 June 1824. 57. Tom Paine, Rights of Man (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 42. 58. Taylor, An Inquiry, pp. 61, 130, 218. St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries: With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws of the Federal Government of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Philadelphia: Birch & Small, 1803), pp. 172–173. For an account of the thought of St. George Tucker, see Brad Clarke, “‘The True Prosperity of Our Past’: The Communitarian Context of American Natural Rights Republicanism” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1997), ch. 4. 59. David Brion Davis, ed., Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1979), p. 458. 60. Marvin Meyers, ed., The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1981), p. 178. 61. Federalist, no. 49. 62. Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 93. See in general the third chapter of his excellent book. 63. Georges Clemenceau, American Reconstruction, 1865–1870 (New York: Dial Press, 1928), p. 227. 64. Laissez-faire was the ideology; regulation at the state and local levels was the reality. William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 65. On the brief governmental upsurge after the Civil War followed by a return to

Notes to Pages 68–73

Notes to Pages 73–78

215

old patterns see Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York: Vintage, 1966). See also Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995). Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (New York: Century, 1901), pp. 18, 31–33, 295. Theodore Roosevelt, Speeches in Europe (New York: C. S. Hammond, 1910), pp. 4, 30. Theodore Roosevelt, Cowboys and Kings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 69. For Roosevelt’s conception of the presidency see his Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 371–372, 378–379, 420, 479, 526. Henry Cabot Lodge, The Democracy of the Constitution and Other Addresses and Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), pp. 75, 98. Richard C. Cortner, The Supreme Court and the Second Bill of Rights: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Nationalization of Civil Liberties (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981). Barante, ed., Royer-Collard, vol. 2, p. 131. Italics in the original. E.g., Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955). Barante, ed., Royer-Collard, vol. 2, p. 131. Tocqueville, Recollections, pp. 170, 72. Barante, Des Communes et de l’Aristocratie (Paris: Ladvocat, 1829), pp. 49–50, 68, 71. Barante, ed., Royer-Collard, vol. 1, pp. 26, 175. Pamela M. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 1814–1871 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), pp. 116, 153. The arch-reactionary Legitimists sought to restore the Bourbon monarchy and the old provincial elites. A point well made by Roger Soltau, French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), p. 258. Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), p. 89. Charles Brook Dupont-White, L’Individu et L’État (Paris: Librairie de Guillaumin, 1865) [originally published in 1856]; La Centralisation: Suite de L’Individu et L’État (Paris: Guillaumin, 1860); La Liberté politique considérée dans ses rapports avec l’administration locale (Paris: Guillaumin, 1864). For daring to challenge Tocqueville, Dupont-White has predictably been condemned as a Jacobin by scholars writing in English. E.g., Soltau, French Political Thought, p. 261. Jules Simon, La Liberté de conscience (Paris: Hachette, 1857), La Liberté politique (Paris: Hachette, 1859), La Liberté civile (Paris: Hachette, 1859). Notes to Pages 73–78

66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85.

216

Notes to Pages 78–81

86. Jules Simon, La Politique radicale [3rd ed.] (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1869), carefully distanced himself (p. 1) from “les absolutistes,—monarchiques ou jacobins,—qui mettent leur système au-dessus de la liberté.” Cf. pp. 16, 392. 87. Ibid., pp. 38, 357, 362. 88. Ibid., p. 291. Jules Simon, Thiers, Guizot, Rémusat (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1885). 89. Simon supported the Nancy Program of 1865. 90. Rémusat, Politique libérale, ch. 7. 91. Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), chs. 3 and 4. 92. Durkheim began his career with a Latin thesis on Montesquieu. It has been translated into English under the title “Montesquieu’s Contribution to the Rise of Social Science,” in Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965). 93. François Guizot, Democracy in France (London: John Murray, 1849), pp. 65, 59, 29. 94. Emile Durkheim, Suicide (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 254. 95. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 41. 96. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 14. His views on occupational ethics are spelled out at the end of Suicide, in the preface to the second edition of The Division of Labor, and, most systematically, in Leçons de sociologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). 97. I find myself in strong disagreement with Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim, His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Srudy (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), who tries to make Durkheim into a French T. H. Green. Durkheim’s true English counterpart, in my opinion, is F. H. Bradley, author of the very conservative “My Station and Its Duties.” 98. Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle (New York: Clarion, 1968), pp. 939–942. 99. Léon Blum, Á l’échelle humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), ch. 7. Originally published in 1945. 100. “What was his [Napoleon’s] ultimate object? . . . Liberty. Yes, liberty! and the more one studies the history of Napoleon, the more will he be convinced of this truth.” Napoleonic Ideas/Des Idées Napoléoniennes (New York: D. Appleton, 1859), p. 36. Originally published in 1839. 101. See Theodore Zeldin, Emile Ollivier and the Liberal Empire of Napoleon III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).

Notes to Pages 78–81

Notes to Pages 82–84

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102. On the Marquis d’Argenson and Turgot see Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 121–125. For Barante’s comments on these enlightened administrators see Des Communes et de l’Aristocratie, pp. 8, 51, 157, 200ff, 225. 103. Rohr, Founding Republics in France and America. 104. Alec Stone, The Birth of Judicial Politics in France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 105. Rousseau, Du Contract social, Bk. II, ch. 7. 106. Alain, Éléments d’une doctrine radicale [4th edition] (Paris: Gallimard, 1933), pp. 54–55. 107. To Alain what matters is “the continuous and efficacious control that the governed exercise over the governors.” Ibid., p. 152. Rousseau denounced representatives in the Social Contract (Bk. III, ch. 15) but reluctantly accepted them in the Government of Poland on condition that they merely report the opinions of their constituents. 108. Albert Camus, L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). 109. Alain, Éléments, pp. 139–140. 110. Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, chs. 8 and 9. 111. On May ’68 and the various interpretations set forth during and just after “the events” see Bernard E. Brown, Protest in Paris: Anatomy of a Revolt (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, 1974). 112. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 256. 113. Raymond Aron, La Révolution introuvable (Paris: Fayard, 1968); Michel Crozier, La Société bloquée (Paris: Seuil, 1970). 114. E.g., Henri Mendras, Social Change in Modern France: Towards a Cultural Anthropology of the Fifth Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Originally published as La Seconde Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). Gilles Lipovetsky, “May ’68, or the Rise of Transpolitical Individualism,” agrees that that 1968 was a turning point toward liberalism but does not approve of the descent of France toward a narrow individualism and hedonism. His essay appears in Mark Lilla, ed., New French Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 212–219. 115. Vivien Schmidt, Democratizing France: The Political and Administrative History of Decentralization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). François Burdeau, Liberté, libertés locales chéries! (Paris: Cujas, 1983). 116. Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen, ch. 4, notes that republicans thought of municipal self-government as an alternative both to “Jacobinism” and to federalism. 117. Blum, À l’échelle humaine, p. 133. Notes to Pages 82–84

218

Notes to Pages 84–89

118. Tom Hayden et al., The Port Huron Statement (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990), p. 13. 119. On Hayden’s debt to C. Wright Mills and John Dewey see James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), chs. 3 and 8. Miller does not, however, offer evidence to sustain his claim that the New Left drew upon a tradition of “civic republicanism” (pp. 16, 145–146). 120. Benjamin Rush, “A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania; to which are added, Thoughts upon the Mode of Education, Proper in a Republic,” in Frederick Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 14, 16, 17. 121. In his The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, pp. 114–118, Gordon Wood underscored the notion of a “Christian Sparta.” He also speaks uncritically of Benjamin Rush’s essay, p. 427, as does Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents, on p. 129 but not on p. 319. 122. Keller, Affairs of State, p. 242. 123. Mark Twain captured the flavor of the coming to town of the evangelical preacher and the circus in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chs. 20, 22. 124. James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 125. Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). On how desperately the new federal government needed parties to save its life, see James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). 126. Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 2 February 1816. 127. “Civic virtue was a central concern of their political argument,” states Wilson Carey McWilliams in his commentary on the Antifederalists. But he offers little in the way of evidence to back up his view. Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra, eds., How Democratic Is the Constitution? (Washington D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), p. 92. 128. The Complete Antifederalist, 5.16.14. 129. Herbert J. Storing offers a useful overview in What the Antifederalists Were for (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 130. Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 35. 131. Cf. Alain. 132. Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), ch. 7. 133. Martin Diamond, “The Declaration and the Constitution: Liberty, Democ-

Notes to Pages 84–89

Notes to Pages 89–96

219

racy, and the Founders,” in Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol, eds., The American Commonwealth—1976 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), ch. 2, esp. pp. 47, 49 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 1–8, 80–94. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections on America Today (New York: Random House, 1969), ch. 7. Democracy in America, p. 524. Earlier in the same chapter (p. 521) Tocqueville suggests that “civil associations pave the way for political ones, but on the other hand, the art of political association develops and improves the technique for civil purpose”—a statement which perhaps meets Putnam’s reading half-way. But note his position on the next page (p. 522), which leads to his final statement on p. 524: “One may think of political associations as great free schools to which all citizens come to be taught the general theory of association.” Richard John Neuhaus and Peter Berger, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1976). Notes to Pages 89–96

134. 135. 136.

137.

4. The Uses of Republican Rhetoric in America 1. E.g., Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 2. Works of Fisher Ames (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), vol. 1, p. 19. 3. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), pp. 5, 10, 120–121, 125, 130, 338, 340, 471, 501, 585–586, 687ff, 694, 721. Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 4. Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 493. 5. It is noteworthy that John Adams and Benjamin Rush, in their correspondence of 1805–1813, attempt to place themselves above partisanship not by rejecting but by accepting the extravagant claims of both parties. Adams and Rush repeatedly speak of the Federalists as English and the Jeffersonians as French. John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1966), pp. 30, 117, 121, 131, 140, 144, 149, 151, 180, 266. 6. “Monarchy,” the first section of Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), is excellent but does not, I think, explicitly address monarchical government or ideology. 7. Jefferson to James Madison, 15 March 1789. 8. Janice Potter, The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

220

Notes to Pages 96–99

9. Patrick Henry, The Complete Antifederalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 5.16.7. 10. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911–1937), vol. 1, p. 83. Louise Burnham Dunbar, A Study of ‘Monarchical’ Tendencies in the United States, from 1776 to 1801 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1920), ch. 5. 11. Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), p. 179. 12. Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), p. 38. 13. Douglas Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1974). 14. E.g., Washington’s Farewell Address, in which he repeatedly sounds, implicitly, the Cincinnatus theme. W. B. Allen, ed., George Washington: A Collection (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), pp. 513, 527. Cf. Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (New York: Doubleday, 1984). 15. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 266, 483, 488. Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1965). 16. Probably Washington’s most famous warning against parties came in his Farewell Address. George Washington: A Collection, pp. 512–527. 17. Marvin Meyers, ed., The Mind of the Founder: Sources in the Political Thought of James Madison (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1981), p. 200. 18. On the conflict of parties in early America, down to 1825, see John Quincy Adams, Parties in the United States (New York: Greenberg, 1941). 19. Meyers, The Mind of the Founder, p. 204. 20. Ibid., p. 208. 21. Ibid., p. 203n. 22. Jefferson: Writings, pp. 670, 671, 1235. 23. Hamilton, “Constitutional Convention Speech on a Plan of Government,” in David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition [2nd ed.] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 138–142. Hume, “Of the Independency of Parliament,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), pp. 42–46. 24. James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). 25. Jefferson: Writings, p. 1236. 26. Tacitus, Agricola, 2, 45; Histories, II, 91; IV, 6–8, 53. 27. Jefferson: Writings, pp. 661–673, 1425. 28. After the Federalists disappeared, the Jeffersonians occasionally employed antimonarchical rhetoric against one another, as when some in their ranks

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denounced “King Caucus,” i. e., the method of choosing presidential nominees through a caucus of the party’s members of Congress. The caucus was also repudiated as “aristocratic.” FDR, “Acceptance of the Renomination for the Presidency,” June 27, 1936, in Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 1938–1950), vol. 5, pp. 230–236. Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission (New York: Vintage, 1966), pp. 38, 60. Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 319, 328. Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 463. Ibid., p. 21. “Imperialism” in Speeches of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1909), vol. 2, pp. 17–49. Robert McCloskey, American Conservatism in an Age of Enterprise: A Study of William Graham Sumner, Stephen J. Field and Andrew Carnegie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 137. John Quincy Adams specifically linked his request for a national university with George Washington’s recommendations. Daniel Walker Howe, ed., The American Whigs: An Anthology (New York: John Wiley, 1973), p. 17. Henry F. May, The End of Innocence (New York: Knopf, 1959), p. 100. On charges of “Prussian” influence see Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983), pp. 72–73, 96, 129–130, 155, 168, 189, 200, 204. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Bk. I, ch. 55. The American colonists were keenly and proudly aware that theirs was a postfeudal world. See, for instance, John Adams’s essay of 1765, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s boast in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) that “we are strangers to those feudal institutions which have enslaved so many.” (New York: Dutton, 1957), p. 7. Jefferson to George Washington, 16 April 1784. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, p. 43. Wills, Cincinnatus, ch. 9. John Adams to Horatio Gates, 23 March 1776. John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. 11, 101. Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, 21 March 1801. Taylor, Inquiry, pp. 13, 20, 75, 79. Ibid., pp. 9, 12, 20, 405–406. Ibid., pp. 27, 36, 43, 50, 223, 231–232, 235. See Taylor’s Tyranny Unmasked (1821) for his attacks on the tariff. Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 6 September 1819. Notes to Pages 100–104

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

222

Notes to Pages 105–109

50. I say “supposedly” because in truth Hamilton was a republican. See Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970). 51. Jefferson to John Adams, 28 October 1813. John Adams to Jefferson, 9 & 13 July 1813; 2 September 1813; 15 November 1813. 52. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 15, 23, 24. 53. On Bolinbroke see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). 54. Southern enthusiasm for natural aristocracy was frequently fused with arguments in favor of slavery. William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), pp. 289– 290. 55. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (New York: De Capo Press, 1971), vol. 3, pp. 207–208. Haraszti, John Adams & the Prophets of Progress, pp. 150, 151. 56. Not until the French Revolution did Adams toy, briefly, with the idea of hereditary office and titles. See Haraszti, John Adams & the Prophets of Progress, ch. 3. 57. John Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England (New York: Arno Press, 1979), p. 210. The first edition was published in French in 1771, the first English edition in 1775. 58. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk. III, ch. 10. See James Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), ch. 5, for Rousseau’s reversal of the cycle of degeneration. 59. Federalist, nos. 10, 35, 57, 68. 60. E.g., Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 2.8.15, 2.9.42, 2.9.46, 5.17.1, 6.12.15. 61. Andrew Jackson, “First Annual Message (8 December 1829),” in James D. Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents [20 vols.] (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), vol. 3, pp. 1011–1012. 62. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Bk. III, ch. 1. 63. William Leggett, Democratick Editorials (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1984), pp. 164, 193, 244, 246, 253. 64. Quoted by Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 85. 65. Ibid., p. 81. 66. Eric Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York: Viking, 1952), p. 17. 67. E. L. Godkin, Problems of Modern Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 311–332.

Notes to Pages 105–109

Notes to Pages 109–115

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68. William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (Boston: Bedford Books, 1994), pp. 54–57, 87. Originally published 1905. 69. Goldman notes that single-taxers sometimes ran for office on the Populist ticket but without the blessing of Henry George. Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 47. 70. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (New York: Robert Schalkenbach, 1942), pp. 534–535. 71. Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind, pp. 25, 27, 31, 37, 42. 72. Ibid., pp. 455–456 for Populist praise of Debs. On occasion, it must be admitted, Debs spoke critically of the Populists. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948), p. 322. 73. Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs, pp. 328, 402. 74. J. Allen Smith, The Spirit of American Government (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 27–39, 63–64, 103, 105, 295, 308. Richard Hofstadter deals only in passing with Smith in The Progressive Historians (New York: Knopf, 1968). 75. Quoted by Merrill Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 343. 76. Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion, 1829–1889 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902), p. 15. 77. Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961), pp. 153, 164. 78. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Mentor, 1953), esp. chs. 2–4, 14. 79. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989) [originally published in 1909], ch. 6, esp. pp. 146, 152. 80. Joseph Blau, ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), pp. 32, 149, 155–156. 81. Ibid., pp. 36–37. 82. Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in David Hollinger and Charles Capper, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition [2nd ed.] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 351–353. 83. Blau, Social Theories, pp. 36, 295, 300, 327. 84. Ibid., pp. 292, 328–332. 85. Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 32, 211. 86. Van Buren defended parties in his Autobiography and in his posthumously published Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States (1867). 87. Robespierre, “Report on the Principles of Political Morality [5 February 1794],” in Keith Baker, ed., University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), vol. 7, pp. 370, 372. 88. Federalist, nos. 10, 14, 39. Notes to Pages 109–115

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Notes to Pages 115–119

89. Donald Brand offers some interesting parallels between the New Left and the Antifederalists, but he makes no claim that “participatory democracy” is an Antifederalist motif. See his essay “Reformers of the 1960s and 1970s: Modern Anti-Federalists?,” in Richard Harris and Sidney Milkis, eds., Remaking American Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), ch. 2. Perhaps the most sophisticated interpretation of the Antifederalists written from a New Left point of view is Wilson Carey McWilliams’ essay, “Democracy and the Citizen: Community, Dignity, and the Crisis of Contemporary Politics in America,” in Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra, eds., How Democratic Is the Constitution? (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), ch. 5. 90. Robert McCloskey, ed., The Works of James Wilson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 772. 91. W. B. Allen, ed., Works of Fisher Ames, vol. 1, pp. 7–9, 34, 124. 92. Ibid., pp. 124–125. See David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper, 1965), for evidence that a younger generation of Federalists copied Jeffersonian tactics of electioneering. 93. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, p. 43. 94. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 76–77. 95. Howe, ed., The American Whigs: An Anthology, pp. 87–88. 96. Ibid., p. 102. 97. John Quincy Adams, The Jubilee of The Constitution [1839] (New York: Bedford, 1848), pp. 53, 115. 98. On the correspondence and friendship between Jefferson and John Adams see Merrill Peterson, Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 99. Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990), p. 212. 100. Ibid., p. 217. 101. Howe, ed., The American Whigs, p. 21. 102. Calvin Colton, “Democracy,” in Howe, ed., The American Whigs, pp. 89–105, esp. 92 and 99. 103. For Calhoun on parties see Ross M. Lence, ed., Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), pp. 32, 37, 159, 199. 104. Merrill Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 338–339. Eugene Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 48–49. 105. Calhoun, Union and Liberty, pp. 248–252, 350, 370–371, 381. 106. Robert C. Bannister, ed., On Liberty, Society, and Politics: The Essential Essays

Notes to Pages 115–119

Notes to Pages 120–122

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

113.

114.

115.

116. 117. 118. 119.

120.

121. 122.

225

of William Graham Sumner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), pp. 81–92, 392. Ibid., pp. 150, 169–170, 189, 193, 197, 199. Henry Cabot Lodge, The Democracy of the Constitution and Other Addresses and Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), p. 157. Ibid., pp. 49, 52. Henry Cabot Lodge, Historical and Political Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), pp. 62–63. Ibid., pp. 102–103, 109. See, especially, his essays on “The Constitution and Its Makers” and “The Compulsory Initiative and Referendum, and the Recall of Judges,” in The Democracy of the Constitution. Even more than Lodge, one might expect Henry Adams to praise republics at the expense of democracies. It is worth noting, therefore, that in his history of the Jeffersonian administrations, 1800 to 1817, Adams used the word “democratic” more favorably than the word “republican.” See Peterson, The Jefferson Image, pp. 285–286. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860– 1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1978), p. 272. Originally published by Rutgers University Press, 1955. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, reprinted in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967), p. 48. Moynihan dealt with immigrants and ethnic politics in the book he coauthored with Nathan Glazer, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1963). Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, KY: Victor Publishing, 1960), ch. 2. Quoted by James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets” (New York: Simon Schuster, 1987), p. 90. Irving Kristol, On the Democratic Idea in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 134. Irving Kristol, “The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution,” in Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 93. Irving Kristol, “‘When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness’—Some Reflections on Capitalism and ‘The Free Society’,” in Mark Gerson, ed., The Essential Neoconservative Reader (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996), p. 109. Irving Kristol, “American Historians and the Democratic Idea,” in Reflections of a Neoconservative, p. 103. The best treatments of the Whigs may be found in Daniel Walker Howe, The Notes to Pages 120–122

226

Notes to Pages 122–128

123. 124. 125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134.

135. 136. 137. 138.

Notes to Pages 122–128

Political Culture of the American Whigs and Making of the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 424. Originally published in 1973. Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (New York: Anchor, 1963). Originally published in 1955 by Criterion Books. Typical of the neoconservatives was Irving Kristol’s remark that “the New Left, every day and in every way, comes more and more to resemble the Old Right.” Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 98. Irving Kristol, “The New Populism: Not to Worry,” in Neoconservatism, pp. 361, 363. Machiavelli, Discourse on Livy, Bk. III, ch. 6. Leggett, Democratick Editorials, pp. 6, 7, 11, 20. Henry George, Progress and Poverty, pp. 372, 374, 532–533. Pollack, The Populist Mind, pp. 9, 153. See also James B. Weaver, A Call to Action: An Interpretation of the Great Uprising, Its Source and Causes (Des Moines: Iowa Printing Co., 1892), ch. 7 (“Rome, Great Britain, and the United States”). Ray Ginger, ed., William Jennings Bryan: Selections (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1967), p. 42. On the campaign against the Masons see Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1967), ch. 1. The Complete Anti-Federalist, 2.7.145–160; 3.15.2. Lincoln charged repeatedly in the Lincoln-Douglas debates that Stephen A. Douglas, Franklin Pierce, Roger B. Taney, and James Buchanan were involved in a conspiracy to universalize slavery. Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), ch. 2. Croly, The Promise of American Life, p. 152. Sallust, The Conspiracy of Catiline, liii. Paine, Rights of Man (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 66.

5. The Strange Career of Liberalism in France 1. André Jardin, Histoire du libéralisme politique: De la crise de l’absolutisme à la constitution de 1875 (Paris: Hachette, 1985), p. 211. Cf. Louis Girard, Les Libéraux français, 1814–1875 (Paris: Aubier, 1985). 2. René Rémond, The Right Wing in France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 100. The distinction between “resistance” and “move-

Notes to Pages 129–133

227

ment” is an old one, found, for instance, in Charles de Rémusat’s book, Politique libérale ou fragments pour servir a la défense de la révolution française (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1875), p. 255. Originally published in 1860. E.g., Guizot, Des Moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition (Paris: Belin, 1988) [originally published January 1821]. Quoted by Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 325. Barante, ed., La Vie politique de Royer-Collard (Paris: Didier, 1861), vol. 2, pp. 468–469. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 483. Guizot, Democracy in France (London: John Murray, 1849), pp. v, 29–30, 59, 67, 69. Cf. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Originally published in 1797. Guizot, Democracy in France, pp. 72–73, 81ff. Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: HarperCollins, 1969), p. 12. Ibid., pp. 692, 703. Ibid., p. 463. Ibid., vol. 2, part 1, ch. 20. Ibid., pp. 429, 460, 485. On Cooper’s attempt to create a distinctively American literature see Michael T. Gilmore’s “James Fenimore Cooper” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, 1590–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 676–693. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 471. Ibid., pp. 393–394. Guizot, Democracy in France, p. 13. Earlier, in 1839, Guizot published an essay on Washington as an introduction to Jared Spark’s collection of Washington’s correspondence. For Rémusat’s similar praise of Washington see his Critiques et Études littéraires, passé et présent (Paris: Didier, 1859), vol. 2, pp. 139–174. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, part 2, ch. 2. Tocqueville, Recollections (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995), pp. 71, 74, 75, 155, 165. Thiers, De la propriété (Paris: Paulin, Lheureux, 1848). Guizot, Democracy in France, p. 33. Guizot, History of Civilization in Europe (New York: John V. Lovell, n. d.), p. 131. Thierry, Essai sur l’histoire de la formation et des progrès du tiers état (Paris: Furne, Jouvet, 1866), pp. 1–2. Ibid., p. x (preface of 15 February 1853). Stanley Mellon, The Political Uses of History: A Study of Historians in the French Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958). Notes to Pages 129–133

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

228

Notes to Pages 133–137

26. Biancamaria Fontana, ed., Benjamin Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 102–114, 309–328. 27. Fustel made his argument in the opening pages of The Ancient City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980) and also in his Inaugural Lecture delivered at Strasbourg in 1862, reprinted in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1956), pp. 179–188. 28. See Tocqueville’s searing indictment of the July Monarchy in the opening pages of his Recollections. 29. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 495. 30. Tocqueville, Recollections, pp. 61–62. 31. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Anchor, 1955), p. 20. 32. Ibid., p. 122. 33. Ibid., p. 47. 34. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 88. 35. Tocqueville, Old Regime, p. ix. 36. Quoted in Arthur Wilson, Diderot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 162. 37. Tocqueville, Old Regime, pt. 3, ch. 3. See Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). 38. Taine, Journeys through France: Being Impressions of the Provinces (New York: H. Holt, 1897), p. 70. 39. Taine favored election in two stages, arranged so that all men would vote but the government would be left in the hands of an elite. See his pamphlet Du Suffrage universel et de la manière de voter (Paris: Hachette, 1872). 40. Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine: La Révolution (Paris: Hachette, 1878), vol. 1, pp. 274ff. 41. See, in general, Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). 42. Taine, Lectures on Art (New York: H. Holt, 1896), vol. 1, pp. 216–217. 43. Renan, L’Avenir de la science in Oeuvrès complètes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947–1961), vol. 3, pp. 722–723, 724. 44. Renan, L’Avenir, pp. 812, 844. On page 1039 Renan argues that the philosophes were superior to the writers of the seventeenth century. 45. Renan, Caliban: Suite de “La Tempête” in Oeuvrès complètes, vol. 3, pp. 375– 435. 46. Renan, L’Avenir, pp. 859, 862. 47. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 144.

Notes to Pages 133–137

Notes to Pages 137–141

229

Originally published as Nous et les autres: La Réflexion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989). Renan, L’Avenir, p. 941. In the aftermath of Franco-Prussian War, Renan pondered the option of renewing his country by means of “l’assujettissement de toutes les races inférieures.” La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1872), p. 305. Renan, L’Avenir, p. 1074. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (New York: Viking, 1960), p. 200 [originally published in 1895]. Ibid., p. 32. I have corrected the highly misleading English translation. Le Bon, The French Revolution and the Psychology of Revolution (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980) [originally published in 1912] and The Psychology of Socialism (New York: Macmillan, 1899). Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples (New York: Macmillan, 1898), pp. 5–6. Ibid., p. 133. Le Bon was by no means isolated in his rejection of the notion that colonized peoples could or should be assimilated. Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1975), pp. 3, 177. Le Bon, The Crowd, p. 18. Quoted by Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology, p. 164. David Thomson, Democracy in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) [4th ed.], p. 73. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology, p. 106. E.g., Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim, His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) and James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). William Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology: The Evolution of French Liberalism, 1870–1914 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983). F. H. Bradley, “My Station and Its Duties,” in Ethical Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 201 [originally published in 1876]. Durkheim, Suicide (New York: Free Press, 1951), p. 254. Douglas Johnson, Guizot: Aspects of French History, 1787–1874 (London: Routledge, 1963), p. 100. Durkheim, Moral Education (New York: Free Press, 1961), pp. 275, 277. Notes to Pages 137–141

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

230

Notes to Pages 141–145

67. Johnson, Guizot, pp. 129, 153. Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1984), p. 4. 68. Léon Bourgeois, Solidarité (Paris: Armand Colin, 1912) [7th ed.], p. 156. 69. Ibid., p. 11. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (New York: Free Press, 1965), Preface to the 2nd edition. 70. Bourgeois, Solidarité, pp. 23–24. 71. Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology, chs. 5 & 6. 72. Fouillée, Education from a National Standpoint (New York: D. Appleby, 1897), p. 2. 73. Durkheim’s Division of Labor (1893) should be contrasted with Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). 74. Léon Duguit, Law in the Modern State (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1919), p. 42. 75. Bourgeois, Solidarité, pp. 53–72, 101. Fouillée, La Démocratie politique et sociale en France (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1910), pp. 4, 13, 60, 84, 138, 201. 76. Bourgeois, Solidarité, pp. 61, 87–88. 77. Ibid., pp. 46, 53–72, 91, 101. 78. Fouillée, La Démocratie, p. 96. 79. Durkheim, Suicide, Bk. 2, ch. 2. 80. Ibid., p. 364. 81. Durkheim’s “Individualism and the Intellectuals” appears in Political Studies, 17-1 (1969), pp. 19–30. I strongly disagree with Steven Lukes’s interpretation of Durkheim’s essay (pp. 14–19). 82. Durkheim, Division of Labor, p. 122. 83. Durkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” p. 24. 84. Durkheim, Division of Labor, p. 123: “It is the division of labor that is increasingly fulfilling the role that once fell to the common consciousness. This is what mainly holds together social entities in the higher types of society.” 85. Durkheim, Suicide, p. 370. 86. Felix Markham, ed., Henri de Saint-Simon: Social Organization, the Science of Man, and Other Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 20. Auguste Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), p. 28. 87. Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), chs. 3, 4, 6. 88. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 14–15, 17. 89. Ibid., pp. 466, 470. 90. Fouillée, La Démocratie, pp. 47, 194. 91. Durkheim, Moral Education, pp. 270–274. 92. E.g., Fouillée, “Synthesis of Idealism and Naturalism,” in A. Fouillée, J.

Notes to Pages 141–145

Notes to Pages 146–153

231

Charmont, L. Duguit, R. Demogue, Modern French Legal Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1921), pp. 165ff, 199, 213, 216. Durkheim, Division of Labor, p. 322. Ibid., p. 173 Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method, p. 49. Ibid., p. 75. Durkheim’s comment is about the statesman but it applies also to the social scientist. Michel Winock, Édouard Drumont et Cie: Antisémitisme et fascisme en France (Paris: Seuil, 1982), pp. 48ff. Durkheim, Suicide, Bk. 1, ch. 2. Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 11–15. Fouillée, La Démocratie, p. 131. Ibid., pp. 59ff. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 132. Montaigne, Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), I, 39, p. 174. Ibid., I, 30, p. 146; III, 13, p. 856. Ibid., II, 16, p. 471. Ibid., III, 1, p. 607. Cf. p. 600. Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, Bk. XI, ch. 4. On Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence see my treatment in Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), ch. 6. Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, cxxi; Spirit of Laws, Bk. XXI, ch. 21. Biancamaria Fontana, ed., Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 52–55. Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime, ch. 7. Mme de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1998), p. 35. Considérations sur la Révolution française (Paris: Tallandier, 1983), pp. 392, 422. Mme de Staël, Considérations, pp. 463ff., 511. Her belief in a law of historical progress is especially evident in De la Littérature. Mme de Staël, Considérations, p. 63. Tocqueville, Recollections, p. 5. Cf. Marx, Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Guizot, Democracy in France, p. 42. Tocqueville, Old Regime, p. xiv. Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill, 18 March 1841. Tocqueville, Écrits et discours politiques in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1962–1990), vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 213. Notes to Pages 146–153

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

232

Notes to Pages 153–158

121. Tocqueville, Écrits et discours politiques, p. 478. 122. Quoted in André Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography (New York: Noonday, 1988), p. 318. 123. Tocqueville, Écrits et discours politiques, p. 197. 124. See Jardin, Tocqueville, ch. 18. Jennifer Pitts, “Introduction” to Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. xxi–xxii. Todorov, On Human Diversity, pp. 194–202. 125. Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism in Seymour Drescher, ed., Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 1–27. 126. Tocqueville, The European Revolution & Correspondence with Gobineau (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), pp. 227, 231–232. 127. On Halévy’s background see his autobiographical Pays parisiens (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1932) and Alain Silvera, Daniel Halévy and His Times: A Gentleman-Commoner in the Third Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966). 128. Charles Péguy, Notre Jeunesse in Oeuvres en prose, 1909–1914 (Paris: Gallimard: 1957), p. 516. This work was written in response to Halévy’s Apologie pour notre passé, published in Péguy’s Cahiers de la quinzaine. 129. Daniel Halévy, The End of the Notables (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), p. 119. 130. Daniel Halévy, La République des comités (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1934), pp. 14, 39, 48, 165, 175, 182–183. 131. Gambetta, Discours et plaidoyers politiques (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1881), vol. 3, p. 101. 132. On the Radicals see Jean Touchard, La Gauche en France depuis 1900 (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 42–52, 102–138; Claude Nicolet, Le Radicalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974); Philip M. Williams, Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth Republic (New York: Anchor, 1966), ch. 9; Albert Thibaudet, Les Idées politiques de la France (Paris: Librairie Stock, 1932), ch. 5. 133. Daniel Halévy, Décadence de la liberté (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1931), pp. 111, 113. 134. Ibid., pp. 30, 41. 135. For Halévy’s evaluation of Péguy see his Charles Péguy et les cahiers de la quinzaine (Paris: Payot & Cie, 1919). 136. Georges Sorel, Le Système historique de Renan (Paris: G. Jacques, 1905)), p. 24. 137. Halévy referred to positivist sociology as “vague matière dont la seule chose qu’on sache avec précision, c’est qu’elle est la philosophie du radicalisme et du socialisme officiel.” Décadence de la liberté, p. 105. 138. Sorel, Le Système historique de Renan, pp. 2, 57, 74. 139. Daniel Halévy, La Vie de Frédéric Nietzsche (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1909). 140. Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 245–246.

Notes to Pages 153–158

Notes to Pages 158–164

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141. Daniel Halévy, La République des ducs (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1937), pp. 107– 108. 142. Halévy, Décadence de la liberté, p. 187. 143. Daniel Halévy, Trois Épreuves: 1814, 1871, 1940 (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1941), p. 168. 144. Quoted by Paxton, Vichy France, p. 22. 145. E.g., Péguy, Notre Jeunesse, pp. 503, 539, 540, 542. 146. Pamela Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 1814–1871 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 126. Notes to Pages 158–164

6. Liberal, Illiberal, and Antiliberal Republics 1. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York: Peter Smith, 1941), pp. 272– 273. First published in six monthly installments in 1906. 2. Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, 29 April 1896. 3. Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples (New York: Macmillan, 1898), pp. 34, 53–59, 135, 140, 145–148. 4. James Hollifield, “Immigration and Republicanism in France: The Hidden Consensus,” in Wayne Cornelius, Philip Martin, James Hollifield, eds., Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 143–176. Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers: L’aventure d’une politique de l’immigration, 1938–1991 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991). 5. Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 5. Originally published as Le Creuset français: Histoire de l’immigration (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988). 6. Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures [5 December 1791], in Papers on Public Credit, Commerce, and Finance (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 194. 7. See Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 8. Renan, “What Is a Nation?,” in Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Essays (London: Walter Scott, 1896), pp. 61–83. Earlier, in La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1872), pp. ix, 28, 40, 116, Renan had already set forth the arguments contained in “What Is a Nation?” 9. Before Renan delivered his famous lecture, Fustel de Coulanges, in his response to Mommsen, had staked out a similar position. See Blandine Kriegel, Philosophie de la République (Paris: Plon, 1998), pp. 273ff. 10. Robert Aron & Arnaud Dandieu, Le Cancer américain (Paris: Les Éditions Rieder, 1931), pp. 102–103, 238, and Décadence de la nation française (Paris: Les Éditions Rieder, 1931), ch. 7. For an overview see David Strauss, Menace in the West: The Rise of French Anti-Americanism in Modern Times (Westport,

234

Notes to Pages 164–168

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

Notes to Pages 164–168

Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978). See also Denis Lacorne, Jacques Rupnik, Marie-France Toinet, eds., The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990). Barrès, Mes Cahiers, 1896–1923 (Paris: Plon, 1963), vol. 3, p. 161. Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (Paris: Plon, 1925), vol. 1, p. 20. Cf. p. 85. Mes Cahiers, vol. 3, p. 112. Barrès, Les Diverses familles spirituelles de la France (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1997), p. 79. Originally published in 1917. Stanley Hoffmann finds more of Michelet’s than Barrès’s nationalism in the education of de Gaulle. Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 215. Perhaps, but the opening of de Gaulle’s Memoirs of Hope sounds very much like Barrès. Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), p. 483. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Bk. I, ch. 9. Charles de Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), pp. 3, 6. For an example of Barrès’s decidedly cool attitude toward the Declaration see Scènes et doctrines, vol. 1, p. 34. Louis Marin’s extreme right-wing ethnologists did function within the parliamentary structure of the Third Republic. But their sympathies for Vichy make it problematical to call them republicans. See Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), ch. 1. Michelet, The People (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), p. 78. Rousseau, Du Contract social, Bk. IV, ch. 8. Quoted by Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, p. 107. Rousseau, Du Contract social, Bk. II, ch. 12. John S. Ambler, “Educational Pluralism in the French Fifth Republic,” in James Hollifield and George Ross, eds., Searching for the New France (New York: Routledge, 1991), ch. 8. A succinct overview is provided by Denis Lacorne, “Multicultural Challenges to the Jacobin Republic,” paper delivered in 2000 at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington D.C. Hugues Jallon and Pierre Mounier, Les Enragés de la République (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1999). George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 12–13. Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 339. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American

Notes to Pages 168–170

235

Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 333. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xix. Quoted by Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990), p. 243. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), ch. 8. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860– 1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1978), p. 9. Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 106, 118–119, 1490–1491. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1965, 1998), ch. 8. Edward N. Saveth, American Historians and European Immigrants, 1875–1925 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965); Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), ch. 9. Saveth, American Historians, ch. 1. Quoted by Higham, Strangers in the Land, p. 143. Of particular interest is Lodge’s essay “The Distribution of Ability in the United States,” in Historical and Political Essays (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892), where he argues (p. 166) a case for “the enormous predominance of the English in the upbuilding of the United States.” Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West: An Account of the Exploration and Settlement of Our Country from the Alleghenies to the Pacific in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1926), vol., 8, ch. 1 and p. 116. Cf. Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas H. Benton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), p. 4. See Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Frontier and Section (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1961), p. 51, for the argument that the frontier was a melting pot. For Roosevelt’s view of the frontier as a melting pot, see Winning of the West, vol. 8, p. 89; vol. 9, p. 180. See Charles Noble, Welfare as We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), ch. 3, for an account of the maternal nature of the Progressive welfare state. William H. Harbaugh, ed., The Writings of Theodore Roosevelt (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 35. Notes to Pages 168–170

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

236

Notes to Pages 170–175

41. Robert Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York: Knopf, 1969), ch. 5. 42. Harbaugh, ed., Writings of Theodore Roosevelt, p. 33. 43. On Grover Cleveland see Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion, ch. 8. 44. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, vol. 9, p. 220. 45. Ibid., vol. 9, p. 274. The Strenuous Life (New York: The Century Co., 1901), p. 254. 46. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 232–233. 47. Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 48. The Strenuous Life, pp. 17, 265. 49. James Ceaser, Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), ch. 5. 50. Theodore Roosevelt, Winning of the West, vol. 8, p. 79; vol. 9, pp. 155–156, 274–278, 285–286. 51. Theodore Roosevelt, Speeches in Europe (New York: C. S. Hammond, 1910), pp. 82–128. 52. For a typical outburst against “hyphenated Americans” see Harbaugh, Writings of Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 223–225. 53. For an overview see Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980). 54. John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 149–150, 223. 55. Ibid., p. 3. 56. Ibid., p. 205. 57. Ibid., pp. 101, 211–212. Cf. Theodore Roosevelt’s position on Japanese immigration. An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo, 1985), pp. 392–393. 58. Races and Immigrants, pp. 230–231. 59. Higham, Strangers in the Land, ch. 6 (“Toward Racism: the History of an Idea”). 60. Note, for instance, Denis Lacorne’s uncritical response to Tony Judt’s essays denying that the French have a tradition of rights. Lacorne, “Le Débat des droits de l’homme en France et aux États-Unis,” Tocqueville Review, 14:1 (1993), pp. 5–31. 61. Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (New York: Mentor, 1955), p. 61. 62. Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967). 63. Lippmann, The Public Philosophy, pp. 54–58; cf. 65–68 (“From Jacobinism to Leninism”). 64. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 124, 126, 161, 163ff.

Notes to Pages 170–175

Notes to Pages 175–179

237

65. Speaking in his own name Berlin does, very briefly, acknowledge that liberals should value political rights as a way of protecting negative libery (p. 165). His overall theme (pp. 129–130), however, is that “freedom in this [negative] sense is not . . . connected with democracy or self-government.” 66. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), pp. 185, 236–238, 253, 255. Originally published in 1904. 67. Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). 68. The writings of Tony Judt are the best example of this phenomenon. See chapter 2 of the present study for a criticism of the essays in which Judt argues that the French republican tradition has been hostile to rights. See also Susan Dunn, Sister Republics: French Lightning, American Light (New York: Faber & Faber, 1999), ch. 5. 69. Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 37. 70. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968). The title should be translated as “senile communism” rather than “obsolete communism,” since Cohn-Bendit’s intent is to repudiate Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. 71. Obsolete Communism, pp. 16, 82, 106. 72. Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), p. 329. 73. My favorite study of Foucault is James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Anchor, 1993). An especially spirited attack on deconstruction is David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991). Less entertaining but quite able is John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). For a defense see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 74. The Socialists’ choice of the Declaration was, of course, political as well as high-minded. They wanted consensus and thought the Declaration their best chance to bring France together at the time of the bicentennial. Despite their efforts, the old conflicts between left and right erupted. For a succinct analysis see Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 13–17. 75. Irving Kristol has not allowed his transition from liberal to neoconservative to prevent him from continuing to make absurd claims that the French Revolution led directly to twentieth-century totalitarianism. See Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. x–xi. 76. “The classic community of publics is being transformed into a society of masses,” wrote C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (New York: Oxford UniverNotes to Pages 175–179

238

Notes to Pages 179–181

77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91.

92.

Notes to Pages 179–181

sity Press, 1956), p. 300. In this matter, as in many others, Hayden simply paraphrases Mills. The Port Huron Statement (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990), p. 18. Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (New York: Anchor, 1964). José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Norton, 1932). Originally published in 1930. Daniel Bell distanced himself from an uncritical acceptance of the theory of mass society. See The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960), ch. 1. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 64–65, called for a social theory suited to distinctively American circumstances. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, pp. xi, 65. W. H. Morris Jones, “In Defence of Apathy: Some Doubts on the Duty to Vote,” Political Studies, 2 (1954), pp. 25–37. For a succinct statement of “the elitist theory of democracy” see Lipset’s introduction to Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1966), esp. pp. 33ff. Very influential was Robert Dahl’s study, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). E.g., Bell, The End of Ideology, esp. the epilogue. Lipset, “The End of Ideology?”, in Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Anchor, 1963), ch. 13. Chaim I. Waxman, ed., The End of Ideology Debate (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968). Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harvest Books, 1952), pp. 248–263 (“Utopia in the Contemporary Situation”). Hayden et al., The Port Huron Statement, pp. 30, 43, 70–72. Ibid., pp. 9–11. Mills, The Power Elite, pp. 299, 309. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, pp. 335–343. Cf. Eric Foner’s claim that “the republican concept of economic independence” stretched from Paine through the reformers of the Gilded Age. Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 10. Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 139. For Irving Kristol’s comments on “the depletion of moral capital,” see Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 100–101. For Putnam’s on “social capital” see “Bowling Alone,” Journal of Democracy 6:1 (Jan. 1995), pp. 65–77. William J. Bennett, The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). Irving Kristol, On the Democratic Idea in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), ch. 8; Neoconservatism, ch. 9;

Notes to Pages 181–185

239

Reflections of a Neoconservative, ch. 7. James Q. Wilson, “The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy,” in Mark Gerson, ed., The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996), pp. 291–304. Eric Goldman notes that both Samuel Tilden and Carl Schurz applied the label “liberal” to themselves, and that the Liberal Republican party launched the word into national politics. Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Vintage, 1952), p. 20. The modern usage of the word “liberal” seems to stem from the Progressive tradition in its latter phases. See William Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), ch. 7, and Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), chs. 7 & 8. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, ch. 4. See also Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1963). James Q. Wilson, “Foreword” to Mark Gerson, ed., The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader, p. ix. For a more developed statement of Wilson’s view see his book The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993). George F. Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 24. Ibid., p. 152. George F. Will, Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 108, 110. Ibid., pp. 164–165. Will’s treatment (p. 194) of Jefferson’s “the world belongs to the living” is thoroughly disingenuous. Hayden et al., The Port Huron Statement, pp. 12–18. Paul Goodman, “In Search of Community,” Commentary (Feb. 1960), pp. 315–323. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted the similarities of Goodman and Nisbet in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (New York: Free Press, 1969), ch. 1. Goodman, “In Search of Community,” pp. 317, 321. The example of bowling leagues comes, of course, from Putnam; Sandel is responsible for the example of Wal-Mart, Democracy’s Discontents: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 334. For Tocqueville on the primacy of political over social associations see Democracy in America (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), pp. 522, 524. Hayden et al., The Port Huron Statement, pp. 62–63, 74. E.g., Gertrude Himmelfarb, “A De-Moralized Society: The British/American Notes to Pages 181–185

93.

94.

95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105. 106.

107. 108.

240

Notes to Pages 185–189

109. 110. 111.

112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121.

122.

123. 124.

125.

Notes to Pages 185–189

Experience,” in Mark Gerson, ed., The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader, pp. 411–433. Daniel Walker Howe, ed., Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976). Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), ch. 1. Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 112.MM Gingrich (p. 34) cites Gordon Wood who, I suspect, would decline the honor. Figures such as Michael Sandel and James Q. Wilson, I think, are much more appropriate choices. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents, is particularly fond of attacking what he calls the “procedural republic.” Higham, Strangers in the Land, p. 294. Here I am borrowing some lines from my essay “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity,” in Mark Hulliung and Roy C. Macridis, Contemporary Political Ideologies [6th ed.] (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), ch. 14. Federalist, nos. 15, 16, 20. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, no. 6. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 96, notes that Madison “read Voltaire early in life and with enjoyment.” See John Burt’s incisive “John Rawls and the Moral Vocation of Liberalism,” Raritan, 14 (Summer 1994), pp. 133–153. The Papers of James Madison (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), vol. 11, p. 163. Marcel Gauchet, La Révolution des droits de l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), pp. 36–59. John P. Roche, The Quest for the Dream: The Development of Civil Rights and Human Relations in Modern America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968), pp. 144– 145. Robert Nisbet contended in The Quest for Community (p. 273) that “the Tennessee Valley Authority is itself a magnificent illustration of the basic compatibility between democratic government and administrative decentralization.” Hayden called for a “proliferation of TVAs” in the Port Huron Statement, p. 64. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents (pp. 272–273) appreciates David Lilienthal’s language of citizen participation. Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949). Although somewhat dated, Grant McConnell’s chilling appraisal of the characteristics of state governments is still pertinent to our present day situation. Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1966), ch. 6. This point is well-made by James Miller, “Democracy is in the Streets”: From

Notes to Pages 189–192

126.

241

Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 321. It is noteworthy that the best works on political parties, informed by historical research and familiarity with “political theory,” are written by scholars who stand outside the liberalism/republicanism debate. James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). E. N. Elliot, ed., Cotton Is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments (Augusta: Pritchard, Abbott, and Loomis, 1860), p. 553. South Carolina’s arch-racist Governor J. H. Hammond tried to blame the French for filling Jefferson’s mind with sanguinary ideas. Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Knopf, 1922), p. 245. James Allen Smith, The Spirit of American Government: A Study of the Constitution, Its Origin, Influence, and Relation to Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1911), p. 14. Ross M. Lence, ed., Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), pp. 42, 44, 45, 565, 566, 569. For an account of the efforts of other Southerners to deflate the Declaration see William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), pp. 59–61, 123, 156–157, 278, and A. V. Huff, Jr., “The Eagle and the Vulture: Changing Attitudes toward Nationalism in Fourth of July Orations Delivered in Charleston, 1778–1860,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 73 (1974), pp. 10–22. Initially, the platform of 1860 omitted the egalitarian language of the Declaration, but after a vigorous protest on the convention floor, the Republicans restored the 1856 endorsement. Rufus Choate to E. W. Farley, 9 August 1856, in Samuel Gilman Brown, Life of Rufus Choate (Boston: Little, Brown, 1898), p. 326. For a brief but able account of Rufus Choate see Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 225–235. Richard N. Current, ed., The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 284–285. Current, ed., The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln, p. 123. Jefferson told Madison in his letter of October 28, 1785, that property rights can be abused to the point of violating natural rights. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream,” in James Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 217–220. Notes to Pages 189–192

127. 128.

129.

130.

131.

132. 133.

134. 135.

136.

Index

Index

INDEX

Abolitionism, 4, 27 Abortion, 36, 88 Action Française, 100, 158, 164 Adams, Herbert Baxter, 169 Adams, John, 1, 8, 13–15, 24, 58, 60, 61– 67, 71, 87, 92, 95, 97, 99, 103–107, 120, 188 Adams, John Quincy, 101, 117–118 Adams, Samuel, 15, 85 Addison, Joseph, 97 Alain (Emile Chartier), 82–83 Alien and Sedition Acts, 71 American Federation of Labor, 31 Américanistes, 69 Ames, Fisher, 93, 116 Anarchists and Syndicalists, 48, 77, 80, 83, 145, 146, 157, 177 Anglomanes, 65, 69 Anglophilia, in America, 117, 169–170; in France, 61 Anglophobia, in America, 69–70, 112–113, 168–169; in France, 69–70 Anglo-Saxonism, 168–171 Anti-Federalists, 62, 67, 87, 96, 106–107, 115 Anti-Masonry, 179 Anti-Semitism, 146–147, 164–166 Appleby, Joyce, 8 Aquinas, Thomas, 52 Aristotle, 11, 13, 52, 105 Aron, Raymond, 38, 75, 83, 89 Aron, Robert, 163 Assimilation, 139, 146, 153, 162–163 Autogestion, 83

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 113 Bailyn, Bernard, xi, 1, 6, 10, 11 Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich, 177 Bancroft, George, 2 Banning, Lance, 8 Barante, Prosper, baron de, 76, 82 Barber, Benjamin, 17 Barlow, Joel, 103, 104 Barrès, Maurice, 48, 143, 162–165 Bell, Daniel, 4, 85, 122, 123, 179 Bellah, Robert, 17 Bellamy, Edward, 28–29 Bennett, William, 90–91, 181, 184 Berger, Peter, 90 Berle, Adolf, 33 Berlin, Isaiah, 38–39, 174–175 Berlin Wall, 38 Beveridge, Albert (Senator), 170 Bicameralism vs. unicameralism, 61–63, 65, 67–69, 72, 81, 147 Bill of Rights (1689, England), 24 Bill of Rights (1789, America), 19, 75 Blackstone, Sir William, 19, 66 Blanc, Louis, 39–40, 59, 62, 93, 132 Blum, Léon, 81, 84 Bodin, Jean, 148 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 97, 105 Bolsheviks, 38, 139, 158, 174–177 Bonald, Louis vicomte de, 130, 136 Bonapartism, 20, 81 Boorstin, Daniel, 89 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 150, 157 Boucher, Jonathan, 96 Bourbon monarchy, 59

243

244

Index

Bourgeois, Léon, 48–50, 140–142, 155 Bradley, Francis Herbert, 140 Brains Trust, 31, 32 Brecht, Bertolt, 38 Broglie, duc Albert de, 50, 60, 156 Broglie, duc Victor de, 66, 79 Brownson, Orestes, 168 Brutus, pseud. (New York), 67 Bryan, William Jennings, 101, 125 Burckhardt, Jacob, 174 Burke, Edmund, 5, 11–13, 49, 80, 90, 91, 132, 135, 182, 183, 191, 192 Burr, Aaron, 120 Caesar, Julius, 99, 118 Calhoun, John C., 119, 124, 168, 190 Camus, Albert, 38, 83, 176, 178 Carnegie, Andrew, 101 Catholic Church, 165; Catholic League, 148 Catiline, 94, 124 Cato, pseud. (New York), 67 Cavaignac, Godfrey, 77 Centinel, pseud. (Pennsylvania), 67 Checks and balances, 10, 58, 62, 67, 68, 72, 87, 99, 110, 115, 188 Chevènement, Jean-Pierre, 166 Chipman, John S., 100 Choate, Rufus, 191 Cicero, 11–13, 105, 148, 149 Cincinnatus, 97, 118 Cincinnatus, pseud. (New York), 67 Civic virtue, 14, 15, 21, 24, 85–88, 92–93, 124, 180, 181 Civil War (English), 11 Civil War (U.S.), 25, 108, 119, 126, 188 Classical education, ix, 9, 133 Classical references, 118, 125–127, 170–171 Classical republicanism, 9–10, 12, 14, 85, 105, 121, 167, 168, 170, 182, 183 Clay, Henry, 108 Clemenceau, Georges, 20, 72–73, 74 Clerical/anticlerical debate, 165 Clermont-Tonnerre, Stanislas-MarieAdélaïde, comte de, 62 Cleveland, Grover, 109, 170 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 176–177 Cold War, culture of, 20, 76, 85, 89, 174– 176, 178, 180 Coleridge, Samuel, 4

Colonists (American), 7–8, 12, 24, 25, 93, 95, 96, 105, 124 Colton, Calvin, 117, 118, 121 Common law, 113; see Blackstone, Sir William Commons, John R., 172–173 Commonwealth Club Address, 32–33, 54 Commonwealthmen, 7, 8, 10–14, 16, 20, 94, 95, 100, 124, 125; see Real Whigs; Opposition Whigs Communards (1871), 48, 78, 136 Communism, 26, 85, 158 Communitarians, xi, 3–5, 15, 17, 23, 30, 39, 55, 84, 93, 160, 173, 183–186, 189 Comte, Auguste, 18, 141, 143–145 Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas, marquis de, 63, 69, 154 Conspiracy, 93, 124–127 Constant, Benjamin, 15, 51, 59, 60, 62, 81, 92, 133, 150–151, 153, 175 Constituent Assembly, 62, 65, 68 Constitution, Federal, 3, 10, 13, 15, 27, 28, 66–67, 75, 86–87, 96, 110, 115–118, 121, 180, 187; American states, 63, 69, 87, 102; of England, 24, 63, 66–70, 106; of France (1791), 65, 67–68; (1793), 19, 39; of the Third Republic, 45; Fourth Republic, 46; Fifth Republic, 46, 81–82 Cooper, James Fenimore, 131 Corruption, 68, 69, 82, 93–94, 97–100, 104, 108, 124–127 Council of state, 82, 166 Counterculture, 4, 89, 181 Counter-revolutionaries, 129, 133 Cousin, Victor, 48, 49, 141 Crisis of citizenship, 1–2, 56, 84 Croker, John Wilson, 132 Croly, Herbert, 33, 53, 54, 111, 126 Crozier, Michel, 56, 57, 75, 83, 89 Cyclical history, 8 Dandieu, Arnaud, 163 D’Argenson, Marquis, 82 De Lolme, Jean-Louis, 106 De Maistre, Joseph, 130 De Seze, Raymond, 44 De Tracy, Destutt, 47, 69–70 Debré, Michel, 82 Debs, Eugene, 28, 40, 103, 110

Index Decentralization and devolution, 75–80, 84, 188, 189 Declaration of Rights (England), 24 Declarations of Rights (France), x-xi, 19, 37, 39–40, 45–51, 75, 77, 136, 159, 165, 178, 188, 192–193 Declaration of Independence, xi, 5–6, 13, 24, 26–29, 30, 37, 45, 53, 54, 88–89, 95, 137, 184, 188, 190–193; and FDR, 32; and Lincoln, 27–28, 191–192 Declaration of Sentiments, 26 Democratic Republican Societies, 28 Derrida, Jacques, 177 Dewey, John, 33, 52, 53, 85, 140 Diamond, Martin, 89 Diderot, Denis, 42 Directory, 47, 70 Disraeli, Benjamin, 182 Division of labor, 141, 142, 146–147 Douglas, Stephen Arnold, 27, 86, 100 Douglass, Frederick, 27 Dreyfus case and Dreyfusards 45, 137–139, 143, 155 Drumont, Édouard, 146 Duguit, Léon, 50, 51, 79, 142 Dupont-White, Charles Brook, 78 Du Pont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel, 69 Durkheim, Emile, 48–49, 79–81, 140–146, 183 Ecology movement (in France), 84 Economic Bill of Rights, 31, 32 Economic Royalists, 95, 100 Edict of Nantes, Revocation of, 150 Elitist theory of democracy, 179 End of ideology, 89, 179–180 Enlightenment, 47, 133, 135–137, 149, 151, 162; Scottish, 53 Espinas, Alfred, 141 Evangelical religion, 4, 88 Evans, George Henry, 32, 39, 180 Existentialists, 176 Farmer, a, pseud. (Maryland), 67 Farmer, Federal, pseud. (Pennsylvania), 67 Fascism, 158, 176 FDR, see Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Federalism, 77–78, 84, 166, 189 Federalists, 57, 58, 62, 63, 66, 67, 69, 70, 86,

245

93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 110, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 124, 131 Feminist movement (France), 177 Ferguson, Adam, 53, 151 Ferry, Jules, 165 Feudalism, 64, 108, 109, 141, 168, 169, 178 Field, Stephen J. (Justice), 26, 29 Fifth Republic, 46, 57, 61, 62, 81, 82, 177, 178 Filmer, Robert, 7, 96, 103 First Congress, 93 First Republic, 47, 65, 177 Fiske, John, 170 Fitzhugh, George, 167–168 Foner, Eric, 184 Foucault, Michel, 177 Fouillée, Alfred, 48, 49 Fourteenth Amendment, 26, 74–75 Fourth Republic, 45–46, 178 Franklin, Benjamin, 63, 69, 96, 113 Freedom, vs. equality, 46, 138; and equality, 46; modern vs. ancient, 15, 133; negative vs. positive, 15, 38–39, 174–175 Freneau, Philip, 103 Frontier, in American history, 34, 39, 53, 54, 125, 161, 170, 172 Furet, François, 16, 57, 178 Fustel de Coulanges, 133 Gambetta, Léon, 156 Garrison, William Lloyd, 27 Gauchet, Marcel, 40 Gaulle, Charles de, 61, 81–82, 164, 165 Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft, 8, 142 General will, 42, 43–44, 46, 74, 166 George, Henry, 29, 30, 39, 52–53, 102, 109, 125 George III, 8, 11, 95, 100 Gettysburg Address, 191–192 Gierke, Otto, 43 Gilded Age, 85 Gingrich, Newt, 10, 36, 54, 88, 114, 124, 185 Gladstone, William Ewart, 52, 170 Glendon, Mary Ann, 23, 36, 37, 51–52 Gliddon, George, 171 Gobineau, Arthur de, 154, 171 Godkin, E. L., 109 Goldwater, Barry, 40, 54, 121, 123, 181 Gompers, Samuel, 110

246

Index

Goodman, Paul, 4, 183 Gordon, Thomas, 11–14, 94, 107 Green movement, 177 Green, T. H., 52, 53, 140 Grotius, Hugo, 13, 19, 41, 42 Guilds, 80 Guizot, François, 47–50, 60, 62, 66, 79, 80, 85, 129–132, 140, 147, 152 Halévy, Daniel, 155–158 Hamilton, Alexander, 8, 13, 14, 21, 66, 93, 96–99, 105, 106, 162, 187 Handguns, 36 Harlan, John Marshall (Justice), 75 Harper, William, 190 Harrington, James, 3, 7, 8, 13, 14, 58, 105, 171 Harrison, William Henry, 118 Hartz, Louis, ix, xi, 3, 6, 7, 21, 37, 55, 88, 184 Haskell, Thomas, 37 Hay, John, 170 Hayden, Thomas, 4, 5, 35, 84–85, 91, 121, 178–179, 183, 184, 189 Heclo, Hugh, 37 Heidegger, Martin, 37 Helvidius, 99 Henry, Patrick, 87, 96 Higham, John, xi, 168 Hitler, Adolf, 102 Hobbes, Thomas, 186 Hobhouse, L. T., 53 Hoffmann, Stanley, 56–57, 75, 89 Hofstadter, Richard, 179 Homer, 161 Homestead Act, 32 Hoover, Herbert, 3, 54, 181 Howe, Daniel Walker, 4, 14 Hume, David, 13, 14, 53, 58, 99, 151 Humphrey, Hubert, 86 Idéologues, 47, 70 Immigrants, 25, 55, 119–121, 161, 162–163, 167, 169–170, 171–173, 192 Indians (American), 73, 148, 161, 170, 172 Individualism, 14, 33, 54, 59, 83, 140–144, 146, 163–164, 182, 187 Inquisition, Spanish, 150 Izoulet, Jean, 141

Jackson, Andrew, 17, 36, 100, 107, 116, 118, 124, 131, 182; age of, 2, 4, 31, 32, 107, 108, 122; and FDR, 31 Jacksonians, 2, 4, 5, 20, 82, 88, 100, 101, 103–105, 107–109, 111, 117, 118, 122, 127, 131, 161, 168, 171, 174, 182, 183; and cultural revolution, 112–114 ; generational autonomy, 31, 71; rotation in office, 87, 107; restoration, 53, 107, 126; applauded by Newt Gingrich, 88, 114, 124; denounced by neoconservatives, 122–123 Jacobins and Jacobinism, x-xi, 18–20, 44, 48, 76, 78–79, 84, 113–115, 133–136, 138, 139, 174, 175, Jardin, André, 128 Jaurès, Jean, 45, 93 Jefferson, Thomas, 1, 5–9, 13, 19, 21, 24, 28–30, 33, 34, 40–42, 47, 54, 57, 69–71, 87, 93, 95–99, 102–105, 110, 111, 117– 120, 168–169, 180, 183, 190, 191, 192 Jeffersonians, 5, 8, 29, 33, 34, 69–71, 86, 93, 94, 97, 99, 102–105, 111, 116, 117, 121, 131, 164, 183, 190 Jews, 161, 163, 164 Jim Crow, 26 Johnson, Lyndon, 3, 35 Jospin, Lionel, 166 Judicial review, 19, 25, 50, 62, 63, 82 Judt, Tony, 22, 37–39, 42, 52, 53 July Monarchy, 45, 48, 49, 51, 52, 66, 68, 77, 92, 128, 129, 131, 133, 140–142, 147, 148, 152–154, 162, 174 Kallen, Horace, 53–54 Kant, Immanuel, 181 Kennedy, John Pendleton, 117 Kennedy, Robert, 35 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 193 Kristol, Irving, 4, 89, 91, 122–124, 179, 181 Ku Klux Klan, 186 Labor, movements, 6, 28, 180–181; study of, 5, 180–181; unions, 28, 31, 40; free vs. slave, 168 Laboulaye, Édouard, 60, 77 La Folette, Robert, 101 Laissez-faire, 8, 26, 40, 41, 73, 91, 123, 152, 168, 183

Index Lally-Tollendal, Gérard-Trophime, comte de, 62, 65, 66, 69 Le Bon, Gustave, 138–139, 161 Le Chapelier law (1791), 76–77 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre 59, 62, 77, 155– 156 Lee, Richard Henry (Virginia), 67 Leggett, William, 108, 124 Legitimists, 77, 130, 141 Lenin, Vladimir, 38, 175 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 165, 166 Levellers, 168 Lewelling, Lorenzo D., 125 Lilienthal, David, 189 Limbaugh, Rush, 114 Lincoln, Abraham, 27–28, 86, 100, 191–192 Lincoln-Douglas debates, 86, 100 Lippmann, Walter, 174 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 85, 123, 179 Livy, 171 Locke, John, 3, 7, 12, 13, 19, 24, 25, 30, 33, 34, 36, 41–43, 72, 88, 98, 107, 167, 183, 186, 190, 191; Lockeans, 7, 12, 29, 34, 40 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 74, 120, 125, 161, 170, 171 Louis XIV, 134, 150 Louis XVI, 44, 97 Louis Napoleon, 59, 61, 81, 133; see Napoleon III Loyalists, 96, 102 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 43, 63, 102, 107, 124, 139, 149, 164, 171 Madison, James, 6, 7, 9, 14, 15, 43, 58, 71, 72, 93, 96–99, 106, 115, 116, 118, 119, 187–188 Madonna, 113 Malesherbes, Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de, 135 Malouet, Pierre-Victor, 62, 69 Manifest Destiny, 73, 100, 170 Mannheim, Karl, 7, 180 Maoists, 38 Marxism and French intellectuals, 16, 38, 52, 175–177 Marx, Karl, 28, 152 Mass society, theory of, 123, 179 Maupeou, René-Nicolas, 135 Maurras, Charles, 161–163, 167

247

May ’68, 83–84, 176–178 McCarthy, Joseph, and McCarthyism, 85, 123, 174, 179 McDonald, Forrest, 97 Melville, Herman, 71, 112–113, 131 Mendras, Henri, 83 Mercantilism, 7, 8 Michelet, Jules, 93, 165 Michels, Robert, 64 Milkis, Sidney, 32 Mill, John Stuart, 11, 78, 153 Miller, Samuel (Justice), 75 Mills, C. Wright, 85, 180 Mitterrand, François, 57, 61 Modernization theories, 6–7, 9 Monarchiens, 66, 67 Monopoly, 29, 107, 111 Montaigne, Michel de, 148–149 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de, 47, 62, 63, 68–70, 80, 96, 149–150, 153 Montmartre, 145 Mounier, Jean-Joseph, 62, 65, 66, 69 Morris, Gouverneur, 120 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 121 Muslims, 55, 166 Mussolini, Benito, 139 Mystique and Politique, 59, 128, 148–159 Napoleon, 20, 47, 59, 76, 78, 81, 150, 151 Napoleon III, 59, 81; see Louis Napoleon Napoleonic Code, 46 National Front, 165 National Origins Act (1924), 121 Natural aristocracy, 64–65, 67, 70, 87, 103, 105–107, 147, 183 Natural rights, 3, 6, 12–13, 19, 24–26, 28, 30, 33, 34, 39–45, 47, 50, 52–54, 77, 79, 88, 95, 133, 159, 168, 191; and land, 29– 30, 32, 34 Nazi Germany, 175, 179 Neoconservatives: x, xi, xii, 3–5, 17, 58, 89, 90, 91, 93, 121–123, 160, 173, 181, 184– 185, 189 Neuhaus, Richard John, 90 New Deal, 31–33, 35, 53–54, 85, 90, 91, 95, 100, 173–174, 180, 184–185, 188, 189 New Freedom Progressives, 33, 110; see Progressives

248

Index

New Left, x, xi, 3–5, 17, 34, 58, 84, 88–91, 93, 115, 121, 123, 160, 173, 178, 181, 183– 185, 189 New Nationalist Progressives, 33; see Progressives New Politics, 34–35, 86, 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich, x, 15, 37, 156, 157, 161 Nisbet, Robert, 183 Nott, J. C., 171 Old Regime, 48, 62, 76, 134, 135 Opposition Whigs, 7, 107; see Real Whigs; Commonwealthmen Order of the Cincinnati, 102 Orleanism, 48–50, 60, 61, 66, 68, 77, 79, 80, 128–130, 132, 135, 138, 140–142, 147, 155–157 Ortega y Gasset, José, 174, 179 O’Sullivan, John, 112 Pacificus, pseud., 98 Paine, Thomas, 6, 8, 9, 25, 29, 39–41, 60, 63, 68–71, 95, 127 Paris Commune (1871), 48, 78, 136 Parliamentary sovereignty, 19, 66–67 Participatory democracy, 4, 58, 84, 115, 178, 186 Péguy, Charles, 59, 155, 158 Pelletan, Eugène, 45 Pétain, Henri Philippe, 158 Phillips, Wendell, 27 Physiocrats, 135 Plessy v. Ferguson, 26 Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, 109 Pocock, J. G. A, 2, 6, 9, 10 Political parties, 81, 86, 93, 94, 96, 101, 119, 164, 189 Polk, James, 100 Popular Front, 158 Popular sovereignty, 12, 13, 19, 41, 47, 50, 51, 62–64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 82, 103, 105– 107, 127, 142 Populism, 29, 100–102, 109–110, 120, 123, 125, 179 Port Huron statement, 35, 84, 179 Positivism, 18, 136, 142, 144, 145, 156 Post-modernism, 113, 177, 178

Powell, Colin, 91 Prévost-Paradol, Lucien-Anatole, 60–61, 135, 155 Price, Richard, 11, 13, 25, 63 Priestley, Joseph: 11, 25, 63, 103 Proceduralism, the Procedural republic, xii, 10, 15, 43, 59, 74–75, 185–189 Proclamation of Neutrality, 98 Progressives, 101, 110, 111, 120, 125, 126, 140, 161, 170, 172–173; see New Freedom; New Nationalist Pufendorf, Samuel, 41 Pullman strike (1894), 28, 110 Putnam, Robert, 17, 56, 84, 90, 91, 181 Racism and theories of race, xi, 133, 136– 138, 146, 168, 171–173, 180 Racine, Jean Baptiste, 136 Radical party (France), 48–49, 155–156 Rap, 113 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 53 Rawls, John, 3, 15, 23, 186–187 Reagan, Ronald, 35, 54, 123, 182 Real Whigs, 7, 11, 12, 19; see Commonwealthmen; Opposition Whigs Rémusat, Charles de, 62, 79 Renan, Ernest, 136–138, 146, 157, 163 Renouvier, Charles, 52 Republic of Virtue, 92 Richelieu, Cardinal, 150 Robinson, Frederick, 113 Robbins, Caroline, 10, 11 Robespierre, Maximilien, 19, 38, 44, 62, 85, 114–115, 150 Roche, John, 188–189 Rodgers, Daniel T., 72 Roe v. Wade, 36 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 3, 31–34, 44, 54, 95, 100 Roosevelt, Theodore, 54, 73–74,120, 161, 170–172 Ross, Edward A., 173 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 19, 40–44, 46, 51, 62, 63, 68, 71, 83, 93, 94, 106, 132, 142, 151, 159, 163, 165, 166, 191 Royer-Collard, Pierre, 50, 51, 60, 62, 66, 75– 77, 79, 129, 130 Rush, Benjamin, 85

Index Saint-Simon, Claude Henri, 144, 145 Sallust, 7, 86, 94, 124, 126–127, 183–184, 226 Sandel, Michael, 4, 23, 184 Schama, Simon, xi Schlesinger, Arthur M., 4, 31–32 Second Empire, 18, 45, 59, 60, 78, 79, 135 Second Great Awakening, 88 Second Republic, 45, 59–60, 61, 76, 129, 131, 133, 158, 174 Selznick, Philip, 189 Seneca Falls, 26 Shakespeare, William, 112, 113, 137 Shaw, George Bernard, 53 Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph, 44, 65, 69 Simon, Jules, 78–79, 84 Simpson, Stephen, 112 Sixties, 4, 34, 89, 123, 181, 183; see May ’68; Counterculture Skidmore, Thomas, 29, 30, 39, 43 Skowronek, Stephen, 109 Slaughter House cases, 75 Slavery, opponents of, 27–28, 47, 78, 126, 191–192 ; defenders of, 119, 167–168, 171, 190–191; wage slavery, 180 Smiles, Samuel, 185 Smith, Adam, 8, 151 Smith, J. Allen, 103, 110, 190 Smith, Melancton (New York), 67, 107 Soboul, Albert, 175 Social Darwinism, 119 Social Contract, 5, 13, 19, 24, 36, 41–43, 47– 51, 53, 71, 89, 142, 163, 170, 191 Social rights, 38–40, 44, 47 Social Security Act, 31–32 Socialism, 7, 53, 167; American, 25, 26, 28, 110, 120; French, 20, 45, 82–84, 131–133, 136, 138, 147, 148, 157, 158, 165, 166, 177, 178 Solidarism, 48–51, 79–81, 140–148 Sorel, Georges, 156–157, 161–163, 167 Spencer, Herbert, 138 Spurlin, Paul, 63 Staël-Holstein, Anne-Louise-Germaine, baronne de, 46–47, 59–62, 92, 132–133, 151, 156 Stalin, Joseph, 38, 102

249

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 26 State of nature, 3, 13, 25, 29, 33, 34, 47, 49, 53, 186, 191 Stevens, John, 65, 66, 103 Stevens, Thaddeus, 72 Strauss, Leo, 52 Stuarts, 24 Sumner, William Graham, 119–120, 124 Supreme Court, 23, 25–26, 71, 74–75, 88, 104, 188 Syndicalism; see Anarchists; Syndicalists Tacitus, 7, 99, 169, 170 Taft, Robert, 40 Taine, Hippolyte, xi, 18–19, 45, 49, 133, 135–139, 146, 147, 159, 178 Talmon, J. L., 38, 174 Taylor, John, 9, 15, 66, 103–104 Terror, 20, 47, 61, 62, 92, 133 Thierry, Augustin, 132 Thiers, Adolphe, 39, 48, 50, 59–61, 66, 78, 79, 132, 145, 154, 157, 159 Third Republic, 20, 40, 42, 45, 48, 50, 51, 59, 61, 73, 79, 81, 100, 136, 138–141, 145, 147, 155, 156, 161–163, 165 Thomson, David, 139 Tocqueville, Alexis de, ix, 2, 16–18, 45, 46, 56–58, 75–77, 89–91, 129–135, 151–154, 159, 184 Todorov, Tzvetan, 137 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 142 Trenchard, John, 11–14, 94, 107 Trotskyites, 38 Tucker, St. George, 71 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, baron de l’Aulne, and Turgotists, 63, 65, 69, 71, 82 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 170 Union Fédérale des Consommateurs, 84 Upton, Emory, 108 Van Buren, Martin, 114, 118 Van Hise, C. R., 101 Veblen, Thorstein, 111 Vichy regime, 57, 158, 175 Virgil, 19, 171 Voltaire, 135, 187

250

Index

Waite, Davis H., 100–101 Walker, Francis A., 169 Walpole, Robert, 8, 11, 104 Walsh, Mike, 168, 180 Washington, George, 86, 97, 102, 120, 131 Watson, Thomas E., 109 Whigs, American, 4–5, 14, 17, 20, 100, 101, 108, 117–118, 122, 123, 131, 174, 191 Wilentz, Sean, 180

Will, George, 182–183 Wilmot, David, 168 Wilson, James, 66–67, 95, 110–111, 115–116 Wilson, James Q., 181, 184 Wilson, Woodrow, 33, 110–111 Women’s rights, 26–27, 88, 170 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 25 Wood, Gordon, xi, 1, 3, 6, 9, 10, 19, 121– 122, 180