From Classical to Modern Republicanism: Reflections on England, Scotland, America, and France (Routledge Research in Early Mo) [1 ed.] 0367509857, 9780367509859

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From Classical to Modern Republicanism

In 1955 Louis Hartz published a volume titled The Liberal Tradition in America, in which he argued that liberalism was the one and only American tradition. Since then scholars of New Left and neoconservative persuasion have offered an alternative account based on the notion that the civic notions of antiquity continued to dominate political thought in modern times. Against this revisionist view the argument of From Classical to Modern Liberalism is that we need to study America in comparative perspective, and if we do so we shall discover that republicanism in the modern world was distinctively modern, drawing upon ideas of natural rights, consent, and social contract. Rather than a struggle between liberalism and republicanism, we should speak about liberal republicanism. Rather than republicanism versus liberalism, we should address liberalism versus illiberalism, the true issue of our age. Mark Hulliung is Richard Koret Professor of History at Brandeis University.

Routledge Research in Early Modern History

Languages of Reform in the Eighteenth Century When Europe Lost Its Fear of Change Edited by Susan Richter, Thomas Maissen, and Manuela Albertone Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment Atheist’s Progress Eric MacPhail Protestant Resistance in Counterreformation Austria Peter Thaler Prosecuting Homicide in Eighteenth-Century Law and Practice “And Must They All Be Hanged?” Drew D. Gray Making the Union Work Scotland, 1651–1763 Alexander Murdoch Major-General Hezekiah Haynes and the Failure of Oliver Cromwell’s Godly Revolution, 1594–1704 David Farr John Stearne’s Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft Text, Context and Afterlife Scott Eaton From Classical to Modern Republicanism Reflections on England, Scotland, America, and France Mark Hulliung For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Early-Modern-History/book-series/ RREMH

From Classical to Modern Republicanism Reflections on England, Scotland, America, and France Mark Hulliung

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Mark Hulliung The right of Mark Hulliung to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hulliung, Mark, author. Title: From classical to modern republicanism : reflections on England, Scotland, America, and France / Mark Hulliung. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge research in early modern history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020020691 (print) | LCCN 2020020692 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367509859 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003052043 (ebook) | ISBN 9781000082531 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781000082555 (mobi) | ISBN 9781000082579 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Republicanism—England—History. | Republicanism— Scotland—History. | Republicanism—United States—History. | Republicanism—France—History. Classification: LCC JC421 .H85 2020 (print) | LCC JC421 (ebook) | DDC 321.8/6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020691 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020692 ISBN: 978-0-367-50985-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-05204-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Simone

Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

1

Introduction: The Use and Abuse of History

1

2

“Republicanism”: Revisiting the Career of a Concept

8

3

Republicans Before the Republic: Helvétius, Holbach, and Saige

52

Republics Without Borders: Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Catharine Macaulay, and Thomas Paine

92

4

5

What Is Living, What Is Dead in “Republicanism”?

145

Index

198

Acknowledgments

As is true of all historians, I have over the years accumulated debts to a number of scholars. To salute everyone to whom I am indebted would take far too long. Here I shall limit myself to naming only a few: Joyce Appleby, Bernard Bailyn, Keith Michael Baker, Lance Banning, Colin Bonwick, Eric Foner, Bridget Hill, Daniel Walker Howe, Lynn Hunt, Isaac Kramnick, Stephen Macedo, Pauline Maier, Drew McCoy, R. R. Palmer, Jack N. Rakove, Caroline Robbins, John Robertson, Daniel T. Rodgers, Richard Sher, Judith Shklar, Lynne E. Withey, Gordon Wood, David Wootton, and Michael Zuckert. The most recent book that I believe deserves widespread recognition is Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism. I wish to express my gratitude for the support I have received from the Norman Funds of Brandeis University.

1

Introduction The Use and Abuse of History

For the last several decades there has been an ongoing debate about the place of Greek and Roman republican thought in the centuries stretching from the early modern to the modern period, from the Italian Renaissance to England’s Puritan uprising, and then to the eighteenth century in Scotland, but most of all to the events and debates in America and France during the age of revolutions. The outpouring of publications addressing the supposedly prominent role of “classical republicanism” in modern times, mostly but not exclusively written by historians and political theorists, has been enormous. Important issues of public life in our times, not simply scholarly studies of the past, have been at stake. In the intellectual world, no less than in the world of fashion, trends come and go; scholars move on to the next wave of contestation. It is possible but not obvious that the scholarly debate about republicanism has come to a close; even if it has, our contention is that it needs to be reopened, because the wrong interpretation has won the day. Or so we wish to suggest. Our thesis, which aims to challenge much of the established literature, is that republicanism in the modern age was distinctively modern rather than an effort to impose an ill-suited classicism upon modern times. Obviously political writers in the period of transition from early modern to modern history were well versed in classical readings, but citations here and there in their works to Livy or Cicero do not prove much if the authors aimed at little more than to embellish their presentations with displays of literary finesse. Yet it seems that whenever scholars of our day come across a classical reference in the letters, essays, and treatises of earlier centuries, they immediately proclaim the discovery of another instance of “classical republicanism” rearing its head in the modern world. No sooner, for example, does accomplished historian Keith Michael Baker encounter a French figure of the late eighteenth century in whose works the classics are cited now and again than he immediately offers an interpretation in terms of classical republicanism,1 never bothering to notice that the Frenchman in question, Guillaume-Joseph Saige, depended fundamentally on distinctively modern conceptions of natural rights and the social contract to

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Introduction

frame his arguments (Chapter 3). Another example is a fairly recent study by Mark Philp of the works of Tom Paine, which is excellent except for one problem. The author sets forth a lucid and thoughtful exposition but unfortunately portrays Paine as struggling over how classical his republicanism should be, despite the complete omission of classical references in Paine’s Common Sense.2 Similarly, one of the very best books on the Scottish Enlightenment, Richard B. Sher’s Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, simply takes the classical republicanism thesis for granted.3 So ingrained is the classical republicanism thesis that it is not unknown for a scholar to deny it in one essay and affirm it in another, not stopping short of finding its expressions in Newt Gingrich’s Republicans.4 With little or no proof, the pattern of much scholarly research is that anything arguably republican is called classical. Mine is not entirely a voice crying in the scholarly wilderness. A number of other historians and political theorists have questioned claims that “classical republicanism” is an interpretation that accurately grasps the meaning of modern writers such as James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, or Alexander Hamilton, to name only a few. The admirable contributions of Joyce Appleby, Isaac Kramnick, Daniel T. Rodgers, and Michael Zuckert immediately come to mind. And it is well worth noting that the ranks of the purveyors of the “classical republican” interpretation include outstanding scholars such as Lance Banning, whose works contain rich specific findings worthy of deep respect even if one disagrees with the overall interpretive framework into which they have been placed. The very publications of those who promulgate the thesis of classical republicanism are often well worth harvesting by anyone who adheres to the alternative thesis of modern republicanism (Chapter 2). It is tempting to say that many scholars find classical republicanism where it does not exist and miss it where it does. A better candidate for the title of classical republican in the modern age than George Fitzhugh is difficult to imagine. Speaking as a champion of America’s slaveowning South, he wrote that “we saw at once 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.”5 As envisioned by him, the political world should consist of landed gentlemen freed by virtue of the labor of their slaves to devote themselves to public service: “Our citizens, like those of Rome and Athens, are a privileged class.”6 Developing his point of view, he made it clear that by no means did he limit his advocacy of slavery to the American South or to blacks. Fitzhugh was not satisfied until he called for white slavery in Europe and across all of America, an arrangement under which the white laboring classes, at present terribly exploited, would gain the comforts of paternalistic security.

Introduction

3

What made it difficult to ignore Fitzhugh’s outrageous proposal was that spokespersons for the Northern labor movement frequently spoke figuratively of “free labor” as “slave labor.” Orestes Brownson, passionate spokesperson for workers, wrote in The Laboring Classes, “We are no advocates of slavery . . . [but] we regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages.”7 If only Northern labor literally were slave labor was Fitzhugh’s rejoinder. Workers would fare much better if they actually were slaves as in the South, their needs attended to by their owners who from self-interest as well as higher objectives would gladly attend to their well-being. Anyone familiar with classical republicanism, Fitzhugh assured his readers, should understand that the Southern states were the admirable equivalent of the ancient polis in the modern world. Scholars craving “classical republicanism” have by and large overlooked Fitzhugh’s uncompromising endorsement of a plan for placing Aristotle at the center of modern life. They have also failed to notice that Fitzhugh’s feisty polemics against natural rights/social contract theory was an attack on the kind of republicanism he feared and which had existed in America from the revolutionary period and continued to exist in his day. What he hated was modern republicanism speaking the language of freedom, consent, and inalienable rights. Fitzhugh gives us ample reason to be grateful that classical republicanism failed in America and to be thankful for all those moments when the natural rights republicanism frequently neglected by today’s scholars succeeded. Why, then, has the scholarship taken a wrong turn, and how might we overcome its shortcomings? To appreciate its deficiencies, it is well to remember that historians are themselves historical beings, and we frequently fall prey to the temptation to read our present-day concerns back into the past. The initial efforts of scholars to press the agenda of a classical republican research pattern – to discover in the past a “paradigm” of classical republicanism, to cite the inflated scholarly jargon – apparently had little or nothing to do with the ideological battles of our times. Before long, however, politically preoccupied scholars set about reading their current agendas into the past, discovering a labor republicanism, for instance, in the nineteenth century that would provide a substitute for a missing socialist tradition in America; or they spied signs in the past of outlooks that would match up nicely with the outlook of the New Left or the neoconservatism of recent years (Chapter 2). Historians of American society and politics, more so than historians of Europe, have been especially eager to pursue a classical republican agenda and to discover themselves, their present-day preoccupations, in the past. Our countervailing strategy is to sustain and avail ourselves of all that is best in the existing studies of republicanism in American history, but to do so while reaching beyond the United States, engaging in examinations of three other countries: England, Scotland, and France. Looking at America from the outside as well as the inside, offering a comparative

4

Introduction

perspective, should be helpful; enlarging our studies by dwelling on four countries may provide us with new insights that examinations of America alone cannot yield. The overall picture of the republican tradition or traditions may better come to light if we can enlarge our focus to include Europe as well as America, while avoiding a presentation of excessive length. We shall pursue what for us are new studies, combined with consolidating and placing into a new focus several of our previous efforts. A synthesis rather than a lumbering study is our objective. It is not our claim that we are somehow, unlike other historians, outside history. Our more modest hope is that within history a comparative perspective can help us to be more “objective” in a world where there is no perfect objectivity, no Truth with a capital “T,” only a number of lowercase truths, some more revealing than others. Nor, even if we could, would we wish to be outside the ideological debates that are implicit in the scholarly literature. Much of the enthusiasm for republicanism comes from intellectuals who are sometimes implicitly, at other times explicitly denigrating liberalism. Our efforts aim to reclaim the riches of the liberal heritage at a time when it has been sidelined or derided in the research on republicanism – this denigration coming at a moment when attacks on liberalism in the political world have been growing by leaps and bounds and show no signs of abating, a time when rampant and aggressive illiberalism is on the rise in America and Europe. Perhaps the most ambitious effort to create a story of American history in which republicanism is contrasted with and against liberalism is Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. From the founding to the present he traces in American history his theme that until the last several decades an ethos of civic concern and participation characterized America, only to be overturned by liberals primarily concerned with the politics of competing economic interest groups or with the use of courts to find in favor of persons conceived as free-standing individuals rather than as participants in social practices or bearers of social roles. Where there once had been civic engagement, there is now only a concern for the protection of privacy, and liberals are to blame for this downgrading of public life. Or so he would have us believe. Sandel imposed upon history his earlier philosophical critique of John Rawls, who in A Theory of Justice had humans deciding behind a hypothetical “veil of ignorance,” in complete ignorance of their social ties and identities, what if given the chance would be their choice of fair-minded principles of justice. Insisting on keeping our social identities, bonds, and commitments at the forefront of our thoughts, Sandel was intent in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice on criticizing Rawls’s “procedural” philosophy of justice. Then, building upon his philosophical critique, he followed up several years later in his book on American history by objecting to the “procedural” and liberal polity of very recent times, which

Introduction

5

in his account threatens to rob us of our long-established communal, republican past. Sandel could only make his argument by failing to recognize that the American record, insofar as it is republican, has been one of liberal republicanism. To sustain his thesis Sandel treated the “procedural” liberalism of recent times as liberalism per se, a device enabling him to filter out all evidence of earlier forms of liberal thought. Everything admirable in American history was republican in his account; liberalism nowhere to be found; nowhere does the rich tradition of natural rights republicanism enter his story; nowhere do the philosophies of institutional arrangements safeguarded by self-interest put forth by John Adams, James Madison, and many other publicists come into focus; nowhere does he take notice of Jacksonian warnings that the idea of “the public good” could be used to justify anything and everything, or the Jacksonian doctrine that freedom is primarily a matter of being permitted to go our own way, so long as we do not harm others (Chapter 5). Other definitions of freedom, presumably more to his liking, were of course available, as in the antebellum Whig contention that we should live in accordance with the demands of our “higher” selves.8 But the American Whigs called themselves democrats, truer democrats than the Jacksonians, and explicitly rejected the republican label (Chapter 2). Citizenship in America, as Judith Shklar noted, has been much more a quest for inclusion than for constant civic participation.9 Excluded groups, whether women, slaves, immigrants, laborers, or African Americans, have appealed not to republicanism but to the natural rights words of the Declaration of Independence to demand inclusion.10 Speaking not only for himself but for all who invoked the Declaration, Abraham Lincoln said, “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use.” Lincoln was a Republican, but he was a liberal republican in his explanation of the Declaration: “no man is good enough to govern another man without the other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle, the sheet anchor of American republicanism”11 – which is to say, he understood that the rhetoric of the Declaration emanated from conceptions of natural rights and a social contract. All the most high-minded moments in American history fit as well or better under the liberal label than the republican. At its best America has been liberal republican or simply liberal, from which it follows that to force a choice between “liberal” and “republican” is a highly misleading undertaking. However wanting his historical argument, Sandel’s earlier philosophical endeavor did lead John Rawls to reconsider his position. In a second book, Political Liberalism, Rawls made clear that he did not aim at a “comprehensive” conception of the good. Distancing himself from his original abstract and universalistic Kantianism, he was careful to sanction

6

Introduction

pluralism, settling for a “political liberalism,” a government that would remain neutral between competing conceptions of the good, permitting different groups to go their own way so long as at the end of the day they sat down together to negotiate their differences. As a philosopher Sandel won a concession from Rawls; as a historian he won nothing except to underscore by the very ambitious scope of his book, its magnifying effect, how false it is to portray the American past as a battle between republicanism and liberalism. Sandel’s book is also one of a number of studies that underscore the weaknesses and misunderstandings that result from neglecting to study the liberalism/republicanism debate in comparative perspective. His treatment of Tocqueville, like that of various other American scholars, is a case in point. To a friend, in a letter addressing his Democracy in America, Tocqueville explained that “Although I rarely spoke of France in my book, I did not write one page of it without thinking of her and without having her, so to speak, before my eyes.”12 Nevertheless, Sandel and his cohort are so fond of Tocqueville’s book and so eager to Americanize it that they fail to remember he was French. Totally misguided are Sandel’s references to “Tocqueville’s republicanism” and “the republican politics Tocqueville describes,”13 when in truth he was very much a liberal, struggling with other French liberals to come to terms with the legacy of the French Revolution. To call Tocqueville a republican could not be more misleading. An admirer of Tocqueville, Sandel would have been forced to reconsider his position on liberalism and republicanism, had he understood Tocqueville in his proper historical context. A comparative perspective is essential. As we journey through episodes in the history of four countries in the chapters that follow, we may indeed eventually find ourselves dealing with the realization that republicanism has receded into the past. But if so, that outcome will not be because liberalism ousted a republican way of life; no, not in the least. Rather it will be because republicanism, usually infused with liberalism, served its purpose and then faded from the scene in a finale that was far from tragic. Not the loss of republicanism but the possible loss of liberalism should be our concern, especially at the present moment when liberalism is under duress, its fate uncertain, its prospects very much in doubt.14

Notes 1. Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 6. 2. Mark Philp, Paine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). See chapter two of the present study. 3. Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 364.

Introduction

7

4. James Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 67, 103. 5. George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 12–13. 6. George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South: Or the Failure of Free Society (New York: Burt Franklin, 1965), p. 93. 7. Joseph L. Blau, ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), p. 307. 8. See Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 9. Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 10. Mark Hulliung, The Social Contract in America: From the Revolution to the Present Age (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), ch. 5. 11. Richard N. Current, ed., The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1967), pp. 89, 73. Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). 12. Tocqueville to Louis de Kergorlay, 18 October 1847, in Roger Boesche, ed., Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), p. 191. 13. Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp.  320, 347. Mark Hulliung, “Republicanism, Liberalism, Illiberalism: An American Debate in French Translation,” The Tocqueville Review, vol. XXI, no. 2 (University of Toronto Press, 2000), pp. 109–132. 14. Throughout the chapters that follow, I shall at times draw upon my The Social Contract in America and three other of my previous books: The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Enlightenment in Scotland and France: Studies in Political Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). My books on Machiavelli and Montesquieu and my edited volumes on Rousseau and Louis Hartz also have some marginal significance in the present study.

2

“Republicanism” Revisiting the Career of a Concept

It was in 1992 that Daniel T. Rodgers published his outstanding essay “Republicanism: the Career of a Concept.”1 Since then a spate of new essays and books, some more comprehensive than anything previously published, has arguably reinvigorated the debate over the uses and abuses of the concept of republicanism. A discussion that had briefly seemed on the verge of drawing to a close sprang back to life. Perhaps the moment has arrived for a revised overview. While my focus in this essay will be on America, I shall endeavor to embellish the discussion by interjecting references to England, Scotland, and France. My effort will be to pull together the strands of scholarly research of recent years, including my own, in an attempt to underscore the evolution from classical to distinctively modern conceptions of “republicanism” and to raise the issue of when “republicanism” is useful, and when a hindrance, to historical understanding. An appropriate place to begin is with recognition that the legacy of studies of republicanism over the last several decades is remarkably ambivalent. On the one side we now have at our disposal well-researched and praiseworthy studies of the transmission of republican thought from antiquity to the Renaissance, then to England in the seventeenth century, and finally to America and France in the eighteenth. On the other side those same historical accounts arguably have the regrettable effect of cheating modernity by reading “classical republicanism” into European and American history long after its expiration date. A surfeit of historical continuity, a failure to acknowledge change and evolution, has blinded us to the transformation of republican notions across the centuries. No doubt scholars have good reason to underscore the theme of “civic virtue” in the Greek and Roman classics, but historians and political theorists have been far too slow to note the recessional of that motif in modern republican thought. Too often it is forgotten that James Harrington, who is regarded as the critical figure in the renewal of classical thought in the English-speaking world, counted not on virtue but on self-interest to sustain a modern republic. “As man is sinful, but yet the world is perfect,” he wrote in Oceana, “so may the citizen be sinful

“Republicanism” 9 and yet the commonwealth be perfect,” provided the regime is outfitted with proper laws squaring self-interest with public interest.2 Other modern republicans followed Harrington’s example. To take two American examples, although Alexander Hamilton has been designated as a purveyor of classical republican sentiments,3 he might better be remembered as a post-classical republican, as suggested by a sentence he penned in 1774: “It is not safe to trust to the virtue of any people.”4 Similarly, John Adams wrote that a republic could exist “even among highwaymen by setting one rogue to watch another; and the knaves themselves may in time be made honest men by the struggle.”5 Institutional arrangements and self-interest are what Hamilton and Adams, much like Harrington before them, counted on to provide a stable modern republic. If the prevalence of the concept of self-interest is one measure of how far removed modern republicanism is from its classical predecessor, another is the widespread presence of notions of natural rights, social contract, government by the consent of the governed, and the absence of the same in classical republicanism. David Hume, in his essay “Of the Original Contract,” took note of the absence of any such conceptions in classical thought. What he might have added was that the prominence of natural rights and social contract theory in such significant seventeenth century republicans as Algernon Sidney and John Milton constituted proof that they defined themselves as much against as in agreement with their classical predecessors. Machiavelli’s name is frequently invoked by scholars who seek a middleman between the ancients and moderns, a figure who transmitted classical republicanism to seventeenth-century England and beyond. But here again the claim of continuity breaks down because the moderns, rather than following him implicitly, raised major objections to the writings of the famous Florentine. “There is not a word of trade in all Machiavel,” complained Hume, “which is strange considering that Florence rose only by trade.”6 In the previous century Harrington, wanting to spread Christianity and freedom across the globe, was sympathetic to Machiavelli’s praise of the aggrandizement of the Roman republic. Not at all, however, did Harrington endorse the methods attributed to the Roman senators in the Discourses on Livy, their supposed use of force and fraud symbolized by the lion and the fox. “Lying lips are an abomination unto the Lord,” wrote Harrington in Oceana; “if setting up for liberty you impose yokes, he will assuredly destroy you.”7 Sidney, too, for all his ardent republicanism and imperial ambition, held that “violence or fraud can create no right,”8 a proposition that put him strongly at odds with Machiavelli. Across the Channel, when Montesquieu in 1734 published his Considerations on the Grandeur of the Romans and the Cause of Their Decline, he took seriously the contention that it was by force and fraud that the republic had expanded, agreeing with Machiavelli for the sake of suggesting that by such means Rome destroyed not only all other ancient republics but undermined its

10 “Republicanism” own republican way of life as well.9 During the first year of the American war for independence arch-republican Tom Paine, speaking of the British army, offered the un-Machiavellian suggestion that “the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both.”10 Later, writing against Burke, he denounced “the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud.”11 Clearly there are serious problems with our understanding of the meaning and role of republicanism in political thought from the seventeenth century to later ages. One way to set out on a more promising course is to begin by highlighting the original but all too often overlooked mission of republican rhetoric in modern times: that of engaging with monarchists in a conversation and eventually a shouting match.

Republicans and Monarchists Late in the eighteenth century the day arrived when republic and monarchy would be antithetical terms, but throughout the preceding years European intellectuals frequently attempted to blur the distinction between the two. Thinkers intent upon converting monarchical subjects into modern citizens without revisiting the worst moments of the Puritan Revolution took turns throughout the century proclaiming that England was as much a republic as a monarchy, living proof that monarchy and republic could be one and that modern republican ideals could triumph without gambling on a politics of revolution. John Toland ushered in the eighteenth century by reissuing the works of English republicans or Commonwealthmen Harrington, Sidney, and Milton. In his preface to Harrington’s Oceana, Toland announced the refrain that others would revisit decade after decade: “the English government is already a commonwealth, the most free and best constituted in the world.”12 Two decades later, in 1721, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, authors of Cato’s Letters, seconded Toland with their assertion that England is “the best republic in the world, with a prince at the head of it.”13 Much the same vision of England was offered by representatives of the French Enlightenment, notably Voltaire who spoke of “monarchies tempered by the republican spirit” and who designated England as a “republic under a king.”14 Perhaps even more significant, given the transnational significance of The Spirit of the Laws, was Montesquieu’s obvious reference to England when he spoke of a modern “republic hidden under the form of a monarchy.”15 As the century wore on, such figures of the French Enlightenment as Helvétius, Holbach, and Diderot asked themselves and their audience whether France might find the means to duplicate the English achievement of hiding a republic under its monarchy. There were republicans before the Republic in France who hoped that subjects might be transformed into citizens by a politics of reform, not revolution (Chapter 3).

“Republicanism” 11 In the course of importing Montesquieu and the writings of such radical English Whigs as Joseph Priestley and James Burgh, Americans sometimes found themselves repeating the claim that England was a monarchical republic. It is no accident that John Adams told Roger Sherman, “England is a republic, a monarchical republic it is true, but a republic still.”16 Many American colonists, not only Adams but teachers, preachers, and editors were familiar with Burgh’s Political Disquisitions, published in 1774 and 1775, and were grateful that he sympathized with the upstart Americans.17 In his pages they encountered once again the view of England as a mixture of republic and monarchy, accentuated in his case by an outspoken preference for strengthening the republican element.18 Initially it may come as something of a shock to discover that in the 1760s both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Baptiste Suard labelled David Hume a republican19 – Hume who consistently labored to suppress any and all outbreaks of radicalism. Yet they were not mistaken or only half mistaken, because Hume knew how to absorb a republican element into his thought without abandoning his underlying conservatism. He had only to follow such predecessors as Toland, Trenchard, and Gordon. “Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic” asked David Hume in 1741, answering that “our mixed government is neither wholly monarchical, nor wholly republican.” He even went so far as to suggest that “the republican part prevails in England, though with a great mixture of monarchy.”20 What saved him from undue worry was the Harringtonian notion that a republic can be grounded in rational self-interest rather than passionate civic virtue. Trenchard, the disciple of Harrington, had preceded Hume in proclaiming that the classical vocabulary of “virtue” and “corruption” could be expunged without abandoning republican commitments. “It is certain that every man will act for his own interest; and all wise governments are founded upon that principle,” Trenchard assured his readers. “So that this whole mystery is only to make the interests of governors and governed the same.” A proper government he likened to a “piece of clockwork.”21 Hume agreed but warned his readers that, “though men be much governed by interest, yet even interest itself, and all human affairs, are entirely governed by opinion.”22 Only if a polity is properly constructed can the public understand its interests and the reign of self-interest be sustained. To that end he proposed an update to the institutional arrangements of Oceana that would fit the needs of a modern progressive society. Ideally, suggested Hume in his essay “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” Britain should be divided into 100 counties and each county into 100 parishes. Under this arrangement Great Britain would remain a monarchy nationally but “every county is a kind of republic within itself.” The outcome would demonstrate “the falsehood of the common opinion, that no large state, such as France or Great Britain, could ever be modelled into a

12 “Republicanism” commonwealth.” Hume’s proposal offered, so he believed, “all the advantages both of a great and a little commonwealth.” Government serving an entire nation yet constructed on a human scale – close at hand and available to citizens – would permit the many to understand their self-interest and would help them appreciate the interrelationship of their interests with the public interest.23 Hume’s neo-Harringtonian essay on a perfect commonwealth marks a high point in Scottish receptiveness to a modern formulation of republicanism. The low point in Scotland came in response to the American Revolution. Against the rebellious Americans the Scots sounded in 1776 exactly as Burke would in 1789 against the French. Not monarchy plus republic, but monarchy versus republic became the new theme of the Scottish Enlightenment. “Let us now support the throne, for it is shaken!” proclaimed an outraged and frightened Alexander Carlyle.24 Almost a decade earlier Adam Ferguson had already sounded the alarm against “misplaced ardors of a republican spirit.”25 The message was clear: either monarchy or republic, not both (Chapter 5). Across the Atlantic, despite their conflict with England, the Americans would take their time before reaching the point of pitting republic against monarchy. Trying to avoid an all-out rebellion, willing to settle for modest concessions in 1774 and 1775, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Wilson issued pamphlets urging George III to assert his authority, not at their expense but against the legislative claims of Parliament.26 Even those colonists reared on Commonwealthmen ideology felt obliged by circumstances, it seems, to restrain themselves until the day arrived when events forced resistance to give way to revolution. Not until the Declaration of Independence did Jefferson enumerate the inexcusable misdeeds of the monarch – in a document which, even then, did not comment on republican and monarchical regimes. Fascination with monarchy stayed alive in America long after the Revolution. So believed Jefferson, who told James Madison in 1789, “we were educated in royalism; no wonder if some of us retain that idolatry still.”27 Jefferson did not exaggerate. Newspapers eagerly recorded the comings and goings of the French royal family, celebrations of the birthday of Louis XVI replaced those saluting George III, the birth of the dauphin was duly noted, and Congress placed on display in its meeting hall a portrait of Louis and Marie Antoinette.28 It was far from surprising then to hear Benjamin Franklin voice the opinion that, sooner or later, America was likely to become a monarchy; in his words: “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.”29 Possibly the story is true that as Franklin emerged from the final day of deliberations on the federal constitution he was asked whether America would be a republic or a monarchy, and he answered, “A republic if you can keep it.”30 One

“Republicanism” 13 matter in this regard is certain: Americans could not express too often their desire that George Washington should be crowned king. At the time of the founding, Americans initially had difficulty avoiding the thought that their fate would be monarchical by default. Was not the large size of America a strong indication that it could not possibly sustain a republican regime? During the constitutional debates Federalist Hamilton confessed that “the extent of the country to be governed discouraged him” and “almost led him to despair that a republican government could be established over so great an extent.”31 Anti-Federalists were, of course, far more vehement than Hamilton in asserting such concerns. Agrippa of Massachusetts was certain that “no extensive empire can be governed upon republican principles.”32 Patrick Henry remarked that the Confederation “has secured us a territory greater than any European Monarch possesses”; no wonder then that the proposed constitution “squints toward monarchy. . . . Your President may easily become King.”33 Not many years later the French would attempt to institute a “republic one and universal”; no such notion was raised by the Americans,34 who were under the influence of Montesquieu. What the American founders missed in the Spirit of the Laws was Montesquieu’s presentation of England as a post-feudal national republic, albeit disguised as a monarchy;35 what they retained was his formulation that monarchies were fit for large territories, republics for small. Because monarchy was supposedly inevitable since a strong executive was necessary for effective governance of a large-scale political unit, figures such as John Adams and Richard Henry Lee wondered out loud how President Washington should be addressed, Adams going so far as to suggest “His Highness the President of the United States.”36 To James Madison it was deeply worrisome that titles dangerous to republicanism were being bandied about. Much to his satisfaction, Washington settled the matter definitively and in a perfectly republican manner. Fending off all requests that he continue indefinitely, Washington stepped down from office. In his farewell address he implicitly but unmistakably invoked the trope of Cincinnatus, who had served when necessary but returned to the plow as soon as he could. To be a founder rather than the destroyer of a republic was Washington’s fulfillment of his quest for fame.37 After his refusal, no American could ever seek a regal title. Barely had the new constitution been ratified when the Americans advanced from reluctant acceptance of the possible inevitability of monarchy to accusations that monarchists in their midst were plotting to destroy the newly formed republic. The theme of republics versus monarchies came to the fore during Washington’s presidency when, much against his will, a conflict of political parties came into being, Jeffersonians against Federalists. Typical of the pronouncements of the Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790s – those “self-created” societies feared by Washington – was the exhortation of one such society in

14 “Republicanism” 1794, “May the next generation know kings only by the page of history, and wonder that such monsters were ever permitted to exist”; and that of 1800, “In republics we have rights, in monarchies we live but to experience wrongs.”38 Recalling in 1818 the earliest years of the Republic, Jefferson held that “the contests of that day were contests of principle, between the advocates of republican, and those of kingly government.”39 On another occasion Jefferson elaborated his point: In place of that noble love of liberty, and republican government which carried us triumphantly through the war, an Anglican monarchical and aristocratic party has sprung up, whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance, as they have already done the forms of the British government.40 Madison likewise expressed his consternation at the emergence in America of an “Anglican party,” out to undo the results of the Revolution.41 Albert Gallitan was no different from other Republicans when he denounced Hamilton as an “apostle of monarchy,” a “Judas Iscariot,” a “crusader against republicanism.”42 In the election of 1796 Republican newspapers and pamphlets defned the overriding issue as a choice between monarchy and republic. It was Hamilton’s championing of the national bank in 1791, his support of the constitutionality of the Proclamation of Neutrality in 1793, and, in general, his effort to use his position as Secretary of the Treasury to unite the executive and legislative powers in his person, transforming himself into the equivalent of a Prime Minister that provoked Jefferson and Madison to denounce him. The outcome of their wrath was the birth of the first party system. A great victory for Jefferson when he assumed the presidency came with the removal of the capital to backwater Washington, where the separation of powers reached a climax in that the members of the three branches of government lived and even died in segregation, buried in different cemeteries43 – a perfect repudiation of Hamilton’s quest for a fusion of powers. Quite deliberately President Jefferson, in his determination to eliminate the pomp and ceremony of monarchy, especially all things reminiscent of the English court, received visitors clad in republican simplicity and rode on horseback rather than in an ornate coach. He proclaimed his election “the revolution of 1800,” and insisted in 1819 that “the nation declared its will by dismissing functionaries of one principle and electing those of another.”44 Americans, in his view, had at last arrived at the day when they unambiguously and permanently sided with republican principles and rejected the monarchical alternative. And yet he did on occasion express doubts as to whether monarchical predispositions had been decisively banished. In a letter written in 1822 he denied the widely held belief that “the republicans and Federalists are

“Republicanism” 15 completely amalgamated.” They are so in “name only.” “All indeed call themselves by the name of Republicans. . . . But the truth is that finding that monarchy is a desperate wish in this country, [the Federalists] rally to the point which they think the next best, a consolidated government.”45 The day would never come, it seems, when Jefferson would be willing decisively to forego the conviction that the contests of American public life were between republicans and monarchists. Never throughout its history was America a monarchy, but that has not prevented frequent recurrence of bitter partisan denunciation of foes as monarchists, as evidenced as late as FDR’s tirade in 1936 against “economic royalists,” “privileged princes of new economic dynasties,” monarchs of “new kingdoms” at war with the New Deal.46 Earlier, during the second party system, Whigs and Jacksonians took turns accusing one another of harboring monarchical sympathies. Whigs enjoyed calling President Jackson “King Andrew the First.” Democrats retaliated by accusing the Whigs of mimicking the English monarchy in their support of a national bank and of aiding and abetting the monarchical enemy in their opposition to Polk’s pursuit of English-defying “Manifest Destiny.” When the Whigs sought control by states of common schools, the Democrats responded by staging a battle for local control against what they deemed a “Prussian,” monarchical menace.47 Monarchy-bashing showed no signs of abating when the newborn Republican Party displaced the Whigs as the alternative to the Jacksonian Democrats. The lively Lincoln-Douglas debates featured, among other things, an attempt by each contender to pin the monarchical label on his opponent. Stephen Douglas would have the audience believe that Lincoln aspired “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.” Lincoln countered by arguing that the issue was 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.”48 At the approach of the twentieth century anti-monarchical rhetoric continued to flourish, especially within the ranks of the Populists. Colorado Populist Davis H. Waite in 1883 urged his audience to ally with him in fighting a war “which must 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.” Ten years later the Farmers’ Alliance charged that “Railroad kings have . . . risen with power under present law to exact slavish and impoverishing tribute from all.” William Jennings Bryan in 1900, kicking off his bid for the presidency, denounced the imperialism of the Republicans in foreign undertakings as proof their party adhered to “monarchical” rather than “republican” principles. The imperial outlook of the Republican Party,

16 “Republicanism” he would have his audience believe, was much like “the position taken by the English government in 1776.”49 The language of republic versus monarchy lived on in America as figurative imagery and denunciatory rhetoric long after it had lost literal meaning. Eventually, however, it faded from public life. FDR could still draw upon it in 1936, but neither he nor anyone else had use for it in the 1940s and thereafter. New evils were at hand: Nazi and Communist, the threats of “dictatorship” and “totalitarianism,” which rendered quaint and irrelevant any derogatory talk about kings and monarchs. One of the most long-lived uses of republican rhetoric inconspicuously exited American history.

Republicans and Aristocrats If ever Americans might have agreed with Machiavelli, it was with his statement that “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.”50 Although Americans lacked a nobility, that did not prevent them from relentlessly exposing the aristocrats supposedly seeking shelter in the opposing political party. The calling of all good republicans was to confront aristocrats, and Americans did so with unfailing energy throughout their history, even if they had to invent them. The battle to root out would-be aristocrats was already visible in 1784 when Jefferson complained to Washington about the Order of the Cincinnati, those French and American military officers, veterans of the Revolutionary war, who wished to pass along membership to their sons by hereditary succession. Such an arrangement, Jefferson insisted, was against the spirit of our constitutions, grounded as they were upon natural equality and “the denial of a preeminence of birth.”51 Washington agreed and made the necessary adjustments. Three years later the issue of aristocracy arose again when Federalists and Anti-Federalists debated the proposed federal constitution. Hamilton’s statement in the Federalist that prohibition of nobility was “the cornerstone of republican government”52 did not satisfy the Anti-Federalists. Remembering their Polybius, the Anti-Federalists thought in terms of a monarchical, an aristocratic, and a democratic element in the constitutional structure. To their minds the popular “order,” as represented in the proposed constitution, was too weak, which would inevitably permit the aristocratic “order” to dominate. James Wilson answered for the Federalists. A constitution based on “different orders of men,” he explained, might be appropriate for England but not for America, where the people are sovereign. The balance in America would be of institutions, not social classes; all three branches – legislative, executive, and judicial – will answer to the people. America is a new world, subject to neither Roman nor English example, free to invent its future.53

“Republicanism” 17 For many years the name of John Adams was at the forefront of charges and countercharges hurled at those who supposedly harbored vile aristocratic sympathies, his writings figuring significantly in the debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists and, later, in a sectional rift between North and South. While serving as ambassador in Europe, Adams became convinced that the shortcomings of the Old World would one day threaten the New: “There is no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others.”54 Inequality, Adams warned in A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, whether based on birth, wealth, or merit, would inevitably foster the growth of aristocracy in America that had long existed in Europe.55 Measures needed to be taken immediately to offset the threat of aristocratic predominance. Above all, a unicameral legislature such as Pennsylvania’s must be avoided because the privileged few, ensconced in a single chamber, would eventually silence the many by virtue of superior education and privilege. Potential aristocrats should be “ostracized,” so to speak, to an upper chamber56 so that institutional balance might be maintained between democrats and aristocrats. The first volume of Adam’s lengthy and convoluted study happened to be published while the Federal Constitutional Convention was meeting. Neither Federalists nor Anti-Federalists could ignore the book when John Stevens of New Jersey brought attention to it in his Observations on Government. Quite wrongly Stevens attacked Adams for supporting aristocracy,57 which forced Federalists such as James Wilson to distance themselves from the Defence of the Constitutions. Anti-Federalists approved of Adams, frequently citing him by name and using his work to support their claim that the proposed constitution would steal public affairs from the many and hand them over to the few. “The few, the well born, etc., as Mr. Adams calls them .  .  . are generally disposed .  .  . to favor those of their own description,” suggested the Federal Farmer.58 Unlike Stevens, the Anti-Federalists understood Adams perfectly well and exploited his unwieldly treatise to pin the derogatory label of “aristocrat” on the Federalists (Chapter 5). Adams was again at the forefront of arguments about aristocrats in 1814, this time a struggle between North and South, when John Taylor of Caroline, Virginia, attacked him. In response to Adams, who had questioned in 1776 whether the “Barons of the South” would support the Revolution,59 Taylor went on the offensive many years later. Unfairly he accused Adams of hostility to popular sovereignty, of desiring hereditary rulers, and of favoring arch-reactionary Robert Filmer.60 He did draw blood, however, in remarking that Adams’s generalizations, drawn from past centuries, had no relevance to the modern world’s most modern nation, America. “Do the Americans recognize themselves,” he inquired, “in a group of Goths, Vandals, Italians, Turks and Chinese?” Was it not incumbent upon Adams, if he wished to derive lessons from ancient

18 “Republicanism” Greece, to prove that “our state of manners and knowledge is . . . exactly similar to theirs?”61 Taylor and other Jeffersonians were quite willing to concede that the growth of aristocracy in their day was a formidable threat, but they insisted it assumed forms unknown before modern times. There was the national bank, repudiated by Taylor as “the aristocracy of patronage and paper,” the “monied aristocracy,” the “pecuniary aristocracy.”62 There was also the disturbing advent in America of a judicial aristocracy. Very early Joel Barlow, Minister to France, had called attention to the existence of a “judiciary nobility” in that country,63 and it was only a matter of time before some of his fellow Jeffersonians spied the embryo of the same in America. In one state government after another, radical Jeffersonians did battle with moderate Republicans over the judiciary.64 More than a few republicans could be expected to sanction Jefferson’s complaint in 1819 that a judicial aristocracy, incarnate in the Supreme Court, “unelected and independent of the nation,” and claiming the right of “exclusively explaining the Constitution,” was “driving us into consolidation.”65 In Jacksonian times Frederick Robinson continued the attack on the courts. What was the judiciary, he asked, if not “the headquarters of the aristocracy”? Rather than adopt the English common law, “we should have adopted republican laws .  .  . written with the greatest simplicity and kindness . . . so that everyone could read and understand them for himself.”66 Robinson’s remarks about judges were quite in keeping with President Jackson’s about governmental officials in his First Annual Message: “the duties of all public officers are . . . so plain and simple that men of intelligence can readily qualify themselves for their performance.” Expertise is unnecessary. For administrative as well as for elective offices, to rotate “constitutes a leading principle of the republican creed.”67 The foregoing words of Jackson and Robinson might, at first encounter, sound like an ultimate fulfillment of republican rhetoric. On a closer look the possibility becomes evident that their version of anti-aristocratic language, rather than a culminating and triumphal moment, may well have been a last gasp before the word republican faded to the sidelines, displaced by the word democratic.

Republicans and Democrats It was a sign of the changing times, from republican to democratic rhetoric, when Jacksonian William Leggett penned his polemical editorials against bankers during the 1830s. He sounded like the Jeffersonians when he lambasted “the noble order of money-changers,” “the paper dynasty.” Free Americans are being reduced to “serfs” by “our aristocracy, our scrip nobility,” he charged. Thanks to the Whig dedication to the Bank of the United States, the ranks of their party are filled with those who,

“Republicanism” 19 “if our government were converted into an aristocracy, would become our dukes, lords, marquises and baronets.” Any day Henry Clay may be “crowned King, and the [Whig] members of the Senate made peers of the realm.” What is omnipresent in Leggett’s “democratick” editorials and difficult to miss is the monarchy and aristocracy-bashing he inherited from the Jeffersonians; what is rarely if ever present and therefore easy to miss is anything resembling a sustained bow to republicanism. The word republic was not indispensable in an age of democracy.68 Throughout modern French history the words republic and democracy have from the very beginning been inextricably fused. However reprehensible his practice, Robespierre in theory held to the principle that “these two words are synonyms.” The French, he continued, “are the first people of the world who have established real democracy, by calling all men to equality and full rights of citizenship.”69 Quite different is the American story where the two terms were initially set in opposition. From the classics the Americans derived the lesson that democracy was mob rule and that Socrates had died at the hands of democrats. Even the Anti-Federalists did not dare go beyond demanding that the democratic element in the mixed constitution be more fully developed to offset the aristocratic and monarchical ingredients. No one at the time of the founding spoke in favor of democracy. A few years later foreign-born Tom Paine in Rights of Man (1791–1792) and the Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790s did dare to speak favorably about democracy,70 but their views were savagely attacked when the French Revolution, which they championed, degenerated into chaos and violence. Not until the Jacksonian period did democracy become the great legitimizing term of American public discourse, but once it arrived it would never exit. Although Jacksonians saw Jeffersonians as their predecessors, their Jeffersonian forerunners fell well short of the Jacksonians in their assaults on aristocracy. “The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction . . . and government of society,” wrote Jefferson to Adams. “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?”71 When the Constitutional Convention convened Madison expressed his hope that the new regime would be governed by leaders 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.”72 With the coming of the Jacksonians all such yearnings for a natural aristocracy were replaced by a call reminiscent of the Anti-Federalists for rulers who would look, sound, and think exactly like common citizens.73 Henceforth rulers would answer to the people, not the people to the rulers. The Jacksonians initiated a democratic cultural revolution that lives on to the present day, as in our oft-expressed scorn for “elites” and “elitism.”

20 “Republicanism” “The Revolution of 1776,” wrote Jacksonian Stephen Simpson, “is not yet fully accomplished.” 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. Substituting a democratic for an aristocratic education was his proposed solution. Send the children of workers to public primary schools but none to college, he advised. “The feudal forms of all colleges and universities” are pernicious; “the Doctor of Laws, the Master of Arts, and other similar unmeaning titles betray the aristocracy of learning under popes, kings, emperors, princes.”74 Universities with their liberal, leisured, aristocratic arts are well suited for Europe but entirely unsuited for, and unworthy of, the independent workers of America. Noteworthy Jacksonian John O’Sullivan may be the anonymous editor who in the Democratic Review lamented that “we are cowed by the mind of England. We follow feebly . . . the ideas and feelings of an utterly anti-democratic social system.” Unfortunately, “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.” “We have a principle, an informing soul of our own, our democracy. . . . This must be the animating spirit of our literature.”75 Herman Melville concurred. He would have Americans forget Shakespeare: “Let us away with this Bostonian leaven of literary flunkeyism toward England.”76 American literature must be distinctively American, which is to say, it must celebrate democracy. Jefferson, reflecting on the significance of his election to the presidency, remarked that “the revolution of 1800 . . . was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.”77 Republican principles had finally come into their own, he suggested, but exactly what that meant was difficult for him to say. In a letter to John Taylor, 1816, he conceded that “the term republic is of very vague application in every language.” To fill the need for meaning he suggested that “the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know of no other measure.”78 Jefferson’s republicanism, it is evident, for all its democratic impulses was overwhelmingly preoccupied with the political in its emphasis. The democratic ideology of Simpson, O’Sullivan, and other Jacksonians went much further in its call for a democratic culture. Ely Moore held that it was the “useful” and “mechanical” arts, the realm of workmen, not the studies of trained scientists, that was responsible for progress.

“Republicanism” 21 What progress could be made in the science of astronomy without the aid of the telescope? In chemistry without the retort and receiver? In anatomy and surgery, without the knife and the tourniquet? In agriculture without the hoe and the mattock, the spade and the plough, the scythe and the pruning hook?79 In an age when Whigs such as Daniel Webster prided themselves on oratory, Frederick Robinson asked, “Which is of the most importance to society, to be able to make a speech . . . or manufacture a shoe?”80 Whereas Jefferson was pleased that unlike the English “we had no occasion to search into the musty records”81 of history, the Jacksonians called for a democratic history, a study of the past that will highlight the lives of ordinary people. “All history,” urged a Jacksonian journalist, “has to be rewritten; political science and the whole scope of all moral truth have to be considered and illustrated in the light of the democratic principle.”82 George Bancroft’s democratically inspired History of the United States was an answer to many a Jacksonian prayer. The Jacksonians bequeathed to posterity a long and arguably still existent legacy of democratic, not republican, repudiations of everything and anything that smelled of aristocracy. The post-Civil War Civil Service Commission provided Democrats, who lived off the spoils of office, with a rich target. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall found intolerable those “nameparted-in-the middle aristocrats” who would inflict “the curse of Civil Service reform” upon an unwary public.83 Land reformer Henry George asked in Progress and Poverty (1879), “Is there not growing up among us a class who have all the power without any of the virtues of aristocracy?”84 Populist Thomas E. Watson was horrified by the advent of “a more brutal and godless and rapacious nobility than ever rode, lance in rest, over the peasantry of Feudal Europe.” The alarm must be sounded, thought the Populists, that railroad magnates and bankers constituted an “overbearing, despotic, insulting monied aristocracy,” determined to “reduce the sovereign people to a state of vassalage.”85 Even some Socialists and Progressives succumbed to the temptation to do battle with the aristocrats of their imagination. Because the American Federation of Labor was indifferent to the plight of unskilled workers, Eugene Debs condemned Samuel Gompers’s organization as a “craft union aristocracy.” Nativists were no better, Debs added, with their “aristocratic notions of their own assumed superiority.”86 For many years Woodrow Wilson cast himself in the mold of a fellow traveler of aristocratic English conservatives, but when he ran for president as a New Freedom Progressive he sounded exactly like Jackson in lashing out against “the deadening aristocracy of privilege,” and in calling for “setting the little men of America free” from monopolistic corporations.87 Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) closed the century with a remarkable restatement of Jacksonian themes. Business

22 “Republicanism” leaders are a new “leisure class,” composed like all previous aristocracies of “parasites” devoted to “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste.” Their children are sent to universities, “corporations of the aristocracy of learning,” where they flaunt class standing by studying useless liberal arts rather than engineering. Jacksonians of earlier times would have agreed with Veblen that higher education is merely another form of “conspicuous waste.”88 There is perhaps no better way to identify the moment when the word democratic displaced republican in American political rhetoric than to glance briefly at the opponents of the Jacksonian Democrats, the affiliates of the Whig party. Frequently disappointed in elections, especially presidential elections, the Whigs eventually learned from their mistakes that they lived in a democratic age. One Whig at a date that was much too late had foolishly identified the Senate as the “aristocratic” and the House the “democratic” element of a mixed and balanced government rather than speaking of the entire political system as democratic.89 John Quincy Adams made the blunder of saying elected representatives must never be “palsied by the will of our constituents.”90 By the 1840 presidential election the Whigs had belatedly learned their democratic lesson, as attested by one of their members who proclaimed that “no fellow shall out-democrat me.”91 Adopting the tricks of their Democratic opponents, the Whigs finally won the presidency with generous servings of hard cider, silly but memorable slogans (“Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!”), and misleading claims that their candidate had grown up in a log cabin. As depicted by the Whigs, Democrat Martin Van Buren was an aristocratic dandy who perfumed his whiskers with “Double Extract of Queen Victoria.”92 Four years later, faced with another election, Whig journalist Calvin Colton transformed what the party had accomplished at the practical level in 1840 into theoretical wisdom. Everyone was a democrat in America he suggested, so no party should claim that name, and the only legitimate question was which party was true to democratic principles. Not surprisingly, he claimed that the Whigs were the “true Democrats,” whereas the presidentially fixated and thus monarchically predisposed Democrats were undemocratic. Before ending his essay, he interjected the comment that although the terms republic and republican may be of significance in France, they have now and never had much meaning in America. His essay titled “Democracy” marks the triumph of democratic ideology and the marginalization of its republican predecessor.93 And yet there were a few moments when the word republic made a temporary comeback, and not simply by insisting that democracy be refused a monopoly in political discourse. On rare occasions proponents of the word republic launched direct challenges to “democracy.” These republicanaffirming, democratic nay-saying figures were always advocates of far right-wing ideology. An early example is the Federalist response to the election of Jefferson to the presidency. Fisher Ames, anxious and frightened, sounded the alarm that “we are sliding down into the mire of a democracy.”

“Republicanism” 23 France’s revolutionary fate threatens to be reproduced in America: “A violent jacobin administration is begun.” The founders “intended our government should be a republic,” not a democracy exclaimed Ames.94 During antebellum times John C. Calhoun likewise hated democracy and its accompanying political parties, in his case because he feared the rule of the majority. “We call our State a Republic . . . not a democracy,” he said of his slave state, South Carolina. The United States was also a republic rather than a democracy, he vehemently affirmed. To his dying day he referred to the Democratic Party as the Republican Party. In search of republican predecessors, he chose the Jefferson and Madison of 1798, who flirted with nullification to offset an intrusive federal government.95 Attempts to make America safe from democracy by declaring it a republic did not come to a definitive close after the Civil War. Famous as a Social Darwinist, William Graham Sumner should also be remembered as an intellectual who wanted to suppress democracy through the device of praising “republican government.” Politics in his day, he was convinced, was as wrong as industry was right. Parties, political machines, and majority rule empowered “the people.” But who were the people? “The ignorant, idle, and shiftless have been taught they are ‘the people.’” An influx of despicable immigrants from southern and eastern Europe clamor for a right to work, cry out for “socialism, communism, and nihilism,” and threaten industrial progress. Democracy must 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.”96 Sumner was not the only noteworthy figure who responded with hostility in the early twentieth century to the new wave of immigrants. Proponents of the National Origins Act of 1924 had as their objective the inoculation of the native stock against further contamination by newcomers. Needing an intellectual rationale to defend their nativist bias, the Congressmen and spokespersons who backed the bill adopted the strategy of hailing America as a representative republic instead of a democracy.97 Indirect, carefully filtered rule must never yield to the pure democracy that would arm the unworthy. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge also feared the new immigrants, deemed those from Italy possible anarchists, deemed one and all potentially receptive to the messages of demagogues. It says much, however, about how limited was the appeal of pro-republic, anti-democracy rhetoric that the rabidly nativist Lodge always applauded “true democracy” rather than republicanism. “Let us lay aside first the word republic for a republic denotes a form and not a principle,” suggested Lodge in The Democracy of the Constitution. “The makers of the Constitution called their government a republic. . . . But they knew that what they were establishing was a democracy.” Neither immigrants, nor Populists, nor radicals of any variety, real or imagined, tempted a frightened Lodge into abandoning democratic for republican rhetoric.98 That even he should praise democracy proves its unyielding force.

24 “Republicanism” On occasion the theme of republics against democracies has made an appearance in more recent times. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater permitted his ghost writer to express anti-democracy, prorepublic sentiments in The Conscience of a Conservative (1960),99 which may explain why in 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, defender of immigrants, invited his readers to “note the assertions of the conservative right that ours is a republic, not a democracy.”100 New Left guru Tom Hayden, advocate of “participatory democracy,” agreed sarcastically that the United States “is a republic, not a democracy, and nearly everyone wants to keep it that way.”101 Usually the claim that America is, was, or should be a republic rather than a democracy has been lodged by spokespersons of the political right: Calhoun, Sumner, proponents of the National Origins Act of 1924, Goldwater. Perhaps the most recent example is Irving Kristol, a neoconservative reacting against the advent of the New Left of the late 1960s. In the 1970s Kristol stepped forth to ridicule “the Jacksonian-egalitarian-populist transcendental faith in the common man.” Bitterly he complained that “the egalitarian, ‘democratic,’ temper of the . . . American people [has] remorselessly destroyed the last vestiges of the . . . ‘republican’ cast of mind.” America was “a capitalist, republican community, with shared values”; now it is “a free, democratic society . . . severed from its moral bearings.”102 Now and again over the course of American history the theme of republics over democracies comes to the fore, but never is it more than the sentiment of a few, and even more tellingly, it never lasts. By the mid1980s Kristol decided to join with other Americans in applauding populist democracy. Out to combat liberals, especially those ensconced in the judiciary, Kristol published an essay in 1985 titled “The New Populism, Not to Worry.” The rulings of liberal judges constituted “a revolutionfrom-above, a revolution imposed on the people.” To its credit the new right-wing populism is “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 to this new populism.”103 At the dawn of the 1970s Irving Kristol was fighting a losing battle against democracy and for a republic, against the people and for the elites. A decade later he was a born-again apologist for the Republican Party, which, as Newt Gingrich would soon proclaim, was explicitly Jacksonian in its faith in the common man.104 Kristol’s turnabout is worth observing because it testifies to a larger point. No matter whether they are Republicans or Democrats, Americans have been democrats, not republicans, since the age of Jackson.

Republicans and Liberals Quite remarkably, despite all the many books and articles over the last several decades devoted to an examination of republicanism, relatively

“Republicanism” 25 little attention has been paid to the topics we have addressed thus far: republicans and monarchists, republicans and aristocrats, republicans and democrats. Overwhelmingly, the scholarship has dealt with another coupling, republicanism and liberalism, and has done all it can to stress differences and even conflict between the two. Sometimes front and center, always in the background of the presentations of the “republican” scholars, has been the 1955 book they were intent on leaving behind, Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America. From Tocqueville, Hartz took the idea that all Americans are, or aspire to be, middle class; from Karl Mannheim, he cribbed the notion that the ideology of the middle class is liberalism. Everyone identifying as middle class in America, Hartz concluded there was no conservative tradition for want of an aristocracy; nor a socialist tradition for want of a proletariat. Liberalism and nationalism in his estimation have been one and same in the United States. Absent the social classes of Europe, all ideological conflicts have been argued within the confines of the “self-evident truths” of liberal ideology. Hartz, in effect, offered an expansion across the entirety of American history and an explanation for what Lionel Trilling had observed five years earlier: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”105 In their quest to replace Hartz, republican-minded scholars have lined up to take turns singing the praises of J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975). To someone on the outside of the republican scholarly movement, there is nevertheless something odd about the fascination with Pocock’s volume. No doubt the ambition of the book is admirable, beginning with the Italian Renaissance, ending with America. Ready accessibility of meaning was not, however, one of the virtues of Pocock’s presentation. J. H. Hexter remarked on its “lumbering, crookbacked, mammoth sentences.”106 In the same vein Daniel Rodgers mentioned “the thickets of Pocock’s syntactic structures” and went so far as to suggest that “its difficulty was so notorious that few actually scaled it.” He also expressed disappointment that Pocock’s “American chapter was second order reinterpretation of other’s research.” And yet “republican” historians seemingly could not endorse his book too often.107 Why? We may hazard the guess that scholars fell prey to the temptation to draw upon the republicanism thesis as an excuse to read their present-day concerns into the past. The surge of “republican” scholarship in the academy immediately after the rise of the New Left in the political world of the 1960s may not be an accident. Pocock himself was not a New Lefter, but there was a moment of uncanny similarity between a statement he made in 1972 and Tom Hayden’s words in the founding document of the Students for a Democratic Society, the Port Huron Statement. Hayden had called for “participatory democracy”; Pocock suggested that republican ideals had been “intensely participatory.”108 Action and reaction pertain to politics no less than to physics. Unwittingly the New Left acted as midwife in the birth of a new right-wing

26 “Republicanism” ideology, the neoconservative movement. Hayden had called for a reinvigoration of civic involvement at the local level while seeking at the national level an expansion of the New Deal to include health care, expansive public works, and the like. Neoconservatives followed by championing greatly enhanced local participation, especially on the part of churches, coupled in their scheme with a reduction of the federal government. “Community” was another of Hayden’s themes, again adopted by the neocons and supported in the academy by “communitarian” scholars, left and right, both ideological camps eager to rediscover the community they yearned for in a lost but perhaps retrievable republican past. Second only to Pocock’s book in citations by later scholars was Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. Or, rather, it was the final ten pages, titled “The End of Classical Politics,” upon which his readers fixated. With the coming of the Constitution, Wood argued, the age of classical politics – of republican civic virtue – came to an end, and liberalism stepped forth to claim the future. After the publication of Wood’s volume, the scholars enamored of republicanism set out, one after another, to outdo their predecessors in postponing the expiration date of classical republicanism. Well into the nineteenth century, or even considerably beyond, classical republicanism remained on the public stage in the eyes of some historians and political theorists who craved for something different from or better than liberalism.109 One example is the notion of “labor republicanism.” Historians of leftwing sympathies had long been frustrated by Werner Sombart’s famous query in 1906: “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” By setting forth their conception of a vibrant labor republicanism, excellent historians such as Sean Wilentz and Eric Foner were convinced that they had uncovered a well-articulated American workers’ political ideology – not socialist admittedly, but possibly as satisfying as socialism. Foner has spoken of “the ‘free labor’ ideology,” which in his view “dominated northern society in the Civil War era, a particular expression of republican thought.” Among the ranks of the workers he discerned a “republican concept of economic independence . . . which stretched . . . through the labor movement of the 1830s, to the opposition to industrial capitalism expressed so violently during the Gilded Age.”110 Sean Wilentz similarly wrote at length and with fervor about what he termed “artisan republicanism.” He quite effectively demonstrated that the artisans of New York were fiercely anti-aristocratic and outspoken advocates of “equality.” Quite questionable, however, was his effort to impose a language of “classical republicanism” upon the workers,111 especially when his own account pointed to a very different conclusion. Wilentz’s focus on celebrations by the workers of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, which extolled unclassical natural rights, situates them far more readily in the liberal than the republican camp. As to the search for economic independence stressed by both Foner and Wilentz, it likely has

“Republicanism” 27 less to do with republican commitments than with the effort they noted of workers striving to avoid the “white slavery” of being forced to sell themselves at the marketplace.112 Workers in America wished to avoid being reduced to the miserable condition of their counterparts abroad or to that of slaves at home; they had no reason to admire the classical teaching of Aristotle and Cicero that workers do not merit civic status. Wilentz wishes to see the small shop as the embodiment of republican values and the fulfillment of working-class dreams.113 Such a notion fits poorly, however, with the topic he takes up later in his book: land reform. Gladly the workers abandoned their workshops to stake claims to land in the West. George Henry Evans was the critical actor, initially a labor militant but then a convert to the scheme of moving laborers from tenements in New York City to the unsettled countryside of the West. Wilentz would have us believe that the slogan of the National Reform Association, “Vote Yourself a Farm,” was a call for republican independence, but such a claim comports poorly with his admission that Evans proclaimed that the white laborer must be “emancipated . . . by restoring his natural right to the soil” – a proto-Lockean, liberal conceptualization if ever there was one.114 How wrong-headed the effort can be to read a classical and Machiavellian republican moment into the movement of Americans across the continent is especially evident, not in Foner or Wilentz, but in Pocock’s comment on this topic: “Machiavelli, we see, is a father of American populism.”115 Another strong indication that it was strains of Lockean liberalism, not classical republicanism that mattered to the workers, was their habitual use of the Declaration of Independence to state their case. Seth Luther, Frederick Robinson, and Stephen Simpson, among others, in their campaign for inclusion of workers as respected citizens, appealed to the natural rights proclaimed in the Declaration’s preamble. Typical of the workers was the alternative Declaration of Independence issued in 1829 by the newly formed Workingmen’s Party of New York. Where the list of colonial grievances against the king had been, there was substituted an item-by-item account of the wrongs suffered by “we, the working class of society” and a demand for recognition of the natural rights of laborers.116 Only if understood as modern and liberal should the workers’ movement be placed under the rubric of republicanism. The findings of Foner and Wilentz display the dangers of trying to impose “classical republicanism” upon the nineteenth century. One of the recurring themes in the ranks of the earliest scholars who argued the case for classical republicanism was the claim that republicanism in modern times has been backward-looking, nostalgic, at odds with modernity. Here, once again, Pocock unfortunately paved the way. “The Founding Fathers,” in his estimation, should be understood as “the culminating generation of civic humanists and classical republicans,” from which we should draw the conclusion that “the American Revolution

28 “Republicanism” [was] less the first political act of revolutionary enlightenment than . . . the last great act of the Renaissance.” Still not satisfied, he pressed aggressively forward, saying America was founded in a “dread of modernity.”117 There is, perhaps, no more effective way to challenge his conclusion than to recount the many claims of the founders and their successors that they were proudly creating a new world, a distinctively modern regime. Jefferson, remarked John Adams, “liked better the dreams of the future than the history of the past.”118 Indeed, he did. To Joseph Priestley in 1801 Jefferson wrote, “we can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in the history of man is new.”119 Late in life Jefferson sharply contrasted the American Revolution with events in English history, including the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. “Our Revolution commenced on more favorable ground. . . . We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to [the rights] of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts.”120 Jefferson embraced change, gladly accepting the reality that “Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.”121 The past, Jefferson insisted, is past. “Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another” he queried in 1789, unhesitatingly answering “the earth belongs to the living.” Time and again, down to his final years, he repeated his message of generational autonomy: “The dead have no rights. They are nothing.”122 By no means was he alone in making such a radical claim. Against Edmund Burke, Tom Paine in 1791 spoke eloquently and uncompromisingly in favor of generational autonomy.123 St. George Tucker made the same point in 1803, as did John Taylor in 1814.124 As late as mid-century Hermann Melville added his voice to the chorus: “The past is dead, and has no resurrection. . . . In the past is no hope; the Future is hope and Fruition.”125 Most astonishing of all was Jefferson’s argument that generational autonomy demanded that every nineteen years citizens “should be provided by the constitution” with “a solemn opportunity” to enact a new constitution. “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.” In truth, however, the “generation now in place . . . are wiser than we were, and their successors will be wiser than they, from the progressive advance of science.”126 The decisive divergence of the “founders” from the classical texts was nowhere more evident than in their Enlightenment belief in the possibilities of human progress. Even Adams, ever the political skeptic, in his most doubting moments expressed faith in progress and in the superiority of modernity to antiquity: The arts and sciences, in general, during the three or four last centuries have had a regular course of progressive improvement. The

“Republicanism” 29 inventions in mechanic arts, the discoveries in natural philosophy, navigation, and commerce, and the advancement of civilization and humanity have occasioned changes in the condition of the world and human character which would have astonished the most refined nations of antiquity.127 Jefferson liked nothing more than to speak of “the progress of the human mind” and to reiterate his conviction that “science is progressive.”128 That progress was the faith of common citizens no less than political leaders was one of the conclusions drawn by Sean Wilentz: “Progress, innovation, and prosperity – these are the artisans’ themes.”129 During his final years Jefferson charted “the progress of society from its rudest state.” Anyone, he suggested, who traveled eastward in America starting from the far west would initially encounter the visage of savage society and soon thereafter frontier society; “he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns.”130 Whether progress is a law of history may be uncertain, but that it has occurred and may continue cannot be denied. Why, then, should the moderns be obsessed with the ancients? In his final letter Jefferson looked forward to upcoming celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs.”131 Quite appropriately, in the course of delivering his eulogy of Jefferson and Adams in 1826, Daniel Webster saw fit to declare “It cannot be denied . . . that with America, and in America, a new era commences in human affairs.”132 At the time of the federal Constitutional Convention the founders took great pains to divest their minds of classical legacies. James Wilson’s words were decisive: “the United States exhibit to the world the first instance .  .  . of a nation .  .  . assembling voluntarily, deliberately fully, and deciding calmly, concerning that system of government under which they would wish that they and their posterity should live. The ancients, so enlightened on other subjects, were very uninformed with regard to this.”133 To justify their new federal constitution Wilson, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison self-consciously rejected the classical proposition that a republic could not last unless it were small. Nervous at the Convention, Hamilton stepped forth with a strong vindication of a large-scale American republic in the Federalist. “It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated.” One of the advantages of the moderns, Hamilton continued, is that “the science of politics, like most other sciences, has received great improvement.” Although he missed the passage in The Spirit of the Laws that implied that England was a national republic, Hamilton justified the

30 “Republicanism” proposed new government by citing the chapter in which Montesquieu addressed the phenomenon of modern, large-scale “confederate republics.” Size, Hamilton concluded, need not be a problem, the classics notwithstanding. At the Convention, Wilson made exactly the same point, also by citing Montesquieu.134 Madison, in agreement with Hamilton and Wilson, repudiated the ancients in the Federalist on the question of the size of the republic. Whereas Anti-Federalist Patrick Henry expressed his bafflement that “This government is so new it wants a name,”135 Madison took heart in “the experiment of an extended republic,” extolling the willingness of Americans to “rear the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe.” Hearken not to the voice which petulantly tells you that the form of government recommended for your adoption is a novelty in the political world. . . . Is it not the glory of the people of America that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity . . . to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense. Madison argued that a large-scale unit is better for controlling the effects of faction than a small republic; “the larger the society, . . . the more duly capable it will be of self-government.”136 Voltaire, in a text long available in English translation, had famously remarked 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.”137 Madison, without citing Voltaire, made exactly the same argument about religious sects in Federalist number ten. Jefferson as president in his second inaugural oration virtually repeated the remarks delivered by Madison in the Federalist. Addressing the Senate and the nation, Jefferson asked “who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively? The larger our association, the less will it be shaken by local passions.”138 The time had come for Americans to abandon classical wisdom and to embrace their leading role in giving birth to a Novus Ordo Seclorum, a new order of the ages. Republicanism in the modern age was a novel and exciting experiment with America taking the lead. At the center of “classical republicanism” stands the notion of “civic virtue.” Gordon Wood set a distinctive tone in this regard in his important book of 1969. “The sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed the essence of republicanism and comprehended for Americans the idealistic goal of their Revolution,” he wrote by way of summarizing his position. Taking matters one step further, he asserted “Ideally, republicanism obliterated the individual.”139 Against his account one may argue that Americans were frequently more interested

“Republicanism” 31 in a republicanism of self-interest than of civic virtue, that they were more concerned to make republican charges of “corruption” and “conspiracy” against their foes than to impose a regime of self-denying civic virtue upon themselves, and that they lodged an enormous number of their most important claims through invoking a post-classical vocabulary of natural rights, consent, and social contract. That the time had come to forget classical notions of civic virtue was explicitly stated by Alexander Hamilton in 1782: “it is as ridiculous to seek for models in the simple ages of Greece and Rome, as it would be to go in quest of them among the Hottentots and Laplanders.”140 Just before and during the Revolution John Adams worried whether the virtue of Americans and the desires inspired by commerce could continue to coexist: “How long then will their virtue last? till next spring?” Souls drunk on self-love would succumb to the temptations of luxury, he feared.141 In sharp contrast stand his later remarks, written just as the federal constitutional convention convened. Our countrymen “are not and never were Spartans in their contempt of wealth, and .  .  . they ought not to be. Such a trait in their character would render them lazy drones, unfit for agriculture, manufactures, fisheries, and Commerce.”142 To ask for civic virtue in the modern commercial world is to reach too far, thought Adams; to ask for ordinary virtue quite feasible if proper laws are put in place: “Mankind have been injured by insinuations that a certain celestial virtue, more than human, has been necessary to preserve liberty. . . . We may hazard a conjecture that the virtues have been the effect of the wellordered constitution rather than the cause.”143 Both in politics and economics Americans learned that their future might better be based on calculations of self-interest and on ordinary virtues than on anything resembling ancient civic virtue. When the federal constitution was debated, both sides, the Federalists and the AntiFederalists, grounded fundamental arguments in appeals to self-interest. Speaking on behalf of the Anti-Federalists, Patrick Henry objected that the proposed constitution was naively based on appeals to civic virtue. “Tell me not of checks on paper; but tell me of checks founded on selflove,” wrote Henry who was ever on the lookout for something to substitute for the classical ethos of civic virtue.144 Madison countered with his understanding of the proposed constitution: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” His was to be a “policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives,” such that “the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”145 Hamilton made the same point in the Federalist, with his assurance that “the best security for the fidelity of mankind is to make their interest coincide with their duty.”146 In economics, too, Americans attended to their future by pursuing the advantages of self-interest. Independence won, George Washington spoke

32 “Republicanism” in 1783 with characteristic dignity about the glories of patriotism, but that did not prevent him from applauding self-interest in the form of “the unbounded extension of commerce” that awaited the victorious Americans.147 Even those scholars who wish to prolong the life of civic virtue admit that the Jeffersonian era was one of international “free trade”; they concede that the accumulation of wealth was sanctioned so long as it had nothing to do with parasitical stockjobbers and speculators.148 England had attempted to impose its system of mercantilism on America, denying the nation its economic liberty, locking the colonies forever into a state of dependency. As early as 1774 Jefferson had written that “the exercise of free trade with all parts of the world [is] possessed by American colonists as [a] natural right.”149 After the Revolution Jeffersonian America was determined to go its own way. The dream of rank and file Americans was that henceforth, if they rationally calculated their economic self-interest, they could flourish as never before in a vastly expanded marketplace. Tellingly, no Americans were more attentive to commerce than New Englanders – this despite their earlier history of subjecting themselves to repressive Puritanical virtue.150 It goes without saying that Jefferson’s voice was crucial in the discussions about commerce. When he addressed the topic in his Notes on the State of Virginia, 1782, he uttered the famous words, “while we have land to labor let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench.”151 Like many other Americans, Jefferson recognized that in Europe this was the era of the workhouse, and he wished to defer as long as possible its coming to America. Agricultural production by free-standing farmers who settled on unoccupied lands was his answer; America would sell raw materials internationally while attending to its need for manufactured goods by buying from abroad, thereby avoiding the development of an oppressed working class. Thirty-four years later he felt obliged to revise his outlook. “Experience has taught me that [American] manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort.”152 As long as possible the domestic manufactures in question should be those produced in households rather than factories, but there was no denying that America had entered a new era in which calculations of self-interest thrived even as the ethos of republican self-denial was forgotten, or had never taken root. One of the more peculiar features of American political culture is that, despite the relative insignificance of rhetoric concerning civic “virtue,” its classical correlate “corruption” has nevertheless thrived, sometimes accompanied by panicky fear of “conspiracy.” Sallust’s The Conspiracy of Catiline was familiar to readers of the classics, and the longest chapter of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy was a discussion of conspiracies.153 Many Americans took up the themes of corruption and conspiracy while relegating virtue to secondary status. William Leggett alerted his readers to be on guard against politicians who spoke of the “public good.” Underneath such vague, high-sounding

“Republicanism” 33 rhetoric, he wrote, lay the conspiratorial schemes of corrupt bankers and politicians. Not civic virtue but corruption was his focus, corruption often aided and abetted by conspiracy. That he was not a figure on the fringes Leggett proved by quoting Jackson’s similar denunciation of the rhetoric of the “public good” in his final message to Congress.154 Later in the century, land reformer Henry George and various Populists, autodidacts all, issued charges of corruption in their time by drawing upon memories of Roman history. With the growth of great landed estates in ancient Rome, wrote Henry George, corruption infected the body politic. His general rule, applied to all times and places, was that “a corrupt democratic government must finally corrupt the people, and when a people become corrupt there is no resurrection.”155 Populist Lorenzo D. Lewelling agreed that “we are in the same condition . . . as that of ancient Rome.” Fellow Populist James B. Weaver, along the same lines, asserted that the passage of “fourteen hundred years” had not compromised 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.” William Jennings Bryan did not doubt that “Cicero only did for Rome what Jackson did for us when he destroyed the bank conspiracy and saved America.”156 One of the most long-lasting legacies of republicanism has been the American obsession with conspiracy theories. Colonists believed there was an English conspiracy to destroy their freedom; Anti-Federalists spied conspiracy in the making of the new constitution.157 Exposing plots of Masons in antebellum America and looking for a Communist in the closet or under the bed in the 1950s are examples of the conspiracy-mongering that has been all too common throughout American history.158 Even in this instance, however, we do not come face to face with a genuine reaffirmation of classical thought. Sallust believed, as Machiavelli would later, that all that was best and all that was worst trickled down to the people from the rulers; by themselves the people were nothing. Exactly opposite is the bottom-up view of the Americans. Conspiracy theorists in America are democrats, populists, usually convinced even in their darkest moments that sooner or later the many will rise up and cleanse the government. The politicians may be corrupt, the people never. Nowhere, it seems, is a significant American commitment to classical civic virtue to be found. And if that is the case, then there has been no battle in American history between liberalism and republicanism. Modern republicanism is post-classical, the best proof being one to which we have previously alluded, the predominance of the philosophy of natural rights, consent, and social contract in American thought. It has been well said that republicanism in the modern American period is new and is “natural rights republicanism.”159 In the English-speaking world America stands out for the vitality of its rhetoric of natural rights. The Scottish Enlightenment began with similar concerns early in the century in

34 “Republicanism” the persons of Gershom Carmichael and Francis Hutcheson, but from mid-century onward retreated from the social contract in the thought of David Hume, Adam Smith, and lesser figures (Chapter 5). America did not retreat and continued to pursue such a way of viewing the world well into the nineteenth century. Throughout its history, many of the most important claims and counterclaims of Americans have been registered in the vocabulary of natural rights, consent, and social contract. A revealing feature of the “republican” scholarship is that the bestknown interpretive works overflow with citations to the historical significance of natural rights and social contract. Caroline Robbins’s The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman is endlessly praised as a founding scholarly document of “republican” research; neglected is that her text brims with commentaries on natural rights and social contract and that her subtitle is “Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought.”160 Similarly, the many “republican” scholars who fixated on the final ten pages of Wood’s Creation of the American Republic, “The Decline of Classical Politics,” ignored the many incisive discussions of social contracts in the preceding six hundred pages.161 Gerald Stourzh’s Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government is yet another work constantly placed on the list of pioneering research by “republican” scholars who conveniently forget the many remarks in his book about the state of nature and social contract.162 He quotes Hamilton crying out against Loyalist Samuel Seabury, “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as in a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature.”163 Unfortunately, so entrenched is the “classical republicanism” interpretation that scholars either pass over the omnipresence of social contract notions without acknowledging their significance or, on occasion, charge that the writers in question were guilty of inconsistency.164 The possibility that a modern version of republicanism had emerged remains unexplored. Stourzh points out that Hamilton flirted with Pufendorf’s distinction between an initial pact of association and a subsequent pact of submission165 – a distinction, Stourzh might have added, relevant not only to Hamilton but to the other colonial rebels from 1765 to 1776. Resistance was the politics during the years leading up to what they wished to avoid, a revolution.166 Drawing upon Pufendorf’s two contracts, one social, the other political, the colonists did not need to risk a return to the state of nature. Society would remain intact even as they took to the streets; good and faithful subjects, they would not demonstrate on the Sabbath. All they asked was that the British government acknowledge it had broken the second, the political contract, by imposing illicit taxes. If the king and his parliamentary agents returned to their senses, revolution could be avoided. England and Scotland in the eighteenth century, still horrified by memories of the Puritan Revolution, were deliberately forgetful of such

“Republicanism” 35 seventeenth century republican polemists as Algernon Sidney. Thinkers of his stripe, forced to the margins in their native land, were nevertheless warmly welcomed in eighteenth-century America. And the republicanism he, Milton, and others stood for, while respectful of classical wisdom, was very modern in its assertions of social contract theory. Sidney, a lover of “manly virtue,” did indeed admire the Roman republican empire-builders of antiquity. Be that as it may, his republican sympathies did not prevent him from vigorously promulgating the theory of the social contract. “Our rights and liberties are innate, inherent,” he affirmed. “All those that compose society, being equally free to enter it or not, no man could have any prerogative above others, unless it be granted by the consent of the whole.” Magistrates may be removed by the people at any time, and “unjust commands are not to be obeyed.”167 When the Americans imported Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, they naturalized natural rights republicanism. From their resistance to the Stamp Act of 1765, onward to the outbreak of the Revolution, Americans found themselves dealing with issues of consent and rights. Completely irrelevant to their concerns were the works of the classical republicans, in whose world political obligation was taken for granted. Very relevant was Sidney’s modern republicanism, suffused with the doctrine of the social contract. Pufendorf sufficed for the colonists’ early politics of resistance, but come the Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, it was the likes of Sidney and Locke who mattered. Whereas rights in the world of Pufendorf and his predecessor Grotius were alienable, and an initial contract bound subjects for all subsequent times, Locke and the Americans embraced inalienable rights and insisted that the people did not alienate their sovereignty upon signing a constitutional agreement. In principle the people could demand a new constitution whenever they wished, which Locke had conceded while warning against overuse. At the federal Constitutional Convention James Wilson did not stop at congratulating his colleagues on accomplishing something the ancients had not so much as thought of; he also remarked in direct contradiction of Machiavelli that, although previous governments “have been the result of force, of fraud,” the Americans were establishing their constitution by rational debate. His final point was that rather than bowing to the English Constitution along with Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Delolme, the Americans were creating a constitution superior to the British because it was far more representative of the people and dedicated to new principles. Only the House of Commons was representative in England; in America all three branches of government were so.168 It was America’s Constitution, the outgrowth of natural rights republicanism, which was remarkable; far less remarkable was the famous English Constitution. In the most general and most meaningful sense, what Wilson and his comrades sought to achieve was the transformation of the social contract

36 “Republicanism” from theory to practice. The American Constitution, ratified by the people, was nothing less than the realization of Locke’s social contract. The time had come to stop bowing down in reverent submission to the English Constitution; the time had arrived for Americans to tout the virtues of their universalistic constitution and to break free from obsession with the English Constitution based on particularistic tradition. America led the way to where other nations might eventually wish to follow with its constitution that enshrined universalistic notions of popular sovereignty, inalienable natural rights, and consent. Americans such as James Otis and Benjamin Rush sought to institutionalize the social contract by combining discussions of the “principles” with the “forms” of government. According to Rush, “Mr. Locke is an oracle as to the principles, Harrington and Montesquieu are oracles as to the forms of government.”169 Otis likewise held that Harrington is excellent with regard to what is “true in fact and experience”; but, offering no social contract, he is unhelpful on what is right. Nor, he continued, should Grotius and Pufendorf, despite their social contract credentials, be consulted: “It is their constant practice to establish the matter of right on the matter of fact.” Only Locke understood the principle that the sovereign power lies “originally and ultimately in the people.”170 The form of government, the institutional structure, is the means; the end is fulfillment of the social contract. If Machiavelli’s ritorno ai principi meant anything in the New World, it was what he would never have understood, a renewal of the social contract. When the Americans dreamed of moving to open land in the West, classical republicanism posed the same problem as when the Constitution was ratified: size. Anti-Federalists had feared an enlarged republic was in defiance of the classical wisdom that only a small-scale republic can be viable. It was the Federalist override of the classics by means of social contract theory that saved the day. Popular ratification of the proposed federal constitution, followed by ongoing representative government rather than the burden of constant civic participation, provided the Federalists with a solution. “A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place” – such was Madison’s definition of a modern republic when the federal constitution was being debated.171 Jefferson came to offer exactly the same definition and drew the consequence that we need feel but little regret if “the political writings of Aristotle or any ancient have been lost.”172 At a later date the Americans discovered that the social contract, which had served so well in 1787, could be extended coast to coast by means of new state constitutions in western territories, ratified by the populace and sustained by representative government. Worries about size and civic virtue were irrelevant. The day would arrive when Benjamin Rush could say, “We do not stand in need now of Greek and Roman poets, historians, and orators. . . . Were

“Republicanism” 37 every Greek and Latin book .  .  . consumed in a bonfire, the world would be the wiser and better for it.”173 Responding to Rush, John Adams, despite his admiration of the classics wrote, “Who would not prefer Hippocrates to Alexander or Demosthenes? Every discovery, invention, or improvement in science, especially medical science, is lasting. .  .  . Solon and Lycurgus have passed away, and what good have they done?”174 Of the many moral causes in which Americans enlisted the doctrine of natural rights rather than classical teachings in the nineteenth century, none was more remarkable than the land reform movement. “In the beginning all the World was America,” wrote Locke,175 who realized that talk about land in the state of nature was not metaphorical in the New World. Americans dreamed of securing property by mixing their labor with the land in good Lockean fashion. Before the Revolution Jefferson turned to the availability of land as a way to avoid for as long as possible the servility common to European workers. Madison issued the same dire forecast of the fate of workers when the Constitutional Convention met, and in his later years reaffirmed his anxiety that “the people will be formed into the same great classes here as elsewhere.”176 The day of reckoning could, however, be deferred indefinitely if Americans continued to settle the Western lands. Upon returning to Europe Tom Paine came face to face with a working class in “a state of poverty and wretchedness, far below the condition of an Indian.” In Rights of Man (1791–1792) he passionately pleaded that the leading question of his time was “not whether this or that party shall be in or not .  .  . but whether man shall inherit his rights .  .  . whether the fruits of his labors shall be enjoyed by himself, or consumed by the profligacy of governments?”177 In Agrarian Justice (1796) he escalated his rhetoric: “The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together.”178 Addressing George Washington in the early 1790s, when the French Revolution was still promising, Paine expressed the hope “that you may enjoy the happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old.”179 When he took up his pen in the later 1790s, he was disappointed with France and fearful that its ill fate might eventually have implications for America if measures were not taken to satisfy the rightful demand for generational autonomy which he shared with Jefferson. Paine lamented that “the common right of all” to the land, an original and inalienable natural right, had been forgotten as humanity progressed through the ages. The accumulated evils inflicted by private property, a social institution, demanded reform in the name of universal natural rights. Rather than risk a revolutionary redistribution of property, Paine settled for an expansive version of what we now call a “welfare state,” paid for by the wealthy and guaranteeing a life of dignity for all persons, regardless their social origin. Where the weapons of the French military

38 “Republicanism” had failed, a proper social program could succeed. “An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.”180 In 1829 Thomas Skidmore both played a substantial role in creating the Working Men’s Party of New York and published The Rights of Man to Property! Boldly he called for a state constitutional convention to abolish landed property, private property in general, and to enact a general program of redistribution, all in the name of securing “the true Social Contract” grounded in “the true principles of government.” Skidmore was pleased with Paine’s refutation of Burke in Rights of Man but felt his predecessor had stopped short of drawing the necessary consequences of his philosophy. Where Paine had been a reformer, Skidmore would be a revolutionary. He would not repeat Paine’s error, “that of attempting to erect an equal government upon a foundation where inequality had already found an existence.”181 Like Jefferson and Paine, Skidmore could not call too often for generational autonomy, but he maintained, unlike them, that the only way to achieve such an objective was to return the property of the deceased to a common pool, to be redistributed as necessary to assure the equality and autonomy of generations. Private property of all kinds, landed and otherwise, was the enemy that had to be defeated. George Henry Evans was, along with Skidmore, a founder of the Working Men’s Party and shared his dedication to “revolution principles.” But soon Evans’s efforts were re-directed to moving workers from the city to unfenced land in the West. Skidmore, who did not look to the West was wrong, Evans explained, to believe “that men, on entering into society could surrender their natural right to the soil, on condition that every citizen, on coming of age, should receive an equal amount of property.” On social contract principles, “the men of every generation have the same ‘original right of soil’ that any generation ever had.” Westward movement is part of his proposed solution; the other part is that the land should be for use only, never private property. “The use of the land is the equal natural right of this and all future generations. . . . From which it will be inferred that I consider the institution of property in land to be [a] great error.”182 What George Henry Evans said at mid-century was reasserted during the Gilded Age by labor leaders Terence Powderly and Robert Blissert, and perhaps most famously by Henry George near the turn of the twentieth century. Land reform, we may conclude, has little to do with republicanism, or at least not with classical republicanism. It is better understood as a remarkable demonstration of the vitality of the liberal theory of natural rights and social contract. Land reform was merely one of many liberal uses of social contract theory in America. To cite only a few other examples, the Loco-Foco or Equal Rights Party complemented its demand for “the separation of bank and state” with the assertion, “we hold the present banking system to be a system at war with the first principles of the social compact.”183 Similarly, when common-law judges struck down labor unions

“Republicanism” 39 as “conspiracies,” the response of the spokespersons of labor was to issue an uncompromising demand that cases be decided not by appeals to precedent but “according to natural right and justice.”184 Most importantly of all, invocations of natural rights were fundamental to the claims of those who attacked the evil of slavery. Another way to underscore the attraction of social contract theory is to take notice of its uses in the antebellum South to register illiberal claims. Children of Locke in 1776, Southerners out to defend slavery at a later date, backtracked to the pre-Lockean social contracts of Grotius and Pufendorf. Spurred on by the Nat Turner revolt, Thomas R. Dew spoke loudly and clearly: “Grotius says that, as the law of nations permits prisoners of war to be killed, so the same law has introduced the right of making them slaves.” By allowing themselves to be captured, Africans have alienated their natural rights and consented to their enslavement. Pufendorf, he added, concurred.185 James Henry Hammond likewise employed social contract theory to justify slavery: “If we travel back with the philosophers who refer all human institutions to an original contract, I will still engage to find a place for slavery there. Let it be regarded as a compact between the master and the slave.”186 Perfect from the slaveholder’s point of view was Grotius who had written that when someone submitted to slavery he decided for all subsequent generations.187 Best of all, perhaps, by way of challenging the Northerners, was what Grotius wrote about supposedly “free” labor: the slave’s “lasting obligation to labor is repaid with a lasting certainty of support, which often those do not have who work for hire by the day.”188 How could the slaveholders fail to embrace the social contract of Grotius and Pufendorf as heartily as they abjured Locke’s? George Fitzhugh might turn to the classics to justify slavery (Chapter 1); other Southerners enlisted under the banner of the social contract. The moral that might be drawn from the Southerners is that when writing historical narratives, we should be less concerned with republicanism versus liberalism, more concerned with liberalism versus illiberalism. In 1955, the year Hartz published his book on supposedly omnipresent American liberalism, John Higham published Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, a penetrating study of endemic illiberalism. We may supplement the findings of Hartz and Higham by suggesting that while in the North the social contract promoted liberalism, in the South it labored mightily to foster the worst kind of illiberalism.

Liberty, Ancient and Modern Why have scholars been so eager to press forward with the notion of the persistence of classical republicanism in the modern world and so willing to overlook the formation of a distinctively modern republicanism? A

40 “Republicanism” definitive answer is impossible, but perhaps we might do well to recall the educational background of the first generation of the soon-to-be “republican” intellectuals. They came of age at a time when the “modernization theory” that had triumphed after World War II was being questioned and when Hartz’s theme of a one-dimensional liberal regime in America had also lost credibility. No longer could anyone believe the non-Western world was in a stage of “transitional society,” awaiting the inevitable moment to arrive when they, the “developing” countries, would be just like us. Nor were the spokespersons of the New Left or its neoconservative adversaries willing to permit the thesis of ever-present liberalism to go unchallenged. “Classical republicanism” stepped into the breach with its claim that even in America and the most “advanced” European nations an old and comforting cultural world persisted and liberalism did not hold sway as an unchallenged monolith. When the initial argument for the persistence of classical republicanism in the modern world by scholars such as Pocock and Wood proved impossible to sustain, they and their cohort offered a more compromising view. Drew McCoy wrote, “Above all, 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 commercial society.”189 Lance Banning similarly pushed back against Joyce Appleby’s contention that he had stressed classical republicanism to the exclusion of what was modern and liberal in American thought. In his reading, liberalism and classical republicanism existed side by side. “Logically, it may be inconsistent to be simultaneously liberal and classical. Historically it was not.” Both Banning and McCoy are outstanding scholars. One may well suspect, however, that their treatment of liberalism and republicanism as separate, juxtaposed, and conflicting ideologies is misleading. The contrast between liberalism and republicanism central to their presentations would disappear if republicanism in the modern world were to be understood as modern and liberal. It is worth asking whether Banning is merely describing or is he applauding when he writes “Classical republicanism regards this merely economic man as less than fully human.”190 However outstanding the publications of scholars who write about “classical republicanism,” we may wonder whether their works do justice to liberalism. Consider Banning’s remarks about the distinction between freedom from and freedom to. No sooner does he utter those words than we are inevitably reminded of the famous text he undoubtedly has in mind but does not mention, Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Published in 1958, Berlin’s speech was an elegant affirmation of “negative freedom,” freedom from, and an uncompromising repudiation of “positive freedom,” freedom to. Berlin’s essay was explicitly a response to the Cold War: “there has, perhaps, been no time in modern history when so large

“Republicanism” 41 a number of human beings, both in the East and the West” have had their lives so “violently upset by fanatically held social and political doctrines,” contended Berlin. The only genuine freedom is freedom from; as for freedom to, it is an excuse for forcing people to be free. Uncompromisingly, Berlin postulated that “freedom in this [negative and admirable] sense is not .  .  . connected with democracy or self-government.”191 Reissued in 1969, Berlin’s essay was a perfect foil for the “participatory democracy” of the burgeoning New Left and the soon-to-follow neoconservative movement. In the paragraph before Lance Banning introduced the distinction between freedom from and freedom to, he sounded a worry familiar to the New Lefters of our age, whether or not he identified with them. “A fundamentally antipolitical spirit,” he suggested, “encroached increasingly on the participatory ideal in the years after 1789.” Unwilling to abandon hope, he took comfort in the thought that, although “the Jeffersonians were very much concerned with freedom from, . . . yet they never broke entirely free from an eighteenth-century concern with freedom to.” On an optimistic note he concluded that “The Jeffersonian perspective – and even, perhaps, our own – was a product of a Revolutionary republican discourse whose parameters proved stubbornly resistant to complete transcendence.”192 The New Left and the neoconservatives were not satisfied with negative freedom alone; they desired both positive and negative freedom, and Banning claimed to have discovered such a combination in earlier American history. Worthy though Banning’s presentation is, one may question his decision to confine liberalism to freedom from. Nowhere does he take into account the possibility that he is selling liberalism short – that the combination of the two types of freedom may be more the contribution of liberalism at its most fully developed in the nineteenth century than the outcome, as he would have it, of an awkward juxtaposition of modern liberal with classical ideals. Was it, as he stated, a combination of “Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic” that he was recounting or, unrecognized by him, a fusion of liberal commitments? Helpful clues to answering our question may be gleaned from Benjamin Constant’s famous essay of 1819, “On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns.” The parallels between Constant and Berlin are striking: both were committed liberals; both were responding to ideological fanaticism and political terror, in Berlin’s case the Cold War, in Constant’s the excesses of the French Revolution. Never did Constant permit his audience to forget that the Republic of Virtue had yielded a Reign of Terror. Ancient liberty, Constant explained, was very different from “what an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a citizen of the United States of America understand today by the word ‘liberty.’” In antiquity “all private actions were submitted to a severe surveillance. No importance was given to individual independence.” The citizen was everything,

42 “Republicanism” the private person nothing. Our modern notions are exactly opposite: individuals wish to make their own decisions, to choose their religion, and to engage in commerce rather than exist off the labor of slaves. Moderns should not refuse to recognize “the changes brought by two thousand years in the dispositions of mankind.”193 For all intents and purposes Constant, without using the words, had drawn a distinction between freedom from and freedom to, lauding what Berlin would call freedom from. Yet he was far from satisfied with negative freedom isolated from positive freedom; although he was a committed liberal, a passive citizenry was not at all to Constant’s liking. “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 holders of authority are only too anxious to encourage us to do so.”194 Constant did not stop with asking citizens to participate in public affairs for the sake of defending their negative freedom. In a ringing endorsement of positive freedom, he announced that “it is to self-development that our destiny calls us; and political liberty is the most powerful, the most effective means of self-development that heaven has given us. Political liberty .  .  . enlarges their spirit, ennobles their thoughts.” Constant sponsored a merger of negative and positive freedom: “far from renouncing either of the two sorts of freedom, . . . it is necessary . . . to learn to combine the two together.”195 If it is moral uplift that the scholars seek who quite questionably read classical republicanism into the modern republic, they might do well to present a less emaciated image of liberalism. All too common it is for scholars to issue an impoverished account of liberalism and then to lament the poverty of liberalism. It has been well demonstrated that the American Declaration of Independence enshrines the liberal aspirations of Locke, whereas the English Declaration of Rights a century earlier settled for Grotius and the fiction that the king had abdicated.196 Over the course of American history the Lockean-inspired Preamble to the Declaration of Independence has time and again been the document to which marginalized groups have appealed for admission to full American citizenship: women at Seneca Falls, Frederick Douglass, the Abolitionists, immigrants, workers, and Martin Luther King in his “I have a dream” oration. What could better demonstrate the moral aspirations of liberalism, pursued decade after decade in a seemingly unending quest?197 Recently a scholar has undertaken the task of recovering “the lost history of liberalism,” an effort, she elaborates, to remind us of the forgotten but retrievable moral aspirations of the liberal tradition.198 Hers is an admirable and overdue quest. Liberalism deserves better than to be driven off the historical stage or parodied when on it. We have had excellent studies in recent years of the record of what is illiberal in America.199 What we also need is to acknowledge, cherish, and build upon our liberal

“Republicanism” 43 heritage, even if it has often been brutally compromised. These days the word republic means little in America. We must make certain the more important word liberal does not suffer a similar fate.

Notes 1. Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History, vol. 79 (June 1992), pp. 11–38. In this essay I shall attempt to draw together and build upon the findings set forth in several of my previous publications. 2. James Harrington, Oceana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.  218. On the rise of the concept of “interest” in seventeenth-century England, see John Alexander Wilson Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). 3. Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970). Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 129, 301. 4. Joanne B. Freeman, ed., Alexander Hamilton: Writings (New York: Library of America, 2001), p. 44. 5. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, in George A. Peek, Jr., The Political Writings of John Adams (New York: Macmillan, 1985), p. 162. 6. Ernest Campbell Mossner, ed., “Hume’s Early Memoranda, 1729–1740,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 9 (1948), p. 508. 7. Harrington, Oceana, p. 229. I have set forth my thoughts on Machiavelli in Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 8. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996), p. 31. 9. Montesquieu, Considérations sur les Causes de la Grandeur des Romains et de leur Décadence, in Roger Caillois, ed., Montesquieu: Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1949–1951), vol. II, pp. 69–209 Mark Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), ch. 6. 10. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press, 1969), II, p. 56. 11. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 70. 12. John Toland, ed., The Oceana of James Harrington and His Other Works (London, 1700), Preface by Toland, p. viii. 13. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), p. 262. 14. Voltaire, Essai sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1963), vol. I, p. 791. Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 54n. 15. Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Lois, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1949–1951), vol. II, p. 304. Bk. V, ch. 19. He speaks of “une nation où la république se cache sous la forme de la monarchie.” 16. John Adams to Roger Sherman, 17 July 1789, in The Works of John Adams (Boston: Charles C. Little & James Brown, 1851), vol. 6, p. 428. 17. Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 16, 44, 64, 237. 18. James Burgh, Political Disquisitions (London: E. & C. Dilly, 1774–75), vol. 2, p. 18.

44 “Republicanism” 19. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. I (Paris: Pléiade, 1959), p. 630. Jean-Baptiste Suard, postscript to his translation of Hume’s “Of Liberty and Despotism,” Journal Étranger, May 1760, p. 170. 20. David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), pp. 10, 12, 47. 21. John Trenchard, A Short History of Standing Armies in England (London, 1731), pp. iii–iv. Originally published in 1698. 22. Hume, Essays, p. 51. 23. Ibid., pp. 512–529. 24. Alexander Carlyle, The Justice and Necessity of the War with Our American Colonies Examined (Edinburgh: Printed for J. Murray & J. Dickson, 1777), p.  48. Carlyle, A Letter to His Grace the Duke of Buccleugh on National Defence (London: Printed for J. Murray, 1778), p. 53. 25. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 71. 26. Adams, Novanglus in C. Bradley Thompson, ed., The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), pp. 147–284; Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 1–21.; James Wilson, Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament, in Robert McCloskey, ed., The Works of James Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), vol. II, pp. 721–746. 27. Jefferson to James Madison, 15 March 1789. Merrill Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 944. 28. Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), p. 179. 29. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911–1937), vol. 1, p. 83. 30. Ibid., vol. 3, appendix A, p. 85. 31. Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), pp. 133–134. 32. Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist: Writings by the Opponents of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 4.6.16. 33. Ibid., 5.16.2.; 5.16.7. 34. A possible exception is James Madison’s proposal of a national veto of state laws in his letter to Jefferson, 24 October 1787. Jack N. Rakove, Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Boston and New York: Bedford Books, 1998), pp. 150–153. 35. See my Montesquieu and the Old Regime. 36. Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), p.  38. Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion, pp. 117–118. 37. George Washington, “Farewell Address,” 19 September 1796, in William Barclay Allen, ed., George Washington: A Collection (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), pp.  512–527, especially pp.  513, 527. Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (New York: Doubleday, 1984). Douglas Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1974), ch. 1. 38. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: A Documentary Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), pp. 103, 118. 39. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 663.

“Republicanism” 45 40. Ibid., p. 1036. 41. Jack N. Rakove, ed., Madison: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1999), p. 547. 42. Quoted by Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion, p. 242. 43. James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). 44. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 1425. 45. Ibid., p. 1463. 46. FDR, “Acceptance of the Renomination for the Presidency,” 27 June 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. 47. 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. 48. Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 319, 328. 49. Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 21, 463. “Imperialism,” in Speeches of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1909), vol. 2, pp. 17–49. 50. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (New York: Modern Library, 1950) Bk. I, ch. 55. 51. Jefferson to George Washington, 16 April 1784. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, pp. 790–793. 52. Hamilton, Federalist, no. 84 in Clinton Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers (New York: New American Library, 2003). 53. Robert McCloskey, ed., The Works of James Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 771–772. 54. Peek, Political Writings of Adams, p. 142. Also John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1966), p. 172. 55. Peek, Political Writings of Adams, pp. 134, 138, 140, 142. 56. Ibid., p. 115. 57. Adams complained bitterly in a letter written to Jefferson, 29 July 1791, that his Defence had been misinterpreted. Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 247–250. 58. Storing, Anti-Federalist, 2.8.54. 59. John Adams to Horatio Gates, 23 March 1776. 60. John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. 11, 101. 61. Ibid., pp. 13, 20, 75, 79. 62. John Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), pp. 12–13, 85, 253. Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), pp. 17, 321. 63. Joel Barlow, Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe (Ithaca, NY: Great Seal Books, 1956), p. 6. 64. Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). 65. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 1426. 66. Joseph L. Blau, ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), pp. 328, 331. 67. 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.

46 “Republicanism” 68. William Leggett, Democratick Editorials (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1984), pp. 164, 193, 244, 246, 253. One exception is on page 235 where he speaks of “the sacred republican doctrine of equal rights.” 69. Robespierre, “Report on the Principles of Political Morality (5 February 1794),” in Keith Michael Baker, ed., University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), vol. 7, pp. 370, 372. 70. Paine, Rights of Man, p. 180. Foner, ed., Democratic-Republican Societies, pp. 104, 139, 173, 245, 291. 71. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 1306. 72. Hamilton, Federalist, no. 10. 73. E. g., Storing, Anti-Federalist, 6.12.15. 74. Blau, Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy, pp. 149, 155–156. 75. Ibid., pp. 36–37. 76. 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. 77. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 1425. 78. Ibid., p. 1394. 79. Blau, Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy, p. 295. 80. Ibid., p. 327. 81. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 1491. 82. Blau, Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy, p. 36. 83. William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (Boston: Bedford Books, 1994), pp. 54–57, 87. Originally published in 1905. 84. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (New York: Robert Schalken Foundation, 1966). p. 534. 85. Pollack, The Populist Mind, pp. 25, 27, 31, 37, 42. 86. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948), pp. 328, 402. 87. Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), pp. 153, 164. 88. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Mentor, 1953), especially chs. 2–4, 14. 89. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 76–77. 90. Daniel Walker Howe, ed., The American Whigs: An Anthology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973), p. 21. 91. Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990), p. 212. 92. Ibid., p. 217. 93. Calvin Colton,“Democracy,” in Howe, ed., The American Whigs, pp. 89–105, especially pp. 92 and 99. 94. William Barclay Allen, ed., Works of Fisher Ames (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), vol. I, p. 7. 95. Ross M. Lence, ed., Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), pp. 32, 37, 159, 199, 248–252, 350, 370–371, 381. Merrill Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp.  338–339. Eugene Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievements and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 48–49. 96. Robert C. Bannister, ed., On Liberty, Society, and Politics: The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), pp. 82–82, 150, 169–170, 189, 193, 197, 199, 392.

“Republicanism” 47 97. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (New York: Atheneum, 1978), p. 272. 98. Henry Cabot Lodge, The Democracy of the Constitution and Other Addresses and Essays (New York: Classics of Liberty, 1996), pp. 49, 52, 157. Originally published in 1915. 99. Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, KY: Victor Publishing, 1960), ch. 2. 100. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for Affirmative Action, reprinted in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), p. 48. 101. Quoted by James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 90. 102. Irving Kristol, On the Democratic Idea in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p.  134. Kristol, “‘When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness’ – Some Reflections on Capitalism and ‘Free Society’,” in Mark Gerson, ed., The Essential Neoconservative Reader (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), p. 109. 103. Irving Kristol, “The New Populism – Not to Worry,” in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 361, 363. 104. Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York: Harper, 1995), p. 35. 105. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950), p. vii. 106. Jack H. Hexter, On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 260. 107. Rodgers, “Republicanism,” pp. 16 17, 24. In my view Pocock’s best book is not The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). It is his earlier book which stands out, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). 108. Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1999), p. 13. J. G. A. Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 3, no. 1 (Summer 1972), p. 134. 109. As noted in chapter one, possibly the most extreme effort to read republicanism into nearly the entirety of American history and to accuse liberalism of undermining this legacy is Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). See my review “The Use and Abuse of History,” The Responsive Community, vol. 7, no. 2 (Spring 1997), pp. 68–72. 110. Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 10. 111. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 92. 112. Ibid., p. 336. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. x, xvii, xix, 59–61, 266–267. 113. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, p. 93. 114. Ibid., p. 336. 115. J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 98. 116. Philip Sheldon Foner, ed., We, the Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), pp. 48–50.

48 “Republicanism” 117. Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce,” p. 120. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 509. 118. Adams to Jefferson, 9 August 1816, The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 487. 119. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 1086. 120. Ibid., p. 1491. 121. Ibid., p. 1494. 122. Ibid., pp. 959, 1402, 1493. 123. Paine, Rights of Man, p. 42. 124. 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. 125. David Brion Davis, ed., Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1979), p. 458. 126. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 1428. 127. Peek, Political Writings of Adams, pp. 107–108. 128. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, pp. 1150, 1401. 129. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, pp. 88–89. 130. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 1496. 131. Ibid., p. 1517. 132. Daniel Webster, A Discourse in Commemoration of the Lives and Services of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Delivered in Faneuil Hall, Boston (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard and Company, 1826), p. 61. 133. McCloskey, Works of James Wilson, p. 762. 134. Hamilton, Federalist, no. 9. “Speech Delivered on the 26th November, 1787, in the Convention of Pennsylvania, Works of Wilson, p. 761. Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Lois, Bk. IX, ch. 1. 135. Storing, Anti-Federalist, 5.16.11. 136. Madison, Federalist, no. 51. Madison also expressed pride that the federal constitution was “a system without example ancient or modern” in his “Preface to the Debates in the Convention,” in Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 (New York: Norton, 1987), p. 3. 137. Voltaire, Letters on England, letter 6. 138. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 519. 139. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 53, 61. Originally published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1969. 140. Freeman, Hamilton: Writings, p. 115. 141. Adams to James Warren, 19 October 1775, Warren-Adams Letters (Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, LXII–LXIII [Boston, 1917–1925]), I, p. 146. 142. Ibid., 4 July 1786, II p. 277. I am drawing upon Drew R. McCoy’s excellent account in The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (New York: Norton, 1982), ch. 2. 143. Peek, Political Writings of Adams, p. 162. 144. Storing, Anti-Federalist, 5.16.14. 145. Madison, Federalist, no. 51. 146. Hamilton, Federalist, no. 72. 147. William Barclay Allen, George Washington: A Collection (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), p. 241. 148. McCoy, Elusive Republic, pp. 76, 84. Lance Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 1 (January 1986), p.  6. Joyce

“Republicanism” 49

149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

160.

161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171.

Appleby launched a vigorous attack upon the claims of Pocock and his progeny that Americans were hampered by fears that luxury undermines virtue. See her Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984) and Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 108. Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, p. 291. Ibid., p.  1371. Note also the exchange of letters between Jefferson and Adams in January of 1812 on domestic manufactures. Cappon, ed., AdamsJefferson Letters, pp. 290–291, 293. Machiavelli, Discourses 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. Ray Ginger, ed., William Jennings Bryan: Selections (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 42. Storing, Anti-Federalist, 2.7.145–160; 3.15.2. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). Michael P. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (New York: Atheneum, 1968) [originally published in 1959], pp. 5, 9, 10, 19, 20, 34, 57, 64, 77, 82–84, 86–87, 113–114, 140–142, 188–189, 213, 275, 283, 313, 319, 336, 338–340, 345, 352, 380, 383. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, pp.  282–291, 542, 601, 602, 607. Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton, ch. I and pp. 18–19, 24–30, 82, 134, 152, 160, 176. Ibid., p.  11. Hamilton, “The Farmer Refuted,” in Morton J. Frisch, ed., Selected Writings of Alexander Hamilton (Washington, DC: AEI Institute, 1985), p. 21. E. g., Mark Philp, Paine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 49, 68. Ibid., pp. 25–26. Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Vintage, 1972), especially ch. 2. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996), pp. 8, 32, 99, 105, 112, 129, 196, 306, 295, 309ff, 341, 360, 379, 406, 412–414, 420, 436ff, 449, 495, 510, 521, 548, 549, 565. McCloskey, Works of James Wilson, pp. 762–763. Benjamin Rush, “Observations on the Government of Pennsylvania,” in Dagobert D. Runes, ed., The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), p. 78. James Otis, “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved,” in Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 423, 424, 426, 436. Hamilton, Federalist, no. 10.

50 “Republicanism” 172. Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 26 August 1816. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), vol. XV, p. 66. 173. Schutz and Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame, p. 183. 174. Ibid., p. 301. 175. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) no. 49. 176. Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, pp. 290–291. Madison: Writings, p. 132. Marvin Meyers, ed., The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1981), p. 415. 177. Paine, Rights of Man, pp. 211, 217–218. 178. Agrarian Justice, in Eric Foner, ed., Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), p. 405. 179. Paine, Rights of Man, p. 33. 180. Ibid., p. 411. 181. Thomas Skidmore, The Rights of Man to Property! (New York: Burt Franklin, 1964), pp. 57, 67, 71, 72, 126, 358. 182. George Henry Evans, “History of the Origins and Progress of the Working Men’s Party in New York,” The Radical in Continuation of the Working Man’s Advocate, vol. 2 (January 1842), p. 9. 183. Fitzwilliam Byrdsall, The History of the Loco-Foco or Equal Rights Party: Its Movements, Conventions and Proceedings (New York: Burt Franklin, 1967), p. 151. Originally published in 1842. 184. Ibid., p. 165. 185. Thomas R. Dew, “Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature, 1831– 32,” in The Proslavery Argument as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), pp. 308–310. Originally published in 1852. 186. Quoted in William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), p. 112. 187. Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), Bk. 3, ch. 7, nos. 1–2, pp. 690–691. 188. Ibid., Bk. 2, ch. 5, no. 27, p. 255. 189. McCoy, Elusive Republic, pp. 10, 48. 190. Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited,” p. 12. 191. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–119, 129–130. 192. Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited,” pp. 18–19. 193. Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” in Biancamaria Fontana, ed., Benjamin Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.  310, 311, 317. 194. Ibid., p. 326. 195. Ibid., p. 327. 196. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, Prologue. Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic, ch. 4. 197. Mark Hulliung, The Social Contract in America: From the Revolution to the Present Age (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), pp. 147–158. 198. Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). See my review in American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture, vol. 8, no. 4 (2019), pp. 600–603.

“Republicanism” 51 199. E. g. Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U. S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Although I admire Smith’s scholarship, my view is that he neglects America’s “civic ideals” and leaves us with nothing upon which to build. Mark Hulliung, “Republicanism, Liberalism, Illiberalism: An American Debate in French Translation,” The Tocqueville Review, vol. XXI, no. 2 (University of Toronto Press, 2000), pp. 109–132.

3

Republicans Before the Republic Helvétius, Holbach, and Saige

Three figures who deserve careful consideration in any account of the coming into prominence of republican thought in eighteenth-century France are Claude-Adrien Helvétius; Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach; and Guillaume-Joseph Saige – none a thinker of the first rank, yet each a noteworthy writer. By and large, however, scholars have overlooked or misread their political writings. It is difficult to discover in contemporary scholarship an historical account in which the significance of the republican commitments of Helvétius or Holbach is adequately appreciated; and in Saige’s case, he has been arbitrarily filed under the category of “classical republicanism”1 when in fact it is the modern theory of the social contract that figures predominantly in his republican political reflections. All three writers were republicans, all three modern republicans. A reconsideration of Helvétius, Holbach, and Saige may well be worth pursuing. The passionate concern of our three thinkers for fostering republicanism in the modern world is evident in Saige’s insistence that we “begin by making citizens out of subjects,” in Helvétius’s overriding concern that we “change men into citizens,” and in Holbach’s stress upon “the importance of education, the necessity of forming from infancy virtuous citizens.”2 In common with all educated persons in their age, Helvétius, Holbach, and Saige were well versed in the classics, but in their republican quest they only borrowed from antiquity what was pertinent to their modernist concerns, ignoring what they deemed irrelevant to their age and strongly criticizing what they deemed morally disturbing in the records of antiquity. Theirs was to be, in Holbach’s words, “an enlightened politique,”3 modern and dedicated to the cause of Enlightenment. Helvétius agreed and issued a call for “a country where every homme d’esprit can enlighten the public as to its true interests.”4 Combating religious fanaticism, fostering tolerance, reforming the criminal laws, opposing needless and brutal wars, denouncing slavery – all the causes of the Enlightenment were pursued by our authors through a program of republican Enlightenment. From the Spirit of the Laws, Helvétius and Holbach had learned to look upon England, in Montesquieu’s words, as “a republic hidden under

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the form of a monarchy,” and they hoped that in the near future the same formula might become relevant to France. Not ancient Rome but modern England showed the way to republican fulfillment. “The [French] nation would be happiest,” wrote Holbach, “if it combined monarchy with republic. . . . England provides us with a test of this government.”5 Much the same may be found in Helvétius, and although Saige did not cite England, he nevertheless consistently read republicanism into French history even at its most monarchical. If our three writers were not inordinately beholden to the classics in forging their republican visions, neither did they shy away from pursuing their republican aspirations by modes of analysis that were distinctly modern: Helvétius and Holbach devoting great labors to working out the implications of philosophies of self-interest and utilitarianism; Holbach and Saige relentlessly staking their claims through theories of the social contract. Theirs was a modern republicanism pursued through employing modern patterns of thought. From the late 1750s to the mid-1770s, Helvétius and Holbach published their political works, two massive tomes by Helvétius and a seemingly endless series of book-length anonymous treatises by Holbach. For his part, Saige in two pamphlets carried republican themes from the 1770s to the 1780s, and eventually to the moment immediately prior to the French Revolution.

Helvétius Why have the strong republican commitments of Helvétius remained unacknowledged? One compelling answer is that his writings have been seen as a precursor of Jeremy Bentham’s works, which are utterly devoid of republican enthusiasm. Arthur M. Wilson, a prominent student of the French Enlightenment, wrote that Helvétius was “a predecessor of Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarian ethics based upon the pleasure-pain calculus.”6 Quite possibly Wilson was influenced by Élie Halévy, who in his well-known study of English utilitarianism repeatedly asserted that Bentham was “a disciple of Helvétius” and that Helvétius served as “Bentham’s master.”7 Like Bentham after him, Helvétius could not speak too often of individual self-interest; and also as Bentham would later, Helvétius repeatedly spoke both in De l’Esprit (1758) and De l’Homme (1773) about the mission of legislators to serve the greatest good of the greatest number.8 Because of their exclusive focus on Bentham, there is no hint of Helvétius’s yearning for greatness and republican fulfillment in the readings of Wilson and Halévy. Presumably an examination of what Helvétius’s fellow philosophes in his own day said about his work might have pointed us toward recognition of his impassioned republicanism. Such, however, has not been the case because his comrades, encouraged by Helvétius himself, conflated

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his presentations with those set forth a century earlier in the famous and infamous deflationary Maximes of La Rochefoucauld. What Voltaire found in Helvétius was a “paraphrase of the thoughts of La Rochefoucauld,”9 who had exposed the narrowly self-interested motives lurking behind our most admirable and seemingly selfless acts: “We should often blush at our noblest deeds if the world were to see all their underlying motives,” La Rochefoucauld had written.10 There was no need for Voltaire to read between the lines in linking Helvétius with La Rochefoucauld: early in De l’Esprit the author himself had explicitly embraced La Rochefoucauld, with the understanding, however, that the Maximes, rather than painting a bleak, satirical picture of humanity, should be understood as a forerunner of Helvétius’s self-professed scientific understanding of society. What La Rochefoucauld had initiated and Helvétius would complete was a comprehensive and dispassionate understanding of who we were, are, and always will be, namely, beings ever preoccupied with serving self-interest. Diderot, who would have us aspire to great deeds, was not impressed by Helvétius’s philosophy, which in his opinion reduced our horizons to seeking “a fuck in the morning and a shit in the evening.”11 To read Voltaire and Diderot, one would never know there was an ardent republican in Helvétius waiting to be discovered. They responded to what was very real in Helvétius’s writings but by no means the entirety of his thought. The extravagant lengths to which Helvétius was willing to pursue his program of reducing all conduct to self-interest narrowly understood explains why so many readers in his age and ours have overlooked the remarkably expansive side of his thought, notably his republican idealism. “Each is to himself everything in the universe,” he wrote; “others are nothing.”12 In what reads as a paraphrase of La Rochefoucauld, Helvétius adds, “honorable men would have to blush at the sentiments in which they take pride, did they discover the baseness upon which they are grounded.”13 When reducing friendship to self-interest, Helvétius – deliberately or not – paraphrases La Rochefoucauld’s deflation of love. According to the Maximes, “the reason why lovers never tire of each other’s company is that the conversation is always about themselves.”14 Helvétius makes precisely the same point about friends: “in what does the charm of the conversation of a friend consist? In the pleasure of speaking of ourselves.”15 The strength of the friendship uniting two persons is not grounded in their merits “but on the force of the interest that unites them.”16 Never do we see beyond ourselves: our response to the opinions and ideas of others, to the sentiments set forth in books – all our passions and judgments – are but implicit considerations as to whether neighbors, friends, and associates satisfy our never-ending quest for social status.17 No matter how often the words of De l’Esprit echo those of La Rochefoucauld, Helvétius was convinced that his work was superior because it was rooted in science. At the outset he affirmed that “it is by facts

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that I have ascended to causes. I have believed that one ought to treat morality like all the other sciences, and make the study of morality like an experimental physics.” Later in the volume he affirmed that “the passions are in morality what movement is in physics,” and proclaimed that “if the physical universe is submitted to the laws of movement, the moral universe is no less to those of interest.” Fifteen years afterward, in the posthumous De l’Homme, he suggested that moral and political propositions were “as susceptible of demonstration as the propositions of geometry.”18 The general conclusion he drew from his examinations was that “sensual pain and pleasure . . . move the moral world.”19 Happiness we all seek, and happiness can always be reduced to physical pleasure.20 Whether it is power, fame, wealth, or anything else we desire, our quest is always for pleasure, and pleasure is always reducible to physical sensibility. To understand our “highest” yearnings, our most “noble” exertions, we should always follow them back to a longing for physical pleasure.21 So deflationary was the philosophy of Helvétius, so insistent upon reducing all our drives to the pursuit of physical pleasure and the avoidance of pain, that it is not surprising able commentators have conflated his outlook with Bentham’s. Unrecognized in even the best scholarly commentaries is the fundamental difference between the two thinkers: that whereas the English author consistently advocated a quantitative ethic, Helvétius championed a qualitative ethic, perhaps inconsistently yet quite vigorously. Push-pin in the world of Helvétius most definitely was not as good as poetry, and poetry was only at its best when it enlightened the citizens of a republic. To Bentham poetry and the arts in general were dangerous because they stimulated the passions: “The game of push-pin is always innocent: it were well could the same be always asserted of poetry.”22 In dramatic contrast Helvétius valued the arts, plays especially, insofar as they called forth a passionate response. “Theatrical performances,” he contended, “do not enjoy full and entire success except in republican states, where the hatred of tyrants, love of country and liberty, are rallying points for public esteem.”23 “Passions are essential to the state. They are its soul and its life,”24 asserted Helvétius. His would be a citizenry armed with “the fire of enthusiasm”25 that he deemed essential to the performance of great deeds. “Really it is only grand passions that can give birth to great men.”26 It is the passion for glory that inspires persons of genius and talent in every undertaking. Without this passion there would not have been a Descartes or a Corneille.27 “The passions are, in effect, the heavenly fire that vivifies the moral world; it is to the passions that the sciences and the arts owe their discoveries and the soul its elevation.”28 One of the aims of “the Legislator” can and should be to form “heroes.”29 Had the greatnesshungry Diderot read De l’Esprit and De l’Homme with more care, he might have embraced Helvétius as surely as Bentham would have repudiated him.

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Although a republican, Helvétius was by no means under the domination of the classics. There was much in the history of Greece and Rome that in his judgment merited condemnation. “Does virtue consist in love of country and fellow-citizens? The Spartans then were perhaps the most virtuous people. Does virtue consist in universal love of humans? These same Spartans were the most vicious.”30 Especially deplorable was Spartan treatment of their slaves. “These republicans, so proud of their liberty and so fierce in their courage, treated their helots with as much cruelty as is practiced today by the European nations against their Negroes.”31 As with Sparta, so with Rome, there is much in the historical record that demands condemnation. Honest among themselves, the Romans were “brigands in their relationships with everyone else.”32 Early Rome, “feeble Rome, was equitable and virtuous. . . . Rome after becoming stronger ceased to be just” and violated the droit des gens.33 Far better than the grandeur of Rome has been the example of modest Switzerland, “content with itself, little concerned with others,” enjoying in “obscurity” its good fortune.34 Not for Helvétius “the fanaticism of those who dispute the preeminence of the Moderns over the Ancients.” Consider the motives of those who downgrade the moderns: “It is envy which makes us find in the Ancients all the modern discoveries.” “How many men prefer the ancients to the moderns to avoid recognizing in their society a Locke, a Seneca, a Virgil?”35 In a chapter on education he voiced his judgment that nothing was “more absurd than to lose eight or ten years” studying Greek or Latin.36 Despite his criticisms of antiquity, Helvétius did find reasons to admire the classical age, particularly when he could read into it an early version of Enlightenment. “The Spartans as well as the Athenians were the most enlightened and illustrious peoples of Greece.”37 Paganism was tolerant, unlike Christianity; church and state were united under the direction of the political magistrates, not the clergy.38 If the absence of priests was, then, one hallmark of antiquity that Helvétius appreciated, another was the public prominence of philosophes in the city-state. For his own time Helvétius wanted nothing more than for philosophes, men of letters, intellectuals, to be at the center of public affairs, and he read into antiquity an early fulfillment of his modern dream. Lycurgus, he would have us believe, “traveled through many countries to draw from the philosophers the knowledge necessary to carry out the happy reform of the laws of his country.”39 Eloquence in public speaking, so essential to the republican way of life, was as triumphant in antiquity as it is absent in modern France. “One knows in what esteem eloquence was held in Rome and Greece: it opened the doors to grandeurs and power.”40 In ancient history the decline of republican grandeur and the loss of eloquence were intimately related: “Rome lost at the same instant its eloquence and its liberty.” Despots destroy eloquence by forcing orators to speak solely about “small

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subjects”; altogether different is the situation of a free republic, for there the human voice comes into its own as it addresses issues of vital importance.41 The general message is clear: nothing is more uplifting than to recognize how “these Greeks and Romans, at the same time men of letters, orators, captains, and men of state, rendered themselves fit for all the diverse employments of their republics.”42 Would that the moderns might reclaim on their own terms this admirable example of human possibilities. All that is wanting is the birth of a new era of republics from the womb of modern monarchies. Antiquity was as adept at bringing to the fore great men as modernity is wanting. “Lycurgus wished to make of Sparta a republic of heroes.” Rome as well as Greece gave birth to heroes,43 which is in sharp contrast with modernity. We admire the distant great figures of classical times, but in our pettiness are torn between admiring and resenting anyone today who aspires to greatness.44 And yet there is no reason to despair. In the conceptual world of Helvétius republican “virtue” is linked not with “corruption,”45 as in classical thought, but with “interest.” “The vices and virtues of a people are a necessary effect of its legislation.”46 The legislator wielding the incentive of self-interest can make of a people what he wishes.47 Les lois font tout. “It is always to their laws that peoples owe their mores and habitudes.”48 Civic education, overseen by an enlightened legislator, can flourish in modernity as it did in antiquity. Under the best legislation, a virtuous republic is as possible now as it had been in the classical age. There was nothing nostalgic about Helvétius’s republicanism. History moves not in a cycle as the ancients believed but forward, and “there is no century which .  .  . has not afforded laughing matter to the following age.” Progress may not be inevitable, but it has been undeniable and remains an open possibility. We have evolved from a nation of hunters to shepherds, to farmers, to traders.49 “The horizon of our ideas expands from day to day, and if legislation like the other sciences participates in the progress of the human spirit, why despair of the future happiness of humanity?”50 Always he took his examples and inspiration from England, the country the philosophes regarded as post-feudal, the most modern and progressive of European nations. All is not lost on the Continent because, “if Europeans are not free, at least they are not entirely degraded by slavery.”51 And in France “our constitution is monarchical, not despotic.”52 Should the French learn from the English how to fulfill the republican possibilities residing within their monarchical status quo, there will be reason to celebrate. It is the great advantage of the English that they enjoy the benefits of a civic life in the modern world. In England, but not under the continental monarchies, the people are respected53 and participate in public affairs. Benefitting from his government, an Englishman “conceives the highest thoughts and can express them as vigorously as he conceives them. It

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is not the same in monarchical states: in these countries the interest of certain corporations, that of various powerful individuals, and most of all a false and small politics, thwart the élans of genius.”54 Wherever the people have no part to play in public affairs, the words citizen and “patrie” are rarely spoken.55 Civic Englishmen in the present, much like the republicans of Rome and Greece in times past, do appreciate what it is to be a citizen and to have a country to call their own. “The necessity in which the citizen finds himself preoccupied with important matters, the liberty he has to think and to say all, give force and elevation to his soul.”56 Eloquence is not unknown in England.57 If England shows all the advantages that accrue to a nation of citizens, France exemplifies how spiritually debilitating it is to inhabit a world of subjects. “In London it is a merit to be instructed; in Paris it is ridiculous.”58 One measure of the deficiency of public life in France is that our countrymen have, “by the form of our government, less need of instruction than of amusement.”59 It is not surprising that the English see the French as “frivolous,” since in Paris “everyone treats public affairs with indifference.”60 Whereas in France writers must flatter to be heard, in England they play a central role in public discussions: If celebrated writers, as the example of Locke and Addison proves, up to the present have been more honored in England than anywhere else, that is because it’s impossible not to make a fuss over merit in a country where each citizen has a part in the management of general affairs – where every man of intelligence can enlighten the public as to its true interests. As a direct consequence of the success of writers in England, “the English nobles are more enlightened than ours.”61 How very different is France, cursed with a worthless educational system that “cannot form citizens and patriots.”62 To the mind of Helvétius nothing underscored more powerfully the woeful state of France in his age than the public’s preference for comedies over tragedies. “Why do tragedies, full of manly and courageous sentiments that inspire love of country, only make upon us light impressions? Because it is very rare for people to combine courage and virtue with extreme submission.” Another measure of all that is wanting in eighteenth-century France is that the audience is more receptive to the overly refined dramas of Racine than to the far more vigorous plays of Corneille, “which in another century or in England would probably have the preference.” Why, asks Helvétius, is Corneille less appreciated now than in his own day? The answer is that Corneille’s century was a time of turmoil and instability, a “time of troubles when minds, heated by the fire of sedition, were more audacious.” Corneille’s heroes were a perfect match with his age but have little in common with a later period

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“when we have few heroes or citizens, . . . and the volcanoes of sedition are extinguished.”63 Even Corneille’s ostensible weakness in his dramas was to Helvétius another reason to admire his plays. “Corneille, whose soul was more elevated than tender, painted great politicians and heroes better than lovers.”64 It was to the discredit of his contemporaries, held Helvétius, that they are preoccupied with love. “I say that in all countries where the inhabitants have no role in the management of public affairs, where one rarely hears the words patrie and citizen, the public cannot be pleased except in presenting on the stage passions agreeable to individuals, such as love.”65 The weaker our civic ties, the stronger our fascination with romantic love. “The route of ambition is, by the form of our government, closed to most citizens; pleasure is all that remains. Among pleasures, that of love is the most lively.”66 Pressing home his point in De l’Esprit Helvétius writes, “our mores and the form of our government do not permit us to deliver ourselves to strong passions”; hence love, a purely private and relatively inconsequential emotion, “almost exclusively preoccupies the French theatre.”67 Fifteen years later he continued his attack on romantic love, once again contrasting France unfavorably with England. Under absolute monarchy, he remarked, where there is nothing better to do, love is an occupation; “in England love is not an occupation; it is a pleasure.”68 One cannot discuss Helvétius on love without proceeding to his more comprehensive, radical, and shocking offerings on women and sex, topics vital to him but which have gone largely unnoticed in scholarly commentaries. “When the book De l’Esprit appeared, the theologians treated me as a corrupter of morals. They reproached me for having maintained . . . that the love of women has sometimes excited men to virtue. The fact, however, is notorious!”69 Of all the incentives at the disposal of the legislator, sexual rewards are especially effective. “Among all the pleasures, that which without question acts most powerfully on us and communicates to our soul the most energy, is the pleasure of women.”70 For an example of the worst way to deal with women, Helvétius frequently cited France; for the best, he repeatedly called attention to the schemes of Lycurgus and expressed admiration for the Saxons, Scandinavians, Scythians, Celts, and Arabs who, in his reading, offered the favors of women as prizes for noble deeds.71 In France we have made women false, indoctrinating them to believe they are immune to sexual desire while at the same time sanctioning their flirtations and affairs.72 Half the resources of Paris have been lost because women have been trained to be frivolous.73 “The love of women is, among polished nations, the almost unique spring which moves them,”74 but nothing good comes from women because they are preoccupied with trifles – and resent anyone who does not fall under their domination, such as male homosexuals.75 Women are at fault but it is not their fault:

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“If women are in general inferior, that is because they receive a bad education.”76 There are two means of saving ourselves from the debilitating influence of women. “The first is to perfect the education of women.” The second “would be to disencumber women of the remains of modesty. . . . Then the favors of women, become more common, would appear less precious; then the men, more independent and wise, would lose in their presence only those hours consecrated to love-making.”77 Although Helvétius protected himself by denying that he preferred the latter strategy, it was in truth the second option he addressed repeatedly, almost thematically, in both of his major publications. “Think of a country where the women were in common,” he urged in De l’Homme. “Their coquettishness would in no way be contrary to the public good. . . . Their favors would become an encouragement to talents and virtues.”78 In De l’Esprit he spoke sympathetically of a hypothetical country in which “the women were common and the children declared children of the state.”79 Lycurgus, who was determined to instill “enthusiasm and, so to speak, fever for virtue,” encouraged “beautiful young Spartan women to come forward half naked, and dance in the assembly of the people.”80 His scheme was to “make love one of the principal springs of legislation,” and to that end he had “young women in the presence of the people wrestle with young Spartan males.”81 What made sexual fulfillment especially enticing in Sparta was that a married couple could only meet in secrecy; for it was Lycurgus’s belief that “the difficulty of an encounter would augment their love.”82 Speaking not only of Sparta but of Athens as well, Helvétius generalized that “these fierce republicans delivered themselves without shame to all kinds of love.”83 Never, however, did they forget their civic duty. Love was a moment of “relaxation” of civic demands, a change of pace, a fulfillment in its own right, but never a substitute for the duties of a citizen. A passionate lover by night was an engaged citizen by day.84 From our point of view, Helvetius’s foregoing remarks show that any resemblance between his thought and Bentham’s utilitarianism is purely coincidental. From Helvétius’s viewpoint, his remarks illustrate how emotionally impoverished is modern France due to its absence of civic existence. “In the actual form of our government, individuals are not united by any common interest.” Genuine friendships do not exist because we have no intimacies to share, no mutual combats to undertake. It is in republics, where public affairs are available to all, that friendships thrive and passion flourishes.85 What was classical, what modern in the republicanism of Helvétius may be tested by examining his thoughts on commerce. Familiar with Aristotle and Cicero, he had been exposed to arguments demoting producers to secondary status. Familiar also with David Hume, William Robertson, and with French writings praising the benefits of modern commercial society, Helvétius charted his own course, reducible to neither the ancient

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nor the modern school of thought. Near the outset of De l’Esprit he presented arguments both for and against luxury. In favor of luxury he noted that it “sweetened mores, created new pleasures, furnished subsistence for an infinity of workers. It excites a salutary cupidity extracting men from that inertia, that boredom which must be regarded as one of the most common and cruel maladies of humanity.”86 Against luxury, Helvétius stressed the deleterious effects of extreme inequality, the oppression of the lower class by an upper class of parasites. Where classical authors deemed traders unworthy of citizenship because they cared less about their country than about seeking markets in the larger world, Helvétius complained that artisans in the modern world were “displaced” by the privileged, denied civic status, not permitted the opportunity to establish roots in their country.87 His position clashed strongly with classical wisdom. Producers, in his view, should be granted full-fledged citizenship. In De l’Homme Helvétius complained that “nothing is more contradictory than the opinions of the Moralists. Do they agree on the necessity and utility of commerce in certain countries? At the same time they wish to introduce an austerity of mores incompatible with the commercial spirit.”88 His patience exhausted, Helvétius complained that “the rage with which most Moralists rise up against luxury is the effect of their ignorance” or of their desire to deliver a “sermon.”89 Rather than denounce all luxury, Helvétius would have us discriminate between beneficial and harmful variants. One form of luxury, “far from being a misfortune, is a public good.” He speaks of a luxury in which all would have enough to fulfill their basic needs, an inclusive luxury which supposes “all citizens in a state of ease [aisance],” enjoying “a nearly equal division of riches.” No one would be rich, no one poor. Harmful luxury is precisely the opposite: it features “a very unequal distribution of riches and this division is without doubt a public calamity.”90 The major works of Helvétius abound in warnings about the fatal prominence in modern societies of poverty and misery, of the unenviable plight of the workers and the consequences of their virtual ostracism from proper society. “It is singular that the nations celebrated for their luxury . . . should be the countries where the majority of men are more distressed than in the savage nations, so scorned by polished nations. Who can doubt that the savage state is preferable to that of a peasant?”91 Strictly speaking, this “degradation is not the effect of luxury, but of the excessively unequal distribution of power and riches, of which luxury itself is an effect.”92 One class is “enervated by laxness, the other exhausted by need.”93 How deplorable, he remarks, is the situation of a country such as France where the link “between the grands and the petits is broken” and the “two orders of citizens compose two rival nations.”94 Helvétius wasted no time on the fool’s errand of trying to turn back the clock from commercial to earlier forms of society; the pattern of the historical evolution of societies from hunters, to shepherds, to farmers, to

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traders, cannot be undone. His strategy was to accept whatever he could in the modern economic world while offsetting the less desirable consequences by means of significant reforms. “Almost all men are without [worthy] passions,” he lamented; many are “greedy traders . . . uniquely susceptible to the hope of gain.” The fault, however, lies not with commercial society but with the preponderance of governments engaged in “a small and false politique.”95 Private life can be complemented by public engagement, as when citizens answer the call to service in the army. “The military spirit has always been regarded as incompatible with the spirit of commerce,” Helvétius acknowledged, but he questioned the claim that these two concerns, the military and the commercial, were hopelessly at odds.96 It was the modest objective of national defense, not conquest, which was his goal, so there were limits as to how much militarism was needed in the modern commercial world. While refraining from praising the expansive wars of Rome, he showered compliments on nonexpansionary Switzerland and expressed revulsion that “every barrel of sugar that arrives in Europe is stained with human blood.”97 All men may rightly be called to military service, but no man should be asked to serve rulers pursuing schemes of foreign aggression. Helvétius was perhaps not completely at ease that the English, “by the form of their government and by their physical position, have less need of great generals than of able traders.”98 But he did not posit a necessary fall from “virtue” to “corruption” in a commercial world. A legislator knowing how to link “virtue” to “interest” can provide the solution, especially by means of a restructured system of public education. From the earliest years children in his scheme will learn that their interest and happiness are best fulfilled by honoring their civic mission. The results will be dramatic: “A people whose public education would give genius to a certain number of citizens, and good sense to almost all, would without question be the first people of the universe.”99 The calling of the legislator is to institute an educational system that will train citizens fit for the modern world. And, if sustained by a free press and the freedom to think and say all, education and enlightenment will be cradle to grave.100 More than public education, Helvétius realized, was needed to cure what ails France and continental Europe. For while corruption was not a word he placed beside virtue when discussing republics, he most certainly did believe that the French and other continental peoples inhabited a corrupt world. Debasement has spread “even to the peasants who compose the largest part of every nation.”“Universal misfortune” characterizes the age, in that there are “in most nations only two classes, . . . one which lacks necessities, the other abounding in superfluities.” Unable to protect themselves, workers have no choice but to forfeit their humanity by selling their labor for exploitative wages. The greater part of the population, suffering from indigence, cannot have a patrie.101

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Legislators should therefore strive to impose a reformed social order in which “men without being equal in riches and dignities, can be equal in happiness.” The goal of the legislator should not be opulence for the few but aisance for the many. Quite tellingly, one chapter of De l’Homme bears the title “A mediocre fortune assures the happiness of the citizen.” Rather than exhaust himself, an urban laborer should be able to attend to the needs of his family by working a reasonable seven or eight hours per day. Citizens living in the countryside would also fare well if the proposed schemes of Helvétius were carried into effect: “What remedy for the malady of the State? Is there a means to recall gentle laws? The only one I know is to multiply the number of property owners and to start over again with a new division of lands.”102 The kind of commerce that he thought proper for a modern republic was outlined near the outset of his first book, De l’Esprit: “What I have said against the commerce of luxury does not apply to all kinds of commerce. . . . It does not apply to the commerce of items of primary necessity. This commerce supposes an excellent cultivation of lands, a subdivision of these lands into an infinity of small holdings, and consequently a far less unequal division of riches.”103 Redistribution of lands and public education were, then, two means Helvétius suggested to transform a disappointing present into a future that might fulfill human possibilities. One more major reform was needed; France, he suggested in De l’Homme, should be reconfigured by an enlightened monarch into thirty federal republics, such that citizens might be actively involved in public affairs.104 Revolutionary though his proposals might be in their dedication to the emergence of modern republics in a monarchical world, Helvétius nevertheless dedicated his posthumous treatise to Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia. Had it not been for Mme de Pompadour and foreign minister Choiseul, he would not have survived the attacks on De l’Esprit levied by Parlement and Sorbonne. Only through authoritarian means, he concluded, could the progressive program of republican Enlightenment be fulfilled. No matter how committed he was to constructing a nation of enlightened citizens, Helvétius had become convinced that Enlightenment, in its initial phase, would have to be top-down rather than bottom-up. Then, and only then, would there be citizens capable of taking public matters into their own hands, attending diligently to their common affairs.

Holbach Exactly like Helvétius, the Baron d’Holbach wanted to do everything possible to call into being a distinctively modern republic, one that would gestate within the body politic of an unsuspecting but ultimately receptive monarchical mother. Also like Helvétius, he was not under the

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domination of the classical heritage in his thoughts about republics, and indeed he went much further than Helvétius in condemning the mores of the ancient world. “The love of country which constituted the character of the Roman citizen, was it not a hatred sworn against all other nations?”, inquired Holbach. “The greatest of the Romans, those conquerors and tyrants of the earth, did they know equity, universal benevolence, compassion, humanity; in sum, all the virtues made to serve as a foundation for the science of mores?” Considering the manner in which the Greeks and Romans treated their slaves, it is evident they had “few ideas of humanity,” he concluded. Unlike Helvétius who had congratulated Lycurgus on his schemes to promote public service through sexual rewards, Holbach insisted that on a proper understanding of their repressive civic virtue, the “Spartans were only monks armed by political fanaticism.”105 Civic virtue in general, as understood in antiquity, was firmly denounced by Holbach: “The ancients .  .  . have falsely given the name of virtue to a disorderly passion for country, a fanaticism which often made the Greek and Roman heroes very bad citizens of the world.”106 Rather than hailing them as heroes, we might do well to call the Spartans and Romans “monsters” and “tyrants.”107 “Antiquity shows us warrior peoples, very powerful peoples, but does not show us sage and virtuous peoples.”108 Whatever Holbach’s worries about the modern age, his doubts did not prevent him from siding decisively with the moderns over the ancients.“On what is founded the obstinate attachment for Antiquity? It is habit, not reason.” Perhaps we are “more effeminate than our fathers, [but] we are also more sensible, more human.” Contrary to the Greeks and Romans who enslaved their conquered enemies, “among the moderns the noise of arms does not prevent us from hearing the cry of nature, of justice, of pity.”109 The ethos of the ancient world quite rightly has no proper place in modern times. In early warlike societies courage was inevitably the virtue par excellence; but “in modern and civilized nations . . . it is time to attach the idea of honor to qualities more peaceable and advantageous to society.”110 No longer should anyone seek to win a famous name in history by means of violent, so-called glorious deeds.111 We need also realize that the moment has arrived to reverse the classical bias against merchants, to overturn the “ridiculous opinion” of Aristotle, the Greeks, and the Romans against permitting merchants to hold public office. Athens, Sparta, and Rome are not the city-states of times past that we should admire; our sympathy, rather, should be directed to the republics of Florence, Venice, and Genoa, because they showed Europe the possibilities of commerce.112 Both the French legal and educational systems could be improved by staunchly embracing the modern world and counteracting the longstanding Latin influence. Hostile to the obfuscating influence in France of Roman law, Holbach calls for “a lucid jurisprudence, written in a language intelligible to all citizens.” As for school, at the end of their studies

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students unfortunately “know much better the history and mores of Athens, Sparta, and Rome than those of the land where they were born.” Upon exiting school, where he spent years immersed in the classics, “the best instructed young man knows not what is a nation, a public society, a sovereign, a subject, a citizen, a father, a master.”113 No longer should the educational system bow in deference to the writings of Greek and Roman authors. On the question of commerce Holbach’s position is at odds with classical wisdom when he frequently expresses his approval of trade; and even when ambivalent he has nothing significant in common with the ancients. Numbered among his many strident criticisms of religion in his early work, Le Christianisme Dévoilé, was its hostility to trade, commerce, industry: “commerce is contrary to the views of a religion whose founder pronounced an anathema against the rich and excluded them from the kingdom of heaven. All industry is forbidden to perfect Christians.”114 In a later work he prepared his readers for an endorsement of commercial society by noting that all of life is “a continual commerce of exchanges,” that is, of daily interactions with family, neighborhood, and other social relationships.115 Along with many other figures of the Enlightenment, he accepted without question the standard argument that society had undergone several phases of evolution, beginning with a savage era and culminating in the increasingly commercial world of his time.116 As he sees the world, there is much to be applauded in the advent of our modern commercial societies. “The inhabitant of towns delivers himself to industry; his desire to enrich himself turns to the profit of society.”117 When honored with “the esteem and the favor of the government, [commerce] extends its branches far; it procures for society the things nature refuses and multiplies the agreements of life.”118 Almost always Holbach addressed commerce, both its pros and its cons, in relationship to politics. With the help of economic considerations it was possible to oppose unnecessary wars by making a pragmatic argument for keeping the peace, a tactic more likely than a moral plea to meet with success: “It is not by . . . the dazzle of its victories . . . that one can judge the prosperity of a people: it is by its industriousness.”119 An ambitious monarch would do well to take note, and if he truly understands his interests, he will realize that it is free-standing farmers, not serfs, who are productive.120 The more enlightened the government, the more it will be obvious that the freedom of the trader, not that of the hereditary nobility, is what matters. “A profession so useful [as that of the merchant], is it not more honorable than the shameful idleness in which the rural nobles stagnate, who have no better occupation than to hunt and to vex the peasants?”121 As a matter of fairness, and as a matter of fostering progress, governments need to institute taxes that are universal, obliging the privileged classes to pay their just share, freeing the lower classes from crushing taxation.122

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In the course of discussing commerce Holbach rarely fails to applaud freedom and to denounce despotism. “Liberty is essential to the state that one wishes to enrich,” he maintained.123 “A bad government is an arid and scorched field, incapable of furnishing an abundant harvest. . . . Commerce languishes without liberty.”124 The lesson that must be learned is that “without liberty it is impossible to have population, agriculture, commerce. . . . It is, however, on these that the power of a state depends.”125 Looking for intellectual allies in his program of fostering economic freedom, Holbach occasionally called upon the Physiocrats. “The government has nothing to do for the merchant other than permit him to abide by the freedom of laissez faire.”126 Quesnay and Mirabeau, remarked Holbach, were “good citizens,” their publications marked by “patriotic zeal.”127 Attentive to the benefits of commerce, Holbach also issued repeated warnings about its dangers. “A greedy government, totally absorbed by commerce or the passion for riches, sacrifices all to its idol, ruins itself, . . . and corrupts the mores of citizens.”128 While favoring a “commerce utile,” Holbach sharply repudiated a “commerce de luxe.”129 Although commerce is the “fruit of liberty,” it can lead to an obsession with luxuries, which “finishes by enervating citizens” and invites despotism.130 “The republican or inhabitant of a free country is less exposed to the contagion of luxury than the subject of a monarchy.”131 Time and again throughout his writings he warned that luxury is a “misfortune inherent to monarchy and especially to despotism.” Republics are not immune to its temptations but “under a king, the vanity [of luxury] is more contagious than under a republican government.”132 Under monarchy, everyone possessed of financial means mimics the gaudy show of excess at court, the constant competition to outdo others in the display of superfluity, the flaunting of items remarkable for their uselessness and appreciated precisely because they are devoid of utility. “Splendor, vanity, jewels, performance become necessary in childish and corrupt nations.”133 No complaint appears so often in Holbach’s writings as his lament that European monarchical peoples live in perpetual childhood, eternal infancy. The contrast with a proper republic could not be greater: Compare for a moment the aspect presented by a free nation with that offered by a state submitted to absolute masters. On the [republican] side, fertile and cultivated fields display to our observation the most lively spectacle – [we see a farmer] not exhausted by his work, surrounded by a large and healthy family. .  .  . [The encouraged producers] bring activity to the village and procure a variety by which the soul is agreeably moved. Widely shared opulence lends to the most simple homes an aspect which proves the aisance of the inhabitants.134

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The promise of aisance for the many reappears in Holbach’s writings whenever he conjures up the pleasing vision of household servants of the rich returning to their roots in the countryside,135 where they and everyone could live in a world where “it is more important for all to have bread than essential that a monarch have palaces.”136 “Commerce de luxe” is the curse of monarchies; “commerce utile” the blessing of modern republics. As a republican and an atheist in monarchical and Catholic France, it is evident that Holbach might be regarded as a radical. Nevertheless, the more he asserted his republican commitments, the more his findings led him to espouse conservative proposals. True, at times he figures as the arch-enemy of tradition: “veneration for Antiquity,” he sighed, “becomes a superstition that one ceaselessly opposes to common sense. . . . Because something was deemed useful and good in another age, it does not follow that it is good today.”137 In a late work, he continued to speak out against traditionally sanctioned rights and privileges that “harm society, desolate the farmer, are hindrances to commerce, are opposed to industry, and place obstacles to abundance and to general felicity.”138 And yet nothing bothered him more than to see that the most socially advanced denizens of the court and Paris begin conversations with “What’s new?” The social elite has lost its way, with the consequence that society in general is “infected.” “No man wishes to be what he is.” Childish emulation and “the passion to appear,” rather than to be, absorb all our energy.139 Rousseau, whom Holbach had come to regard as an enemy, could not have said it better. The claims of tradition must be thoroughly examined, some rejected, but others renewed with a vengeance, thought Holbach, to combat the worst tendencies of the modern world. Nowhere is the quest for renewal of traditional norms more evident in his work than when his topic is women. Unlike the unconventional and shocking views of Helvétius, the comments of Holbach on the subject of women are often vigorous reaffirmations of traditional unflattering assumptions. In his early Le Christianisme Dévoilé he wrote that “hysterical women are commonly those who love God with the greatest intensity.”140 Later, in La Contagion Sacrée, his position was: “it is especially among women that religious fervor acts with the most force. The feebleness of their physique, their natural timidity, their lack of experience, dispose them to devotion; and the liveliness of an imagination that reflection rarely cools exposes them more often than men to religious deliriums.”141 In Système Social he complained that men are demeaned by their interactions with “a sex that everything conspires to retain in eternal childhood,” such that “great importance is made of playthings, jewels, and trifles.”142 In La Politique naturelle he affirmed that “in the measure that luxury augments, women hold greater empire; they eventually reign over all tastes. Confounded with men, their mores are corrupted, their feebleness exposes them to

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disorder.”143 The prominence of women at court is an argument against monarchies and in favor of republics, which, when uncorrupted, confine females to the private sphere. True to Enlightenment, Holbach speaks out forcefully against the ferocious, cruel, and tyrannical manner in which savage societies treat their women.144 At the other end of the spectrum, civilized societies in which well-born ladies are trained to take pride in being useless are also objectionable.145 Especially threatening is the emergence of a “gynécratie, or a feminine empire, to which France owes its dominant taste for frivolities, a fatal taste.”146 Education may offer a solution, providing women with the opportunity to do as much good as at present they do harm. “If the education of men is often neglected, . . . that of the sex destined to be wives and mothers seems to have been completely forgotten in almost all nations.”147 Holbach never advanced beyond the view that “women, by the feebleness of their organs, are not susceptible to abstract knowledge and profound studies,” but he did concede that “the sensibility of their souls, the liveliness of their spirit, the mobility of their imagination render them very susceptible to adopt with warmth the sentiments of the heart. It may then be easy to inculcate in them a morality that is humane, compassionate, charitable.”148 Although Holbach deals with the question of women in virtually all his books, it is his treatment in Système Social that perhaps demands special attention. Near the start of his chapter “Of Women” he offers the generalization, “In all the countries of the earth, the fate of women is to be tyrannized.” Even where not overtly oppressed, he suggests that a divided self is inflicted by sophisticated society upon women, who are forbidden by priests to love the world but urged by their parents to be pleasing in society. Marriage is especially problematic: “She is conducted as a victim to the altar and forced to swear an inviolable love for a man for whom she feels nothing, whom she may have never seen, or whom she detests,” property being the sole concern of the parents. In Catholic countries divorce is not permitted, no matter how miserable the marriage; adultery therefore is a way of life in the ranks of the upper classes. When speaking of the theatre, so dear to the French, Holbach finds himself strangely allied with the clergy in registering the complaint that the stage is a teacher of infidelity.149 The chapter following the one addressed to women bears the title “Of Domestic Felicity or Happiness in Private Life.” Whenever Holbach spoke in his preferred republican voice, espousing its ideals, there was a place of honor for women in his thought – but only a secondary place. Women would attend to private matters, the family especially, an important but lesser calling, while the men attend to the highest calling, public affairs outside the home. There were occasions, however, when Holbach doubted that a revival of republicanism in France was possible. His hopes dashed, he elevated the significance of women and family. “The more a

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nation is corrupt, the more the reasonable citizen will take precautions to protect himself from the public infection. In the event that he cannot remedy the ills of his patrie, he should at least search to procure domestic happiness.” Forced to exist in what may prove to be an incurably corrupt world, “the members of a family should join together to work in concert for their felicity and to resist the blows of fate.” All the more will we be likely to succeed if we realize that “esteem and friendship .  .  . are far more necessary than [romantic] love for the happiness of the husband and wife.” Those at the top of society do not know the joys of family; such delights are located more frequently in the middling ranks where “happy mediocrity” reigns. Within this realm women have the highest calling, which is nothing less than to save men from themselves.150 ** While evidence is wanting to prove that Holbach wrote in response to Helvétius, it is nevertheless quite possible that placing the two authors side by side may yield new insights into the works of Holbach. On many important matters they were in agreement, beginning with their republican commitments. Holbach seconded Helvétius’s concern for the decline of oratory, its demotion from public life and perverse rebirth in the pulpit,151 and agreed, too, that republicanism should be modern, the curriculum of French schools freed of the burden of teaching classical languages.152 They agreed again in their attacks on Christianity, the major difference being that Helvétius entertained the thought that tolerant “natural religion” would “without doubt one day be the religion of the universe,”153 whereas Holbach, writing in anonymity, would settle for nothing less than all-out atheism. “All religion,” Holbach affirmed, “is by its essence in contradiction with nature [and science].”154 On libertinage they disagreed profoundly. Quite consistently with his overall stance, Helvétius believed that the desires of the libertine, if properly managed, could foster ardent citizenship.155 Holbach’s concern was very different. He was intent on arguing that libertines were not atheists, atheists not libertines, and therefore standard denunciations of libertines should not be permitted to double as attacks against enlightened unbelievers.156 Libertines were bad enough in their own right; they were worse insofar as they invited attacks on the philosophes. “L’éducation peut tout” was a slogan of Helvétius, who applied it to argue that modern republics, if well-governed, could readily produce societies of devoted citizens.157 Holbach was less optimistic, but he did say that an “abject courtesan,” if properly educated, could become a “noble citizen,” whereas a potential Newton, poorly educated, might be nothing more than a “ferocious vagabond.”158 In all his works Holbach addressed the topic of education, especially education for citizenship. “The instruction of peoples,” he asserted, “must be the most essential object of all government”; and yet “there is not a single country in Europe where

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politics is seriously preoccupied with the education of citizens.”159 Only if workers are properly educated can a republic succeed. Therefore monasteries should be transformed into secular educational institutions, where the indigent would be offered free schooling in classes staffed by “citizen priests” who will expose students to a readily mastered “moral and social catechism.”160 Calling for a catechism, Holbach paralleled Helvétius;161 and he paralleled Helvétius a second time when he suggested that decentralized federalism is the best way for a modern republic to reach the many. “It would be very useful to parcel out and divide up large states into districts or provinces, in order to form a confederation.”162 Holbach’s firm conviction was that political reform could only be successful if complemented by social and economic reform. “Nothing in society should be more sacred than the life of the least citizen,”163 wrote Holbach, a view leading him to demand fundamental social change. Bitterly he complained about the economic inequality that demeaned many of the French and prevented them from being citizens.164 Much like Helvétius, he believed that “a wise government ought to concern itself solely with the happiness and aisance of true citizens, of those who possess and cultivate land. Land is the true basis of a state”165 and must therefore be redistributed to create a society of small freeholders situated on modest farms, not the large landholdings envisioned by the Physiocrats who, for that reason, were not completely embraced by Holbach. Neither Helvétius nor Holbach opposed the modern age of commerce, but each insisted upon the imposition of no more than, in Holbach’s words, “a moderate workload to procure the true needs of life.”166 Each stressed quality of life over quantity of productivity. Another convergence between Helvétius and Holbach is that both, especially in their later careers, expressed worry about the future and beseeched absolute monarchs to be the initiators of their program of transforming France and other countries into republics hidden under the form of monarchy. Helvétius, as we have seen, turned to Catherine and Frederick, claiming that “they wish to render themselves dear to humanity. .  .  . It is by them that the universe must be enlightened.”167 Much the same was Holbach’s dedication of a late work, Éthocratie, to the new king, Louis XVI, in the hope that he might be a reforming monarch. “Absolute power,” he explained, “is very useful when it proposes to annihilate abuses . . . [and] to reform mores.”168 The difference between the writers was that for two reasons Holbach’s desperation was deeper than that of Helvétius. One reason was that Holbach in 1776 was writing in the aftermath of minister Maupeou, whose efforts to annihilate the legal bodies known as parlements frightened the philosophes, except for Voltaire, with the prospect of an impending degeneration of absolute monarchy into despotism.169 The second reason was that Holbach, unlike Helvétius, had drawn the conclusion that England no longer pointed unambiguously to the possibility of an enlightened future.

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For decades the philosophes had looked to England whenever they sought hope, strongly encouraged by Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1734) and Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (1748). In 1764 Helvétius visited England; in 1765 it was Holbach’s turn. Upon their return, Helvétius reaffirmed but Holbach questioned the standard enlightened view of England. “The Englishman is born free,” asserted Helvétius, and his freedom is guaranteed because in his country alone the writer enjoys the liberty to publish.170 In England and in England alone, moreover, “true patriots are those who rise up with the most force against abuses of government.”171 Peasants fare better in England than in France, and the lesser social ranks are protected by the law.172 Rarely does Helvétius have anything to say against “the enlightened and free English nation.”173 Even when he offers a criticism, it is withdrawn several pages later. First, he worries that the English quasi-republic, lacking a decentralized federal structure, has “representatives who assemble in the Capital, and it is there that they separate their interest from that of [their constituents].” No sooner, however, has he offered this criticism than he writes reassuringly that “there is not in London a worker . . . who does not read the gazettes, who does not suspect the venality of his representatives, and [who] does not believe in consequence in his duty to instruct himself as to his rights as citizen.”174 Precisely the opposite was Holbach’s judgment of England.“There does not exist on earth a well-organized political constitution,” he remarked, directly contradicting the commonly held opinion that Britain’s constitution was an unprecedented marvel of wisdom. “The House of Commons . . . no longer pretends to be accountable to its constituents. . . . These representatives can, without running any risk, betray the interests of the people and sell its liberty to the monarch.” Numbered among the dishonorable are the very public figures who pretend to speak out against the current corrupt leaders. Whigs are no better than Tories. “The English patriot commonly is nothing more than an ambitious actor whose efforts are directed to putting himself in the place of the ministers he decries.”175 England’s commerce, once its mark of praiseworthy distinction, has degenerated to the point where “the passion to enrich oneself changes into an epidemic. . . . Such is, Oh Britons!, the cause of your misfortunes, of the misery you experience despite the riches of two worlds which arrive without interruption at your ports.”176 The uncontrolled national debt, argued Holbach as had Hume and Adam Smith, is a powerful indicator of how the island nation has lost its way.177 It is possible for commerce to elevate everyone, to distribute riches more equally and spread aisance to all;178 in England, however, “commerce enriches but few citizens and leaves the others in misery!” Holbach condemned England because of “the multitude of unfortunates found in the richest nation in Europe.”179 As the 1770s approached, Helvétius found himself expressing considerable worries about France. All the more formidable were Holbach’s

72 Republicans Before the Republic concerns for the future because in his estimation even England, once the beacon of hope for the philosophes, had lost its way. ** Not simply what Holbach thought but how he thought comes into sharper focus when compared to Helvétius. Both authors pursued a typical move of the French Enlightenment in attempting to forge an alliance between self-interest and virtue. But where Helvétius’s efforts in this matter satisfied no one, least of all his allies, Holbach set forth a synthesis with which his comrades could feel comfortable. The other remarkable difference is that the modern theory of natural rights and a social contract is found nowhere in De l’Esprit or De l’Homme but was prominently featured in the many publications of Holbach. Both in his thoughts about self-love and in his reflections on the social contract Holbach demonstrated that his version of republican thought was distinctively modern in conceptualization. His was a natural rights republicanism, rendered governable by implementing schemes for the constructive usage of self-interest. Helvétius had called for legislation that would make it in the immediate, sensual interest of all to immerse themselves in an ethos of civic virtue. Enjoyment always comes first according to him; hence, in a properly constructed republic, legislation should assure that enjoyment and virtue would be one and the same. Holbach likewise championed a nonrepressive morality: “Let no one say again that virtue demands sorrowful sacrifices.”180 Properly understood, “virtue consists not in scorn of riches, grandeurs, power, not in flight from pleasures, not in self-abnegation or renunciation of society. . . . Morality proves that only in following virtue will we be able to obtain true pleasures.”181 But where Helvetius always needed the legislator, an external force, to explain why anyone would seek his or her self-interest in common with others, where he likewise posited a fixed and eternal hyper-individualism alongside a view that we are nothing except what the environment has made us, Holbach avoided all such unsatisfactory, implausible, and inconsistent formulations. As we have observed, Helvétius reduced even the seemingly noblest conduct to our relentless quest to serve narrow self-interest – our perpetual search for physical pleasure. Small wonder, then, that he often displays sympathy for the arch-individualist Hobbes. Yet he also invokes Locke’s tabula rasa and drives it to a deterministic conclusion by proclaiming that the environment makes us precisely and completely whatever we are. One way to force to the surface the difference between Helvétius and Holbach on self-interest is to compare their views of sociability. In a chapter titled “On Sociability” Helvétius objected that it has been treated as an “innate principle.” Nature (that is, physical sensibility) is what is given; society is invented to serve self-interest. “Interest and need are the principle of all sociability” he repeatedly affirms and cites Hobbes favorably.182 Holbach’s contrary position is that we are social beings by our

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very nature and our individualism is itself a social product, not something naturally given. Some societies are far more individualistic than others; all important is the socio-political environment, which comes first and is not invented. If Mandeville, remarked Holbach, reduced all our most worthy actions to narrowly self-interested motives, that was because he was the product of a country, England, wherein individuals are solely preoccupied with enhancing their riches.183 In the same vein is Holbach’s treatment of La Rochefoucauld. Whereas Helvétius had praised the Maximes for presenting an accurate portrayal of humans at all times and places, Holbach suggested that it was the vile court alone that had furnished La Rochefoucauld with his models.184 The contrasting opinions Helvétius and Holbach expressed about Montesquieu’s famous treatise are revealing. Twice in De l’Esprit Helvétius hailed the author of De l’Esprit des Lois as “the illustrious Président de Montesquieu.”185 In De l’Homme, however, he wrote “if Montesquieu had not proposed to give each form of government a different principle of action [honor in monarchies, virtue in republics, fear in despotisms], he would have recognized the same in all. This principle is the love of power.”186 Some pages later he postulated, “There are only two forms of government, one good, the other bad; it is to these two types that I reduce all.”187 Underlying Helvétius’s reformulations of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois was an implicit replacement of what we might term “methodological collectivism” with “methodological individualism.” Only by adding together its individual human constituents could Helvétius understand anything collective in the socio-political world. In his words, “a nation is only the assemblage of the citizens who compose it.” The same is true of the “common interest”: it is “the assemblage of all the particular interests.” Happiness, too, national felicity, is “necessarily composed of all the particular felicities.”188 Montesquieu’s “sociological” account of the collective forces that shape and mold us was deliberately purged by Helvétius. Holbach had also read Montesquieu, and if he did not agree with him in all matters, he most certainly did confirm the view that no explanation of society and politics was viable without an account of what we would call the “political culture” of an age. On the rare occasion when Holbach explicitly addressed Helvétius, it was to deny his slogan “l’éducation peut tout.”189 What Holbach terms “the temperament of a nation” is a complex structure, composed of many historical inheritances, difficult for anyone to fathom, such that the best laid plans frequently go astray due to “unforeseen circumstances.”190 Successful reform comes with troubling side effects if it comes at all. Just as Helvétius had, Holbach sought to transform political studies into a branch on natural science;191 not surprisingly, however, he was more modest about what had so far been accomplished: “In spite of the knowledge in which we take pride, the science of government is as yet but little advanced.”192

74 Republicans Before the Republic Knowing the clergy were protecting their beliefs from criticism by calling them innate, not just Helvétius but Holbach and all the philosophes joined Locke in arguing that such supposedly a priori notions were actually acquired rather than given. Holbach was as hostile to the notion of a “moral instinct” as Helvétius or most any philosophe: “The man without culture, the savage, the man of the people, does not have this instinct,” which is in truth an “acquired habit” of civilized beings, wrote Holbach.193 The same is true of the notion of a “moral sense.” “Several modern philosophers,” such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, remarked Holbach, “give for a basis of the science of mores a pretended moral sense,” an innate benevolence. In response, Holbach contended that “Our sentiments for good and evil cannot be innate or anterior to experience.”194 Only over time do we acquire our moral ideas, and those of one time and place are not likely to match those of another, which means that it is to changing and contrasting circumstances, not eternal ideas, that we must turn for understanding our ethical predispositions. Helvétius had likewise attacked “les Shaftesburistes”195 and for exactly the same reason. Even conscience, conceded Holbach, so vital to his ethics, “far from being an innate quality or inherent to human nature, can only be the fruit of experience.”196 And on pity or compassion, a sentiment central to enlightened thought, Helvétius and Holbach agreed that such emotion was learned, developed through social interaction, rather than given.197 Yet Holbach, with his emphasis upon natural sociability, refused the efforts of Helvétius to reduce all our sentiments to conditioning and refused also the notion that we are born and ever remain selfish beings. What separated them is as remarkable, or more so, than what they shared. One of the foremost indications of their difference is that for Helvétius the only pleasures were physical in nature, while for Holbach “the pleasures named intellectual are the most grand of all.”198 Holbach held that “utility ought to be the sole rule and the unique measure of judgments concerning opinions, institutions, .  .  . and actions” – a view, he acknowledged, that exposed him to the claim that the philosophes had no argument against useful “secret crimes.”199 Certainly in the world of Helvétius the religious authorities had reason to file such a charge. By contrast, in Holbach’s moral universe we “need to love and esteem ourselves,” which is possible only if we “abstain even from hidden crimes.”200 Deeply socialized beings that we are, fulfilled only insofar as we do right and honor our duties, our social existence is one in which no wrong-doer can ever be truly happy.201 It is impossible for us to hide from ourselves because we always see ourselves in the mirror of others. “Whoever lives in society . . . cannot prevent seeing himself at every moment through the eyes of others; he recognizes a tribunal which, even despite his efforts, resides inside of him.”202 Shame is the fate of even the cleverest wrongdoer, proper pride and self-respect the reward for virtuous conduct even for persons living in a corrupt society.203

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In spite of his passionate commitment to forming civic beings, Helvétius never abandoned the premise that society is an external, artificially legislated imposition upon individual human beings. How far Holbach moved in the opposite direction comes sharply into focus when one considers that he, an out-and-out atheist and an excellent critic of the social abuses of his age, went so far as to proclaim, “social life is a religious act.”204 ** In the writings of Helvétius there are only rare and passing comments about natural rights or the sovereignty of the people, and such asides as may be found are isolated, never integrated into a larger philosophy. All the more readily, then, could Helvétius be confused with Bentham who famously designated natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts.” Exactly opposite was Holbach, whose writings constantly articulated a fully developed philosophy of inalienable natural rights and social contract. In setting forth his political philosophy as a strong affirmation of social contract theory, Holbach provided dramatic proof of the independence of his modern republicanism from classical republicanism. It is telling that he cited Hume’s essays on the origins of government, in which one lesson was that notions of social contract were alien to Greek and Roman thought.205 Consent, legitimacy, was never an issue for Aristotle or Cicero but was central to the social contract tradition. In Aristotle’s Politics, forms of government were what was of primary significance; but Grotius, a pioneer of the social contract, had explained that the question of obligation comes first, and the best government was whichever regime happened to be agreed upon in a particular nation. Holbach concurred that “no form of government is perfect” and “the same government does not agree with all peoples.”206 Holbach’s positions both on the classics and the social contract theory come into full view when the topic is slavery. To Aristotle, of course, many persons were born to be slaves, happy and fulfilled to serve their masters. Challenging the classical view, Grotius wrote “no humans are slaves by nature.” Similarly, Pufendorf ridiculed “the absurdity of that opinion, derived from the ancient Greeks, of some men being slaves by nature.” Up to this point Holbach, in common with all the philosophes, was in agreement with the early theorists of the social contract. The next move by Grotius and Pufendorf was, however, totally unacceptable to Holbach and company. After repudiating the classical defense of slavery, Grotius and Pufendorf postulated a new justification, one they derived from the notions of consent and contract. A prisoner of war or anyone sufficiently desperate, Grotius and Pufendorf agreed, could sign away his or her freedom, entering into a legitimate contract of perpetual enslavement. And “there is nothing a master is not permitted to do to his slave,” declared Grotius, no torture too inhumane.207

76 Republicans Before the Republic To structure his thoughts about the social contract, Holbach sided with Locke’s formulations and rejected those of Locke’s predecessors, Grotius and Pufendorf. Where they settled right by fact, ought by is, sanctioning whatever exists, Holbach grounded his thinking, as Locke had, in the notion that history is often a record of oppression and cannot be substituted for thinking on our own about right and wrong. Useless at best, extremely harmful at worst, are “speculators who ceaselessly confound fact with right, what is with what ought to be,”208 affirmed Holbach. In an apparent reference to England, he held that neither charters nor concessions can be the foundation of the social contract, which in truth always exists and is always sanctioned by reason even if unrecognized.209 In Holbach’s estimation, especially devastating in its consequences was the claim of Grotius and others that no social practice could be wrong if it were universal in historical application. Uncompromising was Holbach’s counterargument that “if one formed a morality according to the things practiced by the different nations of the earth, there is not a vice or crime that does not become legitimate or praiseworthy.”210 Holbach also repudiated the claims of Grotius and Pufendorf that our natural rights are alienable and have in fact been alienated; far from it, our rights are inalienable, said Holbach repeating Locke. We could not possibly alienate them, even if we wished, because they are inherent to our humanity. Sometimes, not always, Holbach’s commitment to the social contract lent itself to possibly radical politics. Against Grotius and Pufendorf who held that the contract was signed long ago, never to be reconsidered, Holbach’s contract “renews itself at every instant.”211 The people, who cannot forfeit their sovereignty, should create a government to serve their will and have the right to change it if it fails them. At his most bold Holbach urges that we “make experiments for posterity . . . and flatter ourselves with the consoling hope that our descendants . . . will one day be wiser and happier than us.”212 If the populace is to learn to stand on its feet, if it is to rise above the “perpetual infancy” to which it has been reduced by religion and corruption, educators must “pour into their souls” all the knowledge needed to become independent-minded, good citizens.213 Contempt is the only appropriate response for Filmer: “kings are not fathers of peoples; peoples are fathers of kings.”214 Because promulgated laws frequently violate the law of nature, “knowledge of the human heart and of natural rights is indispensable for a judge.”215 In his eagerness to include rather than exclude, Holbach asks that the rights of the infirm be remembered.216 In his eagerness to exclude rather than include, he asserts in La Politique naturelle that “hereditary nobility can only be regarded as a pernicious abuse.” He likewise argued in Système social that “the prejudice of birth, so strongly rooted in a great number of peoples, is one that by its consequences becomes most deadly.” More concern for talent, less for inherited rank, is sorely needed at court and throughout society. “Virtue is not transmitted with blood;

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merit is a personal quality,” he wrote in La Morale universelle, adding that one necessary reform is for the government to distribute honors and distinctions, including non-hereditary titles of nobility, to those who have earned them. Abolition of primogeniture would be a good first step.217 If sometimes Holbach sounds radical, it is no less true that often he is preoccupied with establishing his conservative credentials. Despite his hostility to hereditary nobility, he upholds social inequality and hierarchy in the strongest possible terms. “Inequality, far from harmful, contributes to the life and maintenance of society.”218 Accepting inequality in its naturally given form of differing abilities, we should assume different tasks, dividing labor and welcoming the benefits that accrue to the entire society. No less harmful than hereditary status is the mania for social climbing: “nothing is more sensible nor more advantageous in life than to remain in one’s sphere.” How unfulfilling is a restless society in which indigent nobility and opulent bourgeoisie battle for vanities, and the men of letters frequent the grands who despise them.219 One of the many faults of an unjust government is that it molds a society in which “each, dissatisfied with his place, wishes to put himself above his level.”220 In a just, or at least a not totally unjust society, “the [satisfied and] content man dreams rarely of leaving his sphere; he loves the profession of his father, to which education has habituated him since infancy.”221 Integral to Holbach’s defense of inequality and contentment with one’s social position was his morality of what might be called “my station and its duties.” “Each citizen is precious as soon as he fulfills the functions assigned to him by his rank.”222 Binding society together is “a chain of duties” from top to bottom of the social scale. In La Morale universelle he spells out chapter by chapter the duties adhering to every social role – masters, servants, spouses, magistrates, lawyers, among others. “All society is a concert whose charm depends on the parties composing it,” he concludes in gushing prose. What more could any man want than to be remembered as a “good father, faithful husband, sincere friend, esteemed citizen?”223 While the conservative strand in Holbach’s outlook was very genuine in its own right, it was also appreciated by him as a way to offset the potentially radical implications of his social contract theory. Rarely has a thinker so strongly advocated a potentially revolutionary philosophy while simultaneously expressing such deeply felt worry about revolution. “In politics as in medicine, violent remedies are always dangerous.” Fury drives revolutions, and fury has “often caused durable calamities.” Therefore society “ought to tolerate wrongs for which it knows no remedies.”224 Yet, at the same time, true to his Lockean premises, he did concede that “despotism obliges us to search in revolutions for necessary resources, cruel and perilous.” Liberty can be the unexpected outcome of revolutions, no matter that they are “rarely the work of reason.”225 The revolution Holbach could unequivocally advocate was a “very desirable

78 Republicans Before the Republic revolution in the minds of the masters of the earth.”226 Somehow, some way, in a better future political leaders and the public might eventually reach maturity if philosophes succeed in their program of Enlightenment. The necessity of consent to taxation227 and for an army national rather than royal might then be recognized as essential,228 and the king might willingly embrace the role of roi citoyen.229 The goal of a republic emerging from monarchy was clear; the means were not and could not be. Holbach’s achievement was that he had made his case for a modern republic by employing modern thought – philosophies of self-love and the social contract. Self-interest and virtue are one, he contended, if only we recognize that we are social beings fulfilled through one another; a non-repressive civic virtue comes naturally in a properly constituted republic. Arguments about self-interest were one central modern feature of his thinking; the other was the social contract. Dominating his pages was the theory of the social contract in its most modern, Lockean form. Throughout his works he constantly articulated doctrines of inalienable natural rights, government by the consent of the governed, and a constitutional arrangement that may be reconsidered whenever the public deems necessary.

Saige De l’Homme, the bulky tome authored by Helvétius, was published in 1773. Five of the most important ethical and political volumes of Holbach were published from 1770 to 1776. As for Guillaume-Joseph Saige, his two relatively brief pamphlets appeared in 1770 and 1775. However different in format, the works of Saige share some striking similarities with the almost simultaneous publications of Helvétius and Holbach. They had examined the possibility that France might become, as Montesquieu had said of England, a republic hidden under the form of a monarchy. Saige refers to France throughout its history, its kings notwithstanding, as la République. Both Helvétius and Holbach had called for a moral and political catechism. The second of Saige’s pamphlets bears the title Catéchisme du Citoyen and is written in the straightforward questionand-answer form typical of religious catechisms, by which the clergy had spread their teachings to the many and by which the new catechism would teach lessons in citizenship to the same audience. Saige’s first essay was titled Caton, ou Entretien sur la Liberté et les Vertus Politiques; his second Catéchisme du Citoyen ou Élémens du Droit Public Français. In the first, his historical references are mainly to ancient Rome; in the second, to the constitutional history of France. In neither, however, does history come first in his thought; the theory of the social contract is primary in his reflections, and history must answer to the contract, not the contract to history. Ought comes first; is illustrates but does not dictate his argument. Grotius and Pufendorf do not matter because

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Saige’s is as uncompromising a theory of the social contract as was that of Holbach. There is, nevertheless, one important difference between the social contract of Holbach and that of Saige. Locke inspired Holbach; Rousseau inspired Saige. Throughout Saige’s essays the presence is felt of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality and Social Contract. Saige began his Caton with a fairly standard republican account of the downfall of the Roman republic. Cicero and Cato are engaged in dialogue in Saige’s text at the moment when the greatest republic of antiquity was about to surrender its integrity to Caesar triumphant. “The cause of all our woes,” sighs Cato, “is this immoderate ambition which makes us believe that we are the legitimate masters of the universe.”230 Cicero and Cato agree that Rome could have been the blessing of the city-states of Greece and Italy; all could have been reinvigorated by the powerful Roman republic. “Mutual confederation” instead of subjugation could have and should have been the Roman objective. Rome’s example might even have reached primitive peoples: “The Gauls and Germans, witnesses of the felicity we would have enjoyed, and respecting our power, would no doubt have attempted to imitate us.” Alas, instead of spreading freedom across the face of the earth, the Romans destroyed the liberty of the ancient world.231 Having deprived other city-states of their liberty, the aggressive Roman republic ended by destroying its own civic virtue. “When the riches of Asia were carried back to Rome, . . . the love of liberty and glory began to fade.” The republic in decline gave birth to Sulla, “that criminal citizen [who] gave corrupt souls the dangerous example of making oneself more powerful than the laws.” Roman legions, far from home, became the soldiers of Pompey or Caesar rather than the republic, and the death knell sounded for civic virtue and republicanism in the ancient world.232 Early in the essay the Cato figure, “passing quietly from particular observations on the decadence of our constitution to more general views, develops for us his ideas on the tight liaison of political virtues and liberty.” One of his concerns is to reinvigorate political education, reminding readers of the formidable achievement of Lycurgus, which should ever be recalled and emulated. “The nations the most renowned for their wisdom have established public education.” May the republic dedicate itself to inculcating “the liveliest love of the patrie”; may young people “from the moment of their birth learn the obligations owed to this tender mother.”233 One may conclude that in outlining his “more general views” Saige immersed himself in classical wisdom. But he did more, much more. From the outset he hinted at the distinctly modern theory of the social contract that soon came to dominate his thought, demoting the classics to lessons about political means and forms of government, while the social contract monopolized discussions of political principles. From the very beginning of his essay Saige has his Roman interlocutors speak about natural rights when they address the

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consequences of Roman aggression. “The heavens punished our ambition, avenging violated rights of nature, and condemned us to lose our liberty as a consolation to the peoples we reduced to slavery.”234 Obviously with an eye on his own time, Saige slightly later in his essay takes up the case of a monarch who would transform his miserable, downtrodden, and disheartened subjects into genuine humans. “He cannot hope to succeed in his project, if he does not begin by awakening in their exhausted hearts the original sentiment of their independence; that is, unless he recalls their rights which they have forgotten; rights that can never be banished because founded on the constitution of man.”235 Only after firmly grounding his proposals in the combination of principles of natural right and the republican practices needed to implement them does Saige believe his enlightened monarch could possibly succeed. “If he does not establish the foundation of his undertaking on the liberty of the nation, and if he does not begin by making citizens out of subjects, all of his efforts will be in vain.”236 As the essay unfolds Saige places such great emphasis on the social contract that it arguably becomes the dominant intellectual force in his presentation. “The social contract,” he affirms, “was the remedy by which sage men succeeded in ending disorder.” By this salutary institution wills and forces that disharmony had reduced to nullity acquired by their union a considerable energy and activity; the public power protected individual feebleness; the law placed rich and poor on the same level; each respected the rights of the other, and no one feared infringement upon his own. Such should at least have been the intention of the first people to pass from the state of nature into civil society.237 It was with a sense of urgency that Saige wrote his Caton. “Our Europe contains fewer free people than nations subject to arbitrary government,” he was convinced.238 The hereditary aristocracy has done more to enable than to thwart despotism.239 To save ourselves we not only need the social contract; we need it in the form presented by Rousseau, that “man of genius who has developed in recent times those very enlightened ideas which for so very long have been in the most profound obscurity.”240 Possibly Saige was under the influence of Rousseau’s First Discourse when he criticized “the crowd of useless arts, children of laziness,” and again when he spoke out against the equally blameworthy philosophers who undermine the religion that is essential to our social bonds.241 Definitely Saige was self-consciously seconding Rousseau when he distinguished between legislative and executive powers, a matter Rousseau had put “in the clearest possible light.” Legislation “is the expression of the general will,” and if even the wisest executives substitute their will, the result cannot be other than “sustained violence, which will always

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contradict first principles and violate the essential rights of humanity.”242 Magistrates must exercise authority over individuals, not the nation.243 On the question of representative government, Saige again followed Rousseau who said the English forfeited their liberty the moment they cast their votes for members of parliament. Saige confirmed Rousseau’s view: “peoples who have representatives possess as little freedom as those who are subjects of a despot, for the will of a nation can no more reside in four hundred men than in one.” As Rousseau had said, only a binding mandate could be legitimate, which would assure that officialdom can only register the will of their constituents. The general principle, Saige confirms, is that “nothing, in a true republic, can remove from the citizen . . . the right to make his voice heard in the affairs that concern him.”244 The very best of political arrangements accomplishes little for the cause of freedom, wrote Saige in agreement with Rousseau, if society remains divided between the few rich and the many poor. “No citizen,” Rousseau had affirmed in his Social Contract, “should be so opulent that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained to sell himself.” Saige was happy to paraphrase Rousseau’s words: “there should be no citizen sufficiently rich to be able to buy the liberty of his compatriots, and none reduced to such misery as to be tempted to sell his.” The government may intervene as necessary, thought Rousseau, to prevent such manifest injustice: “the right of each private individual to all his own resources is always subordinate to the community’s right to all.” Saige similarly called for a polity in which “the laws have care to limit and divide possessions, to prevent accumulation in a few houses.”245 Saige’s Caton appeared a year before, his Catéchisme du Citoyen four years after many philosophes and spokespersons for the parlements sounded the alarm that Chancellor Maupeou had initiated despotism by eliminating the powers of those judicial bodies. A resident of Bordeaux, Saige was distraught that his city’s privileged nobility of the Robe had capitulated to Maupeou. It was therefore with a special sense of urgency that he wrote his Catéchisme, which may explain why from its very opening pages onward he championed the theory of the social contract in the strongest possible terms. Every person, Saige boldly asserted, has “an absolute power over his own being,” and “each individual of the human species being free and independent by natural right, his primitive state can only be modified by his freest and fullest will.” Whatever the origins of society and polity in historical fact, a “contract, express or tacit, is absolutely necessary to the formation of societies, to conserve the imprescriptible rights of the individuals who unite.” Unlike the contract sanctioned by Grotius or Pufendorf, we owe nothing contractually to the government that has been formed. “The parties to the contract are the mass of associates, for one part, each individual for the other”; there is no obligation to the government of our invention. The people are free and so is every person:

82 Republicans Before the Republic “Each individual of the human species being free and independent by natural right, his original state cannot be modified or altered except by his completely and entirely free will.” Laws must be expressions of the general will, their task being to sanction the “sacred and imprescriptible rights of humanity.” If officers, instead of executing laws, substitute their particular decisions, it is not only a right, it is a duty to refuse obedience. “There is nothing essential in the political body but the social contract and the exercise of the general will. . . . Thus the nation can create, destroy, and change all the magistrates of the state, modify the constitution, or annihilate it completely, in order to form a new one.”246 Everything Saige had to say about the social contract in his Catéchisme du Citoyen was consistent with his previous remarks in Caton, the only difference being that his rhetoric was more intense in the later work, more fully developed, more passionate, because Maupeou had given him good reason to worry. If there is one major conceptual difference separating the two pamphlets, it comes not in his treatment of the social contract but, rather, in his commentary about self-interest, selflove, amour-propre. In his first treatise he condemned all thinkers who reveled in philosophies of self-love. He damned the progeny of Democritus and Epicurus, those “vain reasoners who teach that amour-propre is the sole mover of all actions.” This “dangerous doctrine makes only too much progress among us; the passions it favors make numerous proselytes, and the low sentiments which are the natural outcome of these sophisms have taken the place of the virtues which rendered the ancient Romans illustrious.” Nowadays those under the spell of this philosophy regard outcries of love of country as “extravagances similar to those of chivalry.” We are encouraged to dismiss the greatest heroes of Rome on the grounds that “amour-propre was the secret source of the virtues immortalizing them.”247 Taking up the topic of self-love in his Catéchisme du Citoyen, Saige sounds a very different note. “To show the force and extent of our duties to country,” he now holds, “it suffices to say that they unite in the highest degree what we owe to ourselves, and what we owe to our neighbor.” Saige hails “this admirable union of amour-propre and humanity.” He also strives to demonstrate that the “general will” and self-love, now called an “innate sentiment,” benefit from an intrinsic alliance. “From where derives the necessary tendency of the general will to foster the happiness of society?”, he asks, and immediately offers a response in the manner of his question-and-answer catechism: “It derives from the love of self, a sentiment which, directing each individual towards his proper good, necessarily directs . . . any collection of individuals to their common advantage.”248 Here again, it is possible Saige was inspired by Rousseau, who was careful to affirm that the “general will” did not displace self-interest. Addressing the general will in the Social Contract, Rousseau had asked “why do all constantly want the happiness of each, if not

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because there is no one who does not apply this word each to himself, and does not think of himself as he votes for all?”249 Saige posits a favorable interpretation of self-love early in his catechism250 and returns to it later in that treatise, a marked and significant break with his earlier work, Caton. Yet by far his greater concern is his preoccupation with the theory of the social contract. As we have seen, he sets forth his philosophy of the social contract at considerable length and never conflates or compromises his version with those of Grotius and Pufendorf, who had turned to history to deradicalize the contract, taking “is,” the historical record, as their standard for “ought.” Nevertheless, it is quite noteworthy that in the Catéchisme du Citoyen Saige addresses French history at considerable length, albeit always on terms that do not contradict his social contract. If he could use French history to strengthen his case, he would. “The nation is the proprietor of the kingdom; the king is only the administrator,” wrote Saige, speaking in the idiom of the social contract. “The nation has the definitely incontestable right to the legislative power,” he added for emphasis. Without modifying his philosophy, he then entered a new consideration, historical in nature. “To these general and rational truths, let us add positive [historical] proofs that we draw from our primitive constitutions, from subsequent laws, from the history of our ancestors, and the tradition of the first centuries of our monarchy.”251 Not surprisingly, Saige called upon Tacitus, author of Germania, when he searched in ancient sources for confirmation that the earliest kings did not dictate the laws. As Tacitus had indicated, the first people who strode forward from the forest were free.252 It was the ambition of Saige to sketch the record of freedom ascendant during the earliest moments of French history, then repeatedly won and lost over the centuries, always highlighting history when he thought it duplicated the findings of the social contract, always reminding the reader that even at its worst, the historical constitution did not and could not overthrow the timeless constitution of inalienable natural rights. Painful though it was for Saige to record the decline of the legislative assemblies of the Franks, he found solace in the reign of Charlemagne, who reestablished national assemblies in their original purity. “This prince, friend of humanity, made his fellow citizens remember that they were free.” Not only did he restore freedom to his own people; he introduced other Europeans to the joys of liberty. “This era was the most brilliant epoch in the history of the nation. The French, filled with that ardor of courage which is the natural effect of liberty, extended their conquests across Europe.” To their everlasting glory, rather than “fighting to give themselves slaves, they shared their liberty with the peoples they vanquished.” Later kings such as Louis XI betrayed their office by imposing arbitrary rule. Such abuses “must be considered as matters of fact, which

84 Republicans Before the Republic can in no fashion demean right. Royal power must remain immutably fixed in the limits assigned under Charlemagne because this limitation was an act of the general will.”253 The threat of absolute monarchy, of course, would only arise later in French history. The more immediate loss of freedom, post-Charlemagne, came in the form of the rise of feudalism. “The nation was actually concentrated in the body of the barons and their noble vassals.” During the feudal period “the people played no role in legislation because they counted for nothing, and living in a veritable servitude and without any kind of property, were not thought to be part of the state.” Even when discussing this exceptionally depressing era of French history, Saige managed in spite of events to salvage a moment of hope. “This constitution, however unjust, however illegal it was, conserved nevertheless an image of ancient liberty. It was a republic of Seigneurs and Chevaliers.” No form of government, no social order, however reprehensible, could succeed in burying forever the social contract, which was always available for retrieval.254 Ever so slowly France recovered from the age of feudalism unrepentant. With the return of cities, now the realm of traders, unlike the ancient city of warriors, the commoners reclaimed much of the freedom that was always theirs by right. When the people, “by means of commerce and industry, left behind them the nothingness into which they had been plunged by the usurpations of the nobility, they recovered in legislation the participation unjustly denied them.” Saige designates the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteen centuries as a time of constitutionalism recovered. The Estates-General established itself, later to be joined by the parlements, as a safeguard of freedom. “Since this time, the nation has exercised by fact as well as right the legislative power.” What also serves the good cause is that its public figures have at their disposal in the realm of religion a Gallican tradition, permitting state authorities to oversee the church. “The church is enclosed within the state, and the citizen is anterior to the Christian.”255 Although his claims for the Estates-General and parlements are of great significance, Saige’s remarks about “the Communes or Third Estate” are quite simply astonishing. If they were not always included in the assemblies of the nation, that historical fact was overridden by the “imprescriptible right” to be seated, which was always theirs. Only after the “happy revolution” of their inclusion could the “general will” be meaningfully honored. Most remarkable of all, Saige’s claims for the Third Estate did not stop with inclusion; primacy alone sufficed. Members of the Third Estate, he announced, “were society itself, and the two other orders should only be considered as particular associations.” The Communes “form so many small republics in the breast of the grand Republic of the French nation.” Whereas clergy and nobility sit as individuals in

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the Estates-General, the Third Estate is a political body in its own right and is of manifestly greater significance than the other two “subordinate” estates. From historical hindsight it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Saige’s elevation of the Third Estate above the First and Second is a premonition of the French Revolution.256 ** Saige had much in common with Helvétius and Holbach. They wanted France to become a republic hidden under the form of a monarchy, and he believed France had always been a republic situated just below the surface of a monarchy, awaiting the moment to display itself for all to see. Their desire for a program of civic education, a political catechism, was his as well. If he did not share Helvétius’s avoidance of the topic of religion and had no use at all for Holbach’s atheism, he was at one with them in demanding that the Jesuits and all reactionary forms of Catholicism be banished from public life. And, of course, many of Saige’s formulations of inalienable natural rights and social contract republicanism unknowingly echo those of Holbach. There are also a number of noteworthy differences, which have as their common denominator the various formulations and the timing of Saige’s offerings that open the possibility that he was a precursor of the French Revolution. Unlike Helvétius and Holbach, who were willing to call upon Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, or the new monarch Louis XVI to implement their visions, Saige never sought to fulfill his program through the agency of an absolute monarch. The use of violence that Helvétius and Holbach abhorred was not explicitly forbidden by Saige. He ended Cato with the sentence, “May the tyrant fall, may the laws be avenged, and I shall die content.” His Catéchisme ends with a similar statement. He remarks that “an oppressive force has sapped the foundations of the constitution.” The weakened people, incapable of acting on their own behalf, are returned to the state of nature. “If in the general debasement there arises a courageous man who attempts to break the chains of his fellow citizens, his enterprise will carry, in the eyes of wisdom and humanity, the imprint of the most sublime virtue.”257 It is not immediately obvious that Saige shares the fear of revolution common to Helvétius and Holbach. Saige’s Catéchisme, written for the many, continued to circulate underground after being condemned by the authorities. It was reissued in 1787 and released several times in 1788. After speaking as early as 1775 in favor of “the rights of man and citizen,”258 he carried forward his republicanism of the 1770s to the very eve of the French Revolution. Perhaps his writings were no match in quantity or quality for those of Helvétius or Holbach, but he yielded nothing to them by way of constituting himself a noteworthy republican before the Republic.

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Notes 1. Keith Michael Baker’s account, “A Classical Republican in EighteenthCentury Bordeaux: Guillaume-Joseph Saige,” in Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), ch. 6, is excellent. I disagree, however, with his title. In my opinion his reading demonstrates decisively that Saige should not be called a “classical republican.” 2. Saige, Caton, ou Entretien sur la Liberté et les Vertus Politiques (London [Bordeaux], 1770), pp. 32–33. Hereafter cited as Cato. Helvétius, De l’Esprit (Paris: Fayard, 1988), p. 363. Holbach, Système Social in Oeuvres philosophiques, 1773–1790 (Paris: Coda, 2004), p. 159. 3. Holbach, Essai sur les Préjugés in Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: ALIVE, 1999), vol. 2, p. 26. 4. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 184. 5. Holbach, La Politique Naturelle (Paris: ALIVE, 2001), vol. 3, p. 379. 6. Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 310. 7. Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. 4, 20, 27, 53, 78, 282. 8. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, pp. 163–164. Helvétius, De l’Homme (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 88, 466n. 9. Quoted by D. W. Smith, Helvétius: A Study in Persecution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 165. 10. La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1977), no. 409. 11. Diderot, Réfutation de l’ouvrage d’Helvétius intitulé De l’Homme, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1875–1877), vol. II, p. 304. 12. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 98. 13. Ibid., p. 85. 14. La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, no. 312. 15. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 322. 16. Ibid., p. 315n. 17. Ibid., pp. 64, 65, 71, 76. 18. Ibid., pp. 9, 59, 268. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 248. 19. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 328. 20. Ibid., p. 301n. 21. Ibid., pp. 218, 313, 323. Helvétius, De l’Homme, pp. 141, 170, 175, 176. 22. Bentham, The Rationale of Reward (London: John & H. L. Hunt, 1825), Bk. III, ch. 1, p. 206. 23. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 175. 24. Ibid., p. 362. 25. Ibid., p. 277. 26. Ibid., p. 274. 27. Ibid., pp. 281–283. 28. Ibid., pp. 287–288. 29. Ibid., p. 202. 30. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 764n. 31. Ibid., p. 763n. 32. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 143. 33. Ibid., p. 429. 34. Ibid., p. 519. 35. Ibid., pp. 177, 479n. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 346n. 36. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 554. 37. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 511. 38. Ibid., p. 109.

Republicans Before the Republic 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

Ibid., p. 511. Ibid., pp. 340, 183. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 407. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 51. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, pp. 276, 364. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 372. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 337. Ibid., p. 365. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 773. Ibid., pp. 600, 774. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, pp. 291–292. Ibid., p. 28. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 768. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 370. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 338. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 456. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 363. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 340. Helvétius, De l’Esprit., p. 185. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 184. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 656. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, pp. 173, 174, 176. Ibid., p. 436. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 441. Helvétius, De l’Homme, 677–678, 681. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., pp. 177–178. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 148. Ibid., pp. 190, 389–390. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 120. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 305. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 431. Ibid., p. 202n. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 190. Helvétius, De l’Homme, pp. 128–129. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 139. Ibid., p. 325. Ibid., p. 151n. Helvétius, De l’Homme., p. 677n. Ibid., p. 243. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 529. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, pp. 317–319. Ibid., pp. 30–31. Ibid., p. 38. Helvétius, De l’Homme, pp. 592–593. Ibid., p. 583. Ibid., p. 588. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 33n. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 542n.

87

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93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 37. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 543. Ibid., p. 317. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 39n. Ibid., p. 37n. Ibid., p. 184. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 316. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, pp. 12, 363. Helvétius, De l’Homme, pp. 783, 797. Helvétius, De l’Homme, pp. 541, 550, 553–554, 665, 748. Ibid., pp. 551–552, 664, 665, 723, 729. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, p. 35n. Helvétius, De l’Homme, pp. 759, 766, 927. Holbach, Système social ou principes naturels de la morale et de la politique avec un examen de l’influence du gouvernement sur les moeurs, in Oeuvres philosophiques, 1773–1790 (Paris: Coda, 2004), pp. 29–30. Hereafter cited as SS. SS, pp. 51–52. La Politique naturelle ou Discours sur les vrais Principes du Gouvernement par un ancient Magistrat, in Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: Alive, 2001), vol. 3, p. 456. Hereafter cited as PN. La Morale universelle ou les Devoirs de l’homme fondé sur sa nature, in Oeuvres philosophiques, 1773–1790 (Paris: Coda, 2004), pp. 385, 511, 727. Hereafter cited as MU. MU, p. 327. SS, pp. 118–119. SS, p. 218. SS, pp. 193–194. MU, p. 642. Éthocratie ou le Gouvernement fondé sur la Morale, in Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: Alive, 2001), vol. 3, pp. 667–678. Le Christianisme Dévoilé ou Examen des principes et des effets de la religion chrétienne, in Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: Editions Alive, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 98–99. Hereafter cited as CD. SS, p. 45. PN, p. 507. PN, p. 490. PN, p. 407. PN, pp. 489–490. PN, p. 519. MU, p. 641. PN, p. 522. PN, p. 523. SS, pp. 204–205. PN, p. 500. PN, p. 525. Éthocratie, p. 651n. PN, p. 383. Éthocratie, p. 644. PN, p. 384. SS, p. 260. MU, p. 530. PN, p. 567. SS, p. 258. SS, p. 259. PN, p. 498. Éthocratie, p. 681.

106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

Republicans Before the Republic 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183.

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SS, p. 262. PN, p. 383. Éthocratie, p. 614. SS, pp. 258, 260, 277. CD, p. 77n. Le Contagion Sacrée ou Histoire naturelle de la Superstition, in Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: ALIVE, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 286–287. Hereafter CS. SS, p. 251. PN, p. 575. MU, pp. 652n, 772. MU, p. 662n. Éthocratie, 696n. MU, p. 704. Éthocratie, p. 637. SS, pp. 291, 292, 295–297. Holbach frequently spoke against adultery. SS, pp. 36, 96. Éthocratie, pp. 675, 676. He did favor divorce, SS, p. 295. SS, pp. 298–300, 302. SS, p. 253. SS, p. 282. Helvétius, De l’Homme, pp. 106–107. CS, p. 232. Système de la Nature ou des Lois de la Nature et du Monde Moral, in Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: Editions ALIVE, 1999), vol. 2, pp. 518, 521. Hereafter cited as SN. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, pp. 139, 148–151. SS, 79. SN, pp. 288, 614. MU, p. 608. CD, p. 70. Helvétius, De l’Homme, pp. 879–883. SS, p. 13. PN, pp. 433, 514. Éthocratie, pp. 636, 670–671. MU, p. 700. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 903. PN, p. 512. MU, p. 731. SS, pp. 243, 264. Éthocratie, p. 642. SS, p. 265. SS, p. 270. SN, pp. 375–376. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 12. Éthocratie, p. 597. Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism, France, 1770–1774 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 247. Ibid., pp. 387–388. Ibid., pp. 179n, 434. Ibid., p. 487. Ibid., pp. 552, 586. SS, pp. 141, 163, 164. MU, pp. 642–643. Éthocratie, p. 688n. PN, p. 522, 526. Éthocratie, p. 652n. MU, p. 765. SS, p. 102. Helvétius, De l’Homme, pp. 181–186. MU, p. 325n.

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184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207.

SS, p. 209n. MU, p. 724n. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, pp. 343, 361. Helvétius, De l’Homme, pp. 362n, 365. Ibid., p. 785. Helvétius, De l’Esprit, pp. 94, 252. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 659. MU, p. 680. PN, p. 506. SS, pp. 32, 38. SN, pp. 194–196, 502. PN, p. 515. MU, p. 361. SS, pp. 33–34. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 466. MU, p. 366. Helvétius, De l’Homme, p. 469. SS, pp. 68, 289. SN, p. 284n. SN, pp. 531–532. SN, p. 357. MU, pp. 367, 760. SS, pp. 92–93. SN, pp. 308–309, 545, 598–599. MU, pp. 766–767, 781. MU, p. 500. PN, p. 371n. PN, pp. 381–382, 485. SS, p. 137. Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), Bk. III, ch. 7, no. 1, pp. 690–691. Samuel von Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations (Clark, NJ: Law-book Exchange, 2005), Bk. III, ch. 2, no. 8, p. 230. PN, p. 543. SS, p. 130. SS, p. 35. PN, p. 351. PN, p. 564. PN, p. 513. SS, p. 133. PN, p. 449. MU, p. 608. PN, p. 442. SS, p. 284. MU, pp. 557, 671n. PN, p. 353. MU, p. 745. MU, p. 433. PN, p. 533. PN, pp. 427–428. MU, pp. 702, 781. PN, pp. 399, 384, 385. PN, p. 497. MU, p. 687. PN, pp. 405, 489. PN, pp. 435, 567. PN, p. 406. Saige, Caton, ou Entretien sur la Liberté et les Vertus Politiques (London, 1770), p. 14. Ibid., pp. 17–20, 73. Ibid., pp. 11, 12, 14. Ibid., pp. 24, 27–28.

208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213. 214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225. 226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233.

Republicans Before the Republic 234. 235. 236. 237. 238. 239. 240. 241. 242. 243. 244. 245. 246. 247. 248. 249. 250. 251. 252. 253. 254. 255. 256. 257. 258.

91

Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., pp. 32–33. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., pp. 97–98, 58–59. Ibid., pp. 62, 90, 92–93. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., pp. 48, 51, 89. Ibid., pp. 101–102. Catéchisme du Citoyen ou Élémens du Droit Public Français (Geneva, 1775), p. 11. Ibid., pp. 107. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, Bk. I, ch. 9. Bk. II, ch. 11. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. III (Paris: Pléiade, 1964). Caton, p. 64. Catéchisme du Citoyen, pp. 4, 8, 9, 12–13. Caton, pp. 37, 88, 42. Catéchisme du Citoyen, pp. 14, 68–69, 91. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, Bk. II, ch. 4. Catéchisme du Citoyen, p. 7–8. Ibid., pp. 16–17. Ibid., pp. 17, 92–93. Ibid., pp. 19, 20, 31. Ibid., pp. 20–21. Ibid., pp. 21, 22, 55, 64. Ibid., pp. 54–56, 80. Caton, p. 82. Catéchisme du Citoyen, p. 111. Ibid., p. 106.

4

Republics Without Borders Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Catharine Macaulay, and Thomas Paine

Although born in monarchical England, the political writers Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Catharine Macaulay, and Thomas Paine were republicans by conviction, theirs being a republicanism without borders – transatlantic, transcontinental, universal in scope. Natural rights republicans, advocates of the “rights of Mankind,” they championed not the particularistic historical rights of Englishmen but the rights of all humans. During their extensive travels, Macaulay and Paine carried their outlook in person to France and America and were well-received. American colonists immersed themselves in the writings of these and other English radical Whigs throughout the contentious period of the 1760s and 1770s, the years leading up to their revolutionary moment. When the colonists eventually chose to declare their independence, all four of our remarkable English figures dared speak out forcefully in favor of the American Revolution and the newly emerging American republic. Later, they publicly announced their belief that the French Revolution of 1789 was a continuation of the American Revolution of 1776 – both revolutions, in their estimation, meriting the support of everyone who adhered to the ideals of Enlightenment. Long before the French gave birth to a Republic of Virtue that degenerated into a Reign of Terror, these radical English Whigs – heirs of the Commonwealthmen tradition dating back to the seventeenth century, bold though they were – had felt it necessary to offset charges that they were wild-eyed destructive radicals seeking a repeat of the worst moments of the Puritan Revolution. A favorite defensive tactic was to wrap themselves in the protective coating of the well-established trope that Great Britain was a hybrid of monarchy and republic, a strategy permitting them to foster republican ideals while denying that they were attempting to overthrow or delegitimize the monarchy. One respected figure they could draw upon to serve their cause was Montesquieu, who in the Spirit of the Laws had remarked that England was a “republic hidden under the form of a monarchy.” Earlier in the century radical Whigs John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon had eulogized the English government as “the best republic in the world, with a prince at the head of

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it.” Later in the century Voltaire sounded much like Montesquieu when he spoke of “monarchies tempered by the republican spirit” and termed England a “republic under a king” (Chapter 2). The notion that monarchy and republic could be combined – and were in reality fused in British experience – had become so ingrained by the final years of the eighteenth century that even Edmund Burke, in an aside, endorsed it in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. After briefly denouncing Bolingbroke in his Reflections of 1790 as “a presumptuous and a superficial writer,” Burke went on to remark that “he has one observation which . . . is not without depth. . . . He says that he prefers a monarchy to other governments because you can better ingraft any description of republic on a monarchy than anything of monarchy upon the republican forms.”1 In his 1791 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Burke added that both in England and France he had no objection to infusing republican elements into their respective monarchies.2 Even the most radical of the radicals, Tom Paine, in his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, identified the House of Commons as “the republican part of the constitution.”3 We may draw the inference that radical Whigs, Real Whigs, Commonwealthmen, had good reasons in the latter half of the eighteenth century to believe the public was well prepared for their efforts to breathe a republican spirit into the monarchical body politic. With the exceptions of a pamphlet Catharine Macaulay penned in 1770 and a brief comment by Richard Price in 1778,4 the radical Whigs on whom we focus were not engaged in polemical exchanges with Burke until the onset of the French Revolution. Before 1790, if there was a formidable thinker with whom they sometimes strove to come to terms, it was David Hume, who was conservative where they were radical and as eager to deflate political rhetoric as they were to turn ideals into reality – hence his six-volume History of England became the target of Macaulay’s eight-volume account of the past. Burke they frequently dismissed as a writer far more dedicated to offering polished and emotion-provoking prose than coherent thinking; Hume they felt compelled to take seriously. Very convenient for their purposes was that a number of significant commentators identified Hume as a republican, with the consequence that Joseph Priestley was in good company when he wrote that Hume “seems particularly fond of this kind of government.”5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Baptiste Suard called Hume a republican in the 1760s.6 Hume himself in 1741 affirmed that England’s government was a merger of monarchy and republic, and he ventured so far as to suggest the predominance of the republican element.7 Years later, in his History of England, he continued to speak of “the republican part of the constitution.”8 Oddly enough the radical Whigs were in a position to annex Hume the quasi-republican, had they so desired, should they grow tired of refuting Hume the conservative anti-republican. Until the excesses of the French Revolution, they could safely pursue their objectives by placing

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their strongest republican commitments under a monarchical veneer, Paine alone proclaiming himself from the outset the uncompromising enemy of monarchies. By no means did Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France defeat Price, Priestley, Macaulay, and Paine. They more than held their own in their responses to Burke’s polemic. What did defeat them was events, the rise of the murderous regime of Robespierre. Both Macaulay and Price died in 1791, early enough to avoid witnessing the bloody events that would soon take place. Priestley, living until 1804, was a victim of the reactionary politics that coalesced under the leadership of William Pitt the Younger, and as early as 1792 he had to listen to Edmund Burke charge that the Unitarians, with whom Priestley identified, “as a party, . . . are infinitely mischievous: see the declarations of Priestley and Price.”9 Thereafter, when his house was burned, Priestley decided to seek protection by accepting an invitation to reside in America. As always Paine’s story was the most dramatic. Barely escaping the guillotine, he nevertheless stayed in France until 1802, trying against the odds to save the Revolution. At long last, he returned to America only to discover that the Federalist party hysterically portrayed him as a dangerous fanatic in politics and an atheist in religion, the better to attack the administration of the president he admired and they hated, that of Thomas Jefferson. To protect themselves from the vitriol of the Federalists, the Jeffersonians distanced themselves from Paine, who took refuge in drink. History, as written in the wake of the French Revolution, was not as fair-minded as it might have been in accounting for our foursome. They did, however, enjoy considerable success during their lifetimes in the world of public discussion of politically charged topics, each exceptionally talented both in the art of pamphleteering and in writing longer, more systematic works. Their achievements in setting forth a vision of modern republicanism and – especially in Paine’s case – of reaching an audience of considerable size were remarkable and merit re-examination and appreciation.

Richard Price For a single statement summarizing much of the political philosophy that Richard Price called upon to deal with events in England, America, and France, we likely can do no better than this: “The principles on which I have argued form the foundation of every state as far as it is free, and are the same with those taught by Mr. Locke.” To offer a complete overview of his political thought we must, however, take notice of another sentence in which he binds together “Milton, Locke, Sidney.”10 As a Commonwealthman, Price had republican sympathies, yet he was not at all enamored of the Roman republic’s record of imperialism, oppression of provinces, social wars, and slavery.11 His republican thoughts, like those

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of Sidney and Milton in the preceding century, were expressed in terms of natural rights republicanism – the theory of the social contract, which, as Hume correctly observed, was foreign to classical thought.12 It is well worth noting how faithfully Price availed himself of Locke’s political thought; how his writings abound in forceful reproductions of all the great themes of the Second Treatise of Government. Seemingly he cannot speak out too often in the name of “the rights of humanity,” “the rights of mankind,” our “natural and unalienable rights.”13 Again, much like Locke, he is eager to affirm that “free governments are the only governments which are consistent with the natural equality of mankind.”14 Government is based on “common consent” and is a “trust” – Locke’s exact word – rightfully lasting only so long as the governors faithfully perform their duties.15 “Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the doctrine which some have taught with respect to the omnipotence of parliaments.”16 Under any and all regimes the duty of the rulers is the same: “A government is, or ought to be, nothing but an institution for collecting and carrying into execution the will of the people.”17 It is the people who are sovereign, not the king, not the parliament, not the king-in-parliament. Ever attentive to the legitimizing “principles” of government, Price is far less preoccupied with “forms” of government – monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or mixed. Exactly why is not explicit, but one compelling reason may be that he is a powerful proponent of the social contract tradition, which by its very nature downgraded to secondary significance the classical Aristotelian and Polybian discussion of governmental forms. In this regard the pioneering social contract theorist Hugo Grotius had shown the way: “A people,” he wrote, “can select the form of government it wishes; and the extent of its legal right is not to be measured by the superior excellence of this or that form of government . . . but by its free choice.”18 It is not surprising, then, to hear Price say “my intention . . . has been merely to show what is requisite to constitute a state or a government free, and not at all to define the best form of government.” “All its different forms are no more than so many different modes in which they choose to direct their affairs, and to secure the quiet enjoyment of their rights.”19 Price readily appreciated the thought Benjamin Rush shared with him in 1786 about the American Revolution: “we have only finished the first act of the great drama,” wrote Rush. “We have changed the forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a Revolution in our principles.”20 Price and Rush agreed that principles trump forms. Also noteworthy is that Price not only reproduced Locke’s thoughts on children and parental authority but transformed those passages of the Second Treatise into a daring political statement. As Locke had, Price stressed the obligation of parents to safeguard the natural rights of their children during their early years, but then demanded, along with Locke, that once the offspring have attained “a capacity for judging for

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themselves,” they must be permitted to become “independent agents” in charge of their own destiny. Gratitude and respect are owed by offspring to parents; obedience is not, suggested Price in a paraphrase of Locke. Next, politicizing Locke’s familial message, he proceeded to suggest that a time comes when a “parent state,” such as England, must realize that its “child,” America, has developed to maturity and deserves to be free. So readily did Price’s argument flow from Lockean premises that Tom Paine, another offspring of Locke, in the same year, 1776, similarly affirmed that “the colonies come of age.”21 Unlike Grotius and Pufendorf before him, who wished above all to avoid turmoil, Locke had sanctioned a right to revolution, while warning that it should not be invoked too often. “Revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in publick affairs,” he explained. Only if there is “a long train of abuses” should the people stir to action.22 Removing the Stuarts from the throne, Locke believed, would be adequate; no further revolutions should ever be undertaken unless absolutely necessary. Initially Price seemingly concurred, writing that “without [obedience] a community must fall into a state of anarchy that will destroy those rights and subvert that liberty which it is the end of government to protect.” However, in the very next paragraph he goes beyond Locke, lamenting that “the rebellion of Kings against their people has been more common and done more mischief than the rebellion of people against their Kings.” Elsewhere he complains that “mankind are naturally disposed to continue in subjection to that mode of government, be it what it will, under which they have been born. . . . He who will examine the history of the world will find there has generally been more reason for complaining that [the people] have been too patient than that they have been turbulent and rebellious.” Price was far more willing than Locke to sanction revolution. The sovereign people always have the right to enforce or renegotiate their social contract, by whatever means is necessary.23 As a dissenting minister, excluded on religious grounds from Oxford, Cambridge, and Parliament, Price was careful to offset his radicalism with displays of restraint. Offered American citizenship and invited to emigrate to the new republic, he declined despite his considerable ties to the revolutionaries on the other side of the Atlantic and sympathy for their republican cause.24 The only official honor he accepted from Americans was membership in the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia. Exchanging letters with Americans involved no risk, and so it happened that Price, perhaps more than any other English radical, maintained a wide network of correspondence with Americans. He deemed Benjamin Franklin a dear friend and enjoyed a correspondence with him that ended only with Franklin’s death. When Jefferson temporarily left Paris to sojourn in London, he and Price struck up a friendship that Jefferson carried back to the Continent. Although he championed the Americans and welcomed their company, Price nevertheless protected himself

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and his radical Whig comrades such as Joseph Priestley from charges of disloyalty by continuing to proclaim himself an obedient British subject. Quite obvious to Price was that he should avoid the label “republican,” which the establishment Whigs sought to pin upon those who dared question them. On one occasion he suggested that Britain’s political arrangements were too admirable for her to experiment with a republican alternative: “so far am I from preferring a government purely republican that I look upon our own constitution of government as better adapted than any other to this country, and in theory excellent.”25 If, in the foregoing passage, Price indicated that Britain was too good to bother with republicanism, in another work he complicated the matter by suggesting his country was not good enough: “I do not mean to express a general preference for a republican constitution of government. There is a degree of political degeneracy which unfits for such a constitution. Britain, in particular, consists too much of the high and the low (of scum and dregs) to admit of it.”26 Whether Price was truly distancing himself from republicanism is questionable. What is certain is that he realized he could not explicitly enroll under a republican banner. Much the same ambiguity may be found in his comments on the British Constitution. He sought to win favor by praising it to the sky as did everyone in the eighteenth century, but that did not prevent him from sharply criticizing the government in the name of saving the Constitution from the ill-considered actions of the political class. As with his comments on republics, so with those on the English Constitution, Price sometimes appears to safeguard and even to promote his radicalism in the course of propounding an ostensibly conservative message. Montesquieu praised the British Constitution in the Spirit of the Laws; Blackstone did the same in his Commentaries; so did Jean Louis Delolme in The English Constitution, which in its English translation contained none of the French edition’s complaints about rotten boroughs and infrequent elections. Price dutifully added his voice to the celebratory chorus in an early work, Britain’s Happiness, and the Proper Improvement of It (1759). Effusive in his praise, Price referred to England as “a land where, peace, plenty, knowledge and liberty abound and flourish. A land which has the best constitution of government, the best laws, the best king and the best religion in the world.”27 During the years of the American Revolution, Price continued to express admiration for the theory of the Constitution, its “general frame and principles,” while criticizing its practice and calling for much-needed reforms. Changes such as much shorter terms for parliamentarians would have to be sanctioned, and “all orders” would need to be included before he would be “less disposed to complain of the injustice done . . . to the greatest part of the kingdom by depriving them of one of their natural and unalienable rights” – the right to fair representation.28 Later, he reiterated his point: “the most important instance of the imperfect state in which the Revolution [of 1688] left

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our constitution, is the inequality of our representation. . . . You should remember that a representation in the legislature of a kingdom is the basis of constitutional liberty in it, and of all legitimate government, and that without it a government is nothing but a usurpation.”29 In all likelihood nothing could be more pitiful than the repeated insistence of the British government that the defective system of representation at home proved that the Americans had no cause to complain that they were inadequately represented. “We submit to a parliament that does not represent us, and therefore they ought. How strange an argument is this?”30 Outright corruption of Parliament was the problem. Had not Blackstone correctly warned that if ever one of the three branches were lost, “there would soon be an end of our constitution,” asked Price.31 Had not Hume written that “an absolute monarchy is the easiest death, the true euthanasia of the British constitution?”32 What Price feared was that the corruption of the government – king and ministers filling parliamentary seats with their lackeys – might be reaching the point of intractability. Price continued to express faith in the Constitution at the same time that he warned of its possible demise. “The government of this country . . . is so well balanced, and the institutions of our common law are so admirable and have taken such deep root, that we can bear much decay before our liberties fall. Fall, however, they must, if our public affairs do not soon take a new turn.”33 America inspired him with hope for England. “We are not maintaining but violating our own constitution in America,” he had warned;34 with the arrival of 1776 he wrote optimistically that “the liberty of America” might prove “the means of restoring to us our almost lost constitution.”35 After the Revolution he affirmed that “the late war . . . did great good by disseminating just sentiments of the rights of mankind and the nature of legitimate government, by exciting a spirit of resistance to tyranny.” It was “a revolution by which Britons themselves will be the greatest gainers, if wise enough to improve properly the check that has been given to the despotism of their ministers, and to catch the flame of virtuous liberty which has saved their American brethren.”36 As a political thinker it is Price’s writings on America and its revolution that are especially prominent. To his mind, the American Revolution and its republic were without borders, models beckoning others to follow. “Next to the introduction of Christianity among mankind, the American revolution may prove the most important step in the progressive course of improvement,” he proclaimed in 1785.37 Much to their credit, the Americans had understood that the question was “not what jurisdiction over them precedents, statutes, and charters give, but what reason and equity, and the rights of humanity give.”38 Earlier in his career, Price had accepted the claim that the British empire was enlarging the sphere of freedom across the globe. Throughout the turbulence of the years preceding the revolution, he and other English radicals hoped for reconciliation

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and favored the proposal suggested both by them and the colonists – that the Americans would not be taxed but would agree to export raw materials to Britain and import English manufactured goods.39 With the dawn of the Revolution, Price was no longer satisfied with an accommodation based on commerce, and soon found himself writing repeatedly in favor of the ideals of natural rights, consent, and social contract that the Americans championed in their pamphlet literature. England, he was certain, had abandoned the cause of freedom; “a nation, once the protector of liberty in distant countries and the scourge of tyranny, [had been] exchanged into an enemy to liberty, engaged in endeavoring to reduce to servitude its own brethren.”40 The torch of freedom had passed from British to American hands. Almost everything American was admirable and a welcome contrast to England. “In America we see a number of rising states in the vigor of youth, inspired by the noblest of all passions, the passion for being free, and animated by piety. Here we see an old state, great indeed, but inflated and irreligious, enervated by luxury, encumbered with debts, and hanging by a thread.”41 Admittedly not every American practice merited praise; slavery, the one American sin, must be abolished. “Till they have done this, it will not appear they deserve the liberty for which they have been contending.”42 While the worst of American sins, slavery, should not be forgotten or excused, the best of that country should prove inspirational in England, on the Continent, everywhere. Peering across the ocean, Price marveled, both during and after the American Revolution, at the sight of “a rising empire, extended over an immense continent, without bishops, without nobles, and without kings.”43 When speaking of America, Price dared place his republican sympathies on full display. Religion was one of the realms in which he believed the Americans distinguished themselves. Dissenters in England could hope for reluctant toleration at best; America, by contrast, was a land of dissenters. True, he acknowledged, religious tests were unfortunately enshrined in several state constitutions, but the overall picture was uplifting. “An experiment is now making by our brethren on the other side of the Atlantic of the last consequence, and to which every friend of the human race must wish success. There a total separation of religion from civil policy has taken place.” As a consequence, the door to public life is open to able Dissenters, the public realm enriched, conscience respected, and religion rescued from contamination by the political authorities.44 The social structure of America is another of its major advantages over England. “Old countries consist, generally, of three classes of people, a gentry; a yeomanry; and a peasantry. The Colonies consist only of a body of yeomanry supported by agriculture, and all independent and nearly upon a level.” The larger pattern is that “free governments are the only governments which are consistent with the natural equality of mankind,” and America exemplifies what it is to have a free, equal, and triumphant

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middle class. Human happiness and an able citizenry, he maintained, are found far more frequently in a middling than a hierarchical society. “It is not in the high ranks of life, or among the great and mighty, that we are to seek wisdom and goodness. . . . They are to be found chiefly in the middle ranks of life.”45 Not only was it the middling members of society whom Price appreciated; also worthy of admiration in his estimation were societies in the middling stage of history. “Our American Colonies, particularly the northern ones, have been for some time in the happiest state of society or in that middle state of civilization, between its first rude and its last refined and corrupt state.”46 So he affirmed in 1776, and in 1785 he repeated, that best by far was “the middle state between the savage and the refined, or between the wild and the luxurious state. Such is the state of society in Connecticut and some others of the American provinces.” His fear was that “a state of society so happy will not be of long duration.”47 Early in his career he remarked on “the plenty and opulence we [in England] enjoy” and was proud that “our commerce is extended from one end of the earth to the other.”48 It is not obvious that in his later career, when he began to have second thoughts, he abandoned altogether the dream that commerce, if properly maintained, could spread enlightenment. Whatever his eventual misgivings, one form of commerce he always greatly admired was that located in “those inland parts [of America] where agriculture gives health and plenty,” and he gave voice to his hope that the new nation’s economy would continue as long as possible to be based on farming and local trade.49 In his admiration of the middle state of civilization and worry that advancements of refinement are often accompanied by corruption, he shared company with various other significant figures of the Enlightenment, including Helvétius, Holbach, and Diderot.50 Of one thing we may be certain: it was not a concern for the civic virtue of the classics that shaped Price’s outlook and concerns when he addressed commerce or any other pressing concern. For Roman history he usually had no use, nor does he bother to cite classical authors when setting forth his own views. Or if he does occasionally cite Roman history, it is only to assert that the Romans in subduing others were in consequence themselves subdued, their liberty lost in the course of destroying the liberty of other republics.51 His “zeal for virtue” could not be more ardent, but his is a Christian, not a classical understanding of virtue, his virtue having everything to do with “the everlasting kingdom of Jesus Christ.” Our desire for redemption in the next world is what should inspire efforts to act as civic, moral beings in this world. In his words, “He that expects to be a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem ought to be the best citizen of this world.”52 Uncompromisingly committed to freedom of conscience, he has no affection for a classical or neo-classical collectivist education forcing us to be free. “The end of education . . . should be to

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teach how to think, rather than what to think.”53 Not the pagan republicanism of Greece or Rome but that of Christian and revolutionary New England was what impressed Price.54 Despite his doubts about England’s future, Price managed to hold on to his view that history is a record of progress. Certainly his misgivings on this score were sometimes substantial, as when he suggested that “probably we are gone too far and corruption has struck its roots too deep to leave us much room for hope.”55 Venality “has poisoned the springs of public virtue among us.”56 Nor can any consolation be derived from the record of history: “the history of the world is but little more than a recital of the oppressions and rapines of men entrusted with the powers of government.”57 Yet, in spite of such potentially overwhelming worries, Price on most occasions set forth an optimistic view of relentless progress. “One generation thus improved communicates improvement to the next, and that to the next, till at last a progress in improvement may take place rapid and irresistible.”58 All the more did he believe in progress when he concluded that Providence was on display in the events of the American Revolution: “I think I see the hand of Providence in the late war working for the general good. . . . The world has hitherto been generally improving. Light and knowledge have been gaining ground, and human life at present, compared with what it once was, is much the same that a youth approaching to manhood is compared with an infant.”59 Envisioning the millennium, Price awaited the moment when “the kingdom of the Messiah [would] become universal. Reason and Scripture lead to this expectation.”60 Of all Price’s political writings, it is his relatively brief A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) for which he is best known because it served as Burke’s target in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Written to commemorate the centennial of England’s Glorious Revolution, Price also addressed the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. “After sharing in the benefits of one Revolution, I have been spared to be a witness to two other Revolutions, both glorious.” Praiseworthy as an introduction to later revolutions, the English revolution nevertheless did have serious defects that he wanted the revolutions of his day to remedy. The inequality of representation following the revolutionary settlement in England, the failure to grant full equality and inclusion to Protestant Dissenters, and the corruption of parliament were major shortcomings still awaiting resolution a century later. It was the “principles” of the Revolution that were admirable, principles including “the right to choose our own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to frame a government for ourselves.”61 These principles, he explained, were an inheritance drawn from the likes of Locke, Sidney, Milton, and Turgot. Under the terms emanating from the events of 1688 and the agreements of 1689, it was understood that “civil governors are properly the servants of the public, and a King is no more

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than the first servant of the public,” subject to removal at the wish of the people.62 Price’s sermon reached its climax in rhetoric conjuring up images of “darkness” and “light.” What Enlightenment meant to him was dissemination of the “Religion of Benevolence” across the globe, matched by universal recognition of the “rights of humanity.”63 The ideals first publicly recognized in England in 1689, then enshrined by the Americans in 1776, were now being honored in France. And France should not be the end of the story; many other countries awaited liberation. The day of an enlightened world might well be at hand. Love of country was of precious little worth if it meant nothing more than “that spirit of rivalship and ambition which has been common among nations.” What was “the love of country among the Jews, but a wretched partiality to themselves and a proud contempt of all other nations? What was the love of their country among the old Romans,” who were little better than “a band of robbers in their attempts to crush all liberty but their own?”64 We should love our country but always “consider ourselves as citizens of the world.”65 From a proper cosmopolitan perspective, it is not enough to enlighten our own country. Our duty is to “instruct mankind,” “to prepare the minds of men [in other countries] for the recovery of their rights,” and to encourage them to “overthrow priesthood and tyranny.”66 ** As previously noted, because of Burke’s attack on A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Price’s sermon of 1789 is the most recognized of his political writings. For Price this was a grave misfortune, since its result has been that all of his earlier publications have been largely overlooked, known nowadays only to a few scholars. It was Price’s essays on America and its revolution that were the centerpieces of his efforts, and these have mostly faded into oblivion. One may well question how fairly Burke confronted Price, but we cannot question that the turn to violence during the French Revolution placed Burke’s polemics at the forefront of subsequent awareness while marginalizing Price to the point of insignificance. Not only Price but other radical Whigs suffered when all that was revolutionary in the earlier revolution in America was written out of history by Burke and his cohort in the course of their denunciations of the revolution in France. Events have conspired to help Burke and Burkeans delete revolutionary principles from the account of the revolution in America, and the absence of public acknowledgment of such principles has undercut appreciation of Price and his fellow radicals and Commonwealthmen. Best known of Burke’s thoughts on the Americans is his Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, 1775. “A love of freedom is the predominating feature” of the colonial mind he observed, but nowhere did

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he recognize that the Americans had long been seeking their freedom in the name of universal, natural rights. Instead, he has them demanding “liberty according to [concrete] English ideas. .  .  . Abstract liberty is not to be found.” To the colonists of the North, it is their type of Protestantism, “the dissidence of dissent,” that accounts for their love of liberty; to the South, it is the practice of slavery that makes freedom precious, as in ancient city-states.67 Two years later, in his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, Burke did take hostile notice of revolutionary thought directed to American events, but it was the pamphlets of radical Whigs in England to which he objected, not unacknowledged pamphlets written by Americans. Apparently less than acutely aware of the factions into which English Whiggery was divided, Price expressed dismay that Burke spoke out against the natural rights rhetoric common among radical Whig supporters of the American rebels. “Such has been the zeal which he [Burke] has discovered for the rights of mankind, that I think it scarcely possible his ideas and mine on this subject should be very different. His language, however, sometimes puzzles me,” wrote a perplexed Price in 1777.68 By no means was it foolish for Price to express surprise, for it is quite possible upon perusing Burke’s works to find him speaking on occasion in terms Price might regard as identical to his: “The rights of men – that is to say, the natural rights of mankind – are indeed sacred things,” wrote the pre-French Revolution Burke, who was quick, however, to add that “If these natural rights are further affirmed . . . by written instruments and positive engagements, they are in a still better condition.” Ill at ease with the abstract rights he conceded, Burke wished to retreat as soon as possible to chartered liberties, but nevertheless did not hesitate to charge the East India Company with wrongly asserting chartered rights at the expense of “the natural rights of mankind.”69 It is also worth noticing that in Blackstone, too, Price encountered a conservative Whig who made occasional concessions to Locke in his Commentaries before denying that the Second Treatise should be taken literally70 (Chapter 5). The distinction between conservative and radical Whigs was not definitive until the French Revolution, and even then, it was not immediate. Those Whigs in parliament who followed the lead of Charles James Fox were initially receptive to the French. Fairly early during the French Revolution, Price and the radical Whigs suffered defeat both in theory and practice. In practice, Burke successfully brokered an alliance of his band of establishment Whigs with the Tory leader, William Pitt the Younger. Any possibility of cooperation on at least some occasions between conservative and radical Whigs was from that moment lost forever; the radicals were left out in the cold. In the realm of theory, the decisive moment arrived when Friedrich Gentz published his Burkean-inspired The French and American Revolutions Compared. For all his many speeches and writings on America, Burke

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never truly addressed the American Revolution. Gentz, theorist of the Counter-Revolution, did so, offering what would become thereafter an almost automatically reiterated claim that the American Revolution was admirable because it was not a revolution; the French Revolution, damnable because it was. The year 1776, said Gentz, was little more than 1688 revisited – exactly what the radical Whigs had been at pains to deny. Enunciations of revolutionary principles by American spokespersons for their newly emerged natural rights republic were dismissed by Gentz as hollow and harmless rhetoric; Americans in his view had been solely preoccupied with breaking free of England. He barely mentions Richard Price, except to say that he was not as despicable as Tom Paine.71

Joseph Priestley Joseph Priestley had much in common with Richard Price. Both were scientists, and their respective branches of science yielded meaningful practical results – in Price’s case actuarial science, which was vital to schemes of insurance; in Priestley’s case chemistry, known for its manifold everyday uses, as in medicine. Both were devoted dissenting ministers, convinced that Unitarianism was as pure as the established Anglican Church was tainted. Both were members of London’s Club of Honest Whigs, where they relished interaction with yet another renowned scientist, Benjamin Franklin. When the age of revolution arrived, they greeted it with high expectations and did not doubt that the hand of Providence could be discerned in the events that transpired in America and Europe. Sympathy for the emergence of a modern natural rights republicanism was as central to Priestley as to Price. One matter on which they went their separate ways was the question of whether history is worth studying, with Price finding few reasons to bother mastering the record of human folly,72 whereas Priestley found himself in agreement with figures such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, and William Robertson, for whom the study of the past was an excellent way to enlighten the present and future. Even so, the views of Priestley and Price concerning the past occasionally overlap, perhaps the best example being their mutual repudiation of ancient Rome and classical republicanism. Much like Price, Priestley damned the Roman republican governors who looted and abused the provinces. “No history,” he generalized, “furnishes so striking an example how incompatible extensive empire is with political liberty.”73 As for Sparta, its famed regime was in reality a tribute to inhumanity, “the worst government we read of in the world; a government which secured to a man the fewest of his natural rights.” Far preferable were the “convulsions of Athens” to the “savage uniformity of Sparta.”74 Few refrains were dearer to Priestley than that of “the superior humanity of modern times.”75 Neither thinker, moreover, was tempted by thoughts about a Machiavellian moment. “Machiavelli’s

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very name coveys the idea of baseness and villainy” asserted Priestley, who, having sided with “being” over “seeming,” could hardly be expected to rise up in defense of the famous and infamous Florentine, whose rank order was precisely the opposite.76 At his most forgiving Priestley wrote that “Those times of revived antiquity [known as the Renaissance] have had their use, and are now no more. . . . Their maxims of life will not suit the world as it is at present.”77 In common with Adam Smith, Priestley contended that the division of labor had rendered the citizen’s militia irrelevant; the only question was whether the professional generals of modern times would be compelled to answer to the public.78 Paralleling Price, Priestley’s republican sentiments were consistently modern and Protestant. Although Price and Priestley were alike in their dismissal of classical history, the considerably more historically inclined Priestley spent far more time expounding his reasons for championing modernity over antiquity. Without question, thought Priestley, the British have moved “infinitely beyond whatever [the Greeks and Romans] had attained to in respect to science, commerce, riches, power and I may add happiness.”79 The same point may be made in favor of modernity in general: “A thousand circumstances show how inferior the ancients were to the moderns in religious knowledge, in science, . . . in government, in laws, both the law of nations and those of particular states, in arts, in commerce, in the conveniences of life, in manners, and in consequence of all these, happiness.”80 In vindicating the quest for happiness, Priestley distanced himself from notions of repressive civic virtue. Citizens should have room to go their own way; it is not only descriptive but prescriptive to remark that “the generality of mankind will prefer their private interest to the public good.” It is right and proper that no government “can be expected to stand, the constitution of which does not make it in the interest of the great body of the people to preserve it.”81 James Harrington, with his stress on self-interest rather than classical civic virtue, would have agreed. Happiness was, of course, one of the foremost themes of the Enlightenment, as in Jefferson’s expression “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Priestley was quite willing to further that quest by arguing against the classical generalization that luxury necessarily entails “effeminacy.” Luxury is what we make of it, not a sentence to irremediable corruption. The unhappiness of the Roman republic – its sad and endemic brutality, as evidenced by the practice of poisoning – was most common not when luxury held sway but during the period “when the constitution of Rome was most perfect.” Unfortunately, “the Romans had none of those diversions and amusements which . . . do greatly promote the humanization of our manners.”82 Nor did they reap the joys of enlightened religion. “All the religion of the ancients, that of the learned Greeks and Romans least of all excepted, was superstition of the most absurd kind.”83 By way of a conclusion, Priestley wrote “Let the person, then, who would trace the

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conduct of Divine Providence, attend to every advantage which the present age enjoys above ancient times.”84 In Priestley’s estimation the uses of historical knowledge went well beyond freeing the moderns from the Greeks and Romans. Coming to terms with the past, especially of Europe through the ages, was essential for anyone seeking to carry the lessons of enlightenment forward to the future. But the teachings of history could not be mastered, he was convinced, unless we think seriously about what it is to think historically. To that end he dropped hints here and there which, if collected, might be said to amount to a handbook on historical method. As much as possible, Priestley wanted the methods of science to be applied to history. If properly studied, “history may be considered as containing examples of the sciences of morals and politicks.”85 Taking the successes of natural scientists as his inspiration, Priestley would, insofar as possible, apply the technique of experimentation to the past. “All civil societies, and the whole science of civil government, on which they are founded, are yet in their infancy. Like other arts and sciences, this is gradually improving; but it improves more slowly, because opportunities for making experiments are fewer.” Nature repeats, which makes it ideal for conducting experiments; the human world does not repeat but can nevertheless be studied scientifically if viewed as the many singular experiments humans have undertaken across the ages. In this regard, as with natural science, we are superior to the ancients: “Imperfect as the science of government is at present, it is certainly much more perfect than it was in their time.”86 Just as is true of science, so likewise with history: investigators must seek out the best possible evidence before drawing grand conclusions. Ancient medals “now give great light to history.” They record events, but what is perhaps more telling is their use in understanding the meanings of events and practices in previous ages. “We find upon them traces of customs and manners, the figures of ancient buildings, instruments, habits, and of a variety of things which show the state of the arts and conveniences of life in the age wherein the medals were struck.”87 We must also recognize “what importance the study of language may be to a person who would get a thorough insight into the history, the genius, and the manners of a people.” Language, yes, but investigators must not stop until they have mastered the laws of a country. “One of the greatest imperfections of historians in general is their ignorance of law.” Most readers desire accounts of battles and court intrigues, but “a politician may derive more useful information, and a philosopher more rational entertainment” from “the knowledge of the progress of laws.” “The change of manners, and way of living, may be traced in the changes of the laws. Thus the change from a military to a commercial state may be traced in England by the progress of our laws, particularly those relating to the alienation of landed property; a thing absolutely inconsistent with strict feudal notions . . . but which took place by degrees, as the interests

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of commerce were perceived to require that everything valuable should circulate as freely as possible.”88 The “science of government” to which Priestley aspired could not, he realized, be achieved solely on the basis of “historical facts.” What he called facts did not explain themselves; a larger framework was necessary. “A close examination of particular parts is very useful [only] after a general view of the whole of anything,” he advised. “For this reason, the history of our own country . . . is not proper to begin with”; that is to say, we must look beyond ourselves to find ourselves; Britain must be understood as part of a larger world. Much the same strategy should be employed in studying any particular historical period of a country: “Let him first make himself acquainted with the history of the country in general, and then study the history of the particular period.”89 If “observations and experience are the only safe guides” for scientists, the same is true of historians.90 They should speak only when adequate evidence exists, when the “two eyes of history,” geography and chronology – the where and the when – have had their say,91 while refraining from holding forth if records are not to be found. Only the final moments of Saxon times are adequately known, in contrast to which we are well versed, thanks to the monks, on the Norman period.92 In common with natural scientists, historians must learn both how to collect proper evidence and how to place their particularistic findings into a larger framework of explanation and understanding. Priestley’s list of what-to-do/what-not-to-do items when studying history, his implicit manual of methodology, was not simply a guide as to how to write the best history. At stake also, and more fundamentally, was his sense of the mission of the historian, nowhere more evident than in his hope that a thoughtful understanding of the past will free us from our present-day prejudices. The calling of the historian is “to free the mind from many prejudices, particularly an unreasonable partiality for our own country.”93 Even with the best of intentions there is the difficulty that “no person who writes the history of his own times can escape the influence of prejudice,” especially the “spirit of faction.”94 All the more, then, should we adhere to the rule of method demanding that we step outside our country and time period before attempting to understand our contemporary situation. Ancient historians had the disadvantage of having no access to records preceding their time; modern historians are better situated to follow the past to the present rather than falling prey to the temptation of reading the present into the past.95 Above all, historians should remember that they are civic beings whose mission it is to elevate and enlighten the citizenry, rendering it fit to meet the challenges of freedom in the modern world. Our studies should be “calculated to form the statesman, the military commander, the lawyer, the merchant, and the accomplished country gentleman.” History is “for

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the use of persons of both sexes, and of men of all ranks and of all professions in life.” Hume was correct in his essay “Of the Study of History” to recommend that women read history rather than romance novels. History is, or can and should be, political education.96 History has a way of helping us cope with defeat in our darkest days and never abandons us to despair. Understanding the past “prepares our minds to submit to adversity with more patience and resignation.”97 Resignation, however, need not entail fatalistic submission. If our struggle for the good cause fails in the present, we should recognize that others suffered the same fate in the past, then came back to fight another day. What most of all can save us from despair is recognition that, frequently in ways beyond our comprehension, Providence has always been immersed in the flow of time, shaping the outcome of events. At the outset of his lectures on history Priestley spoke of “true history . . . [as] an exhibition of the conduct of divine Providence.”98 His study climaxed in a prolonged discussion of the leading role of Providence throughout history; all events in his account, even the worst lead to a better world. Between the beginning and the finale of his treatise he repeatedly invoked Providence to sustain his account of never-ending historical progress. Early in his lectures Priestley inquires, “How can we help acknowledging the hand of God when we see great and important events brought about by seemingly trifling and inconsiderable means?”99 Later he remarks that all the capital events in this world, which have contributed to bring about a better state of things in general, all the situations in human affairs favorable to liberty, virtue, and happiness, were brought about in a manner independent of the policy . . . of all human beings, and must be ascribed wholly to the great providence of God, wisely over-ruling the passions and powers of men to his own benevolent purposes.100 It was Providence, again, that permitted Priestley to overcome his fear of revolution. “The chance of being well settled after a violent revolution is very small,”101 he had warned. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, he affrmed, that on occasion tumultuous upheavals succeed, and when they do “we see the hand of Divine Providence in those revolutions which have gradually given a happier turn to affairs.”102 In his fnal lectures Priestley contended that the worst events in history had admirable consequences. Conquests have only been successful when the conquered power was corrupt and needed to be displaced; science has often been advanced by war; feudal wars made princes dependent on the people; Crusades helped break the power of the barons. Under the guidance of Providence the worst of intentions throughout human history have yielded the most admirable unintended consequences.103

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By no means does the link Priestley drew between historical outcomes and Providence signal a retreat from his commitment to a scientific study of history. Quite the contrary; he was firmly convinced that investigators can arrive at a purely scientific explanation of highly significant unanticipated consequences. Providential and scientific understandings are mutually reinforcing, Providence blessing what science explains. For the well-trained investigator, the outcome of past events will sooner or later be placed under the heading of “anticipated experience,” not unanticipated consequences. Why history unfolded as it did need not be a mystery. “If we read history like philosophers, we must principally attend to the connection of cause and effect in all the great changes of human affairs.” To be avoided is the temptation to believe that famous historical individuals have understood the larger meanings of their actions: “An opinion of the profound policy of particular persons is often the occasion of great mistakes with respect to the causes of important events.” There is no suitable alternative to causal explanations of collective forces.104 The old political history must yield to the new. “This attention to the connection of cause and effect ought by no means to be confined to philosophers. It is in the interest of the active statesmen to study it.”105 Detached understanding did not satisfy Priestley; rather, he held that the more we understand, the more we should be able to control the world we inhabit. The unity of theory and practice was his aim. The full title of his treatise on history was Lectures on History and General Policy, the last two words of his title signifying that statesmen, if properly trained, should be able as never before to pursue their objectives successfully. The study of history would henceforth be the examination of how to initiate policies without suffering unanticipated, unwanted consequences. History would become a policy science, and the world would harvest the fruits of Enlightenment. Of great importance to Priestley was the project of identifying a force driving history forward, a force accounting for its progressive development and promising more progress for the future if attended to by enlightened rulers who know when to intervene and when not. In the record of commerce and manufactures he discerned the answer to his quest. As opposed to Richard Price’s scheme of the stages of history, which lauded the middle stage between barbarian beginnings and corrupt finale, Priestley postulated an uninterrupted progression throughout the ages, onward and upward, with commerce the driving force. The ambivalence about commerce that marks Price’s works, the contrast between his initial optimism and his later doubts, is not to be found in Priestley. After the isolation of the hunting stage, “a pastoral life brings mankind nearer together, agriculture nearer still, and in a state addicted to commerce, the connections of individuals are the most intimate and extensive.”106 Commerce, progress, and enlightenment were one and the same in Priestley’s estimation.

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“The progress of society, and the steps by which nations advance to opulence and power, is one of the most pleasing and useful objects of speculation.”107 Agriculture came first and should be one of our concerns, but we must always remember that “the only way to encourage agriculture is to excite other kinds of industry . . .; that is, to make it subservient to commerce.”108 Even better than the linkage of agriculture and commerce is the marriage of commerce with manufactures. “Innumerable facts in history exhibit, in the strongest light, the vast advantage accruing to a people from manufactures, in conjunction with commerce.”109 There is everything to gain from commerce, not just riches but the moral wellbeing of society. “By commerce we enlarge our acquaintance with the terraqueous globe and its inhabitants, which tends greatly to expand the mind, and to cure us of many hurtful prejudices.” Commercial dealings are also praiseworthy in that they provide an education in “the principles of strict justice.”110 To its everlasting credit, commerce fosters the development of open, inclusive societies, and gives modern nations incentives to avoid the wars that were endemic to the classical and feudal ages. Repeating Adam Smith, one of his favorite authors, Priestley argues that in modern times the labor of slaves is increasingly recognized both as wretched and as more costly than that of free laborers.111 Workers in Great Britain are included in the benefits of society, whereas in antiquity they were excluded. When Priestley remarks on “the low state of commerce in ancient times,”112 he does so to contrast sharply and favorably his modern republican sentiments with those enshrined in the classics. Openness to the outside world, no less than inclusion in the political community, is fostered by commerce. Repeatedly Priestley registered pleas for openness by demanding ease of naturalization.113 It was the Flemings, coming to England during the reign of Edward III, who stimulated the growth of the modern trade in cloth.114 England served itself insofar as it naturalized the Flemish, which stands in sharp contrast to the closed societies of the ancients where drab flannel was the only garb.115 Commerce promotes openness, again, in the form of international trade, and has the additional welcome effect of promising an end to the perpetual wars that have plagued humankind. “The most remarkable revolution in the whole history of commerce was the discovery of a passage to the East Indies . . . and of America.”116 Small nation though it is, long isolated by surrounding ocean, England is now open to and connected with the rest of the world. The hope for peace, moreover, is not foolhardy in a world of trade, especially if we follow Adam Smith’s injunction to reject mercantilism. “The happiness of all nations as one great community will be best promoted by laying aside all national jealousy of trade,” wrote Priestley. The conviction that “the gain of one must necessarily be the loss of the other” is the foolish doctrine that must yield henceforth to enlightened political economy. “Every fair bargain is

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a gainful transaction to both the parties, and consequently all nations are benefited by their commercial intercourse.” Present-day treaties of commerce “seem to show that mankind begin to be sensible of the folly of war.”117 Commerce exercises “a favorable influence on benevolence; and no person can taste the sweets of commerce, which absolutely depends upon a free and undisturbed intercourse of different and remote nations, but must grow fond of peace.”118 Insofar as war is still a fact of life, we may derive a measure of consolation from the thought that “modern conquests generally terminate in leaving the conquered to live according to their own laws, and the private property of individuals is untouched.”119 Despite his admiration of Adam Smith and agreement with him on most economic matters, Priestley refused to follow Smith, Hume, and other Scots when they decided that since existing governments were not founded on consent, the time had come to discontinue discussions of the social contract.120 There is a chapter on “forms of government” in Priestley’s Lectures on History, but also ample mention in that work of natural rights and discussion of “principles” of government. Another of his publications bears the noteworthy title An Essay on the First Principles of Government. Priestley’s works feature a persistent concern to complement discussions of constitutional forms of government with applications of the theory of the social contract and natural rights to the events of his day. When discussing constitutional government, he begins by observing that England’s is the wonder of the age, winning the unstinting praise of foreigners such as Montesquieu and Voltaire.121 At the time of the Restoration, the constitution was not yet settled; happily for Great Britain the bigotry of James the Second saved the day, giving birth to the Glorious Revolution, to which Priestley duly genuflected: “A revolution so remarkable, and attended with such happy consequences, has perhaps no parallel in the history of the world.”122 Nevertheless, years prior to the American Revolution, he was already warning that the theory of the Constitution was one thing, the practice another. “I can heartily join with the greatest admirers of the English constitution in their encomiums upon it, when compared with that of any other country in the world, . . . but if any person should say that it is perfect, . . . I beg leave to withhold my assent.”123 Supposedly the king and parliament are dependent upon the people for their supplies, which forces them to respect the many; in reality, however, the House of Commons is not truly representative of the people124 – a charge lodged by Priestley and all the radical Whigs. Sometimes he dares criticize the theory of the Constitution itself, not simply the deficient practice. Especially wanting in England is an understanding that the institutional order and governmental practice of constitutional government must answer to underlying, legitimizing principles. “It is wise in societies, if not expressly to appoint a formal revision of their

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whole constitution after a certain time, at least to do this with respect to subordinate parts.” In a more assertive mood he held that “every nation has a right to make whatever changes they please in the constitution.”125 Time cannot be frozen. “Were the best formed state in the world to be fixed in its present condition, I make no doubt but that, in a course of time, it would be the worst.”126 Coordinating “forms” with “principles” of popular government is a never-ending task. The purpose of a constitution, which is a social contract, is to protect our natural rights. Against Grotius and Pufendorf but in agreement with Locke, Priestley wrote “Men cannot, surely, be said to give up their natural rights by entering into a compact for the better securing of them.”127 In another of his works he made exactly the same point, that our rights are inherent and cannot be alienated: “In a state of civil liberty a man retains the most important of his natural rights.”128 To protect our liberty, to permit us to make our own choices, to develop our talents as we see fit, and to worship as we wish – these are the purposes of government. “Without a spirit of liberty, and a feeling of security and independence, no great improvements . . . will ever be made by men.”129 The liberty that is Priestley’s passionate concern has two dimensions, one civil, the other political. “The power which the community leaves him possessed of with respect to his own conduct may be called his civil liberty, whereas the share that he may have in directing the affairs of the society may be called his political liberty.” Applying the categories of Isaiah Berlin to Priestley, we might suggest that his fundamental desire was for negative liberty, but he believed that positive liberty is its necessary safeguard. “Political liberty is the only sure guard of civil liberty, and it is chiefly valuable on that account.” Not for him the collectivist liberty of civic virtue, but he did exhort his fellows to seek freedom in a form that reached higher than that of seeking simply to avoid being coerced. For the common citizen, political liberty should be valued because “without this there cannot be that persuasion of security and independence, which alone can encourage a man to great exertions”; with it, the citizen can “indulge a free and manly turn of thinking.”130 Without question, the most challenging moments of Priestley’s career as an engaged political thinker came when he felt obliged to defend the American and French Revolutions and to answer the charges Burke had launched in Reflections on the Revolution in France against Richard Price. What Priestley wrote about America was especially important because it set the stage for his treatment of events in France. During the 1760s, when the Americans were resisting rather than rebelling against England, Priestley penned a pamphlet titled The Present State of Liberty in Great Britain and Her Colonies. Here, hoping for a peaceful settlement, he was at his most modest in his commentary of American events. His focus was primarily on Britain, as may be seen in the section “Of the State of Liberty in England,” where his comments on political ministers bristle with

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disgust, even as he diplomatically avoids laying blame at the foot of the throne. Attacks on liberty of the press must end, the refusal of parliament to seat its critic John Wilkes must be denounced, and reforms must be initiated to eliminate rotten boroughs, to make elections more frequent, and to make representatives more genuinely representative of the public. As for America, the claim must be dropped that because Manchester is taxed without being represented, Americans should settle for the same. Both America and England will benefit from an agreement under which the colonists will provide raw materials and England will provide manufactured goods. “The benefits arising spontaneously from our extensive and increasing commerce with them, will infinitely overbalance all that we shall ever be able to extort from them by way of tax.”131 So ended his pamphlet on liberty in Britain and its colonies. It is the beginning of this same treatise, however, that set the stage for his subsequent political publications. On the very first page and throughout the first half of his document, Priestley spoke up forcefully on behalf of natural rights at a time when “few countries in the world . . . are not in a state of slavery.” It is to the credit of the colonists that they were intent upon “securing their natural rights as men, and the civil rights which they have hitherto enjoyed as Englishmen.” Never should it be forgotten that “the great natural rights and liberties of mankind are best secured when the supreme magistry is in the hands of persons chosen by the people, and when they are entrusted with that power for a limited time.” These supreme magistrates, he added, are “the servants of the people, who have, therefore, a right to call them to account,” which is to say that Priestley, when addressing America in an early work, was already paraphrasing the language of the social contract that would be more explicit in later works.132 In his Lectures on History, Priestley commented on the newly emerging American republic and its distinctive political order. Voicing his thoughts in the language of science, as was his wont, he suggested that “the new governments in North America are so many new experiments, of which political philosophers cannot fail to make the greatest use.”133 Perhaps most significantly, he generalized that America favorably displayed the difference between a modern republic and long-standing European monarchies. In the monarchical states of Europe it is highly improbable that any form of properly equal government should be established for many ages; the people in general . . . being proud of their monarchs, even when they are oppressed by them. On the contrary, in North America there seems to be no prospect of the peaceable establishment of any form of government besides one in which the rights of all shall be equal.134 Such were his thoughts about America before the coming of the French Revolution.

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More than the Present State of Liberty, or the Lectures on History, it is Priestley’s Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke that must be examined to encounter his most astonishing comments on America. Published in 1791, prior to the excesses of the French Revolution, Priestley’s response to Burke treated the French Revolution of 1789 as the fulfillment of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 and, even more, the American Revolution of 1776. “The Americans, sensible of more evils . . . than our ancestors at the Revolution, ventured to do a great deal more, and set a glorious example to France, and to the world.” Their revolutionary ideology, having no borders, had reached across the ocean to France. Americans “formed a completely new government on the principles of equal liberty, and the rights of men, without nobles, as Dr. Price expressively and happily said, without bishops, and without a king.”135 Instead of the politically compromised established religion that Burke insisted upon, the Americans had created a world in which Dissenters ruled supreme. How very foolish, then, was the war with America: “the expense of the late American war would have converted all the waste grounds of this country into gardens. What canals, bridges, and noble roads, what public buildings, public libraries, and public laboratories” might have been promoted with those squandered funds.136 Burke had lost sight of the “principles” upon which all governments should be grounded, wrote Priestley in his first letter, titled “Of the General Principles of the French Revolution.” He had failed to appreciate what any Whig should understand, the continuity of 1688, 1776, and 1789. Together, England and France could free the world; at odds, a great historical opportunity would be lost. An era of natural rights republics, with or without monarchs in the background, might well be at hand as a consequence of the age of revolution. “These great events, in many respects unparalleled in history, make a totally new, a most wonderful, and important era in the history of mankind, . . . a change from darkness to light, from superstition to sound knowledge, and from a most debasing servitude to a state of the most exalted freedom. . . . So that, in comparison with what has been, now only can we expect to see what men really are, and what they can do.”137

Catharine Macaulay Catharine Macaulay’s credentials as a republican were unmistakable, recognized by friend and foe alike. Among her famous enemies, both Horace Walpole and Edmund Burke denounced her as a republican; among her friends, Richard Price and Joseph Priestley gladly recognized that she shared their commitment to the Commonwealthman tradition. She was outspokenly appreciative of the American Republic, offered a republican proposal for Corsica in the late 1760s when its future was in question, and the single most dramatic feature of her historical writings on

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England was a bold and daring defense of the republican period of the mid-seventeenth century. For Macaulay, as for her friends Price and Priestley, the fate of a person identified as a republican in England was to be subjected to the charge that she favored violent revolutionary uprisings. With the coming of the American Revolution, to which she was publicly sympathetic, Macaulay had to fend off renewed accusations that her rendering in the 1760s of the trial and execution of Charles the First in her History of England proved that hers was a bloody radicalism. In 1781, at the height of the war with America, she glanced back for a moment at her account of regicide in midseventeenth century England, feeling compelled to defend herself against the claims of her detractors. “I was so far from feeling myself the bloodyminded Republican, as I have been termed by the butcherly writers of these days, . . . that I shed many tears while I was writing his catastrophe.”138 In the course of responding in 1790 to Burke’s polemic against the French Revolution, she advanced her republican sentiments by the safe tactic of repeating his endorsement of Bolingbroke’s generalization that a republic was better grafted on a monarchy than vice-versa.139 That is to say, she repeated the standard radical Whig call for injecting republicanism into a monarchical government rather than overthrowing a monarchy. Catharine Macaulay was a republican, but no more than Richard Price or Joseph Priestley was she a “classical republican.” Supposedly Machiavelli is the bridge between antiquity and the rebirth of classical republican wisdom at the time of the Renaissance; quite revealing, then, is the difficulty of finding a passage in Macaulay’s prodigious publications which features an appreciation of Machiavelli the republican. Her far from enthusiastic references to Machiavelli are typically to the infamous teacher of underhanded political tactics.140 As for the ancients, any favorable comments flowing from her pen were occasional and highly selective; unfavorable or dismissive comments were typical and strongly articulated. Perfectly in keeping with her general outlook was her claim that the institution of representative government demonstrates the irrelevance of the classics: “It is, I think, very little to the purpose of enlightening men’s minds on the subject of government, to quote the reflections of ancient authors, or draw comparisons from ancient times, which were totally unacquainted with that excellent policy by which the people’s power is represented.”141 In her judgment it is completely to the honor of modern republican government that it is based on the system of representative government unknown to the Greeks and Romans. At her most generous in assessing the classics, she praised Stoicism for anticipating the moral outlook of Christianity;142 such admiration of ancient Stoic philosophers carried no implications whatsoever, however, of approval of the political practice of ancient republican times. Macaulay’s positive comments on Greek and Roman antiquity are occasional, decisively overridden by a multitude of negative judgments.

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Addressing the Romans, she wrote that “Their public counsels were corrupted by the lust of conquest; and their private manners by the possession of riches and power. . . . The abuse of power and riches was carried by the Romans to its highest excess. Their slaves were innumerable; and they were treated with a cruel indignity.”143 Sparta in her account was noteworthy for its civic virtue but far more remarkable was its brutality and inhumanity. “The Spartans, who, in one favorable point of view, appear with a luster superior to all other nations, will not bear the nice inspection of a critic in morals.” They “treated their slaves with an equal degree of cruelty to that which the negro race at present experiences in the European settlements of the West Indies.” Ever the advocate of “benevolence” in her ruminations on ethics, Macaulay was distressed to see that the Spartans “did not enforce on the citizens the benevolent duties of life.” Initially in her Letters on Education she suggested that the ancients may have been superior to the moderns in their program of education and expressed disappointment that “few treatises have been handed down to us on this important subject.” Later, in the same work, she decided that neither in public nor in private education were the Spartans worthy exemplars. The same was true of the Romans: “their virtues were often at enmity with their humanity.”144 Virtue was central to Macaulay’s moral vocabulary, but her usage has little or nothing to do with the militaristic virtue of antiquity and everything to do with enlightened Christian virtue. Seconding an opinion she attributes to Rousseau, she asserts that “the most important of all duties . . . is not to do injury to anyone.” In her own voice she adds the un-pagan reflection that “The virtue of benevolence is of so comprehensive a nature that it contains the principle of every moral duty.”145 Such an ethics of non-transgression and sympathy accorded well with her deeply felt Christian convictions and most assuredly could promote civic acts, but was quite independent of Greek and Roman virtue. Also worth noting is her outspoken rejection of any ethics that demanded unwarranted “privations”146 – a stand that distanced her both from rigid Calvinism and from the most self-denying of ancient ideals. Although opposed to an ethics of vulgar self-interest and crude utilitarianism, she spoke favorably of a high-minded, “refined self-love,”147 in which one finds fulfillment in serving others. Overwhelmingly, moreover, her concern was with natural rights, rather than civic virtue as understood by the ancients: “It is well-known,” she remarked critically, “that a great part of the ancient .  .  . [peoples made] a deity of their government, in whose high prerogatives they have buried all their natural rights.”148 As an educator, Macaulay was quite willing to expose students to classical literature in their earlier years, but at nineteen “the study of politics may be commenced, and the authors I would recommend on this subject are Harrington, Sidney, Locke, and Hobbes”149 – the last two modern social contract theorists, the first a modern republican whose thought revolved

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around the concept of self-interest, the second a republican whose classical references were matched by modern discourses on natural rights. Hers was a quest for “men of true virtue, . . . that is, men who have a just regard for the rights of nature.”150 Even when speaking the language of virtue, classical republicanism was rarely her reference point. Christian virtue and the virtues of natural rights were her concerns. Catharine Macaulay’s was a modern republicanism, as attested both by her dedication to natural rights philosophy and her receptiveness to commercial society. Not least among the topics that recur frequently in her writings is commerce, which she touts because trade fosters peace and peace fosters trade. “The improvement of commerce may undoubtedly be reckoned among the arts of peace; and it is under the benign influence of the olive branch, and not by conquest and rapine, that societies may flourish and grow rich.” Rather than issuing a classical warning that commerce corrupts, she argues it is “ignorance and corruption” that undermine the progressive, enlightened movement of trade. Freedom of trade was a cause she enthusiastically championed: “there cannot be a truer political maxim than that a free commerce is the only source of opulence to a state, and that every tax laid upon trade is a very pernicious and a very heavy burden on society.” When she speaks of trade she looks beyond the borders of England to international political economy: “The empire of the sea is attended with such important commercial advantages, and is so strong a security against the ambition and insolence of foreign enemies, that it is impossible that any sovereigns can be mistaken in this grand point of policy.”151 Writing her famous histories of England, Macaulay praised or damned the political leaders of times past insofar as they promoted or obstructed trade. “I have taken some liberty myself in ridiculing James the First; but undoubtedly the large foundations of trade were laid in the reign of this monarch.” From the combination of James’s wariness of war and Parliament’s reversal of several of Elizabeth’s monopolies, the outcome was that the foundations were laid for a modern England.152 On her list of the many faults of the succeeding Stuart monarch, Charles the First, was that “shipping had been wholly neglected; the naval force of England was on so contemptible a footing that the commerce of the country was left unprotected.”153 Far better was “the policy of the English republicans, on the account of trade,” their efforts to use it “to balance the growing greatness of France” and “to keep on terms of amity with Spain.” For the Protectorate she expressed contempt; nevertheless, she did concede that “under the administration of Cromwell, every branch of trade flourished.”154 In her judgment, the story of Restoration England was one of economic opportunities squandered. Charles the Second “might have . . . concluded a treaty highly advantageous to the commerce and to the naval power of England: but Charles . . . seems to have confined his notions of honor to being a tractable dupe to the intriguing spirit of Louis [XIV].”155

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Perhaps surprisingly, commerce was not ignored during the otherwise disastrous rein of James the Second: “his extreme attention to trade was not less alarming to the whole body of the Dutch than his resolution not to rush into a war with France was mortifying to the stadtholder.”156 In the early eighteenth century Anne was Queen, her unfitness for office evident in the foolish wars that cost trade dearly: “Whilst England was engaged in this expensive and unnatural war on the Continent, her navy was shamefully neglected, her trade was unprotected, and the merchants with reason complained of frequent and great seizures by the enemy.”157 Dealing in 1775 with the conflict in America, Macaulay bemoaned the “interruption given to our commerce,” which “threatens the immediate ruin of thousands of families.” “Let the once opulent trader, let the starving mechanic, bear witness to this truth, that our commerce has been declining for the past ten years.”158 Macaulay’s view of commerce places her republicanism in the modern, post-classical camp, and the same is true of her passionate commitment to natural rights. Whereas the conservatives Blackstone and Burke usually denied natural rights while praising the rights of Englishmen or occasionally claimed that the rights of Englishmen were the implicit embodiment of all the legitimate rights of nature, Macaulay vigorously rejected their provincial apologies for the status quo. “I have always considered the boasted birthright of an Englishman as an arrogant pretension, built on a beggarly foundation. It . . . intimates a kind of exclusion to the rest of mankind.” Although she sometimes spoke of “native rights,” she was always quick to explain that her reference was to “the native and inalienable rights of man.”159 Nothing was more vital in the education of someone waiting to inherit a throne, she advised, than that he or she should be given ample exposure to doctrines of natural rights and the theory of the social contract.160 No one, then, could be more unfit for the throne than Charles the First, who “would never endure conversation which tended to inculcate the principles of equal rights in men.”161 Quarreling with Burke in 1790, she held that “either an individual, or some privileged persons, have an inherent and indefeasible right to make laws for the community, or the authority rests in the unalienable and indefeasible rights of man.” Hers was a foregone conclusion: “whatever form or complexion any future government in France may bear, it can have no legitimate source, but in the will of the people.”162 Twenty years earlier, 1770, was when she initially challenged Burke’s outlook, and in the course of doing so invoked “the just ends of government, viz., the full and impartial security of the rights of nature.”163 In 1767 Hobbes was her target, and while repudiating him she wrote that “a toleration of all religions . . . is undoubtedly agreeable to the principles of justice and the rights of nature”164 – an assertion much to the satisfaction of Price and Priestley, both religious Dissenters. From the beginning to the end of her career, nothing mattered more to Catharine Macaulay

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than to uphold the notion of natural rights and to place it at the forefront of public life, preferably in a regime that was implicitly a natural rights republic. It was especially satisfying for Macaulay to unearth examples of modern republics that embodied her aspirations. “The year 1609 is notable for the prevailing influence of liberty. The republic of Holland, animated with its virtue,” wrote an admiring Macaulay, “had become the astonishment of mankind.”165 Even more remarkable in the seventeenth century than the Dutch republic was England’s republican experiment near midcentury. Macaulay greatly admired “the matchless Republic of England, straining every nerve of power to bring down the pride of its rivals.”166 Monarchies quivered when faced with the English Commonwealth, which was as formidable abroad as it was praiseworthy at home. “The power of England,” she wrote in volume five of her History of England, “during the short time it had been supported by the energy of the Republican government, had become the terror of all Europe.”167 In volume six she repeated her message: “the naval power of England was carried by the republic to a height which struck a terror in every European state.”168 The Commonwealth was “a glorious and flourishing republic”169 and should be recognized not as the worst but the best of all English regimes. Had the form of government intended by the popular leaders taken place, and had Englishmen at this day lived under the sway of a wellregulated democracy, we should have looked up to these execrated characters [the Republican leaders] with all that respectful veneration which was paid by the Greeks and Romans to the illustrious founders of their republics.170 Cromwell was the villain of her history of England, republicans the heroes. The Republicans, by their wisdom, valor, and inflexible resolution, having acquired possession of the reins of government, though inconsiderable in numbers, would have maintained their post against all domestic and foreign opposition, had not the mischievous ambition of Cromwell introduced division into their party, debauched the morals of their army, and interrupted that career of glory and prosperity which attended their councils.171 Unfortunately, it was the ill fate of the republican moment that its achievements were overlooked in the eighteenth century and Cromwell given credit for whatever the republic had accomplished. “Royalists of all denominations [Whig and Tory] are well pleased to give to the government of an individual a reputation which was alone due to the Republic.” Entertaining a “great man” interpretation of the past, historians have

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granted Cromwell praise he did not merit, when in truth “a just narration of those times shows that it was under the government of the Parliament . . . [that] the nation gained all its real advantages.”172 Of all the historians to whom she objected it was clearly Hume who occupied her attention the most, and against whose six-volume History of England she penned her own eight-volume account. She crossed swords with Hume in philosophy as well as history, and it may well be that the full measure of her discontent with his historical works cannot be sensed without a brief look at her philosophical writings. How very different her philosophical conceptualization of the world was from Hume’s is evident in her book, A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth. In this work she praised “Mr. Locke’s incomparable Treatise on the Human Understanding”173 but refused to follow it to the skeptical conclusions embraced by Hume. Her quest was for moral certainty at a time when she feared a “weakening [of] those strong principles of natural reason which support the belief of revelation, the providential government of God, and the sanction of future rewards and punishments.”174 Exactly the same sentiment was expressed by Richard Price – the conviction that “morality is eternal and immutable,” as he stated in A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals.175 The circle of radical Whigs was as hostile to skepticism as to superstition. In Macaulay’s formulation, “superstition and skepticism equally involve the mind in such confusion on the nature of moral truths . . . as to form one of those insuperable difficulties which have hitherto prevented the fixing morals on such a firm basis of certainty.”176 So ill at ease was Macaulay with skepticism that in her moral treatise she at one point burst into vituperation and parody when commenting on Hume: “It is allowed by that famous skeptic Mr. Hume, that the felicities of a good [physical] constitution, a gay and volatile temper, with the advantages of temporal prosperity, will secure an impunity from those stings of conscience, and that remorse which commonly follow the blacker acts of turpitude.”177 Macaulay had no more sympathy for the implicit skepticism of Hume’s historical volumes than for the explicit skepticism of his philosophical works. In Hume’s judgment, unlike that of the radical Whigs, history has no necessary rhyme or reason, and although he appreciated the progress of modern times, he believed that regress is a constant threat. Moderation, therefore, was always his norm, nothing in excess his implicit motto, which made him the steadfast opponent of all forms of political radicalism. Politics today, politics of all past days, given the complexity of social relationships, is a record of unpredictable consequences wrote Hume, and it is, tellingly, innovative leaders acting from the best of intentions who often cause the greatest wreckage. Radical Whigs, too, spoke of unanticipated consequences, but they enjoyed the consolation of believing that Providence always provides the best outcome, whereas for Hume the dice are not loaded, the outcome as likely to be regrettable as satisfying.

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Although Hume’s History of England addressed the entire sweep of English history, he began with two volumes covering the period from the accession of James the First to the Glorious Revolution; only later did he address the preceding centuries, which were apparently of lesser interest to him. All of Macaulay’s eight volumes dealt with Hume’s starting point, from the Stuarts to 1688, and no one failed to recognize that her intention was to undo Hume’s conservative account with her radical rendering of the same period. “Extremes of all kinds are to be avoided” advised Hume,178 who therefore set out to excoriate every example of impassioned ideological rhetoric that he encountered across the centuries, especially the proclamations of religious and political zealots. Abhorrent to him was the moment of Stuart times when “every man began to indulge himself in political reasonings and inquiries.”179 Chaos inevitably followed and was made all the worse by indulgence in public discussions of notions of consent, legitimacy, social contract, and natural rights. Even when he wrote about earlier centuries Hume insisted upon interjecting the claim that “it is a shameful delusion in modern historians to imagine that all the ancient princes who were unfortunate in their government, were also tyrannical in their conduct, and that the seditions of the people always proceeded from some invasion of their privileges by the monarch.”180 Consistent with his general outlook, Hume’s remarks on monarchy and monarchists were typically as favorable as they were hostile to the English republic and republicans of the mid-seventeenth century. In all these matters Macaulay chose to cast herself as his nemesis. His purpose and hers in writing history were perfectly contradictory. He did so to encourage the British “to cherish their present constitution,”181 far superior to all that preceded it; she to gain a vantage point outside the present moment from which vigorously to criticize the status quo. In 1748 Hume published “Of the Original Contract,” an essay repudiating the theory of the social contract. Later, in his History he aimed to show how destructive was its practice. “The consent of the people had no authority in a monarchy not derived from consent, but derived from hereditary right,”182 he argued in his second volume, asking his readers to face up to reality. In the fifth, treating the Puritan uprising, he deflated “a principle which is noble in itself . . . but is belied by all history and experience, That the people are the origin of all just power”; and “that kings themselves acted but in trust from that community.”183 Macaulay and her radical Whig cohort worried that the populace waits too long to rise up against a tyrant; Hume, contrariwise, feared any and all such uprisings, and would cast into oblivion all the justifications offered in the “despicable”184 treatises of Locke, his forerunners, and his progeny. If ever .  .  . it were laudable to conceal truth from the populace, it must be confessed that the doctrine of resistance affords such an

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In his History Hume suggested uncompromisingly that “the doctrine of obedience ought alone to be inculcated, and the exceptions, which are rare, ought seldom or never to be mentioned in popular reasonings and discourses.”185 Catharine Macaulay’s History of England186 was a concerted effort to overturn Hume’s History, a deliberate plan to expose what she regarded as his monarchical prejudices, and to speak on behalf of England’s republican experiment, especially insofar as the republicanism in question was natural rights republicanism. In recognition of Hume’s formidable reputation, rather than relentlessly dismissing him outright, she frequently cited his work with respect and occasionally praised him as “the great Mr. Hume” or hailed him “a writer of great note.”187 But never is her overall verdict in doubt; to her, he was far too much the Tory to write commendable history. She did not conceal her contempt for what she called “his usual partiality for all princes,” and accused him of being “one of the most artful apologists for those errors in the administration of the family of the Stuarts, which have been severely [condemned] by others.”188 Unforgiveable was his representation of Charles the First – in her summary of his position – as “a prince whose government had in no degree exceeded the arbitrary precedents which had been set by his predecessors”; and she vigorously rejected Hume’s conclusion that – as paraphrased by her – “Charles fell a victim to the malignity of the times, rather than to any faults in his administration.”189 She understood Hume’s words but apparently not his reasons for uttering them. It is not obvious she comprehended that what appeared to be a Tory bias was actually an attempt on Hume’s part, not to side with Tories against Whigs, but rather to deflate the ideological pretensions of both parties, the Whigs especially because in his day their errors of historical interpretation were dominant; and even the complacent Whiggery of his time, in his view, contained dormant radical ideals. How dramatically different were Hume and Macaulay on the topic of monarchies comes especially to light when one places side by side his unquestioning acceptance of absolute monarchy in France and elsewhere, if it provided stable government, with her statement that “an absolute monarch is a beast of a more peculiar and more hurtful nature than any other in the creation.”190 How dramatically different they were on the topic of republics is evident in their contrasting treatments of the natural rights republic of England’s mid-seventeenth century. As an essayist Hume had commented on the unreality of the social contract, its divorce from public awareness, its non-existence outside the mists of ethereal philosophy. As a historian he usually concentrated on what he regarded as

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the destructive role it played in the Puritan Revolution. From time to time Hume did see something conducive to liberty emerging from the republican moment, but never as more than an unintended consequence.191 Macaulay took exactly the opposite position, arguing that groups such as the Levellers, whom Hume demeaned, had successfully transferred social contract theory into practice, briefly realizing the commendable potential of a natural rights republic. The thesis/antithesis character of the debate of Macaulay with Hume is especially evident in their discussion of the Levellers and the document Agreement of the People. As presented in Hume’s account, “the Levellers insisted on an equal distribution of power and property, and disclaimed all dependence and subordination.” Not for Hume these soldiers, the most radical spokespersons of the New Model Army, who defied their officers and called for a written constitution based on inalienable rights. Anarchy was what he saw in the words of the rank-and-file soldiers who demanded a government tied to the consent of individual citizens. Speaking about the Levellers, as so many would after him, Hume summarized their views in a manner certain to render them odious: “Royalty it was agreed to abolish: Nobility must be set aside: Even all ranks of men be levelled; and an universal equality of property . . . be introduced.”192 Macaulay, by contrast, spoke up for “those who were simply honest to the principles of equal and general freedom, who called themselves Commonwealth’s men, but who were in derision [called] Levellers.” Far better versed in the pamphlet literature of the Puritan Revolution than Hume, Macaulay rightly repudiated the claim that the so-called Levellers had demanded an equal distribution of property. She objected to the term Leveller, a “hackneyed term of reproach, flung out on all occasions by the adversary against the partisans of liberty.” Hereditary privileges they did refuse but without demanding redistribution of property. To demand respect for equal natural rights is not to demand overturning all property arrangements. Exactly opposite of Hume, when Macaulay spoke of the Levellers, she imagined the wondrous possibilities of natural rights republicanism.193 One document on which they both commented was the Agreement of the People.194 Hume spied in it “the plan of a republic,” and so did Macaulay but their reactions were antithetical. The very most he was willing to concede was that it contained plausible schemes for correcting the inequality of representation in government. “Other parts are too perfect for human nature, and savor strongly of that fanatical spirit, so prevalent throughout the kingdom.” For her part, in unspoken opposition to Hume, Macaulay admired “that famous Agreement of the People, the establishment of which was in vain contended for by the Levellers.” Hume regretted that the government the Agreement would have replaced had been “violently pulled in pieces.” In Macaulay’s contrary scheme the Agreement was an exemplar of the type of government that could banish violence forever by recognizing the natural rights of all the English.195

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Without question it was Hume above all other writers whom Catharine Macaulay regarded as the person she must challenge and defeat in intellectual combat. Less present in her thought but also a noteworthy opponent was Edmund Burke. Addressing in 1790 his famous polemic against France, she expressed disgust that he had explicitly and deliberately spoken in behalf of “prejudice,” knowing full well, as he definitely did, that it had been denounced by all the philosophes. And when she wrote that “Mr. Burke has certainly a fine imagination,” her message decoded was that he was not much of a thinker. The most privileged of the French, she reminded her readers, voluntarily “surrendered to the people all their feudal privileges” in 1789, an act which constituted “a monument of their singular greatness.” She spoke out forcefully against Burke’s condemnation of the representatives of Third Estate for their rejection of voting by estates instead of by head, under which scheme they would have had only one-third rather than one-half of the votes. Her demand and that of the French was for “a fair and equal representation of the whole people.” The French Revolution, in her view, was nothing less than the triumph of Enlightenment: “From what can this difference which subsists between the French nation and other societies arise, but in a more general diffusion of knowledge.” Those whom Burke dismissed as “the swinish multitude,” she insisted, were the defenders, he the enemy of the rights of man. “Why has he . . . endeavored to rouse all nations and all descriptions of men against them, and thus to crush in their ruin all the rights of man? . . . Would he recommend to the potentates of Europe a renewal of that wicked conspiracy against the rights of men?” Macaulay, comparing 1789 to all that preceded it, proclaimed the dawn of an unprecedented era. Where Burke saw a shocking break with the past, she saw the emergence of a new hope for all humankind.196 Natural rights republicanism recognizes no borders; it is available for all nations. The essay Macaulay wrote twenty years earlier in 1770, criticizing Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, is possibly as important as her essay of 1790 criticizing his Reflections. In the latter, she defended the early phase of the French Revolution; in the former she expressed her deep disappointment with the outcome of the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. In 1778, she would publish her History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time and in 1783 the final volume of her History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution. Both of those historical volumes voiced her dismay that the Whigs, in her judgment, had betrayed the promise of 1688. Every assertion she made against the post-revolutionary Whigs in her historical works is already present in her essay of 1770, written in response to Burke’s Thoughts on Present Discontents. She denounced Burke’s speech of 1770 as a “pernicious work.” Supposedly he had set out “to expose the dangerous designs of a profligate

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junto of courtiers”; but his speech “likewise endeavors to mislead the people on the subject of the .  .  . no less dangerous maneuvers of the aristocratic faction and party.” The Whigs whose interests Burke touted were a continuation of their predecessors dating from the time of the Revolution, who grasped power at the price of degenerating into a faction no better than the Tories. “A system of corruption began at the very period of the Revolution. . . . Parliament, the great barrier of our much boasted constitution, while it preserved its forms, annihilated its spirit.” Burke, “this mighty champion of the whig faction,” sanctioned – as had his Whig predecessors – the noxious septennial parliaments which replaced the more responsive triennial legislatures of an earlier time. As did his forebears, Burke opposed rotation of office and articulated a “shallow pretence of horrible disorders attending frequent elections.” Falsely, Burke claimed that radical Whigs were “speculative reasoners .  .  . out of touch with reality.” No more than his Whig predecessors did Burke condemn placemen, pensioners, a standing army, heavy taxes, and destructive debt. Speaking as a radical Whig and against the established Whiggery of Burke, she complained that “the generality of mankind are too fond of accustomed establishments, however pernicious.” Making matters all the worse, “in all the great struggles for liberty, true reformation was never by the ruling party either effected or even intended.”197 Usually Catharine Macaulay spoke with a voice that was uncompromising, definitive, free of self-doubt. There was, however, one matter about which she was profoundly ambivalent, namely, “the people,” whom she praised on some occasions and scorned on others. By turns she was democratic or elitist, never simply one or the other. To speak affirmatively about “the people” in social contract theory was one thing; in concrete historical reality quite another. At her most weary, in the third volume of her History of England, she spoke of “the multitude, whose blind, fatal credulity no experience can enlighten.”198 But by the time she reached volume six, she could say “I have endeavored, with the most indefatigable pains to make my History useful to men of all conditions,” and she saw to it that her books could be afforded by the many.199 Back and forth she moved, writing on one occasion, “In the natural state of humanity, I believe two thirds of any given society may be numbered in the classes of fools and madmen.”200 Elsewhere she lamented that “bigotry, enthusiasm, and infidelity are the three divisions under which we may class the great majority of society.”201 Yet, when writing about the reign of Charles the First, she suggested that “the natural good sense of the people of England, strengthened by an increase of knowledge, could not long languish under this diabolical tyranny.”202 If there was hope for the future, it was that the privileged might attend scrupulously to their education and pass the benefits of their learning along to the many: “the education of the great, were it properly attended

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to, . . . would be felt in the improved virtue of all the subordinate classes of citizens.”203 Macaulay was, perhaps, provoked to suspend her doubts about the populace for a moment when she witnessed Burke, in her words, “trembling” at the thought that “if the question of the abstract rights of men were brought before the eyes of the people, the most dreadful confusions might follow.”204 Catharine Macaulay was typical of the upper middle-class radical Whigs in her ambivalence about the lower class. Tom Paine was a radical Whig of the lower class and was anything but ambivalent about reaching out to the many.

Thomas Paine Unintentionally symbolic of Paine’s efforts to import radical English Whiggery to America was the designation of the author of the initial edition of Common Sense, not as Tom Paine but as “written by an Englishman.” That this pamphlet, released on January 10, 1776, was the message of Price, Priestley, and Macaulay but intended now for the many rather than the few is indicated by the presence of plentiful citations to the Bible, with which a very large number of Americans were familiar, and the absence of classical references, which would only have appealed to a restricted audience. Common sense, he assured his readers, was all they needed to understand him. Somewhere from 100,000 to 150,000 persons wasted no time in agreeing with him by purchasing his pamphlet, an astonishing readership. Years later he could not restrain himself from writing, “The success it met with was beyond anything since the invention of printing.”205 Second on the list of his most noteworthy works, Rights of Man, 1791–92, cost a mere sixpence, making it affordable for all social classes, eagerly awaited, another best seller. Of all the radical English Whigs who welcomed the American and French Revolutions, Paine stands alone by way of direct participation. Catharine Macaulay did visit America for a year but after independence, from the summer of 1784 to that of 1785, during which time she met various figures of the Revolution, such as James Otis, Mercy Otis Warren, Richard Henry Lee, and visited George Washington at Mount Vernon. The hope of Americans that she would write a history of their revolution was dashed by her ill health. Tom Paine, more significantly, was present in America from the start and his pamphlet Common Sense arguably sparked the Revolution. He was also at the center of the French Revolution, serving as a delegate to the National Convention and agreeing in October of 1792 to serve on the Committee of Nine to frame a new constitution. His words and actions were the perfect climax of English radicalism and the unstinting fulfillment of the unity of its theory with its practice. Where Price, Priestley, and Macaulay hesitated, Paine forged forward, always refusing the compromises proposed by the coterie of England’s

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radicals. Not least was this true than when he sided decisively against monarchical and in favor of republican government in Common Sense, rather than accepting, as they had, the compromise a hybrid regime. “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings,” he told his American audience, “is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so often frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” Forcefully he spoke out against a “distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is, the distinction of men into Kings and Subjects.” George the Third merits contempt: “the naked and untutored Indian is less savage than the king of Britain.” Among the many ills of monarchies is the relentless search for glory in bloodshed; quite the contrary is the record of modern republics: “The republics of Europe are all . . . in peace. Holland and Switzerland are without wars, foreign or domestic.”206 The Bible, too, he insisted in Common Sense, was anti-monarchical and pro-republican. “The quiet and rural lives of the first patriarchs has a happy something in them, which vanishes away when we come to the history of Jewish royalty.” Monarchists gloss over the anti-monarchical parts of scripture and take great care to be unaware that David was praised not as king but as “a man after God’s own heart.” “Near three thousand years passed away from the Mosaic account of the creation, till the Jews under a national delusion requested a king. Till then their form of government . . . was a kind of republic administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes.” It is no accident that in the modern world the Protestant, Bible-reading countries favor republics, whereas the Catholic, Bible-deprived countries favor monarchies. “There is as much of kingcraft as priest-craft in withholding the scripture from the public in Popish countries. For monarchy in every instance is the Popery of government.” Although devoid of sympathy for the notion that we enter the world in a state of sin, Paine could not resist saying “original sin and hereditary succession are parallels.”207 From the outset Paine made clear in Common Sense that the regime he advocated was a natural rights republic, Lockean in all but name. He was uncompromisingly opposed to the English government because it was guilty, albeit without acknowledgment, of “declaring war against the natural rights of all mankind.” Early in his pamphlet he asked his readers to detach themselves mentally for a moment from the current reality and to imagine the hypothetical commencement of a country that remained true to nature. The beginning would be a state of nature, everyone living in a condition of “natural liberty,” seeking a government that would guarantee their freedom. On the basis of “common interest,” and “not on the unmeaning name of king,” free humans would seek a mutually agreeable union. All would understand that “A government of our own is our natural right”; and the purpose of government would be recognized as that of protecting our rights. “In this parliament every man by natural

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right will have a seat.” Representative government would soon arise, of course, given the growing number of citizens and their time-consuming involvement in everyday nonpolitical activities. Frequent elections and rotation would suffice to keep the elected officials faithful to pursuing not their interests but those of the electors.208 Well aware that England was called the “mother” country, Paine argued that the colonists fled “not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster.” More significantly, he held that “the colonies come of age” and in consequence now have the natural right to attend to their own affairs. That is, he took what Locke had said about how children should claim their natural rights upon reaching maturity and applied it to the America he deemed destined to hold up to the world the image of a living embodiment of a natural rights republic.209 In Common Sense Paine initiated a discussion of public affairs in terms of the social contract and natural rights theory that he would continue to pursue throughout his career, especially in Rights of Man. To his implicitly Lockean discussion in 1776 of the legitimizing “principles” of government, he added his thoughts in the same pamphlet on the proper “form” of government, its institutional structure. In the course of adumbrating his thoughts on political institutions, he went well beyond the position of his fellow radical Whigs. They had spoken in favor of England’s mixed and balanced government, supposedly composed of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements, limiting their criticism to complaints that a spoils system was corrupting an otherwise admirable structure. Paine dared go further, much further, with his call for a unicameral legislature to replace the undue complexity and unaccountability of the English constitution. “The more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered,”210 he wrote, confident that with proper procedural mechanisms, which he specified at a later date, due deliberation could most certainly be assured in a single chamber.211 While John Adams immediately wrote against Paine’s unicameralism,212 most Americans simply ignored this part of his pamphlet, but in Pennsylvania, the state Paine made his own, a unicameral arrangement reigned from 1776 to 1790. Paine’s radical English Whig cohort spoke with admiration of England’s republic hidden under the form of a monarchy. He, by contrast, held that the crown has so “eaten out the virtue of the house of commons (the republican part in the constitution) that the government of England is nearly as monarchical as that of France or Spain.”213 Despite the famous panegyrics delivered by Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Delolme on behalf of the English constitution; despite the bows to the English constitution coming from the radical Whigs; despite John Adams’s prideful claim in 1775 that “we enjoy the British constitution in greater purity than they do in England,”214 Paine dismissed outright “the so much boasted constitution of England.” In his view “it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government that the

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crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey.” As a good social contract theorist, Paine in Common Sense could and did switch the emphasis from the constituted to the constitutive authority, from the institutional arrangements to the sovereign people.215 Paine rejected the historical assertion of the establishment Whigs that the constitution dated from “from time immemorial.” How could anyone take seriously such a claim, considering that William the Conqueror was a usurper ruling without consent? “The plain truth,” remarked Paine, “is that the antiquity of the English monarchy will not bear looking into.” Nor did Paine sanction the claim of radical Whigs such as Catharine Macaulay and sometimes Joseph Priestley that the Saxon period preceding the Normans was one of freedom, a myth Hume had decisively repudiated.216 The past does not matter in Paine’s account. “The birthday of a new world is at hand.”217 In Paine’s presentation, America figures both as the last asylum and the first beacon of liberty. “Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression”; America stands alone in its freedom. Yet he maintained that if America became a natural rights republic, its example would know no borders and the American cause might become that of other nations. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” he asserted in his Introduction to Common Sense. In his closing pages he wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present has not happened since the days of Noah to now.” What was at stake was not only the present but the future: “posterity are virtually involved in the contest.”218 Already in 1776, it is evident, Paine’s firm commitment to natural rights republicanism was on full display. What was not on display was a concern for classical republicanism. Neither in Common Sense nor in his later work did his thought ever dwell except in passing on the ancients. Always he is a modern, concerned with natural rights, the benefits of commerce, and the hope that modernity will be a time that will place all past times in the shade. In American Crisis, the journal Paine penned during the course of the American Revolution, he explained why the classics were by and large irrelevant. Briefly commenting on the Greeks and Romans, he remarked that “we do great injustice to ourselves by placing them in such a superior line.” Insofar as they were worthy of notice, it was unfortunately because they were “possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at the same time that they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave.” He concludes by saying “I have no notion of yielding the palm of the United States to any Grecians or Romans that were ever born.”219 Elsewhere he regrets that “in the ancient world” there was “a rude and perpetual turn for war.” He also seemed to be targeting the ancients among others when he wrote, “Instead of placing his ideas of greatness in the rude achievements of the savage, [modern man] studies arts, sciences,

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agriculture and commerce, the refinements of the gentleman, the principles of society, and the knowledge of the philosopher.”220 For only one moment in his career did Paine praise the ancients, and that was when he wished to affirm that democracy, a word for so long associated with mob rule, could be admirable. “What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude. The one was the wonder of the ancient world; the other is becoming the admiration and model of the present.”221 Frequently Paine’s outlook directly contradicts the injunctions set forth by the republicans of antiquity and their neoclassical heirs of the Renaissance. Machiavelli apparently is not worth mentioning, not surprisingly considering Paine’s contempt for those who “attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud.”222 Nor does Paine, a firm believer in historical progress, have any sympathy for classical notions of the inevitable decline of government – a hoary conviction, he sighed, linked to a wrong-headed analogy with the decline of humans as they approach old age. “A nation is not a body, the figure of which is to be represented by the human body.” There is no reason why a republican government cannot be so constituted as to be “in a state of constant maturity . . ., never young, never old.”223 Revealingly, civic virtue in the classical sense is decisively downgraded by Paine. When public virtue is not available, he is quite willing to settle for turning our vices and narrowly considered self-interest to public advantage: in his words, “where men have not public spirit to render themselves serviceable, it ought to be the study of government to draw the best use possible from their vices.”224 And the individualism of the modern age, so incompatible with classical notions, troubles him not at all. “A nation,” he readily concedes, “is composed of distinct, unconnected individuals, following various trades, employments and pursuits; continually meeting, crossing, uniting, opposing and separating from each other, as accident, interest and circumstance shall direct.” Nevertheless, he continues, the public good is always within reach, because the “Public good is not a term opposed to the good of individuals; on the contrary, it is the good of every individual collected.”225 At the forefront of classical thought was the demand for unity, the quest for one united citizenry, bound together by a civic faith overriding all social differences, with some citizens shipped off if necessary to form colonies, but no groups from the outside ever permitted to gain entrance and earn civic status. As a resident of Pennsylvania, Paine was familiar with a very different world in which multiple religious, ethnic, and economic groups kept their separate identities while successfully interacting with one another on a regular basis. Years later, during his residence in France, he may well have had his experience in Pennsylvania in mind when he directly contradicted the classical view. If there is a country in the world where concord . . . would be least expected, it is America. Made up, as it is of people from different

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nations, accustomed to different forms and habits of government, speaking different languages, and more different in their modes of worship, it would appear that the union of such a people was impracticable; but by the simple operation of constructing government on the principles of . . . the rights of man, every difficulty retires, and all the parts are brought into cordial unison.226 Thomas Paine could not have been a more ardent republican, nor less classical in his republicanism. Commerce is another realm in which Paine was eager to distinguish his republicanism from that of the ancients. He explained that trade “has had a considerable influence in tempering the human mind” and accounts for much of our progress since ancient times. It was the absence of gainful workplace employment on the part of those enjoying civic status in the ancient world that “occasioned in them such a rude and perpetual turn for war.” Their “indolence,” made possible by slavery, afforded “leisure for mischief.”227 They had nothing better to do than fight. When arguing his case for American independence in Common Sense, he used trade to great advantage: “Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port.” America must go her own way in the world of international trade, “which she never can do, while by her dependence on Britain, she is made the make-weight in the scale of British politics.” There is one passage in Paine’s famous pamphlet that calls commerce into question, but it is quickly overridden by another. “With the increase of commerce, England has lost its spirit. . . . The rich are in general slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel.” A few pages later, in an appendix, he sounds the opposite note, as he had throughout his presentation, praising to the skies the search for material well-being: “no nation in a state of foreign dependence, limited in its commerce, and cramped and fettered in its legislative powers, can ever arrive at any material eminence.” Should, however, America break free of England, she will arrive at a stage of material prowess “unparalleled in the history of other nations.”228 After hesitating briefly in Common Sense, possibly but not certainly diverging for a moment from previous and later comments in that work, Paine speaks without the slightest ambiguity in favor of commerce throughout his later writings. In the 1777 issue of American Crisis he reaffirmed his finale to Common Sense: “The freedom of trade .  .  . is, to a trading country, an article of such importance, that the principal source of wealth depends upon it; and it is impossible that any country can flourish . . . whose commerce is engrossed, cramped and fettered by the laws and mandates of another.”229 In 1782 he remarked that the citizen of today “trades with the same countries, which in former ages, . . . he would have gone to war with. . . . The idea of conquering countries,

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like the Greeks and Romans, does not now exist; and experience has exploded the notion of going to war for the sake of profit.”230 A decade later, he summarized his sentiments: “In all my publications . . . I have been an advocate for commerce, because I am a friend of its effects. . . . The most effectual process . . . of improving the condition of man [is] by means of his interest; and it is on this ground that I take my stand.”231 Relentlessly Paine continued throughout his life the attack on monarchy that he initiated in Common Sense. When in 1792 French royalty was abolished, he wrote dismissively that “a person cannot be a mere workman without some sort of ability; to be a king all that a man requires is to be born.” In the same Essay for the Use of New Republicans in Their Opposition to Monarchy, he made clear that his greatest fear was of “kings who were men of genius . . . [because] intelligent rulers have been a greater curse to nations than those who were intellectually deficient.”232 To Paine the incompetence of Louis XVI should not be held against him. When Louis was put on trial Paine argued that it is monarchy that should be executed, not the pitiful figure who was born to a royal title; better it would be to banish the ex-king to America, where he could learn to be a citizen, than to make a martyr of him.233 Paine’s generosity toward the uncomprehending Louis stands in marked contrast to his suggested treatment in 1776 of Americans who would betray the Revolution. “A line of distinction should be drawn between English soldiers taken in battle and inhabitants of America taken in arms. The first are prisoners but the latter traitors. The one forfeits his liberty, the other his head.”234 In Rights of Man and throughout his later publications Paine completed the work he had begun in Common Sense of attacking the famous English model of government and setting forth his ideal of a natural rights republic. Beyond his devastating critique of the English constitution in 1776 was his denial in 1791 that the people of Great Britain had a constitution. “A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government.” England’s so-called constitution, its government, “arose out of a conquest, and not out of society,” whence it follows that England has no constitution. “Can Mr. Burke produce the English Constitution? If he cannot, we may fairly conclude, that though it has been so much talked about, no such thing as a constitution exists, or ever did exist, and consequently that the people have yet a constitution to form.” The English Bill of Rights was in reality a Bill of Wrongs since it was drawn up by a sitting government, not a constitutional convention, and the rights in question were not recognized as natural rights. What Burke needs to realize is that “government without a constitution,” such as England’s, is “power without a right.” Infinitely superior are America and France, America where the constitution is “established on the authority of the people,” France where “the word nation is used instead of the people.”235

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Paine’s call for a constitution willed into being by the sovereign people is an invocation of social contract theory – of Locke’s version, not that of his predecessors. “There is no such thing as the idea of a compact between the people on one side, and the government on the other,” Paine contended. Elsewhere in Rights of Man, he repeated, “It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom to say that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed: but this cannot be true.”236 Paine’s argument was with Pufendorf and his heirs. To propose absolutism by free choice was Pufendorf’s aim, and he did so by calling for an initial social contract, followed by a second contract, a political contract of submission. The Americans accepted his scheme in significantly revised form when from 1765 to 1776 theirs was a politics of resistance. They would conduct public demonstrations forcing parliament to realize it had broken the second, the political contract, but they would not risk a revolutionary repeal of the original social compact and a dangerous return to the state of nature. Paine’s, by contrast, was a revolutionary social contract formed in Locke’s image. In his view government should be held in “trust,” exactly as Locke had written, hence revocable whenever the sovereign people wished.237 Past agreements do not bind the present. So far as “forms” of government were concerned, Paine sounded initially like all previous contract theorists when he wrote “I am not contending for nor against any form of government. . . . That which a whole nation chooses to do, it has a right to do.” But when it came to “principles” of government, he moved definitely beyond Grotius and Pufendorf to speak with the voice of a radicalized Locke: “Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead that are to be accommodated.”238 Generational autonomy and a constantly renegotiable social contract, a new constitution if necessary, are intimately allied concepts in Paine’s thought. No wonder Jefferson admired Paine – Jefferson, who wrote “the dead have no rights. They are nothing.”239 No wonder Pitt the Younger feared Paine, whose words recalled those of the Leveller Richard Overton: “whatever our forefathers were . . ., we are the men of the present age.”240 Well aware that his political philosophy might be used to destabilize even the best of governments, Paine sought an anchor of continuity and found it in government that would be properly assertive when necessary. His position in Common Sense was that “the Continental belt is too loosely tightened.” He would have the Americans unite immediately under one well-structured national government, warning that half a century later fusion might be impossible due to a multitude of new interests brought forth by trade and population growth.241 Addressing the government of Pennsylvania in the mid-1780s, he warned that “the late Assembly, by assuming a sovereign power over every act and matter done by the State in former assemblies, . . . [has] rendered government incompetent to

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all the great objects of the state.” Projects for “inland navigation, building bridges, opening roads of communication,” and, most of all, a bank from which both merchant and farmer gain financial advantage, are in danger of being nullified by a refusal of the legislature to abide by past commitments. Inevitably “individuals will not venture their money . . . on an act that may be made by one assembly and broken by another.” Laws, Paine insisted, may be repealed at any time, but contracts must be honored. The bank and other public projects should remain in place, beyond the reach of the sitting legislature. Was this to overturn his commitment to generational autonomy? Not at all he insisted, not if charters and contracts automatically expire after thirty years, the duration of a generation.242 Paine’s willingness to employ government in resolving pressing issues is evident in the social welfare programs he unveiled in the second part of Rights of Man and, four years later, in his pamphlet Agrarian Justice. Readers familiar with Common Sense must have been quite surprised by the Paine they encountered in 1792 and 1796, for in 1776 his call on the very first page of his pamphlet had apparently been for a minimalist government: “Society in every stage is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil. .  .  . Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence.”243 Caught up in the difficult social circumstances of the French Revolution – an illiterate peasantry and downtrodden artisans – he knew he could not turn for a resolution to those “called Nobles or Nobility, or rather [persons of] No-ability.”244 Governmental intervention was essential and, he proclaimed, could readily be defended in the language of natural rights. Bad government was the problem, good government the cure. Under current conditions, the young meet their demise on the gallows, the elderly in workhouses, because the lower classes are unjustly condemned to live in wretched conditions of poverty, even worse than that of American Indians. “I speak not of one country, but of all. It is so in England, it is so all over Europe.”245 To end poverty and to reinstitute the reign of natural rights, he proposed progressive taxation to fund comfortable retirement at age sixty, education for the children of the poor, public employment whenever jobs were otherwise unavailable – all in the name not of charity but of right.246 In Rights of Man, Paine placed all the blame on government, none on the modern economy. Commerce, he remained convinced, is “a pacific system, operating to cordialize mankind.”247 The fault lay solely with voracious rulers – monarchs and privileged classes – who served their vile interests at the expense of everyone else. Several years later he altered his argument in the pamphlet Agrarian Justice. As author of Rights of Man he had written that the problem of poverty “lies not in any natural defect in the principles of civilization, but in preventing those principles having a universal operation.”248 As author of Agrarian Justice he reconsidered his earlier view, raising the question “whether the state that is proudly . . .

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called civilization has most promoted or injured the general happiness of man.” Are not the “most miserable of the human race to be found in the countries that are called civilized?” His reconsidered view was that “A revolution in the state of civilization is the necessary companion of revolutions in the system of government.”249 The downfall of humanity was “landed monopoly.” Private property in land “could not exist in the first state of man, that of hunters. It did not exist in the second state, that of shepherds.” But with the advent of the third state, that of cultivators, it did exist, yielding the disastrous consequence that even as the productivity of land was enhanced, the new arrangement “dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation.” Add to the list of institutionalized ills the inheritance of landed estates by succeeding generations, and what is the result? One has arrived at a world wherein the dead govern the living, and the many are denied their birthright to the original commons. What is to be done? Paine would not go so far as to confiscate all forms of property, but he would insist that in regard to land “the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, [would be] individual property.”250 That which was grown on the land would belong to the persons who grew it, not to the idlers who had long lived off the labors of others. “Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally”; from which it follows that the person who holds property “owes, on every principle of justice, . . . a part of that accumulation back from whence the whole came.”251 The overall objective was to make the land available to the use of all and, by means of a common fund, for “every person when arrived at the age of twenty-one years [to be] an inheritor of something to begin with.”252 Obviously the norm of generational autonomy had acquired a new, an economic meaning in his thought. Held in custody during the worst moments of the French Revolution, barely escaping execution, Paine might have emerged from prison in a state of despair for the future of France and its revolutionary ideals. Instead, with the publication of Agrarian Justice he affirmed that his revolutionary faith was as strong as ever. It was the indigence of the vast majority of the French, he explained, that had thrown the revolution off its course, a problem for which his pamphlet proposed a solution. He also remained fully dedicated to exporting the revolution across the Channel to England. Before imprisonment, he had called upon the English people to hold a constitutional convention. After his release, he proposed to the Directory and Napoleon an invasion, “to give the people of England an opportunity of forming a government for themselves.”253 Military action is sometimes necessary to fulfill the promise of republicanism without borders. Doubtless he remembered that the second part of Rights of Man had enjoyed a wide readership in Manchester, Sheffield, and London; and

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he remembered as well that the government’s effort to suppress his work had actually greatly increased its popularity. Hundreds of thousands of copies sold during the first several years of the 1790s.254 What sustained Paine’s optimism through even the worst of times was his firm conviction that history was on his side, setbacks temporary, ultimate victory inevitable. “Our style and manner of thinking has undergone a revolution more extraordinary than the political revolution of the country,” he wrote during the American war with Britain. We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used. . . . We are now really another people, and cannot again go back to ignorance and prejudice. The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.255 Later, during the French Revolution, he made the same point: The mind, in discovering truth, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before he saw it. Those who talk of a counter-revolution in France show how little they understand of man.256 In 1792 he wrote, “I do not believe that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries in Europe.”257 Subsequent events forced him to alter his timetable but not his conviction that a new and irreversible world would emerge, sooner or later, from the ashes of modern revolution. Providence as well as history, so he believed, guaranteed an eventual favorable outcome.258 Measured against the first stage of human development, a “barbarian world” in which “hunting and war” were the “chief occupations,” the eighteenth century is one of remarkable progress. Trade has linked human to human, nation to nation. To everyone’s advantage, “the sea is the world’s highway.” Letters, books, pamphlets, newspapers, and the publicly shared learning they sponsor have broken down barriers. Preoccupied with antimonarchical rhetoric at the beginning of his career, Paine asserted that “The Republic of Letters is more ancient than monarchy.” A few years later he worked “letters” into his scheme of historical progress with the affirmation that “Letters, the tongue of the world, have in some measure brought all mankind acquainted. . . . Through them distant nations became capable of conversation.” And then there is science: “It was not Newton’s honor, neither could it be his pride that he was an Englishman, but that he was a philosopher: the heavens had liberated him from the prejudices of an island, and science had expanded his soul.” Two years later he generalized his argument: “Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple

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where all may meet.”259 Of all the sciences that have progressed in modern history, not least is political science. Until the American Revolution, the science of government stood still. Since then it has come into its own. “That the science of government is beginning to be better understood than in former times . . . the experience of every day proves to be true.”260 “We live in an age of revolutions,” Paine remarked during his sad final years, finding solace in the thought that modern revolutions, knowing no borders, might be temporarily held in abeyance but could never be permanently repealed. During the first Revolution, the American, he had proclaimed quite early that “the true idea of a great nation is that which extends and promotes the principles of universal society.” Separation from England would have mattered relatively little on the world stage, he noted later, “had it not been accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practices of governments.” The American was “the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew.” Upon his return to an unwelcoming America, he continued to maintain in 1805 that “America has the high honor and happiness of being the first nation that gave to the world the example of forming constitutions by conventions elected expressly for the purpose.”261 It was America’s Declaration of 1776, he declared in 1791, that inspired France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789; and to the end of his days he continued to believe those Declarations offered a teaching to the world as to what a republic might be.262 It was always his position that it would be vain “to look for precedents [to 1776] among the revolutions of former ages,” since “what were formerly called revolutions were little more than a change of persons.” The so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 was far from glorious, considering that “the rights of man were but imperfectly understood.” In France the revolution was directed against the system of despotism and in favor of natural rights, whereas “in the case of Charles I and James II of England, the revolt was against the personal despotism of the men.” No one should deny that the Revolution of 1688 was decisively eclipsed by “the luminous revolutions of America and France.” Against Burke, Paine argued that the French revolutionaries are to be congratulated, not condemned, for “bringing [revolution] forward under a reign more mild than the preceding ones,” and for doing so in the name of principles and natural rights. From America to France had been the forward march of revolution, and Paine hoped that from France it would spread to England. His ultimate dream was that “all Europe may form but one republic, and man be free.”263 ** Alas, none of his dreams came true. John Adams likened Paine to a dangerous star or meteor.264 If a meteor Paine was, he proved to be one that flashed brightly across the firmament for a moment but then disappeared,

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burnt out. Throughout his career he repeatedly called himself “a universal citizen,” “a citizen of the world.” “My attachment is to all the world,” he often stated. “My country is the world.”265 Yet the day would come, later in his career, when he discovered to his dismay that he was a citizen nowhere, never at home, a perpetual outsider. There no longer was an audience for his proposed republicanism without borders. Outlawed in England and burned in effigy, he could never return to his original country after his departure in September of 1792. In 1795 he broke ranks with the French republicans because he believed their proposed new constitution of that year was a betrayal of the promise of 1789: “The Constitution,” with its strict property qualification for the vote, “provides solely for the rights of the few, to the exclusion of the many.”266 Similarly, he held that the Federal Constitution in America failed to live up to the hopes of 1776. “The Federal Constitution is a copy, though not quite so base as the original, of the form of the British Government.” Against John Adams, Paine raised the complaint that he “never contemplated the origin of government, or comprehended anything of first principles.” John Jay, to his everlasting infamy, wanted a senate appointed for life. “These are the disguised traitors that call themselves Federalists.”267 After his return to America in 1802, it did not take long for Paine to realize that President Jefferson’s strategies for holding the Federalist Party at bay included distancing himself from Tom Paine, the bold supporter of the bloody French Revolution. Tom Paine did, indeed, light up the skies for a number of years with brilliant and quotable messages that arguably were the fulfillment of the English republicanism of the likes of Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and Catharine Macaulay. A meteor he was, but meteors – spectacular though they may be – are short-lived.

Notes 1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 110. 2. Edmund Burke, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” in Works of Edmund Burke (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1866), vol. IV, pp. 109–110. 3. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 81. 4. Catharine Macaulay, Observations on a Pamphlet Entitled Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents [4th ed.] (London: Printed for Edward & Charles Dilly, 1770). David Oswald Thomas, ed., Richard Price: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 15–16. 5. Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy, to Which Is Prefixed An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (Dublin: Printed for P. Byrne, 1788), p. 249. Hereafter cited as Lectures on History. 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. I (Paris: Pléiade1959), p. 630. Jean-Baptiste Suard, postscript to his translation of Hume’s “Of Liberty and Despotism,” Journal Étranger (May 1760), p. 170.

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7. David Hume, Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), pp. 10, 12. 8. David Hume, The History of England (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983), vol. IV, p. 60. 9. Edmund Burke, “Speech on the Petition of the Unitarian Society,” in Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Edmund Burke (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 127. 10. Thomas, Price: Political Writings, pp. 20, 182. 11. Ibid., pp. 33, 35, 66. 12. Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Essays, pp. 465–487. 13. E.g., Price: Political Writings, pp. 33, 36, 96, 120. 14. Ibid., p. 85. 15. Ibid., pp. 24, 28. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), no. 149. 16. Ibid., p. 28. 17. Ibid., p. 64. 18. Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), Bk. I, ch. 3, no. 8, p. 104. 19. Price: Political Writings, pp. 79, 23. 20. Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), vol. I, p. 388. 21. Price: Political Writings, p. 39. Paine, Common Sense, p. 94. 22. Locke, Second Treatise, no. 225. 23. Price: Political Writings, pp. 50, 185. 24. Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pp. 104–105. 25. Price: Political Writings, p. 165. 26. Ibid., p. 146n. 27. Ibid., p. 5. 28. Ibid., pp. 95–96. 29. Ibid., pp. 191–192. 30. Ibid., p. 41. 31. Ibid., p. 97. 32. Ibid., p. 100. Hume, Essays, p. 53. 33. Price: Political Writings, p. 96. 34. Ibid., p. 45. 35. Ibid., p. 56. 36. Ibid., p. 117. 37. Ibid., p. 119. 38. Ibid., p. 36. 39. Ibid., p. 55. 40. Ibid., p. 65. 41. Ibid., p. 69. 42. Ibid., p. 150. 43. Ibid., p. 19, 146. 44. Ibid., pp. 130, 131, 134, 136, 161. 45. Ibid., pp. 56, 85, 87. 46. Ibid., p. 56. 47. Ibid., p. 145. 48. Ibid., p. 3. 49. Ibid., pp. 148, 68. 50. Mark Hulliung, Enlightenment in Scotland and France: Studies in Political Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), p. 118. 51. Price: Political Writings, p. 99. 52. Ibid., pp. 111, 112.

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53. Ibid., p. 137. 54. On New England’s Christian republicanism see Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 55. Price: Political Writings, p. 100. 56. Ibid., p. 30. 57. Ibid., p. 109. 58. Ibid., p. 167. 59. Ibid., pp. 118, 69. 60. Ibid., p. 173. 61. Ibid., pp. 195, 190. 62. Ibid., pp. 182, 185. 63. Ibid., pp. 180, 196. 64. Ibid., pp. 178–179. 65. Ibid., p. 181. 66. Ibid., p. 182. 67. Burke, “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,” in Works of Edmund Burke, vol. II, pp. 120, 123–124. 68. Price: Political Writings, p. 15. 69. Burke, “Speech on Mr. Fox’s East India Bill,” in Works of Edmund Burke, vol. II, pp. 437–438. 70. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (University of Chicago Press, 1979), vol. I, pp. 52, 122, 157, 206. 71. Friedrich Gentz, The French and American Revolutions Compared (New York: Gateway, 1955), p. 65n. 72. Price: Political Writings, p. 109, as previously noted. 73. Priestley, Lectures on History, pp. 26–27, 215. 74. Joseph Priestley: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 109. 75. Priestley, Lectures on History, pp. 385, 414–415. 76. Ibid., pp. 15, 18. 77. Ibid., p. xxix. 78. Ibid., p.  408. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), pp. 699–706. 79. Priestley, Lectures on History, p. 227. 80. Ibid., p. 455. 81. Ibid., p. 267. 82. Ibid., pp. 355, 356, 362–363. 83. Ibid., pp. 445–446. 84. Ibid., p. 454. 85. Ibid., p. 32. 86. Priestley: Political Writings, pp. 108, 110. 87. Priestley, Lectures on History, pp. 49–50. 88. Ibid., pp. 66–69. 89. Ibid., p. 122. 90. Ibid., p. 12. 91. Ibid., p. 91. 92. Ibid., pp. 163, 167, 184. 93. Ibid., p. 9. 94. Ibid., pp. 60, 123. 95. Ibid., pp. 59–60. 96. Ibid., pp. xxiv, 1, 2, 9, 11. 97. Ibid., p. 27. 98. Ibid., p. 4.

Republics Without Borders 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

141

Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., p. xviii. Ibid., p. 460–471. Ibid., pp. 207, 210, 212. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., pp. 238–239. Ibid., p. 313. Ibid., p. 310. Ibid., p. 321. Ibid., pp. 327–328. Ibid., p. 319. Ibid., p. 349. Ibid., pp. 334, 388. Ibid., p. 321. Ibid., p. 325. Ibid., pp. 226–227. Ibid., pp. 336–337. Ibid., pp. 327–328. Ibid., pp. 414–415, 424. Hulliung, Enlightenment in Scotland and France, ch. 6. Priestley, Lectures on History, p. 10. Ibid., pp. 220–221, 289. Priestley: Political Writings p. 108. Priestley, Lectures on History, p. 247. Ibid., pp. 232, 269. Priestley: Political Writings, p. 109. Priestley, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Birmingham: Printed for Thomas Pearson, 1791), p. 24. Priestley, Lectures on History, p. 237. Priestley: Political Writings, p. 36. Ibid., pp. 237–238. Priestley, The Present State of Liberty in Great Britain and Her Colonies (London: Printed for Johnson & Payne, 1769), p. 32. Ibid., pp. vi, 11–13, 15. Priestley, Lectures on History, p. 12. Ibid., p. 267. Priestley, Letters to Burke, p. 40. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., pp. 143–144. Catharine Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution [8 vols.] (London: Printed for A. Hamilton, 1763–1783), vol. VI, p. xii. CatharineMacaulay, Observations on the Reflections of Burke on the Revolution in France (London: Printed for C. Dilly, 1790), p. 39. Catharine Macaulay, An Address to the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Bath: Printed for Edward & Charles Dilly, 1775), p. 28. History of England, V, 218n; VII, 307, 322, 340; VIII, 131, 152, 196, 213. Catharine Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of Burke, pp. 38–39. Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (Dublin: Printed for H. Chamberlaine et al., 1790), pp. 278, 279, 281–282. Ibid., pp. 162–163.

142 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186.

Republics Without Borders Ibid., pp. 13, 150, 157. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., pp. 120, 251–252. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 84. Macaulay, To the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland, p. 13. Macaulay, History from the Revolution to the Present Time (Bath: Printed for R. Cruttwell and Sold by E. and C. Dilly, 1778), pp. 314, 263, 125. History from the Revolution, p. 314. Macaulay, History from the Accession of James I to the Revolution (London: J. Nourse, 1763-83), I, p. 277. History to the Revolution, II, p. 201. Ibid., V, pp. 336, 202. Ibid., VI, p. 360. Ibid., VIII, p. 278. History from the Revolution, p. 124. Macaulay, To the People of England, Scotland, and Ireland, pp. 18, 13. Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of Burke, pp. 15, 21, 22, 45. Macaulay, Letters on Education, pp. 141, 143. History to the Revolution, IV, p. 424. Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of Burke, p. 45. Macaulay, Observations on a Pamphlet Entitled Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (London: Printed for Edward & Charles Dilly, 1770), p. 10. Macaulay, Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be Found in Mr. Hobbes’s Philosophical Rudiments (London: Printed for T. Davies, 1767), pp. 14–15. History to the Revolution, I, pp. 46–47. Ibid., V, pp. 91–92. Ibid., V, p. 162. Ibid., VI, p. 129. Ibid., V, p. 260. Ibid., VI, p. xi. Ibid., V, p. 249. Ibid., V, pp. 202–204. Macaulay, A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (London: Printed for A. Hamilton, 1783), p. 168. Ibid., p. viii. Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, D. D. Raphael, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 50. Macaulay, Immutability of Moral Truth, pp. 163–164. Ibid., p. 110. David Hume, The History of England (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983), VI, pp. 533–534. Ibid., V, p. 93. Ibid., II, pp. 173–174. Ibid., II, p. 525. Ibid. II, p. 320. Ibid., V, pp. 533, 536. Ibid., VI, p. 533. Ibid., V, p. 544. On Macaulay’s History see Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) and Lynne E. Withey, “Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism, and Propaganda,” Journal of British Studies, vol. 16, no. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 59–83.

Republics Without Borders 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213. 214. 215. 216.

217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223. 224.

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Macaulay, Letters on Education, p. 120. History to the Revolution, IV, p. 153. History to the Revolution, VII, pp. 322, 60n. Ibid., VI, p. viii. Macaulay, Loose Remarks in Hobbes, p. 9. Hume, History of England, IV, pp. 145–146, 368. Ibid., VI, p. 3. V, p. 513. Macaulay, History to the Revolution, IV, p. 355. The Agreement of the People and other documents of the Levellers may be found in Don M. Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1944). Macaulay, History to the Revolution, V, p. 22. Hume, History of England, V, p. 532. Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of Burke, pp.  7, 11, 17, 23, 42–44. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp. 69, 76–77. Macaulay, Observations on Thoughts on Present Discontents, pp. 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 22–23, 27. Macaulay, History to the Revolution, III, p. 357. Ibid., VI, p. xiii. History from the Revolution, p. 302. Macaulay, Letters on Education, p. 56. History to the Revolution, II, p. 59. Macaulay, Letters on Education, pp. viii–ix. Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of Burke, p. 21. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (New York: Penguin Classics, 1988), pp. 219– 20n. All subsequent citations to this work will be to the readily available Penguin edition. Paine, Common Sense, (New York: Penguin, 1986), pp. 72, 76, 95, 114. All subsequent citations to this work will be to the readily available Penguin edition. Ibid., pp. 72, 73, 75, 76, 78. Ibid., pp. 63, 66, 67, 98. Ibid., pp. 84, 94. Ibid., p. 68. It was in his later work that he spelled out how to deliberate in a unicameral government. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press, 1969), II, pp. 585, 1001. John Adams, “Thoughts on Government,” in George A. Peek, ed., The Political Writings of John Adams (New York: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 83–92. Paine, Common Sense, p. 81. Peek, ed., The Political Writings of John Adams, p. 48. Paine, Common Sense, pp. 68, 71. Priestley, Lectures on History, pp. 163, 167, 184, 279–281. Macaulay, History to the Revolution, I, pp. 387n, 388n; II pp. 1, 221; III, pp. 5; VI, 2, 71. History from the Revolution, p.  5. Hume, History of England, I, pp.  15, 23–24, 26, 50–51, 160–161, 168, 437, 455ff, 460–461, 464–465, 473; II, 524. Paine, Common Sense, pp. 78–79, 120. Ibid., pp. 82, 100, 120. Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. I, pp. 123–124. Ibid., II, p. 241. Paine, Rights of Man, pp. 177, 180. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 181. Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 98.

144 225. 226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234. 235. 236. 237. 238. 239. 240. 241. 242.

243. 244. 245. 246. 247. 248. 249. 250. 251. 252. 253. 254. 255. 256. 257. 258. 259. 260. 261. 262. 263. 264. 265. 266. 267.

Republics Without Borders Ibid., II, pp. 371–372. Paine, Rights of Man, pp. 166–167. Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. II, p. 241. Paine, Common Sense, pp. 86–87, 107, 115. Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 80. Ibid., II, p. 242. Paine, Rights of Man, p. 212. Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, pp. 542, 545. Ibid., II, pp. 551–555. Paine, Common Sense, p. 118. Paine, Rights of Man, pp. 71–72, 131, 185, 191, 193. Ibid., pp. 70, 188. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. 42. Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin, 1975), pp. 560, 580. Don M. Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, p. 114. Paine, Common Sense, pp. 108, 118. Paine, “Dissertations on Government; the Paper Affairs of the Bank; and Paper Money,” in Complete Writings, II, pp. 376, 380–381, 395, 397, 400, 413. Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), ch. 6. Paine, Common Sense, p. 65. Paine, Rights of Man, p. 106. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., pp. 242, 243, 248, 251. Ibid., p. 212. Ibid., p. 211. Agrarian Justice, in Complete Writings, I, pp. 609–610, 621. Ibid., pp. 611, 612. Ibid., p. 620. Ibid., p. 618. Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. II, pp. 504–505, 680. Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution, pp. 230–231. Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. II, 243–244. Paine, Rights of Man, pp. 118–119. Ibid., p. 156. Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. I, 54, 118, 120. II, p. 909. Ibid., I, pp. 58, 164. II, pp. 241, 262. Ibid., II, pp. 510, 571. Rights of Man, p. 207. Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. I, 230. II, 256, 681, 1007. Paine, Rights of Man, p. 159. Ibid. II, p. 520. Ibid., II, 220, 909. Paine, Rights of Man, pp. 43, 47, 49, 75–76, 91, 144, 209. Lyman Henry Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 330. Ibid., I, p. 146. II, pp. 256, 552. Paine, Rights of Man, p. 228. Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. II, pp. 590–591. Ibid., pp. 693, 696.

5

What Is Living, What Is Dead in “Republicanism”?

Benedetto Croce wrote a famous essay bearing the title, “What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel?” Perhaps we may profit by following his lead, posing the same question about the concept of “republicanism.” What has been the fate of the notion of republicanism in England, Scotland, America, and France? While most of our attention has been devoted to the eighteenth century, there have been brief forays in our essays into the seventeenth century, where we have highlighted the fusion of civic republican thought with natural rights philosophy in such key English figures as Algernon Sidney and John Milton. Another encounter with England in the middle of the seventeenth century, its Roundhead republic, came to the fore when discussing the historical writings authored a century later by David Hume and Catharine Macaulay. Beyond our primary focus on the eighteenth century and the secondary glance at the seventeenth, we have had occasion to deal at least in a preliminary way with America’s natural-rights republican thought well into the nineteenth century and its anti-monarchical utterances reaching into twentieth century, plus the efforts in recent times of scholars and journalists inspired by the New Left and neoconservatism to read republicanism into the past and to seek a revival. What we wish to attempt in this final chapter is, first, to summarize our overall findings and to bring them into sharper focus by comparing and contrasting the fate of republicanism in England, Scotland, and America. Our second concern will be to pay renewed attention to France because it is arguably there, far more than in any other country, that republicanism truly was a lively topic of debate throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth; and there, too, not in America as has been claimed, that there was a prolonged struggle between republicanism and liberalism. The irony upon which we mean to dwell is not only that it was in France rather than America where a debate between republicanism and liberalism occurred. It is that in France, as the nineteenth century unfolded, the republican mission proved to be one of saving liberalism from degenerating into illiberalism, an outcome little appreciated or not at all in the English-speaking world.

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Seventeenth-Century England In England republican thought met its demise in 1789 or slightly thereafter in reaction to the French Revolution. In Scotland, the moderate literati of Edinburgh decisively rejected republicanism even earlier, around 1776 in reaction to the American Revolution. Nothing resembles more Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, we shall see, than the Scottish polemics written well over a decade earlier in condemnation of the American Revolution. If republican aspirations were to survive in the English-speaking world into the nineteenth century, America was the remaining possibility. It is worth revisiting and appreciating how strongly articulated republican thought had been in seventeenth century England and how this Commonwealthman legacy was available to be renewed and refashioned or neglected in the countries under scrutiny. Caroline Robbins successfully traced the record of Commonwealthman or republican thought in her well-known book, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman, which included extensive study of seventeenth-century figures. In general, her themes were well-developed, but one beckoning topic she neglected to underscore. Although her study teems with allusions to seventeenth and eighteenth century journalists and polemicists who called for government by the consent of the governed and demanded recognition of natural rights, she never draws together these strands of her findings, never explicitly acknowledges the extent to which many of the Commonwealthmen she discusses were as much or more so social-contract, natural-rights republicans than they were classical republicans. John Milton is a perfect example of a seventeenth-century Commonwealthman whose passion for the classics was undeniable, but equally evident in his writings is a deep immersion in social contract theory. Remarking on his childhood, he wrote “At my father’s house .  .  . I gave myself up entirely to reading the Greek and Latin writers.” If only, he sighed, the England of his day were to be the reincarnation of ancient Rome: “Where is this goodly tower of a Commonwealth, which the English boasted they would build to overshadow kings, and be another Rome in the west?” A good example of his allegiance to the Greek and Roman classics is his unflinching embrace of tyrannicide. A good example of his even greater embrace of the social contract is his preferred method of deposing a tyrant or any ruler whose services are no longer wanted by the people: Since the king or magistrate holds his authority of the people, . . . then may the people as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him, retain him or depose him though no tyrant, merely by the liberty and right of free born men. Always we should remember that “our king made not us, but we him.” We are “born free,” free by our “natural birthright,” and owe obedience

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only to a government of our choice, a government to which we have consented. As Locke would later, Milton held that “the power of kings and magistrates is . . . committed to them in trust from the people.”1 Another Commonwealthman, Walter Moyle, although not a social contract theorist, was nevertheless well aware that notions of voluntary and revocable obedience had been skillfully articulated in the works of a number of his fellow republicans, including the formidable Milton and Sidney. His fear was that such thinking “makes the grounds of subjection and obedience to government too precarious and loose.” Yet he did not hesitate to urge any persons wishing to travel down such a dangerous road to begin by reading Locke’s Treatise on Government. “That work contains the first rudiments upon this subject. I know a gentleman who calls it the A. B. C. of politics.”2 Republicanism and social contract theory walked hand in hand in the works of Commonwealthmen. Even in Moyle’s case, such misgivings as he entertained had nothing to do with a sense of a clash between the two; his hesitation was limited, rather, to the practical problem of assuring the stability of a republican regime.

Eighteenth-Century Scotland The natural-rights republican writings of seventeenth-century English polemicists were available to the Scots of the following century but apparently had little impact. Natural-rights thought did have its Scottish moment earlier in the century, and republicanism its moment later in the century; never, however, the twain did meet in Scotland. Never did natural rights and republicanism merge into natural-rights republicanism, and by the end of the eighteenth century both natural rights and republicanism were past tense. So far as the intellectual tradition of natural rights/social contract is concerned, Gershom Carmichael was its founding spokesperson at the University of Glasgow from 1694 to 1729. Where Locke shortly before 1688 had in the name of natural rights called upon the English to expel the Stuart monarch who would rule by divine right and Papism, Carmichael not long after 1688 argued that the “endless [Scottish] rebellions in favor of the papal Pretender” have “no other source than ignorance of the true principles of natural right.” And while Carmichael was willing to embrace Pufendorf insofar as he was the critic of Hobbes, it was Locke who truly mattered. Government was a “trust”; slavery a violation of natural right; Roman law answerable to natural law; property the result of labor; and children acknowledged as masters of their rights upon reaching adulthood – all exactly as Locke had insisted.3 Carmichael’s title of Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, and more importantly his intellectual legacy of thinking in the social contract tradition, were passed on to one of the most revered figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Francis Hutcheson. Unlike Carmichael, who

148 What Is Living, What Is Dead? had worked his way to Locke in the course of first embracing and then politely distancing himself from Pufendorf, Hutcheson in his final work broke unmistakably and definitively with the pre-Lockean conservative versions of social contract theory set forth by Grotius and Pufendorf, offering in their place formulations more Lockean than Locke’s. By way of discussing the social contract, Hutcheson referred to government as a “trust,” exactly like Locke; and, again like Locke, called government an “umpire” in matters concerning the settling of disputes.4 But whereas Locke warned against rising up against the government too often, Hutcheson sounded a very different note. “Mankind,” he lamented, “have generally been a great deal too tame and tractable; and hence so many wretched forms of power have always enslaved nine-tenths of the nations of the world, where they have the fullest right to make all efforts for a change.”5 The right to revolution was powerfully and unflinchingly vindicated by Hutcheson, revolutions as often as necessary. What apparently is never Hutcheson’s concern, nor Carmichael’s, is the thought of praising republics at the expense of monarchies. When Hutcheson explicitly set the modern notion of liberty as security in juxtaposition to the civic variant of the ancients, it was at the expense of the latter.6 He does, admittedly, wish “to diffuse as far as we can the principles of virtue,”7 but what he has in mind is “piety,” not classical civic virtue. His larger ethical commitment is to “benevolence,”8 a poor fit with ancient notions but a ready companion of Christian devotion. In sum, early in the Scottish Enlightenment the philosophy of natural rights and social contract thrived; republicanism by contrast languished. Ancient republicanism was of no interest or was simply rejected; modern natural-rights republicanism also had no place because the early Scots were as indifferent to all forms of republicanism, both classical and modern, as they were preoccupied with natural rights and the social contract. Later in the eighteenth century, republicanism did make a modest, post-classical showing in Scotland, perhaps most notably in Hume, but at the same time that republicanism appeared, the theory of the social contract virtually disappeared. On the republican front, Hume’s essays as early as 1741 feature the oft-repeated assertion that the government of Great Britain is “neither wholly monarchical, not wholly republican.” Altogether to Great Britain’s credit, he affirmed, is that its element of republicanism has nothing in common with the cruel, warlike, ethos of ancient Rome. Also to its credit is that the republican element in England has fostered an exceptional liberty of the press. Republicanism in modern guise can, however, be dangerous. Too often, he warned, the growth of a republican embryo inside the modern body politic is accompanied by the rise of “parties from principle” rather than “interest.”9 The fanaticism that originally came to the fore during the early modern wars of religion has been periodically reborn in more recent times in the form of secular factions consumed by uncompromising ideological pretensions. For the

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purpose of offsetting this threat, Hume turned to Harrington’s republicanism of self-interest, which could be used to deflate ideological politics. To Hume what matters most is granting everyone an interest in accepting the status quo and maintaining a balance between monarchical and republican ingredients in the English polity. Under no circumstances should such republicanism as exists be permitted to come out into the open and flaunt itself as an all-encompassing doctrine, what we would call an ideology. Neither externally nor internally is Hume’s a republicanism without borders; abroad, he respected the monarchies of the Continent and at home demanded that the monarchical element should not give way to the republican. We must acknowledge, he insisted, that freedom often exists under monarchies, and that despotism is far from unknown under republics. Let ideological passions cool, and a stable polity, a mixture of monarchy and republic, will be the welcome outcome. Anything resembling a revival of ancient ideals of republicanism, as contrasted with Hume’s modern republicanism of self-interest, is difficult to come by in the writings of the Scots. The closest they approached, perhaps, was in their call for a militia during the Seven Years War and again at the time of the American Revolution. Their coastline exposed, whether to the French or an American marauder such as John Paul Jones, members of the Edinburgh Moderate literati – figures such as Adam Ferguson, Alexander Carlyle, and William Robertson – demanded the creation of a Scottish militia and sometimes entertained a rhetoric of “manliness” reminiscent of the ancients. The threat “should teach us . . . to mix the military spirit with our civil and commercial policy,” wrote Ferguson, but even he, probably the most militaristic of the group, never abandoned the advances of modernity in a quest to revive ancient mores.10 If there was one figure of the Scottish Enlightenment who appeared ideally suited to don Roman robes and to flaunt them in modern times, it was surely Adam Ferguson. By the circumstances of his birth he was ideally suited to the task, if he so desired, of injecting militaristic Roman conceptions into modernizing Scotland. He was born in the Perthshire village of Logierait, on the dividing line between the English speaking Lowlands and the Gaelic speaking Highlands; also between the Scotland of commerce and universities, on the one side, and, on the other, that of Scots who seemed to be living in another century, an earlier era marked by the “masculinity” and militarism that Ferguson sometimes found enticing. Tempted though he may have been, it is telling that Ferguson sided with the moderns over the ancients. The “warlike disposition” of our ancestors, he remarked, was not a choice freely and carefully made after due consideration; far from it, it was a decision forced upon them by the “very miseries and inconveniences” of their circumstances. To our great advantage “we may . . . in military honors stop many degrees short of the Romans” and yet be perfectly capable of defending ourselves with modern weaponry and part-time military service in a militia. In the

150 What Is Living, What Is Dead? language of our day it was usually “negative freedom” that Ferguson admired, not the “positive freedom” of the ancients. In his estimation it is to be applauded that, unlike Sparta which “made virtue an object of state,” we “derive our freedom from a different source.” Living in Great Britain, we are so fortunate as to “expect justice from the limits which are set to the powers of the magistrate, and . . . rely for protection on the laws.”11 There was no place, we may conclude, for classical republicanism in modernizing Scotland, and no reason to bemoan its irrelevance. Neither, quite obviously, did the Scots of the later eighteenth century champion a modern natural rights republic. How could they, having abandoned social contract theory? Without naming him, David Hume in effect rebuked Hutcheson in his essay “Of the Original Contract” and again in his History of England when he maintained that the conception of a social contract was wrong-headed, mistaken in theory, thoroughly unrealistic, and had been pernicious in its practical results during the Puritan Revolution (Chapter 4). He believed, as William Blackstone would later, that the question of political obligation should never be raised. It is wrong, dangerously wrong Hume cautioned, to think that the muchadmired Glorious Revolution of 1688 proves a social contract had been successfully enacted on at least one occasion. “Let not the establishment at the Revolution [of 1688] deceive us. . . . It was only the succession, and that only in the regal part of the government, which was then changed: And it was only the majority of seven hundred, who determined that change for near ten millions.”12 Adam Smith was as determined as David Hume to denounce social contract theory, not only as intellectually deficient but even more as socially and politically disruptive. Much if not all of his concern was that “this was the prevailing and favorite doctrine from the year 1640 to 1660,” the Puritan revolution. For one devastating moment during the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century there had indeed been a regime that spoke the language of natural rights republicanism, Cromwell’s, which “disgusted the whole people at a republican government.” Not every Whig of Smith’s day, to his consternation, had definitively buried the notion of social contract, so he could not simply ignore it as he wished; his burden therefore was to demonstrate how poorly the theory meshed with the world in which we live. Against those who foolishly “alleged that [the king] was no more than the supreme magistrate, trusted by the people,” a Lockean contention, he felt obliged to counter with the observation that such is “the doctrine of reason and philosophy, but it is not the doctrine of Nature,” not, that is, the doctrine of human experience. No social contract has ever been signed nor is one sought by the many, and the claim of “tacit consent, so much talked of, is never thought of either by the governors nor the governed.” How utterly unrealistic such universalistic ideas are is evident when we consider that the “doctrine of obedience as

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founded on contract is confined to Britain . . . and even here it can have influence with a very small part of the people, such as have read Locke.”13 At one point, but at one point only, did Smith bother to dwell upon the distinction between monarchies and republics when discussing the question of obedience versus resistance to an established political regime. No matter what the government, monarchy or republic, he was insistent that only under the most extreme circumstances is an uprising permissible. There is, however, one difference in this matter between monarchy and republic. Under monarchies the “principle of authority” prevails, whereas under modern republics “utility” is the standard “which chiefly, nay almost entirely, occasions the obedience of the subject.” In Britain both principles are in play. “The principle of authority is that of the Tories, as that of utility is followed by the Whigs.” Above all, neither principle should be construed as having anything to do with popular sovereignty, consent, or social contract.14 Fragments at most of the original full-blown Scottish theory of the social contract are all that survived into the latter half of the eighteenth century, the era of Scotland’s high Enlightenment. John Millar, student of Adam Smith, friend of Lord Kames and David Hume, mentions natural rights now and again throughout his lengthy An Historical View of the English Government; nowhere, however, does he integrate such rhetoric into a larger view of the social contract. William Robertson, the accomplished historian, in the course of celebrating the centennial of the Glorious Revolution, was willing to speak of “the natural rights of man” but careful to avoid any reference to notions of a social contract. Even Adam Smith occasionally mentions natural rights, while keeping such notions away from a larger theoretical discussion. Vague residues and dilutions of Hutcheson’s outlook were all that survived into the second half of the Scottish eighteenth century.15 As a student at the University of Glasgow, Adam Smith had studied under Francis Hutcheson; much later in his correspondence he spoke of “the never to be forgotten Dr. Hutcheson.” But forget him he did, as did everyone else who figured in the later, full-blown Scottish Enlightenment.16 Quite possibly the best way to underscore the sharp contrast between earlier and later phases of Scottish political thought in the eighteenth century is to review the responses of Scots to overseas events in America throughout the years leading up to and then during the break with Great Britain. Writing well before the issues of resistance and revolution had come to the fore in the American colonies, Francis Hutcheson asserted that “there is something unnatural in supposing a large society, sufficient for all the good purposes of an independent political nation, remaining subject to the direction and government of a distant body of men who know not sufficiently the circumstances of this society.” All the more are colonists justified in calling out for change, he continued, “if the plan of the mother-country .  .  . degenerates by degrees from a safe, mild, and

152 What Is Living, What Is Dead? gentle power, to a severe and absolute one.” Under such circumstances “they are not bound to continue in their subjection.”17 Not surprisingly, even though the later Scots were pleased to forget Hutcheson, the Americans remembered him fondly. His books occupied a prominent place in the colonial curriculum, and New Englanders drew upon the seventh chapter, third book of Hutcheson’s A System of Moral Philosophy to justify their resistance to Thomas Hutchinson, Governor and Captain General of Massachusetts. No one was surprised when The Massachusetts Spy in February of 1772 came to the aid of the colonial cause by reissuing a substantial portion of Hutcheson’s chapter.18 In the writings of Francis Hutcheson the Americans found all they needed to justify their initial politics of resistance and later politics of revolution. Had the most prominent Scottish thinkers remained faithful to Hutcheson’s earlier utterances issued in a natural-rights, social-contract vein, they might have expressed sympathy with, or at least understanding of the rebellious colonists. Neither sympathy nor understanding was forthcoming, and to the extent that any Scottish empathy for the Americans was expressed, it came solely from the ranks of the popular Presbyterian party – the religiously preoccupied Scots who were anathema to the enlightened literati of Edinburgh and Glasgow. David Hume’s dissatisfaction with England’s response to the upstart Americans had nothing to do with grand principles, which he refused to understand were at stake, and everything to do with maintaining Great Britain’s strength at home. National debt was a serious worry and would only grow worse, he surmised, if there were a conflict across the Atlantic. Problems at home were mounting in his view, quite conspicuously in the phenomenon of John Wilkes, whose radical politics Hume abhorred. Both Wilkes and the elder Pitt were stirring up the London radicals, Hume feared; a situation that could easily get out of hand, especially if the stabilizing authority of the landed and trading classes in Parliament were thereby undermined. Best it was to ignore the political rhetoric of the Americans and let them go their way. More pressing issues were in play.19 Adam Smith admired the commercial spirit of Americans but was upset that “the English colonists have never yet contributed anything to the defence of the mother country. .  .  . They themselves, on the contrary, have been defended almost entirely at the expense of the mother country.” Smith took the stand that if any province of the British Empire failed to meet its financial obligations, there was no reason for England to continue burdening herself with its support. Other than his isolated hit at “the ulcerated minds of the Americans,” Smith, like Hume, ignored the American rhetoric about natural rights and a broken contract. Nor did he deign Richard Price’s pro-American natural rights pamphlet of 1776 worthy of a response. Having deleted the natural rights/social contract theory of Hutcheson from their thought, Hume and Smith were not about to allow it to sneak back into Scotland through what to them was

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the back door of the American Revolution and its radical English Whig sympathizers.20 When America declared independence and risked a prolonged war with England, it had no choice but to identify itself as a republic. Leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, all of whom believed every advantage the Americans had previously enjoyed was owed to monarchical Britain, responded with an all-out assault on republicanism. No longer was Alexander Carlyle willing to tolerate speech about the possibilities of a hybrid regime, republic infused into monarchy. Reacting against the Americans, he was certain the time had come to choose between monarchy and republic, one or the other, and he was convinced that a decision in favor of a republic was thoroughly reprehensible. To his dismay, the Americans had chosen to side with “the highest republican and antimonarchical principles,” which left him with no choice but to demand that they be rigorously punished. Carlyle, in the course of denouncing Richard Price, insisted that by writing a pamphlet defending the Americans, he “has overturned all ideas of subordination, which is the bond that holds men together.”21 The American Revolution has threatened Europe, Britain especially, with “republican principles of the most levelling kind . . . and will no doubt aim, with the assistance of their restless friends in England [the radical Whigs] to overturn that happy limited monarchy . . . which has been long the glory of Britain, and the envy of the world.”22 So wrote Alexander Carlyle, whose angry words perfectly expressed the outlook of the highest representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment. The immediate threat at home, from the point of view of the Scottish friends of Enlightenment, was that the enthusiasts of the Popular party of Presbyterians would want to transform their republican vision of the church into a republican political party at large. It was disconcerting but essential to come to terms with the possibility that the Popular party might move in the direction of providing a base of support both for radicals abroad and for such radicals at home in Britain as John Wilkes. The loyalist press of Scotland could not issue too many dire warnings about the devastation that would result if the radicals had their way.23 Adam Smith, faced with political radicalism and revolutionary possibilities later in the century, confessed in 1790 that he feared “men of system,” purveyors of “the madness of fanaticism.” The “frequent . . . success of the most important quacks and imposters . . . sufficiently demonstrate[s] how easily the multitude are imposed upon by the most extravagant and groundless pretensions.”24 Hume’s view, voiced at an earlier date, was similar. For a moment he was willing in “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” (1752) to engage in the intellectual experiment of thinking about a wellgoverned imaginary republic grounded in rational self-interest; but earlier he had explained in “Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic” (1741) that in the real world we should beware of “a fine imaginary republic of which a man may form

154 What Is Living, What Is Dead? a plan in his closet.” Popular government, he concluded, is if anything more worrisome than unchecked monarchy, because the “danger is more terrible.” The reality of republicanism, which we must never forget when indulging in speculations about political regimes, is the dreadful Oliver Cromwell.25 Never was there much of a republican tradition in Scotland, and with the coming of the American Revolution what little there was had scant chance of survival. Then came the French Revolution, which made it virtually unthinkable for many years into the future for anyone Scottish to so much as whisper a word of praise for republican political possibilities.

Eighteenth-Century England England in the eighteenth century, except for the radical Whigs, was devoid of thinkers who engaged in serious ruminations about any kind of republicanism, whether the variety based on ancient civic notions or on modern thoughts about self-interest and natural rights. Immensely selfsatisfied, the English rested assured they needed no political philosophy, for theirs was an age untroubled by any significant political problems to solve, none worth mentioning given that England was ensconced comfortably on the pinnacle of the world. Having emerged victorious from the Seven Years War, England could proudly boast that it had displaced France as the greatest of all powers in Europe and perhaps in the world at large. There was much to be said for Catharine Macaulay’s claim that immediately after 1688 the Whigs stayed in power by forgetting their principles. There is also much to be said for the proposition that at the middle of the eighteenth century the Whig oligarchy proved it was as inept in practice as it was anemic in theory, having badly mismanaged the war with France in its early phases. At that moment William Pitt the elder, called the People’s Tribune, stepped into the breach and saved the day, whereupon he invited his countrymen to bask in the rays of English freedom without asking too many questions about their source. Throughout the century, the English celebrated their freedom, took it for granted, and saw no reason to theorize about it. Montesquieu had praised the freedom of England as had Delolme. What more need anyone know? And, of course, everyone English could always fall back upon the celebration of their country set forth in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published from 1765 to 1770. Taking great pains, Blackstone theorized repeatedly against permitting theory to enter into discussions of constitutionalism and common law, those two wonders that together embodied “the accumulated wisdom of ages”26 and constituted the pride of England. If Blackstone had his way, everyone, even the potentially most recalcitrant, would worship at the altar of England’s singular historical

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achievement, and to that end he went so far as to look for a way to meet the challenge of accommodating John Locke. Blackstone sought a strategy for making Locke palatable before pushing him gently aside. He began by finding an excuse to compliment Locke, even though the Second Treatise of Government was not based upon admiration of the past and might have constituted a formidable obstacle to Blackstone’s reasoning. On the lookout for something to praise, Blackstone noted that “Mr. Locke has well observed [that] where there is no law, there is no freedom.”27 Having praised Locke for upholding an opinion with which no one would disagree, a perfectly bland opinion, Blackstone was free to marginalize, neglect, or reject everything in Locke that truly mattered. It did not take long before he issued a warning that the author of the Second Treatise “perhaps carries his theory too far.”28 No sooner had Blackstone cited Locke approvingly in a single instance than he registered his strong discomfort with the overall political doctrine set forth in Locke’s famous political treatise. “It must be owned that Mr. Locke and other theoretical writers held that ‘there remains still inherent in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative’. . . . But however just this conclusion may be in theory, we cannot adopt it, nor argue from it, under any dispensation of government at present actually existing.”29 There was no historical embodiment of Locke’s view, which proved its irrelevance. Blackstone deemed his argument irrefutable, never dreaming that only a relatively few years into the future an Englishman named Tom Paine would draw the inference that, if Blackstone was right, all existing governments were illegitimate and the future should be one of radical change. It was to the past, not the future to which Blackstone looked, especially to the lessons to be harvested from England’s wisdom in 1688. When he took up the topic of the Glorious Revolution, Blackstone’s starting point was that “the true ground and principle, upon which that memorable event proceeded was an entirely new case in politics.” Never at home with novelty, he then immediately retreated to the safe and misleading claim that the issue at hand had been “the abdication of the reigning monarch,” as if James the Second had not been driven from the throne. Blackstone noted with approval that a parliamentary convention had dealt successfully with the question of succession to the royal title; he also observed that “the reasons upon which they decided may be found at large in the parliamentary proceedings of the times; and may be matter of instructive amusement for us to contemplate, as a speculative point of history.” Quickly, however, he pivoted to the position that “care must be taken not to carry this inquiry farther than merely for instruction or amusement.” Too much reflection upon these matters risks a revival of “those dangerous political heresies, which so long distracted the state, but are at length happily extinguished.” We must set aside notions of social contracts and the inquiry whether consent has been granted. Our obligations to the settlement of 1688 are clear: “whereas our ancestors

156 What Is Living, What Is Dead? having most indisputably a competent jurisdiction to decide this great question, and having in fact decided it, it is now become our duty at this distance of time to acquiesce in their determination.”30 What made the revolution of 1688 and the constitutional settlement of 1689 “Glorious” was that matters were settled amicably, without drawing upon the dangerous principles of John Locke. [The political actors of the age] held that this misconduct of king James amounted to an endeavor to subvert this constitution and not to an actual subversion, or total dissolution of the government, according to the principles of Mr. Locke: which would have reduced the society almost to a state of nature; would have levelled all distinctions of honor, rank, offices, and property; would have annihilated the sovereign power, . . . and would have left the people at liberty to have erected a new system of state upon a new foundation of polity. They therefore very prudently voted it to amount to no more than an abdication.31 The lesson of the Glorious Revolution, glorious because not a revolution, was unambiguous: “It is well if the mass of mankind will obey the laws when made, without scrutinizing too nicely into the reasons of making them.”32 Overwhelmingly, Blackstone’s efforts to remove all political theories from consideration in public affairs were aimed at suppressing discussions of a social contract, and only rarely did he allow a potentially disruptive question of monarchies versus republics come to the fore. On such infrequent occasions as he did discuss monarchical government it was to present it as something virtually religious, sacrosanct, as if it were almost a divine rather than a human construct. “Though a philosophical mind will consider the royal person merely as one man appointed by mutual consent to preside over many others, . . . yet the mass of mankind will be apt to grow insolent and refractory, if taught to consider their prince as a man of no greater perfection than themselves.” It is necessary, then, that we treat the monarch as the embodiment of “certain attributes of a great and transcendent nature; by which the people are led to consider him in the light of a superior being.”33 Plato had resorted to his noble lie, and Blackstone apparently was no stranger to the same device. The list of items on Blackstone’s account of royal prerogatives is extensive, including the creation of peers, the rejection of bills, the negotiation of treaties, and the issuing of pardons. To his delight, Blackstone found he could cite a passage in Locke to his liking, the Locke who “has well-defined” prerogative in his treatise on politics. Even Locke, it seems, understood that only when the constitution expressly forbids a royal initiative, may the monarch’s actions be questioned.

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Blackstone rarely mentions republican notions, and on the rare occasion when he does, it is to demand that “over-zealous republicans” be held in check. Their sin is that they are far too eager to claim what cannot be denied in the abstract but must be avoided in the concrete – namely, that “resistance is justifiable to the person of the prince when the being of the state is endangered.”34 Blackstone expressed his views on republicanism by avoiding it almost entirely, since it was a source of instability. There was nothing to gain and perhaps much to lose from theoretical discussions pitting monarchy versus republic. In the second half of the eighteenth century the best political thought by far in Great Britain came from Scotland but was little appreciated in England by Blackstone or anyone else. Partly this was true because, as with Blackstone, the English were wary about entering into the potentially volatile realm of political discourse. Another reason was that the English were snobs. David Hume had to hide his Scottish accent when visiting London, knowing full well that such Englishmen as Horace Walpole and Samuel Johnson enjoyed ridiculing Scots, and that English notables had expressed amazement upon discovering that the Scot William Robertson had somehow managed to write his histories in proper English. Something was lost when the self-satisfied English, settling comfortably into their unquestioning salutations to the status quo, ignored the far more theoretically sophisticated Scots. If establishment Whigs in England had appreciated that it was in their interest to fend off charges of parliamentary corruption, they could have benefited from reading Hume’s essay “Of the Independency of Parliament.” To make governance possible, argued Hume, votes had to be bought and sold: “We may give to this influence what name we please; we may call it by the invidious appellations of corruption and dependence; but some degree and some kind of it are inseparable from the very nature of the constitution, and necessary to the preservation of our mixed government.”35 Were the establishment Whigs less self-satisfied, Hume’s essay published in 1741 might have been of great use to them when the radical Whigs, such as Catherine Macaulay and Richard Price among others, time and again scored points by denouncing placemen, bribery, and the entrenched system of corruption. The Scots offered a theoretical justification of the status quo that the English never questioned and accepted unthinkingly. Blackstone more than others might have benefitted, but did not, from remembering the words of leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. In the opening pages of his Commentaries he had observed admiringly that “most gentlemen of considerable property . . . are ambitious of representing their country in parliament. . . . They are the guardians of the English constitution; the makers, repealers, and interpreters of the English laws, delegated to watch, to check, and to avert every dangerous innovation.”36 It was to Blackstone’s detriment that he failed to appreciate

158 What Is Living, What Is Dead? all that David Hume and Adam Smith had written to explain and safeguard the social psychology of deference he left unexplained and took for granted. For Hume it was imperative that we recognize and sustain the willingness of the many to defer to the few: Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.37 Hume was not wanting for an explanation: “the regard paid to the rich and powerful” derives “from the enjoyment communicated to the spectator by the images of prosperity, happiness, ease, plenty.”38 Along the same lines Adam Smith, who shared with Hume the task of underscoring the craving of the many for leadership, wrote that “it is the misfortunes of kings only which afford the proper subjects of tragedy.” Smith developed more fully Hume’s point. He emphasized that the man who enjoys social privilege rarely fails to make himself the subject of admiration: His air, his manner, his deportment, all mark the elegant and graceful sense of his own superiority. . . . These are the arts by which he proposes to make mankind more easily submit to his authority . . . and in this he is seldom disappointed. Our “obsequiousness to our superiors” is remarkable, he continued, and is not founded “upon a regard to the utility of such submission.” The many want to submit and will do so if the few give them an excuse. Is it not true, asked Smith, that “all the innocent blood that was shed in the civil wars provoked less indignation than the death of Charles I”?39 Blackstone might have rendered his reasoning more nuanced and powerful if he had reached out to the Scots. It is typical of the anti-theoretical and insular mentality of English thinkers that he could not be bothered to do so. Hume and Smith had armed themselves in advance to fight off the anti-deferential, democratic notions of would-be republicans. Blackstone and his cohort were unprepared due to their striking unwillingness to engage in meaningful intellectual debate about public affairs. Natural rights republicans such as Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and Catharine Macaulay were voices crying in the wilderness, banished from the universities and parliament, the first two because they were Dissenters, the last because she was a woman. They were the most eloquent political spokespersons of their day, but we may wonder how wide was their readership and whether their names would still be recognized had not Burke attacked their kind in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Only one radical English Whig, it appears, reached an unquestionably wide

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audience – Tom Paine, a man for all countries and all revolutions, but he had to leave his country of origin or face trial and inevitable imprisonment for fomenting rebellion. It was American pamphlets imported to England and sold in London before the American Revolution that appear to have reached a wider English audience, possibly a considerably larger readership than anything written in England by its own intellectually formidable radical Whigs. Two works of James Otis, one his widely acclaimed Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, were reproduced and made available for purchase in England. Daniel Dulany’s Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, composed in response to the Stamp Act, was reprinted in London. Five essays written by John Dickinson made their way across the Atlantic, among them his important Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. Thomas Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British America also made the rounds in London.40 The list of imported American pamphlets and of Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush conversing regularly with Londoners in coffee houses was formidable. While the messages of brilliant radical English Whigs had trouble breaking through the defenses of entrenched English conservative Whiggery, the readily available writings of American pamphleteers could, in principle at least, accomplish all that their underappreciated radical counterparts in England could not. Before the Revolution, the writings of the Americans frequently upheld doctrines of natural rights, exactly as Richard Price and company wished; until the Revolution the colonists also avoided, as did their English counterparts, an overtly republican message, their republican sentiments hidden under a monarchical façade. John Dickinson had gone so far by way of rendering potentially radical thought palatable as to refer in 1768 to “the elegant and ingenious Mr. Hume,” not stopping short of calling him “this great man.”41 Equally noteworthy, however, is that in 1774 he declared that “England must be saved in America.”42 Another parallel of the radical English Whigs with American spokespersons was the contention of John Adams, shortly before the Revolution, that the revered constitution was indeed admirable but the country which upheld it was America, not England.43 If radical Whiggery made any impact in England, it may well be that it was the Americans rather than the outstanding English writers who were responsible. How could the American polemicists be ignored, their enticing pamphlets neglected, when they were stirring up resistance to the mighty government of Great Britain? Come the French Revolution all such intellectual and ideological advances were, needless to say, suppressed. There was a moment or two in Burke’s most famous and influential pamphlet when he stole the language of republicanism before banishing it from his account of English history. As we have previously noted, he conceded to non-establishment Whigs in Reflections on the Revolution

160 What Is Living, What Is Dead? in France (1790) that England was a hybrid of monarchy and republic, and a year later in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) he briefly suggested his openness or indifference to France becoming the same (Chapter 4).44 His remark about England in 1790 was ostensibly an affirmation of the old-fashioned Whig argument of Lord Bolingbroke, but he might also have had in mind the radical Whigs of his day who for their purposes made a similar claim about an English marriage of monarchy and republic. Willing to concede something he deemed harmless to proponents of a republican element in the constitution of England, Burke also waved a fig leaf to those who spoke of a social contract. In the famous words of his Reflections on France, “Society is indeed a contract, . . . 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.”45 In reality, of course, his polite bow to the social contract was purely rhetorical. Nothing could be less Lockean than the suggestion in 1790 that the present generation is bound by the past and the generations still to come. In a speech delivered in 1783 Burke had spoken of “the natural equality of mankind,” of government as a “trust,” and confirmed that “it is of the very essence of every trust to be rendered accountable.” He did not stop short of asserting “I ground myself . . . on this principle: that, if the abuse is proved, the contract is broken, and we reenter into all our rights.”46 With the advent of the French Revolution, all such language was expunged from his thought. The thrust of Burke’s speeches in 1790 and 1791 is unambiguous. Much like Blackstone before him, but far more vehemently, he would remove all serious discussions of political thought from public life. “Men of letters,” he announced in his Reflections, “fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation.”47 For the intellectuals of France – for their citadels, the academies; for “Condorcet, the friend and correspondent of Priestley” – he in 1791 expressed nothing but contempt;48 it was they, especially Rousseau,49 who had led the French public dangerously astray. No theme of the Enlightenment, whether in France or elsewhere, was more pronounced than the denunciation of “prejudice,” usually a code word for religious fanaticism. Therefore Burke spoke out in favor of prejudice: “Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit and not a series of unconnected acts.”We act on the basis of “precedent, authority, example,” which is as it should be because “we are [rightly] afraid to put men to live and trade each on his private stock of reason.”50 In 1783 he had been quite willing to endorse ideas of natural rights, “the rights of men,”51 but by the time he penned his anti-ideas-in-politics Reflections he would only admit prescriptive rights, historically sanctioned rights, the rights of Englishmen, not ahistorical and universal natural rights. Burke in his frightened polemic of 1790, issued before the French Revolution had gone awry, sounded exactly as the Scots had when they responded to the beginning of the American Revolution in 1776.

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Memories of the Puritan Revolution haunted both the Scots earlier and Burke later, led them to suppress any further discussion of natural rights and republicanism, and made it very difficult for them to understand the American and French Revolutions. When the Scots in 1776 and Burke in 1789 agreed in condemning revolutions which had barely started, it was not because they had keen insight into the future; it was because they automatically saw what was new through the prism of the English past, the revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. Burke’s recollection of past revolutions was central to his argument in the Reflections and quite distinctive for highly questionable but exceptionally influential efforts to take everything new out of 1688 and 1776, the better to damn the French for attempting something new in 1789. The English nation in 1688, he would have us believe, was “on the defensive” and successfully restored the “ancient constitution” that James the Second had temporarily disrupted. Conveniently forgotten was Hume’s argument, which Burke had understood when reviewing Hume’s History early in his career,52 that the reason why 1688 was glorious was that the constitution had never at any time been settled prior to that date (Chapter 4). Also forgotten was that journalistic spokespersons for Robert Walpole’s regime earlier in the century had preceded Hume in making exactly the same argument as that recorded in his History of England. Against Bolingbroke’s complaint that they were undermining an ancient constitution, Walpole’s polemicists argued that their achievement was to sustain an unprecedented world of constitutional government, created for the first time in 1688, unknown in previous ages.53 Burke chose to view the American uprising of 1776, no less than the English of 1688, as a restoration rather than a revolution. According to him, one measure of how Charles James Fox had betrayed the Whig cause was that he wrongly held that the Americans rebelled “because they thought they had not enjoyed liberty enough.” Burke thought otherwise: “On a supposition that the Americans had rebelled merely in order to enlarge their liberty, [I] would have thought very differently of the American cause.” The Americans, Benjamin Franklin had assured him, were out to save their “ancient constitution.” And so it was that Burke “considered the Americans as standing at that time, and in that controversy, in the same relation to England as England did to King James the Second.”54 Burke wrote to demonstrate “that no comparison was to be made between the British government and the French usurpation.”55 Exactly why it was a usurpation for the Third Estate to object to being seated as in 1614, controlling only one third of the votes, is not entirely clear, unless France’s less than constitutional tradition somehow was its ancient constitution, as Burke sometimes implied. Nevertheless, Burke’s rhetoric was undeniably powerful, as his enemies the radical Whigs always conceded; and when the French Revolution soon degenerated into a Republic of Virtue that was a Reign of Terror, the Reflections on the Revolution

162 What Is Living, What Is Dead? in France would be viewed from that moment onward as a masterpiece; the English Revolution of 1688 and the American of 1776 would be vindicated as non-revolutions; the French condemned because it was a revolution. Ideas in public life were henceforth vigorously repudiated as destructive ideological politics, to be avoided at all costs. No longer was there a place for the likes of Price, Priestley, and Macaulay in political discourse. In the nineteenth century Burke would be the hero of both liberals and conservatives, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. And the Macaulay of the nineteenth century who published a History of England, Thomas Babington Macaulay, was in every respect the opposite of the Macaulay of the eighteenth century, Catharine Macaulay, who had also written a History of England. He was opposite by his gender, by his political sympathies, and opposite most of all by offering an account of the English and French Revolutions, which reads as a perfect reissue of Burke.56 Republicanism was unspeakable in nineteenth-century England. After the French Revolution, the official spokespersons of England presented the world an image of their nation as undeniably a monarchy through and through, never so much as hinting of a republican element. Their country was henceforth portrayed as a land in which republican language had never been spoken, except for a fateful moment during the mid-seventeenth century, a moment best forgotten, or recalled only as a warning. It was as if Catherine Macaulay, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and the radical Whigs of the eighteenth century had never existed.

Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America America backed into being a republic. During the period of resistance to the “mother country,” 1765 to 1776, the colonists embraced monarchy with a vengeance, so that they might call upon English monarchists to honor their proud commitment to liberty. Once they had severed their ties with England in 1776, the Americans discovered by what amounted to a process of elimination that their emergent regime had willy-nilly become a republic. No longer monarchists, they had no choice but to be republicans, whereupon they were faced with the question, what did it mean to live under a republic? Later in their history they might no longer care, other concerns having risen to the fore, such as what it meant to fulfill the promise of democracy or what precisely were the terms of the social contract they had signed in 1787. But during the early years they felt compelled to provide an answer to the question of what constituted a republic. We have had occasion to comment on republicanism in America (Chapter 2), especially on its prominence during those earlier years; here our effort will be to embellish that account and to bring those explorations to a fulfillment.

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By way of classical teachings, what the Americans inherited was much more a negative warning of looming danger than a positive message of ideals to be pursued. Size was the problem. How could a country as large as America unite under one government and yet remain a republic? Even Hamilton, very likely the most ardently nationalist of the Federalists, confessed in a secret speech at the Constitutional Convention that “the size of the Country to be governed discouraged him.”57 On the AntiFederalist side, it was quite in keeping with the overall viewpoint of their many spokespersons when one of their numbers charged that “the United States are to be melted down into one empire. .  .  . Anything short of despotism could not bind so great a country under one government.”58 Both sides in the debate over the proposed constitution of 1787 turned to Montesquieu, not to the Montesquieu who in Book Five of the Spirit of the Laws spoke of England as a national centralized republic, hidden under the form of a monarchy, but to the Montesquieu of Book Nine who addressed the possibility of a “federal republic,” which ideally should enjoy “all the internal advantages of republican government and the external force of monarchy.”59 The question the Americans faced was, what kind of federal regime would govern their republic? Would it be as weak as that of the Netherlands, cited time and again in the constitutional debates; would it be only mildly stronger than the dysfunctional regime sanctioned by the Articles of Confederation; or would it be the far more consolidated regime desired by the Federalists and feared by the Anti-Federalists? One advantage enjoyed by the Americans was that they did not overburden themselves with what they had read as youngsters in the classics. Finding a way to duplicate ancient civic virtue on a national scale was not their concern. At most they worried, as did Anti-Federalists Brutus and Federal Farmer, whether the proposed government, composed of states so different in makeup, most of all between North and South, could ever be one people.60 Only with considerable difficulty does an exploration of the writings of the Anti-Federalists yield anything reminiscent of the civic formulations enshrined in the classics. Centinel of Pennsylvania might be cited as an exception, suggesting as he did that “A republican, or free government, can only exist where the body of the people are virtuous, and where property is pretty equally divided.”61 His voice was rarely if ever seconded in the ranks of the Anti-Federalists, and even in his case the argument quickly moved on to demands for short terms and rotation of office. Far more central to Anti-Federalist polemics than unrealistic calls for “civic virtue” were proposals shared with the Federalists that constitutional order be based on appeals to ever-present and therefore reliable “self-love.” Patrick Henry was not alone, but he was perhaps the most outspoken. “Virtue will slumber,” he warned; “the real rock of salvation is self-love.” Addressing his Federalist opponents, he asked “Where are

164 What Is Living, What Is Dead? your checks?”62 Institutional mechanisms meant everything to Patrick Henry; well-intended but vacuous appeals to civic virtue, little or nothing. Exactly the same argument, that we should not count on ethereal civic virtue but build the polity upon the solid rock of self-interest, was offered by Madison and Hamilton in Federalist papers 51 and 72. John Adams chimed in with a similar opinion. Only a moment before the Federalist/ Anti-Federalist debate, in his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, a text known to both sides, Adams suggested the viability of a republic of rogues, just as James Harrington had a republic of sinners. Like Harrington before him, Adams registered the claim that laws linking self-interest with public interest offered the best solution to the problem of creating a modern, large-scale republic. There is no reason to think the Americans had to struggle to accept the philosophy of self-interest or self-love, and every reason to think it came naturally to them, given their immersion in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. George Washington, although known more as a man of action than a political thinker, tied America’s hopes for the future directly to the Enlightenment in a statement immediately following the end of the war for independence: The foundation of our empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined than at any former period. .  .  . At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a Nation, and if their citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own.63 When it came to counting heavily and unapologetically on the uses of the idea of self-interest to further their schemes, the Americans drew upon what they had inherited from the Scottish version of Enlightenment. Dating from the middle of the eighteenth century, the standard list of textbooks assigned in American colleges featured prominently the essays and treatises of the leading intellectuals of Scotland. At Princeton, at William and Mary, and at Harvard among other colleges, young Americans, leaders of the feature, read the works of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, and Thomas Reid. Nine members of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were graduates of Princeton.64 Thanks to their familiarity with the writings of the Scots, the Americans were well prepared to bolster the prospects of their new republic by grounding their schemes without embarrassment in the political theory of self-interest rather than civic virtue. Early in the century Bernard Mandeville had enjoyed shocking his audience with his proclamation that it was “private vices,” calculations of self-interest that yield “public benefits,” by which means he appeared to force a choice between morality

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and progress. Leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Hume, Smith, and Ferguson stamped out Mandeville’s deliberately contrived scandal by saying, along with Hume, “it seems upon any system of morality little less than a contradiction in terms to talk of a vice” when discussing that “which is in general beneficial to society.”65 The Americans benefitted yet again from Hume when coming upon his suggestion that in “fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest.”66 Between Hume’s “knaves” and John Adams’s later republic of “rogues” there was no difference. Also of great use was Hume’s essay “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” in which he suggested how vastly superior a republic on a large scale, if based on the reign of self-interest, would be to a city-state republic. In effect, Madison in the Federalist reissued Hume, making his own Hume’s argument that the dangers of differing interests and factions – so destructive in a small republic – could be effectively absorbed in a large republic. George Washington also was no stranger to the uses of interest in promoting American well-being. In his Farewell Address, after saluting “patriotism,” he called explicitly upon “interest” to deliver the assurance that “here every portion of the country finds the most commanding motives for carefully guarding and preserving the Union of the whole.”67 For the Americans, thanks to their Scottish inheritance, there was no need to sacrifice interest to virtue when they went about building their republic. One of the more remarkable features of American attempts to come to terms with their new republic is how frequently in 1787 they looked favorably upon, and sought to borrow lessons from, the government of their erstwhile enemy, England. In his secret speech to the Convention, Hamilton admitted that the difficulties of constructing a new constitution to manage so immense an expanse of territory seemed overwhelming. Reluctantly he confessed his conviction that “The British government was the best in the world, and he doubted much whether anything short of it would do in America.”68 For Hamilton to take such a stand is perhaps not surprising. What is astonishing is that the Anti-Federalists also turned to England for lessons to be learned. It was from John Adams that the Anti-Federalists took their instructions about England; and from Adams as well, their persistent fear that under the proposed new regime an aristocracy would rise to the top and strangle popular government. An aristocratic republic was exactly what the Anti-Federalists feared and wished to avoid. While serving as a diplomat in Europe, Adams found himself confronted by the philosophe Turgot who seconded Ben Franklin and Tom Paine in favoring the unicameral legislature and weak executive of Pennsylvania. In response, Adams wrote his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, in which he ransacked all of history to prove the superiority of bicameralism and a strong one-person executive. From England he took

166 What Is Living, What Is Dead? his example of successful mixed and balanced government and applied it on a universal scale. Only a proper combination of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements will do in America or anywhere, or so he affirmed in a three-volume study, which by accident saw the light of day just in time to be exploited by the participants in the debate over the proposed federal constitution. Federalists ran away as quickly as they could from Adams’s cumbersome treatise for fear that they would be accused of agreeing with his acceptance of different social “orders” and his affirmation of the unfortunate inevitability of social inequality. AntiFederalists outdid one another in using Adams to press their claim that the new constitution would undermine the principle of equality that had been central to the Revolution. Quite possibly the most striking argument of Adams, and certainly the argument that concerned the Anti-Federalists the most, was that even when a government was grounded in popular sovereignty, it was only a matter of time before a ruling class would come to the fore. There being no special providence for America, it was only a matter of time before the problems of Europe became those of America, warned Adams. Inequalities of wealth, birth, and merit will always win out.“There is not a city nor a village; . . . not a private club in the world, in which inequalities are not more or less visible.” If America is different, this is only in the sense that “the vainest of all” citizens will pretend to be “of the people” as a scheme to manipulate the many. Worst of all is a unicameral legislature because under such a regime the newly arisen aristocrats will dominate the entire government. Better is a bicameral legislature in which the privileged, the “natural aristocracy,” will be “ostracized” to the upper house, where they cannot control the entire legislature. Best of all is bicameralism combined with a strong executive, as exemplified by England’s government.69 Other than the prohibitive size of the proposed American republic, the theme that arguably recurs most frequently in the writings of the AntiFederalists is their fear that under the new regime an aristocracy will surface, and in its wake hopes for a popular government will be shattered. Borrowing directly from Adams, they expressed their worries for America in terms of Great Britain’s political structure, its combination of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and were especially concerned that under the proposed federal constitution the democratic element would fall far short of being democratic. Melancton Smith cited Adams in the course of warning that “the influence of the great will generally enable them to succeed in elections,” an unfortunate outcome because “a representative body, composed principally of respectable yeomanry is the best possible security to liberty.”70 Similarly, Brutus of New York conveyed exasperation that “the natural aristocracy of the country will be elected. Wealth always creates influence, and this is generally much increased by large family connections. . . . There will be no part of the people represented but the rich, even in that branch of the legislature,

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which is called democratic.”71 The Federal Farmer agreed in the strongest possible terms; “how disproportionately,” he complained, “the democratic and aristocratic parts of the community were [to be] represented.” Even in “the house of representatives, the democrative branch, . . . men of the elevated classes in the community only can be chosen.”72 And Centinel could not suppress his outrage at what he took to be “a most daring attempt to establish a despotic aristocracy among freemen.”73 George Mason, originally an advocate of constitutional reform, refused to sign the final document, arguing that “the government will commence in a moderate aristocracy; it is at present impossible to foresee whether it will, in its operation, produce a Monarchy, or a corrupt Aristocracy.”74 Our representatives, he insisted, “ought to mix with the people, think as they think, feel as they feel.”75 The theme of aristocracy-bashing in the writings of Anti-Federalist journalists is unmistakable and echoes of their warnings may be heard in later ages. We must nevertheless take note of how infrequently the Anti-Federalists made any effort to link their anti-aristocratic rhetoric with a concern for republicanism. Jacksonians and other democrats of later times inherited the Anti-Federalist theme that we must ever be on the lookout for the rise of highfalutin, democracy-denying aristocrats: bankers, judges, the wealthy class. No more, however, than the AntiFederalists did the Jacksonians, except on rare occasions, speak of republics when denouncing wishful aristocrats. Perhaps the most noteworthy exception is President Andrew Jackson’s first annual message, December 8, 1829, extolling the principle of rotation in office. The last thing Jackson wanted, he explained, was governance in the hands of professionals, experts, an administrative elite. Polemicizing against the growth of an aristocratic officialdom, he announced that the duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance; and I cannot but believe that more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience. All his efforts would henceforth be directed to “promoting that rotation which constitutes a leading principle in the republican creed.”76 Other Jacksonians would follow their leader in reviving the Anti-Federalist theme of avoiding the growth of aristocracy by rotation and short terms of offce. Few, however, if any, followed his lead in drawing a direct connection between that theme and republican ideals. Democracy was their usual word of choice, not republic. Some Jacksonians actually went out of their way to denounce republican ideology, especially when promulgated in classical terms. William Leggett sounded the alarm that under “pretense of acting for the public

168 What Is Living, What Is Dead? good,” a government “can do anything.” Always we should honor the principle that everyday Americans are “the best judges of their own affairs, and should be permitted to seek their own happiness in their own way.”77 The Democratic Review warned that the phrase public good was one “to which the lives and fortunes of millions have been wantonly sacrificed.” “The great object of government,” continued the reviewer, “is to secure every man in the enjoyment of his rights. Beyond this, it should not meddle with the affairs of men.” Much the same was Orestes Brownson’s assertion that true democracy “takes care not to lose the man in the citizen.”78 Not for Jacksonians was it tempting to reissue the ancient quest for what we now call “positive” freedom; their concern was for the liberation of “negative” freedom: freedom from coercion, freedom to do as we please so long as we are not harming others. It was with the emergence of the first party system, Jeffersonians against Federalists, that the word republican assumed significance for its day but not for all days to come. George Washington denounced “the baneful effects of the spirit of party” in his Farewell Address because he witnessed the growth of party spirit within his cabinet, with Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton pitted against Secretary of State Jefferson. Hamilton cheered that Washington had acted on his own rather than working with Congress when issuing his Neutrality Proclamation of 1793, which vowed that America would stay aloof from the war between France and England. In Hamilton’s judgment, the president had properly exercised executive power not explicitly stated but undeniably implied by the Constitution. Jefferson and Madison, by contrast, were aghast at this act of what, to them, was monarchical usurpation. Reaching out to the public, Hamilton expounded his views on the powers of the presidency under the name Pacificus; to which Madison as Helvidius responded in strident terms: “The power of making treaties and the power of declaring war, are royal prerogatives in the British government,” wrote an embittered Madison. Invoking such claims in America constitutes nothing less than a betrayal of the young republic. “Pacificus is read with singular pleasure and applause by the foreigners and degenerate citizens among us, who hate our republican government and the French revolution.”79 Jefferson’s republican words in 1793 were similar to those of Madison: There are in the U. S. some characters of opposite principles; some of them are high in office, others possessing great wealth, and all of them hostile to France and fondly looking to England as the staff of their hope. . . . Excepting them, this country is entirely republican, friends to the constitution, anxious to preserve it and to have it administered according to its own republican principles. The little party above mentioned have espoused it only as a stepping stone to monarchy. . . . The successes of republicanism in France have given the coup de grace to their prospects.80

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Several months earlier he had written to Tom Paine in France, “It is but too true that we have a sect preaching up and pouting after an English constitution of king, lords, and commons, and whose heads are itching for crowns, coronets and mitres. But our people . . . are frm and unanimous in their principles of republicanism.”81 Suddenly in the year 1793 the word republican had gained emotional and rhetorical significance. American republicans had begun to march forward in a war waged against domestic “monarchists,” a conflict that would not and could not abate overnight, considering the inflammatory insistence of Federalists upon blurring the distinction between American republicans and French Jacobins. Jeffersonians had to continue counterattacking by pinning the monarchical label on Federalists. During the early years of the nineteenth century, John Adams repeatedly and revealingly expressed his exasperation that “Patriotism in this country must be tinctured with English or French devotion or be without support.” Those Jeffersonian Republicans who call for unicameral government “are the sans-culottes of this country,” he suggested, and on the other side “every state in the union has a party . . . who are still Englishmen in their hearts.” Adams’s correspondent, Benjamin Rush, responded in 1809 that Jefferson was wrong to say in his conciliatory inaugural address of 1801 that “We are all republicans – we are all federalists.” More accurate would be “We are all Frenchmen or all Englishmen.”82 Neither Adams nor Rush wanted harshly divisive party government, but each recognized how the ongoing partisan fervor sustained the claim of a struggle between Francophiles and Anglophiles, republicans and monarchists. Not only in 1793 but both earlier and later Jefferson denounced the Americans he derisively termed “monocrats.” Perhaps he was the most persistent, but he was not alone in his attacks upon those who in his opinion would inject monarchical prejudices into a young republic still struggling to define itself. Only when the second party system, Democrats and Whigs, came into being and the battle became one of who promoted, who blocked the advance of “democracy,” did monarchy-bashing fade to the sidelines, save for occasional rhetorical flourishes (Chapter 2). For all the passion invested in the republican cause, its most outspoken champions, among them the Jeffersonian Republicans, were often at a loss to define its content. Beyond charges that Federalists were closet monarchists, what was it that constituted the essentials of their republican creed? What did republicanism mean to any of the figures who uttered it most frequently in the opening years of America’s newly created republic? In January of 1776, John Adams released a pamphlet titled Thoughts on Government, which was meant to tame Common Sense, especially Paine’s call for unicameral government. In the course of presenting his argument, Adams declared with great certainty that “there is no good government but what is republican.” After so promising a

170 What Is Living, What Is Dead? beginning he had trouble filling in his generalization with meaningful content and settled for defining a republic as “an empire of laws, and not of men,” a definition that accomplished little, except perhaps to remind his readers of the text he did not mention, James Harrington’s Oceana, on the opening page of which readers could find the very words Adams would borrow more than a century later.83 In 1786 Adams repeated that “a free republic is the best of governments, and the greatest blessing which mortals can aspire to,” whereupon he immediately complicated matters, saying “The name republic is given to things, in their nature as different and contradictory as light and darkness, truth and falsehood, virtue and vice, happiness and misery.”84 Three years later, July 17, 1789, he offered Roger Sherman the useless definition of a republic as “a government whose sovereignty is vested in more than one person.”85 This was followed on August 8, 1807, in a letter to Mercy Otis Warren, with the revealing statement: “There is not a more unintelligible word in the English language than republicanism.”86 The finale, presumably, was his letter of April 30, 1819, to J. H. Tiffany: “the word republic, as it is used, may signify anything, everything, or nothing.”87 Even Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, the most ardent of republicans, had trouble providing a meaningful explanation of what it was that they and their fellow republicans championed. “The term republic is of very vague application in every language,” Jefferson admitted in 1816. “The abuses of monarchy,” he continued, “had so much filled all the space of political contemplation that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy.”88 In his Dissertations on Government (1786) Tom Paine had trouble reaching beyond banal truisms when explaining what he had in mind. “Republic means the public good,” he suggested in an acceptable but uninspired definition. Trying again, he held that “a republic, properly understood, is a sovereignty of justice,” another acceptable but vague rendering. Perhaps he explained why he could not be more specific in defining republicanism when he wrote, “Our experience in republicanism is yet so slender.”89 How and why, then, did the image of republicanism figure prominently in the American imagination during the early years of independence? What filled the void left by the irrelevance of classical notions in the modern age? Was there anything to republicanism beyond the determination to leave monarchy behind – any positive message to be gleaned from republican rhetoric? One answer worth considering is that it was doctrines of social contract and natural right that filled in the blanks of republicanism and were frequently on display during the early years, as in the debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists. To the Federalists the new constitution differed from England’s precisely in that it was a social contract rather than an historical inheritance; an agreement drawn up not by a sitting legislature but by a special convention obliged to take its proposal to the sovereign “people” for ratification or rejection.

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Anti-Federalists had their own ideas about a constitution regarded as a social contract. Federal Farmer, a candidate for the title of the most formidable of Anti-Federalist spokespersons, contended that “the opposers [of the proposed new constitution] are generally men who support the rights of the people, and are properly republicans. The advocates are generally men not very friendly to those rights, and properly anti-republicans.”90 The formulations of the Federal Farmer were those of a natural rights republican, determined to prevent the ratification of a form of federal government which, in his estimation, was disloyal to republicanism and a threat to natural rights. The language of social contract permeates the writings of the Anti-Federalists. The only question was, which version of a social contract? There was an older as well as a newer conception of social contract theory available to them. The older version dated from Pufendorf and spoke of a contract between rulers and ruled – a political contract signed following an initial social contract on the part of the people agreeing to establish a government. From 1765 to 1776 the colonists used Pufendorf’s formulation to argue that parliament had violated the political contract and could therefore be resisted, fortunately without risking a return to the state of nature; the initial social contract remained intact. Then the colonists graduated at the moment of revolution to Locke, who had denied that the people could ever be bound by contract to any government, not even to one of their own making. Anti-Federalists, even as they insisted against Pufendorf that our natural rights are inalienable, that they were not alienated long ago as he held, nevertheless frequently retreated to a revised formulation of his dual contract, one after another among their ranks speaking in terms of what amounted to a pre-Lockean political contract between governors and governed. Brutus of New York was typical of the Anti-Federalists in his belief that “a constitution is a compact of a people with their rulers.”91 Much the same was the announcement of the Federal Farmer that “in the year 1788 the people of the United States make a federal constitution, which is a fundamental compact between them and their federal rulers.”92 In another contribution dealing with “the social compact,” he sounded caught between Pufendorf and Locke: possibly Lockean in his assertion of “unalienable and fundamental rights,” but less than fully Lockean in his statement that “a free and enlightened people, in forming this compact, will not resign all their rights to those who govern.”93 Under a fully realized Lockean dispensation, apparently misunderstood by the Federal Farmer, we resign none of our natural rights to the rulers but merely place some of them in trust. Their duty is to attend to all our rights, and if they fail, they can and should be replaced. One Anti-Federalist from Pennsylvania did understand that the language of the proposed constitution was Lockean, formulated “in the style of a compact between individuals entering into a state of society,” rather

172 What Is Living, What Is Dead? than a contract between rulers and ruled. All the more, however, did he worry that “consolidation pervades the whole constitution.” A social contract posited in Lockean terms, with its focus on individuals, could be manipulated to override the Anti-Federalist request for a “confederation of states.”94 The same worry was voiced by an Anti-Federalist from New York: “This constitution considers the people of the several states as one body corporate, and is intended as an original compact; it will therefore dissolve all contracts as may be inconsistent with it.”95 Their concerns were not misplaced. Several times in their Federalist essays Hamilton and Madison had voiced their conviction that “the great and radical vice in the construction of the existing Confederation is in the principle of legislation for states or governments in their corporate or collective capacities and as contradistinguished from the individuals of whom they consist.”96 At a later date, 1832, the fears voiced by the Anti-Federalists in 1787 were confirmed when President Jackson said no to the South Carolina legislature’s declaration that the tariff passed in that year was “null and void.” Jackson assured the public that “no one, fellow citizens, has a higher reverence for the reserved rights of the states than the magistrate who now addresses you.” Nevertheless, he insisted that the constitution “operates directly on the people individually, not upon the states.” Only if they were willing to undertake a revolution could the Southerners nullify a federal law. “To call it a constitutional right is confounding the meaning of terms.”97 Apparently Anti-Federalists had found it easier to state their claims in a revised version of the old social contract theory than in an uncompromising embrace of the new. Their choice of which social contract doctrine to follow, often the older, was only one dimension of a much larger retreat in their thinking to earlier times. Innovation was a pejorative word in the Anti-Federalist lexicon. “There is nothing solid or useful that is new” opined “A Farmer” of Maryland in a formulation that was faithful to the sentiments of many of his cohort.98 Anti-Federalists also borrowed from Adams the old fashioned understanding of government as a mixture of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements that Federalists had abandoned for what to their minds was the newer and more appropriate conception of legislative, executive, and judicial functions. As Federalists saw the world, the Anti-Federalists were hopelessly blind to American conditions in their constant talk, once more borrowed from Adams, of different social “orders,” each of which must be represented in a constitutional arrangement. What social “orders” asked the Federalists, who believed such terminology, obviously borrowed from Europe, was inappropriate for America. Nothing pleased Federalists more than to portray Anti-Federalists as out of touch with the modern world. They may have had a point, but it should be observed that both sides of the constitutional debate grounded their arguments in distinctively post-classical discourse about a

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social contract; both sides passed on to subsequent generations a concern for natural rights, consent, and contract that relegated arguments about what is or is not a proper modern republic to the periphery of political discourse. Under the regime of natural rights republicanism, natural rights came first, republicanism second, reduced to serving as their receptacle; where civic virtue had been, natural rights would henceforth be. Federalists and Anti-Federalists engaged in battle on the field of theories of the social contract and, in the course of doing so, prepared the way for subsequent debates throughout much of American history. Successful though the Federalists were in addressing the new federal constitution as an enactment of Locke, the Anti-Federalist invocation of a social contract reminiscent of Pufendorf also had its moment of remarkable triumph, notably with the passage of the Bill of Rights. Hamilton had argued vigorously that a Bill of Rights was out of place in the proposed federal constitution: “Bills of rights are, in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgements of prerogative. Such was Magna Charta. . . . Such, also, the Declaration of Right presented by the Lords and Commons to the Prince of Orange in 1688.” Bills of Rights, he continued, “have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people. . . . Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing.” In the new world of America “the Constitution is itself, in every rational sense . . . A Bill of Rights.”99 Hamilton’s position was Locke’s revisited; the Anti-Federalist rejoinder was a reworking of Pufendorf’s notion of a contract between rulers and ruled. Adapting Pufendorf to their needs, the Anti-Federalists affirmed that a bill of rights was necessary to protect the people from abuse of political power. Federalists reluctantly granted the concession so dear to the hearts of Anti-Federalists. The lasting influence of the Anti-Federalist Americanization of Pufendorf may be seen, in significantly altered and revised form, in the writings of antebellum Southerners, ever on the lookout for ways to defend slavery. For Locke the Southerners had no use, except to denounce the document he inspired, the Declaration of Independence. William Harper of South Carolina asked, “Is it not palpably nearer to the truth to say that no man was ever born free, and that no two men were ever born equal?”100 It was pre-Lockean notions of natural right and social contract that the Southerners championed. When Thomas Dew of Virginia defiantly spoke in defense of slavery, he, like the Anti-Federalists decades before him, cited the writings of Grotius and Pufendorf. The difference is that where the Anti-Federalists had ignored the claims of Grotius and Pufendorf that rights are alienable, Dew reinstated the full dimension of these pre-Lockean thinkers in order to assert that slaves had signed a contract alienating their freedom.101 It also did not take Southerners long to recognize their agreement with the Anti-Federalist warning that the formula “We the people” could be used to break down the barriers blocking the federal government from

174 What Is Living, What Is Dead? forcing its will upon the states.102 Following in the footsteps of the AntiFederalists, the Southerners posed the question, who are the “people”? Predictably their answer was that it was the “people” of the states, not the nation in its entirety. Was it not the people in the various state conventions who had ratified the constitution, they asked? By such a reading they could keep the federal government at bay and thereby preserve slavery, plantations, their proudly cherished way of life. Theories of the social contract predominated North and South, East and West. Movement from East to West, greatly expanding the republic, raised once again the problem of size. The answer was to forget classically inspired fears of a large-scale republic, substituting notions of an expanding social contract. Territories to the West could hold their constitutional conventions to create new states and then petition for admission to the Union. A federal republic anchored in conceptions of social contract could reach across the entire country (Chapter 2). As for North and South, the Northerners could launch a formidable challenge to Southern slave-owners by speaking the language of natural rights republicanism. If the constitution did not refuse slavery, the Northern foes of that abominable institution could demand such revisions as would recognize the natural rights of slaves and hope to place the worst of American evils on the road to extinction. In addition to their initial interpretation of the Constitution as a social contract forged in Lockean terms, Northerners at a later date called again upon notions of inalienable natural rights to demand a correction for what was wrong or lacking in the document of 1787. Abraham Lincoln is an outstanding case in point. In the great ideological controversies of antebellum times and beyond, Americans had recourse to the theories of social contract which had long been abandoned in Europe, replaced by one form or another of what we would now call historicism. Europeans wanted their countries to rediscover vital links between past and present as an antidote to the disruptions of the French Revolution, and in consequence insisted upon thinking historically rather than indulging in ahistorical and dangerous talk about social contracts and natural rights. Nor did Europeans want anything in their vocabulary similar to what was increasingly secondary but sometimes still heard in American political discourse, the language of “republicanism.” Americans did continue to speak in a republican tongue on occasion in antebellum times, but as time passed their words had ever decreasing significance. The titles of their political parties, for instance, implied an attention to republicanism in America that had little bearing upon reality. Before adopting the insignia of Democrats versus Whigs, advocates of those emerging political parties had spoken briefly of a choice between National Republicans such as John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, on the one side, and Democratic Republicans such as Andrew Jackson, on the other. Finally, there was the advent of Lincoln’s Republican Party. In America those

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republican names were bandied about but increasingly were little more than hollow labels. Democracy rather than republic was the word that mattered. Each political party had to prove it was more democratic than the other, Whigs quite tellingly claiming to be more devoted to democracy than Democrats. Residues were all that remained of the old republican rhetoric in America. Throughout most of Europe even such residues were non-existent, republican language having been deliberately stamped out early in the nineteenth century. Although for many European nations the word republican conjured up such unpleasant memories of revolutionary upheaval that it was expunged from the vocabulary at an early date, there was one nation where it would not be silenced, and that country, of course, was France. In America the word republican was ever present but had questionable meaning and diminishing significance. In France the fight for a republic and for the fulfillment of republican ideals was an ongoing and impassioned struggle throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Republicanism with a French accent would not readily fade into insignificance.

Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France It was only during the early years, at the time when Jeffersonians indicted the Federalist program as monarchy revisited, that republican sentiments were particularly vehement in America. Once the figurative monarchists had been defeated, America moved on to its lasting vocabulary, which centered more and more, and still centers, on democracy. In France, by contrast, monarchy was a literal and long-lasting threat to republican aspirations. First there was the Bourbon or Restoration monarchy of 1815 to 1830, which could not have been more hostile to republicans, followed by the Orleanist monarchy from 1830 to 1848, which did all it could to outlaw devotees to the republican cause. Both before and after those two monarchical regimes, republicans were faced with hostile emperors willing to overthrow republican governments: Napoleon Bonaparte and then Napoleon III. Republicanism was kept alive by its unforgiving enemies, ever ready to blame the republicans of the nineteenth century for the horrors of Robespierre. This succession of aggressively anti-republican governments, doing everything possible to suppress the republicans, may have inadvertently served the republican cause. Forced to fight for their very survival, republicans became all the more fervently committed to their cause and awaited the day when they could redeem the promise of their faith. There is another comparison with America that may illuminate the situation republicans faced in France. In America the conflict scholars have conjured up between liberalism and republicanism is imaginary, a statement more about ourselves than the past; natural-rights republicanism was both liberal and republican. Contrariwise, in France the conflict

176 What Is Living, What Is Dead? between republicans and liberals was very real throughout the nineteenth century: French republicans were champions of democracy, French liberals its foes; the two sides in constant combat. Finally, although the suggestion that in America a republican tradition was necessary to counteract liberalism is false, in France it is true. French republicans, in the course of refusing to bow to illiberal treatment by liberal governments, stood up for liberal causes, ironically saving liberalism from degenerating into illiberalism. Our final goal in this chapter will be to discuss the battle between republicans and liberals in nineteenth-century France. But our starting point is to retrieve the emergence of republicanism in the eighteenth century. We have had occasion to discuss the republican thoughts of Helvétius, Holbach, and Saige (Chapter 3). Now we shall turn our attention to the Marquis d’Argenson, Turgot, Diderot, and Condorcet. ** Under the Old Regime, two of the most noteworthy efforts to raise the possibility that France might become a republic hiding under the form of a monarchy were set forth by thinkers inside the French state, the Marquis d’Argenson and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, each eligible for the title of ministre-philosophe. Whether their proposed republic would serve a monarchy or the monarchy serve a republic was a question that differentiated the two, d’Argenson leaning toward monarchy, Turgot toward republic. In the course of gathering as much information as he could about other countries, d’Argenson expressed admiration of Holland, a small nation but unburdened by the dead weight of a feudal nobility and boasting a citizenry actively involved in provincial governments. What he learned during the course of his extensive comparative studies was that the best way to invigorate monarchy was “to admit the public more in the government of the Public,”103 as was true in Holland, and as might be achieved in France if it were transformed into a “true democracy residing in the midst of a monarchy.”104 Those serving the French king should carry to the throne the lesson that aristocracy is his problem, democracy his solution. The Third Estate, the cities, the people are his natural allies; the aristocrats are the obstructive force preventing him from governing effectively.105 France should be ruled by a “popular administration,”106 by Officiers du Peuple rather than Officiers Royaux. At the level of the villages, it is locals who should govern, drawn from all ranks of society, not excepting peasants.107 D’Argenson insisted that governance should not be imposed from above in the manner of Richelieu and Colbert; nor should the Estates General or the legal bodies known as parlements have a say, those aristocratic institutions that serve only the interests of their privileged members. Talent rather than birth should be rewarded; hereditary

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titles are of no worth.108 “It will be said that the principles of the present treatise, favorable to democracy, lead to the destruction of the nobility, and that is not mistaken; nor is it an objection. It is a confirmation of our findings.”109 Nothing is more revealing than to visit the border separating “republican lands from monarchical.” Lethargy is on the monarchical side; energy, economic vitality, and public works on the republican side.110 No official boundary marker is necessary to mark the difference. Despite his many efforts toward transforming subjects into citizens, d’Argenson was careful to point out that his purpose was to strengthen the monarchy: “everything good for republics augments monarchical authority.”111 Under the dispensation he outlined, the remaining Officiers Royaux would be delighted to discover that “the laws constitutive of the state” were theirs alone to administer, the Officiers populaires limited to local affairs.112 No matter how often the people would assemble to transact administrative matters, the king would remain in full control of legislative power.113 In the contest for European supremacy, France would triumph over England, the Marquis d’Argenson was convinced, if the king and his ministers were to enact his program.114 One may question whether anyone in the government was listening, but certainly he was admired by the philosophes; the first volume of the Encyclopédie was dedicated to him. If nothing else, d’Argenson proved that Montesquieu’s idea of a republic hidden under a monarchy could be applied to France as well as England. Turgot was a contributor to the Encylopédie and briefly held the post of Controller- General before losing out to the privileged social orders. At his request Dupont de Nemours drafted a Mémoire sur les municipalités in 1775 that was a remarkable effort to embed republicanism in the monarchical government. Much of the Mémoire was reminiscent of d’Argenson’s earlier Considérations sur le Gouvernement Ancien et Présent de la France, but the advocacy of a republican outlook was more forcefully articulated, far less hidden under the form of a monarchy, far more available publicly for all to see. A barely muted republicanism had dared come out into the open. “The English do not have the exclusive right of being citizens,” Turgot had written in “Foundation,” his Encyclopédie article of 1757.115 Two decades later the Mémoire outlined a scheme to transform subjects into citizens. As d’Argenson had, Turgot’s mouthpiece called for a demotion of the nobility, to the point where it “will retain only honorable distinctions rather than fiscal exemptions.”116 Tax assessments and public works would henceforth be debated by an engaged citizenry at the level of villages, cities, and provinces. Hereafter France would be “a single body perpetually animated by one sole objective, the public good and the preservation of the rights of each individual.”117 A civic education “would bring patriotism to that high degree of enthusiasm only seen before in the ancient world.”118

178 What Is Living, What Is Dead? Following d’Argenson’s lead, the author of the Mémoire protected himself in advance from counterattack even as he advanced potentially radical ideas. The proposed scheme of decentralization and civic participation, contended the writer, would not threaten but rather strengthen the king’s hand by offering him the information necessary to arrive at informed decisions. Very revealing, however, is that Turgot was deliberately reaching out to Rousseau’s republican writings. In Rousseau’s First Discourse one reads, “We have physicists, geometers, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, painters; we no longer have citizens”; the counterpart to which in the Mémoire is “There are methods and institutions for training grammarians, mathematicians, doctors, painters. There are none for training citizens.”119 After his painful break with Rousseau, David Hume turned to Turgot for consolation, only to be told by his French comrade that Rousseau’s Social Contract “amounts to a precise distinction between the sovereign and the government, but that distinction presents a very illuminating truth, and it seems to me to establish forever the idea of the inalienable sovereignty of the people, whatever the form of the government.”120 Without threatening the monarch, Turgot the minister and philosophe was advocating natural-rights republicanism. Never willing to risk the politics of revolution, Turgot was careful to keep his potentially radical natural-rights republicanism locked within the bounds of a politics of reform. During his final years the remarkable philosophe Diderot took matters one step further, cheering the natural-rights republicanism of the American Revolution. Tom Paine in 1782 complained that Raynal’s Révolution d’Amérique missed the principles that had given birth to the uprising in America.121 Had Paine been familiar with Diderot’s contributions to Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes in the early 1780s, he presumably would have taken deep satisfaction to discover that Raynal had permitted Diderot to speak up for those principles. With America in mind Diderot took the stand, reminiscent of Locke, that “liberty is having ownership of yourself,” and insisted that under no circumstance can we ever legitimately resign our liberty. Our rights are inalienable, anchored in “eternal and unchangeable truths, the foundation of all morality, the bedrock of all reasonable government.”122 To be denied liberty, affirmed Diderot, is to be denied our humanity. “Without liberty, . . . you cannot be a husband, father, relative or friend. You have no patrie [or] fellow citizen.” Each generation must be free; the current generation is not bound by the past, nor may it bind future generations. There is no society which cannot change its government, exercising the same freedom which its ancestors used in setting it up. . . . There is no political authority, whether created yesterday or one thousand years ago, which cannot be abrogated in ten years or tomorrow.123

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So downtrodden are the people, Rousseau had argued, that there is little or no hope for revolution to succeed. Diderot thought otherwise. A truth proved by history is that “all arbitrary power rushes towards its own destruction, and that everywhere revolutions – quicker or slower, soon or later – bring back the reign of liberty.”124 The danger is not that the people will fail to rise up in revolution but that they will go too far. Sometimes, unfortunately, a nation “is only regenerated in a bath of blood”;125 ideally “all innovations should be gradual.”126 Years in advance of the French Revolution, he called for convening “the assembly of the estates of a great nation.”127 Also well in advance he sounded a demand for what from historical hindsight sounds like the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen. Nothing less will do, he proclaimed, than recognition of “natural liberty, civil liberty, and political liberty, that is to say, the liberty of the man, of the citizen, and of the people.”128 Directly addressing events in America, Diderot suggested that its revolution amounted to asking the English to abide by the principles they had invoked in the seventeenth century. “These principles, born in Europe and especially in England, had been transmitted to America by philosophy. The home country’s own enlightenment was used against itself.”129 England had been, but it was in danger of being no more “the country of great political phenomena.” There we have seen freedom in the most violent struggle with despotism. . . . There one king, brought legally to the scaffold, and another deposed with all his line by national decree, have given a great lesson to the world. The fnal and happy result of upheavals in England was the triumph of enlightenment and the coming of age of citizens who were henceforth “an integral and constituent part of the state and the nation.”130 If Diderot’s words sound familiar to anyone familiar with the works of England’s radical Whigs, that is likely not an accident. That he was not only in agreement with the radical Whigs but perhaps engaged in a deliberate advocacy of their affirmative position on the meaning of the American Revolution is suggested by a lengthy direct quotation in his writings, without quotation marks, from Tom Paine’s Common Sense.131 Again, he was much like England’s radical Whigs in his belief that corruption had become rampant in Great Britain’s public life132 and in his conviction that the American example might inspire a regeneration in the country that had become too self-satisfied to watch over its freedom. For dramatic effect Diderot created a dialogue in which an Englishman says to an American, “your virtues and laws could re-animate us. They could recall to our degraded hearts both the price and greatness of liberty.”133 As presented in Diderot’s final political writings, the American Revolution

180 What Is Living, What Is Dead? and its emergent natural rights republic signified hope not only for the Americans but also for the English, and potentially all Europeans. Condorcet in 1786 took up where Diderot left off. How painfully different, he remarked, was the fate of defenders of the doctrine of natural rights in France from that of their counterparts in America. In France the worth of natural rights philosophy “was proved by the philosophes precisely at the same time as they were being accused in the journals, in episcopal letters to the faithful, and in prosecutors’ briefs of preaching sedition.” In republican America he discerned precisely the opposite: the “Declaration of Independence is a simple and sublime expression of these rights, so sacred and so long forgotten. Among no nation have they been so well known or preserved in such perfect integrity.” Montesquieu’s relativism should not be permitted to compromise the universal significance of natural rights. “The spectacle of a great people among whom the rights of man are respected is useful to all other peoples, despite the differences of climate, customs, and constitutions.” “Maxims of Machiavellism are erected into political principles” in Europe, suggested Condorcet, whereas in America the principles of natural right are on display both in theory and practice. “By a necessary consequence of the respect of the American laws for the natural rights of humanity, every man, whatever his religion, his opinions, his principles, is sure of finding asylum there.” Liberty of the press is also well established, which we should appreciate all the more considering that in self-congratulatory England “it is more to the liberty of the press than to its [famous] constitution that this country owes the maintenance of the laws.” Finally, the American example suggests that if the French wish to institute freedom, they need to think about ridding themselves of their oppressive feudal legacy. The spectacle of equality that reigns in the United States .  .  . can also be useful to Europe. We no longer believe here that nature has divided the human race into three or four orders . . . and that one of these orders is condemned to work much and eat little. America has neither a hereditary nobility nor a peasantry. It is a model of modern natural rights republicanism, and among the lessons it teaches is that freedom has a social as well as a political dimension.134 Turgot, Diderot, and Condorcet, in their forceful presentations of the philosophy of natural rights, set forth ideals in the eighteenth century that would be reiterated time and again by French republicans in the nineteenth century. These three thinkers were numbered prominently among those who played a major role in establishing the “principle” of republicanism, its underlying values. The “form” of government as understood by nineteenth-century republicans, its proper institutional structure, was also established during the waning years of the previous

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century, especially in the French reaction to John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, which had been explicitly written as a challenge to Turgot. So attentive was the French audience to the state constitutions of America that they were published five times from 1776 to 1786. Remarkably, Adams’s bloated three-volume study, burdened with overflowing historical references, was much commented on in France, just as it had been in America during the Federalist/AntiFederalist debates. Adams’s Defence, with its repudiation of a unicameral legislature and call for a strong executive, was written against “the attack of M. Turgot.” Turgotists responded by issuing an annotated version of a 1787 American attack on Adams, the Observations on Government by a Farmer of New Jersey. John Stevens, the “New Jersey gentleman,” was favored by the followers of Turgot because he had accused Adams of propounding an apology for aristocracy and monarchy, his one fault being that he did not speak up on behalf of unicameralism, so the French editors took liberties with the pamphlet, expurgating and interpolating until it said what they wanted to hear. Adams’s warnings about the need to find ways to offset the inevitable emergence of aristocracy were mistakenly regarded by the Turgotists as an apology for aristocracy. The bicameralism endorsed by Adams, charged the Turgotists, would unacceptably permit the privileged classes to dominate; unicameralism and a relatively weak executive, by contrast, would permit the idea of popular sovereignty to have practical meaning. Such was the position of monarchy-accepting but republicansympathizing public figures in France shortly before the convening of the Estates General in 1789. When a Constituent Assembly met at Versailles and then in Paris, reactions to Adams played a role in implanting the dividing line between what would in the nineteenth century become a conflict between republicans and liberals. The Comte de Lally-Tollendal, in the course of arguing for bicameralism and an absolute royal veto, spoke disparagingly of John Stevens, “the unjust and inconsistent censor of Mr. Adams.”135 JeanJoseph Mounier sounded like Adams when he contended that an enfeebled monarchy had led to feudal tyranny – and even more like Adams when he argued against unicameralism by setting forth an Adams-like assertion that the few would dominate the many in such an assembly.136 Their opponents such as Sièyes, advocates of unicameralism, struck back by calling them monarchiens or anglomanes. Sometimes explicitly, at other times metaphorically, the split over institutions was between those who might be placed in the camp of Montesquieu with his notions of mixed and balanced government, checks and balances, and the followers of Rousseau with his unicameral legislature and limited executive.137 Soon this division would be between liberals and republicans. As the nineteenth century unfolded, the divide was between those who were for democracy, the republicans, and those against, the liberals. Lally-Tollendal

182 What Is Living, What Is Dead? and Mounier, monarchiens though they might be, were willing to sanction popular sovereignty;138 but their Restoration and July Monarchy successors, Pierre Royer-Collard, Adolphe Thiers, and Victor de Broglie, would turn back the clock, reinstating the hereditary peerage and denying popular sovereignty. François Guizot would utter his infamous expression: Il n’y aura pas de jour pour le suffrage universel. Leading liberal of the Bourbon Restoration Royer-Collard was speaking for virtually all liberals of his time, and in retrospect for those of the July Monarchy which followed, when he wrote “we wish to end the Revolution”; nothing was more necessary than “the definitive and absolute proscription of the revolutionary monster.”139 More forthrightly stated, he and his fellow liberals wished for the suppression of the republicans and democracy by any and all means. Adolphe Thiers was not alone; other liberals supported him when he announced that “the vile mob has never changed. . . . One day it erects altars to the patrie, the next it raises scaffolds.”140 French liberals were ardently anti-democratic. Exactly the opposite were the republicans who from the very beginning, the First Republic, had announced that they were committed to democracy. The Second French Republic would seek to redeem the democratic commitment that Robespierre proclaimed but defiled. It was not only the far right but the liberals who feared democracy, which is why Tocqueville stands out in their ranks, he virtually alone in the 1830s attempting to deal seriously with emerging democracy both as a form of government and as a newly emerging type of society. Guizot, the leading liberal in the government of the Orleanist monarchy, so brilliant before he came to power, was quite willing upon assuming the reins of government to protect the liberal order by illiberal means; anything would do if it prevented the pro-democracy republicans from having a say in public life. Throughout the July Monarchy, traumatized by fears of a republican uprising, the liberals refused the right of groups to associate. In 1831 they passed a law banning meetings of groups consisting of more than a few. Under such conditions it was not the liberals who spoke of rights; it was the republicans. On trial, the republican Godfrey Cavaignac defended himself by proclaiming that association is a fundamental human right. Later, near the close of the July Monarchy, it would be the well-known republican leader Alexandre Ledru-Rollin’s turn to cite the natural right to assembly against the reigning liberals, which he did by quoting the Declaration of Rights of 1793.141 If the liberals had been liberal, they would have opposed Article 291 of the Penal Code, which required special permission for any group of more than twenty members to assemble. Instead, they violated their principles by applying the Code against the republicans. One might expect liberals to repeal the Le Chapelier law of 1791, which forbade workers to combine and strike; they did not, and the law persisted until 1884.

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Rights had always been dear to republican spokespersons, as seen from the outset in the Declaration of 1793, and rights became all the more cherished by Cavaignac, Ledru-Rollin, and all the republicans when theirs were violated time and again by the reigning liberals. It was the republicans arguably more than the liberals who spoke the language of liberalism. During the July Monarchy republicans gathered their following under the banner of the Société des Droits de l’Homme until the government forced it to close; with the coming of the Second Republic it was reopened. In La République Une et Indivisible the arch-republican Louis Blanc called for “an entirely free press” and proclaimed that “liberty of thought is a principle beyond dispute among democrats.”142 At a later date another republican, Jules Simon in La Politique Radicale, similarly wrote that “in a country where liberty of the press does not exist, . . . political rights are not guaranteed”; and he claimed, “as a natural right, anterior and superior to political rights, the right to unite and to associate.” Republican he was, but that did not prevent him from saying “liberal doctrines have been those of all my life.”143 Fear of democracy distanced liberals from the theme of rights; commitment to democracy wed republicans to the same. There were moments when the liberals of the July monarchy attempted to incorporate an element of democracy into their world view, but such efforts were less than convincing and short-lived. Royer-Collard had toyed with the idea that the Revolution of July was simply the latest chapter in the ongoing, long-standing democratic story of the retreat of the nobility in the face of the rise of an enlightened middle class. By 1837 he revised his stand out of fear of “the superabundance of the democratic spirit.”144 Any remaining willingness on the part of the liberals to somehow incorporate the word democracy came to an abrupt finale when they were faced with the arrival of the Second Republic, the Republic of 1848. The prospect of universal manhood suffrage struck fear into the hearts of the liberals, as did Louis Blanc’s call for a social republic upholding a “right to work.” To Thiers the advent of a social republic compromised private property and thus threatened nothing less than civilization itself. Very likely he remembered with high anxiety that the right to work had been proclaimed by the republicans in their 1793 Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen.145 In 1848 he published De la propriété to warn that Blanc’s ideas would result in the downfall of the family, civilization, and everything sacred. Guizot agreed. “The Social Republic,” wrote an alarmed Guizot, “is at once odious and impossible. It is the most absurd, and at the same time the most perverse of all chimeras.”146 Immediately after the fall of the July Monarchy and the rise of the Second Republic, Guizot penned De la démocratie en France. In this volume he made clear that it was not only the social program of the Second Republic that struck fear in his heart. Equally upsetting was the new

184 What Is Living, What Is Dead? regime’s dedication to democracy. “I am convinced,” wrote a distressed Guizot, “that the evil which lies at the root of all France’s evils . . . is the idolatry of democracy.” It is imperative that “all the conservative forces in the country unite closely and act constantly together,” and he held up his end of the bargain by injecting into his supposedly liberal thought much of the ideology of the far right. France, he announced, is “a great organic body” in danger of being reduced by republicans to “a series of individuals,” with no ties between the generations. Democrats fail to understand that without family, property, and inheritance, we are “nothing but individuals who appear and then vanish.” Progress will cease and humans descend “to the level of the lower animals.”147 Tocqueville’s Democracy in America stands in a class of its own within the ranks of French liberals. His two-volume study arguably demonstrates the best in his country’s liberal sentiments, even if his other works all too often display the shortcomings of the French liberal tradition. Where his fellow liberals were fixated upon England, the land of constitutional government and extremely limited franchise, Tocqueville insisted it was more important to study democratic America. Where they saw America as an adolescent country, well behind mature Europe, Tocqueville suspected that America was the future. The legacy of the French Revolution was that an unstoppable democratic telos was at work in France. Unburdened by feudal nobility or peasantry, America was born democratic, modern, and ahead of France. It was imperative to come to terms with America because it offered invaluable clues as to France’s inevitably democratic future. Tocqueville is famous for his advocacy of decentralization, but he was not the first French liberal to sing the praises of decentralized government and civic participation as answers to the woes of modern times. “Centralization sprang forth from a society ground down into dust,” RoyerCollard complained in 1820. “Thus it is that we have become a people d’administrés.”148 Nevertheless, his insistence upon entrusting public affairs to only the most constricted of elites defeated his ends in advance. Prosper de Barante in 1821 made a more forceful plea than RoyerCollard’s for decentralization in Des Communes et de l’Aristocratie. Whereas in France the nation suffers under la tutelle de l’État, in England “one sees a nation which administers itself,” opening the door to “civic virtues” and “public spirit.”149 Never, however, did the liberals before Tocqueville advance far down this road. Although Prosper de Barante placed the blame on Napoleon’s over-mighty political regime, far more typical of French liberals was their willingness to support the Emperor’s centralized state for the sake of stability. Adolphe Thiers, who like many liberals was at least as conservative as he was liberal, praised Napoleon in his History of the French Revolution and was instrumental in placing Napoleon’s statue on the Vendôme column in 1833. Against such a background one may conclude that Tocqueville’s enshrinement of the New England town meeting should hold a place of honor in the liberal

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pantheon, not only because he refused to compromise his praise of participation, but also because he was speaking of democratic America rather than aristocratic England. Despite his best efforts, and brilliant though his performance was, Tocqueville could not entirely divest himself of his aristocratic preconceptions during his stay in America. Wrongly he declared “Jackson is the majority’s slave” and made matters worse by predicting that Jackson’s legacy was an enfeebled presidency.150 Impressed by the “great” party debates pitting Federalists against Jeffersonians in times past, Tocqueville noticed nothing of importance in the “small parties” of antebellum America. The grand debates and soaring oratory of the second party system, Jacksonians against Whigs, escaped his notice.151 In the second volume Tocqueville frequently seemed more intent on drawing deductions from his model of “democratic society” than on actually studying American conditions. He decided in advance that poetry and philosophy will not succeed in a society where everything is in constant motion,152 and he saw no evidence of an emerging American literature153 – taking no notice of the likes of James Fenimore Cooper or the ongoing efforts of Jacksonian journalists to call into being a literature that will treat as much of democracy as England’s does of aristocracy.154 Whatever its defects, Tocqueville’s performance was outstanding and places him above all other French liberals. He, far beyond any of his fellow liberals, attempted to face up to the reality of an emerging democratic age. And yet already in Democracy in America, both at the beginning and at the ending of his presentation, he flirted with the despair that would eventually overtake his writings and which was all too common in the ranks of French liberals. His was a book “written under the impulse of a kind of religious dread,”155 he announced in his opening pages. In his final pages he predicted that with the coming of the democratic age an “orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery” will enter human history, perhaps never to exit. “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, and the spirit of man walks through the night.”156 The year was 1840, the regime the July Monarchy. Come 1848 and the Second Republic, hope for the future will be virtually indiscernible in his works, and completely absent after the advent of the Second Empire, 1852. “Socialism will always remain the most essential feature of the February Revolution [of 1848],”157 wrote a distraught Tocqueville in his notebooks. He feared the “socialist theories, which in the shape of greedy, envious desires continued to spread among the people, sowing the seeds of future revolutions.”158 As early as 1835 he had issued a stern warning in his Memoir on Pauperism to avoid social welfare legislation. Any permanent, regular, administrative system whose aim will be to provide for the needs of the poor . . . will in time reduce the rich to

186 What Is Living, What Is Dead? 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.159 Forever bemoaning the small-minded commercialism of the July Monarchy, Tocqueville sounded far more than he wished to acknowledge exactly like its reigning liberal spokespersons when he addressed the fate of the poor. The only difference was that he was more polemically adept, as when he remarked mockingly in 1848 that the doorkeeper at his Parisian residence was “a slightly 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.”160 Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856) vies with Democracy in America for the title of his best book. Yet here again he could not free himself from the shortcomings of other French liberals, in this case their penchant for indulging in historical despair whenever events upset their hopes and expectations. Their strategy since the Restoration had been to remain silent about the supposedly dangerous doctrines of 1789 concerning natural rights and social contract, turning instead to the claim that their inheritance was not to that disruptive year but to the many preceding centuries that had prepared the way for their triumph in 1830. Overlooking the revolutionary Third Estate of 1789 was central to their strategy; equally important was to write joyfully about the slow but steady evolutionary rise of the Third Estate during the pre-revolutionary centuries. Guizot was typical when he asserted in his History of European Civilization that “there can be no doubt that the commons, the Third Estate of 1789, politically speaking, are the descendants, the heirs of the free towns of the twelfth century.”161 Much the same was Augustin Thierry’s generalization 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.”162 When 1848 arrived, a badly shaken Thierry concluded that he had no choice but to suspend his research: “the history of France appears to have been overturned as much as France herself.”163 Tocqueville sounded like the liberal historians when in The Old Regime and the French Revolution he stated, “I am dealing here with classes as a whole, to my mind the historian’s proper study.”164 His despair was also reminiscent of the liberal historians who preceded him. Their concern, however, was for the fall of the middle class, his for the fall of the aristocracy. Earlier in his career he had expressed contempt for the middle class and disgust with its years of triumph during the July Monarchy: “The middle class, entrenched in its power, . . . treated government like a private business” and “took on the features of a trading company.”

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Timid and mediocre, it instituted “a government without either virtues or greatness,” and its legislature was a “parliamentary comedy.”165 Only insofar as France’s middle-class regime asserted itself in imperial policy could Tocqueville find any sign of vitality in the July Monarchy: “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.”166 It is difficult to determine which he despised more, the July Monarchy or the Second Republic that succeeded it. In Tocqueville’s final book he conjured up a vision of his country as having lost its liberty before the advent of the Second Empire, before the Second Republic, before the Orleanist and Restoration monarchies. He read his despair as far back into the past as possible, not stopping until he reached the age of the Old Regime. The seventeenth century in his reading of events was the time of the political decline of the class that might have saved France, the aristocracy. “A powerful aristocracy does not merely shape the course of public affairs, it also guides opinion, sets the tone for writers, and lends authority to new ideas. By the eighteenth century the French nobility had wholly lost this form of ascendancy.”167 Louis XIV allowed the nobles to retain their privileges but rendered them politically insignificant. It was to the Third Estate that the king and his ministers turned in their search for a social base upon which to build an absolute monarchy. With the aid and comfort afforded by the middle class, the royal administrators could intervene in even the most trivial of local affairs. “Thus it was that the middle class prepared itself for governing, and the French people for liberty.”168 Towns had been but were no more democratic republics; provincial assemblies were defunct; the Estates General did not meet. All possibilities of self-government in the future were closed off ages in advance, with the consequence that when the middle class eventually triumphed, it could not have been more ill prepared to exercise power. In Democracy in America, written before he had capitulated to despair, Tocqueville wrote that “under Louis XIV there was much less administrative centralization than there is now.”169 Two decades later, in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, he offered the very different assertion that under the old order “the government of France was already highly centralized and all-powerful.”170 The Intendants fit into his scheme, but he could only make his argument plausible by failing to come to terms with the great many offices that were venal, bought as private property, often carrying a noble title, constituting a kind of neo-feudalism. He refused to acknowledge what he had previously understood: that the French state of the Old Regime was as weak as it was strong. When writing Democracy in America in the 1830s Tocqueville yielded little to the thesis of historical determinism; in The Old Regime and the French Revolution he granted it everything. Always there is both causality and freedom, he had written in his study of America, even if “general

188 What Is Living, What Is Dead? causes explain more, and particular influences less, in democratic than in aristocratic ages.”171 In his notebooks of 1848 he rejected the “literary men” who spy general causes everywhere, thereby “banishing men from history”; and he likewise repudiated politicians who “attribute everything to particular incidents.” The view he stood by was that “the February revolution was born of general causes fertilized . . . by accidents.”172 The Old Regime and the French Revolution of 1856 marks the moment when he decided in favor of all-out determinism: “Chance played no part whatever in the outbreak of the Revolution,”173 he announced in his opening pages. With the decline of the aristocracy in the seventeenth century and the middle class unfit to rule, it was only a matter of time, in his account, until France would forfeit all hope of freedom. Determinism enabled Tocqueville to accept the defeat of his hopes. However different from other French liberals, Tocqueville was like them in turning his back on natural rights and the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen. His only reason for mentioning such notions was to ridicule them. “In the nation-wide debacle of freedom we had preserved one form of it,” he commented in disgust; “we could indulge, almost without restriction, in learned discussions on the origins of society, the nature of government, and the essential rights of man.” What could be worse than to find that “abstract theories on the nature of human societies not only became daily topics of conversation among the leisure class but fired the imagination even of women and peasants.”174 It was in a chapter dealing with the philosophes that Tocqueville ridiculed the tradition of natural rights thought. It was also in this chapter that he displayed a contempt for the philosophes matched only by his refusal to understand their labors and legacy. The disdain he expressed in The Old Regime and the French Revolution for the philosophes and possibly for the Enlightenment more generally was remarkably similar to the earlier misinformed and ill-tempered polemics of Edmund Burke – this despite Tocqueville’s recognition in his notes of Burke’s limitations.175 Within the French context his remarks were similar to those of other liberals such as Guizot who had chided the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and Royer-Collard who had denounced the “anarchical doctrines of the eighteenth-century.”176 It is disappointing that the most distinguished French liberal author of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville, did little or nothing to discern a way forward to the merger of liberals and republicans into a coalition capable of supporting the rise of a liberal republic. But what was lacking in Tocqueville and in the likes of Guizot may be found in a number of other liberals who learned how to open the door to a reconciliation. Benjamin Constant is an excellent early example. “Liberty is possible under all forms [of government],” he suggested in 1820. It is the end, and all forms of government are the means. There are individual rights, sacred rights, indispensable guarantees that one

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must have under 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.177 In his efforts to convince liberals that monarchy was not essential, the right kind of republic acceptable, Constant was not immediately successful. Not much later, directly contradicting Constant, Royer-Collard wrote, “There is no need to prove that monarchy alone agrees with France. For us it is not only a political truth; it is also a truth of sentiment, and the unshakeable result of our experience.”178 Be that as it may, Constant had issued an invitation to reconciliation with republicans over the question of monarchy or republic that some liberals would eventually accept. Constant’s ardent fellow liberal in the early nineteenth century was Mme de Staël. In her Considérations sur la révolution française (1818), she rejected widely accepted claims that England’s revolution of 1688 was admirable, France’s of 1789 regrettable. “The same movement of spirits produced the revolution of England and that of France in 1789,” she affirmed. “One and the other led to the establishment of representative government, under which the human spirit advances from all sides.”179 Benjamin Constant and Mme de Staël were committed to ending the conflict between liberals and republicans, and even their frequently narrowminded liberal successors of the July Monarchy and thereafter spoke on occasion, as Thiers did in the 1860s, in favor of any political regime that would safeguard what he called the “necessary liberties.” The message of Constant and Mme de Staël may have been lost during the July Monarchy, but it was retrieved by Lucien Anatole PrévostParadol two years before the demise of the Second Empire and the birth of the accidental Third Republic. La France Nouvelle, the book PrévostParadol published in 1868, proved to be the bible of the liberals during the early years of the Third Republic. Adolphe Thiers, Édouard Laboulaye, Albert de Broglie – the liberals in general – applauded PrévostParadol, whose program of substituting dispassionate discussions of workable institutional arrangements in place of shouting matches over monarchies versus republics echoed Constant’s political writings of the early nineteenth century. In a message of conciliation, of exhortation to rise above bitter ideological struggles, Prévost-Paradol declared himself “incapable of hatred or enthusiasm for the words monarchy or republic.” The “good citizen” of his aspirations would be “neither intoxicated nor repulsed by the words republic or monarchy.” All of Prévost-Paradol’s research had but one objective, that of finding “institutions that can with equal ease accommodate the monarchical or the republican form.” Although the advent of the Third Republic was two years into the future, he was already prepared to rally liberals to its defense: “To crown the

190 What Is Living, What Is Dead? institutions that we have sketched in the preceding pages with the republican form cannot be repugnant to sensible minds.”180 Prévost-Paradol was also insistent upon the demand that liberals embrace democracy in the future as ardently as they had resisted it in the past. The first step is to recognize that “one would be more likely to see a river flow back to its source than see a democratic society surge back to aristocracy.” The second step is to acknowledge that universal suffrage secures peace rather than provoking upheavals. The third is to institute such reforms as will have as their “principal results that of changing the commune, the canton, the department into so many practical schools of public life.”181 One might say that, where France was concerned, PrévostParadol was more Tocquevillian than Tocqueville. Tocqueville’s Old Regime, written midway through the reign of the Second Empire, portrayed the past in the worst possible light and was a confession of liberal despair. Prévost-Paradol wrote near the end of the Second Empire and paved the way to the emergence of a liberal republican hope for the future. ** With the advent of the Third Republic, France entered into an age of liberal republicanism. Many problems persisted, of course, some of them pertinent not only to the Third but to the Fourth and Fifth Republics. Could France decentralize, could it step back from striving to be a “republic one and indivisible,” a nationalized fulfillment of Rousseau’s “general will,” or would anything less permit the Catholic Church to undermine its existence? Could it survive attacks from the far left and the far right without surrendering its liberal republican identity? Did it need to continue forcing its citizens to be free by means of a highly centralized system of public education? Would a crucifix or a Muslim headdress in the classroom of a public school undermine the Republic? Whatever the answers, republicanism in France was here to stay. And if some of the problems bedeviling its republicanism have already been resolved, and others in the best case scenario may be in the process of being resolved, the consequence may well be that in France the language of republicanism will nominally remain but will more and more appear a residue from a passing age. It is not obvious that in any of our four countries – Scotland, England, America, or France – republicanism in our day is a subject of great concern or that anything has been lost by its recession into the past. We may have reached the point where, even in France, the words republic and republicanism have little resonance. If so, this is not an outcome of worrisome concern nor an excuse for exercises in nostalgia. It is simply a matter of history moving on and for us to realize that the time has arrived to learn how to address the problems and challenges of a new age. Moving forward, the fate that should concern us is that of liberalism, not

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republicanism. Our struggle is not one of republicanism versus liberalism, but of liberalism versus illiberalism.

Notes 1. Areopagitica and Other Political Writings of John Milton (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), pp. 58–60, 63, 67, 79, 116, 169, 203, 309, 361, 420– 421. I am drawing upon my Enlightenment in Scotland and France (New York and London: Routledge, 2019). 2. The Whole Works of Walter Moyle (London, 1727), p. 58. 3. James Moore and Michael Silverstone, eds., Natural Rights on the Threshold of the Scottish Enlightenment: The Writings of Gershom Carmichael (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), pp. 12, 74, 94–96, 126, 139–140, 168. 4. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), nos. 75, 87, 149, 212, 227. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), pp. 192–193. Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, vol. II, Bk. III, ch. 7, p. 271, in Collected Works of Francis Hutcheson (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1969), Reprinted in vols. 5 and 6 of the 1969 edition. It should be noted that Hutcheson sounded unLockean for a moment in A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, vol. 4, Bk. III, chs. 5 and 7, pp. 286, 287, 304, in Collected Works. 5. Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, vol. II, Bk. III, ch. 7, p. 280. See also my account in Enlightenment in Scotland and France (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 134–137. 6. Ibid., vol. II, Bk. III, ch. 7, p. 282. 7. Ibid., vol. II, Bk. II, ch. 16, p. 112. 8. Hutcheson, An Inquiry, pp. 103, 104, 118, 135. 9. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), pp. 59–61. 10. Adam Ferguson, Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (London: printed for R. & J. Dodsley, 1756), p. 3. 11. Ibid., pp. 5, 6, 9, 36. Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 155. 12. Hume, Essays, p. 472. 13. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), pp. 297, 316, 321. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), p. 53. 14. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp. 318–319, 402. 15. John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), pp. 5, 192, 238, 357, 439, 581, 588, 623, 695, 713, 758, 800, 802, 806. William Robertson, “Sermon on the Centenary of the Glorious Revolution, 1788,” in The Works of William Robertson (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996), vol. XII, p. 177. 16. “Smith to Dr. Archibald Davidson, 16 November 1787,” in E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross, eds., Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), no. 274, p. 309. 17. Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, vol. II, Bk. III, ch. 8, pp.  308–309. 18. Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 199. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 190.

192 What Is Living, What Is Dead? 19. John Greville Pocock, “Hume and the American Revolution: The Dying Thoughts of a North Briton,” in Daniel F. Norton, ed., McGill Hume Studies (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1979), pp. 325–343. 20. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), vol. II, pp.  573, 580, 947. George Herbert Guttridge, ed., “Adam Smith on the American Revolution: An Unpublished Memorial,” American Historical Review, vol. 38 (1933), p. 717. 21. Alexander Carlyle, The Justice and Necessity of the War with our American Colonies (Edinburgh: Printed for J. Murray, 1777), pp. 13n, 39, 48. 22. Alexander Carlyle, A Letter to His Grace the Duke of Buccleugh on National Defence (London: Printed for J. Murray, 1778), p. 53. 23. Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 1985, 2015), p. 267. David. B. Swinfen, “The American Revolution in the Scottish Press,” in Owen Dudley Edwards and George Shepperson, eds., Scotland, Europe and the American Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), pp. 66–74. 24. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 232, 249. 25. Hume, Essays, pp. 52, 53. 26. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), Bk. IV, ch. 33, p. 435. 27. Ibid., Bk. I, ch. 1, p. 122. 28. Ibid., Bk. I, Introduction, sect. 2, p. 52. 29. Ibid., Bk. I, ch. 2, p. 157. 30. Ibid., Bk. I, ch. 3, pp. 204–205. 31. Ibid., Bk. I, ch. 3, p. 206. 32. Ibid., Bk. II, ch. 1, p. 2. 33. Ibid., Bk. I, ch. 7, p. 234. 34. Ibid., Bk. I, ch. 7, pp. 243–244. 35. Hume, Essays, p. 45. 36. Blackstone, Commentaries, intro., sect. 1, p. 9. 37. Hume, Essays, p. 32. 38. Hume, An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), no. 201. 39. Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 52–54. 40. Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), ch. 2. 41. John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies, in Merrill Jensen, ed., Tracts of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), p. 148. 42. Dickinson, A New Essay on the Constitutional Power of Great Britain over the Colonies in America (London: printed for J. Almon, 1774), p. 62. 43. George A. Peek, Jr., ed., The Political Writings of John Adams (New York: Macmillan, 1985), p. 48. 44. Edmund Burke, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1866), vol. IV, pp. 70, 109–110. 45. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), pp. 84–85. 46. Edmund Burke, “Speech on Mr. Fox’s East India Bill,” in Works of Edmund Burke (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1866), vol. II, pp.  439, 441. Worth noting is that in his early (1756) A Vindication of Natural Society Burke spoke quite convincingly in the voice of a radical Whig, before saying

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

193

in a second edition that his intention was satirical. Satire is one possibility, ambivalence another. Burke, Reflections, p. 97. Edmund Burke, “Thoughts on French Affairs,” in Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Edmund Burke (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 507. Burke, “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” The Portable Edmund Burke, pp. 507–516. Burke, Reflections, pp. 76–77. Burke, “Speech on Mr. Fox’s East India Bill,” vol. II, p. 437. In his early 30s Burke had expressed appreciation that Hume had shown “from what a strange chaos of liberty and tyranny, of anarchy and order, the constitution, we are now blessed with, had at length arisen.” Kramnick, ed., The Portable Edmund Burke, p. 94. Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 127–136. Burke, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” pp. 99–101. Ibid., p. 70. Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (London: Longman, Green, Roberts, 1863), vol. II, pp. 662–671. 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. I, p. 140. Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Anti-Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 2.7.17–18. Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Lois, Bk. IX, ch. 1. Storing, ed., Anti-Federalist, 2.8.26; 2.9.16. Ibid., 2.7.9. Ibid., 5.16.14. William Barclay Allen, ed., George Washington: A Collection (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), pp. 240–241. Douglas Adair’s treatment of the Scottish influence in America is of great interest. Fame and the Founding Fathers (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1974), ch. 4. Hume, Essays, p. 280. Ibid., p. 42. Allen, ed., George Washington: A Collection, p. 515. Hamilton, “Constitutional Convention Speech,” p. 141. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), vol. I, pp. 115, 137, 138, 140, 142. Storing, ed., Anti-Federalist, 6.12.16–17. Ibid., 2.9.42. Ibid., 2.8.7; 2.8.25; 2.8.54; 2.8.58. Ibid., 2.7.10. George Mason, “Objections to the Constitution of Government Formed by the Convention,” in Hollinger and Capper, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition, p. 136. Storing, ed., Anti-Federalist, 5.17.1. James D. Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), vol. III, pp. 1011–1012.

194 What Is Living, What Is Dead? 77. Lawrence H. White, ed., Democratick Editorials: Essays in Jacksonian Political Economy by William Leggett (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1984), pp. 5, 11. 78. Quoted by Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 105, 109. 79. James Madison: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1999), pp. 537, 545. Letters of Pacificus and Helvidius on the Proclamation of Neutrality of 1793 (Washington: J. & G.S. Gideon, 1845). 80. Jefferson to William Short, 3 January 1793, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1005. 81. Ibid., p. 992. 82. John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1966), pp. 29–30, 140, 149, 151, 266. 83. John Adams, “Thoughts on Government,” in George A. Peek, Jr., ed., The Political Writings of John Adams (New York: Macmillan, 1985), p.  86. James Harrington, Oceana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 8. 84. Adams, Defence of the Constitutions, vol. I, p. 87. 85. Adams, Political Writings, p. 165. 86. “Correspondence Between John Adams and Mercy Warren,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 4, 5th series (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1878), p. 432. 87. Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–56), vol. 10, p. 378. 88. Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 1392, 1396. 89. Philip Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press, 1969), vol. II, pp. 372, 375. 90. Storing, ed., Anti-Federalist, 2.8.72. 91. Ibid., 2.9.196. 92. Ibid., 2.8.51. 93. Ibid., 2.8.19. 94. Ibid., 3.11.30. 95. Ibid., 2.9.57. 96. Hamilton, Federalist (New York: New American Library, 1999), nos. 15, 16, 20. 97. James D. Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), vol. 3, pp. 1203–1219. 98. Storing, ed., Anti-Federalist, 5.14.9; 5.16.11; II 5.1.22. 99. Hamilton, Federalist, no. 84. 100. William Harper, Slavery in the Light of Social Ethics. Originally published 1837. In E. N. Elliot, ed., Cotton is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments (Augusta: Pritchard, Abbott, and Loomis, 1860), p. 553. 101. Thomas R. Dew, “Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature, 1831– 32,” in The Proslavery Argument as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States [1852] (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), pp. 308–310. 102. Storing, ed., Anti-Federalist, 3.11.30; 5.16.1. 103. D’Argenson, Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1765), ch. VIII, art. i, pp. 267–268. 104. Ibid., ch. II, p. 28. 105. Ibid., ch. V, art. iii, p. 148. Ch. V. art. vii; ch. VII, art. li.

What Is Living, What Is Dead? 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

135.

136. 137.

138. 139.

195

Ibid., Avertissement. Ibid., ch. VII, arts., I, vi, xli. Ibid., ch. VI, p. 212; ch. VIII, art. ii, pp. 306, 308. Ibid., ch. VIII, art. ii, pp. 305–306. Ibid., ch. III, art. viii; ch. VIII, art. I, pp. 64, 270. Ibid., ch. VIII, art. ii, p. 303. Ibid., ch. II, p. 35. Ibid., ch. VIII, art. ii, p. 303. Ibid., ch. I, p. 3; ch. III, art. ii. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, “Fondation,” Encyclopédie, vol. VII, p. 75a. “Mémoire sur les municipalities,” in Keith Baker, ed., The Old Regime and the French Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 111. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 101. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléide,1969), vol. III, p. 26. Turgot to Hume, 25 March 1767, Oeuvres de Turgot (Paris: F. Alan, 1913–23), vol. II, p. 660. Thomas Paine, “Letter to the Abbé Raynal,” in Complete Writings, vol. II, pp. 212–263. John Hope Franklin and Robert Wokler, eds., Diderot: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 186–187. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., p. 173. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 188–189. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 204. Jean Antoine Nicolas de Condorcet, “Influence of the American Revolution on the Opinions and Legislation of Europe,” in Keith Baker, ed., Condorcet: Selected Writings (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), pp. 71–83. On the theme of natural rights in the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution, a thoughtful and convenient source is Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996). For speeches delivered by members of the Constituent Assembly I have used 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. Ibid., “Discours de Mounier sur la sanction royale” [5 September 1789], pp. 394, 396. Later in the century Charles de Rémusat in his Politique libérale ou fragments pour server à la defense de la revolution française (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1875), p. 58, and Louis Blanc, La République Une et Indivisible (Paris: A. Naud, 1851), pp. 25, 31–45, were still defining their liberal and republican positions by citing Montesquieu and Rousseau. Ibid., pp. 345, 385. M. de Barante, ed., La Vie Politique de M. Royer-Collard: Ses Discours et Ses Écrits (Paris: Didier & Cie, 1861), vol. I, pp. 26, 175.

196 What Is Living, What Is Dead? 140. Quoted by René Albrecht-Carrié, Adolphe Thiers or the Triumph of the Bourgeoisie (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), pp. 25–26. 141. Pamela M. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth Century France, 1814– 1871 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 116, 153. 142. Blanc, La République Une et Indivisible, pp. 5, 99. 143. Jules Simon, La Politique Radicale [3rd ed.], A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven, eds. (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1869), pp. 38, 357, 362. 144. Barante, ed., La Vie politique de Royer-Collard, vol. II, p. 483. 145. The twenty first article of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, 1793. 146. François Guizot, Democracy in France (London: John Murray, 1849), p. 33. 147. Ibid., pp. v, 29–30, 59, 67, 69. 148. Barante, ed., La Vie politique de Royer-Collard, vol. II, p. 131. 149. Prosper de Barante, Des Communes et de l’Aristocratie (Paris: Ladvocat, 1829), pp. 49–50, 68, 71. 150. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1988), pp. 393–394. 151. Ibid., vol. 1, part 2, ch. 2. 152. Ibid., pp. 429, 460, 485. 153. Ibid., p. 471. 154. E.g., Joseph L. Blau, Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 2003), pp. 35–37. 155. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 12. 156. Ibid., pp. 692, 703. 157. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995), p. 75. 158. Ibid., p. 165. 159. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Memoir on Pauperism,” in Seymour Drescher, ed., Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 1–27. 160. Tocqueville, Recollections, p. 155. 161. François Guizot, History of Civilization in Europe (New York: John V. Lovell, n. d.), p. 131. 162. Augustin Thierry, Essai sur l’histoire de la formation et des progrès du tiers état (Paris: Furne, Jouvet, 1866), pp. 1–2. 163. Ibid., p. x (Preface of 15 February 1853). 164. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1983), p. 122. 165. Tocqueville, Recollections, pp. 5, 16. 166. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Écrits et discours politiques,” in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1962–1990), vol. III, pt. 1, p. 213. 167. Tocqueville, Old Regime, p. 142. 168. Ibid., p. 47. 169. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 88. 170. Tocqueville, Old Regime, p. ix. 171. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 495. 172. Tocqueville, Recollections, pp. 61–62. 173. Tocqueville, Old Regime, p. 20. 174. Ibid., pp. 139, 141. 175. Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), pp. 163–165. 176. Barante, ed., La Vie politique de Royer-Collard, vol. I, p. 354. George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 113.

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197

177. “Mémoires sur les Cent-Jours,” in Oeuvres completes, t. 14 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), p. 116. Cf. Biancamaria Fontana, ed., Benjamin Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 85–87. 178. Barante, ed., La Vie politique de Royer-Collard, vol. I, p. 221. 179. Mme de Staël, Considérations sur la revolution française (Paris: Tallandier, 1983), p. 69. 180. Lucien Anatole Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle [11th ed.] (Paris: Michel Lévy, Frères, 1871), pp. ix, 107–108, 131, 134, 152–153. Originally published in 1868. For another statement of much the same view see Victor de Broglie, Vues sur le gouvernement de la France (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1870). 181. Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle, pp. 17, 52, 83.

Index

Adams, John 5, 9, 11–13, 17, 19, 28–29, 31, 37, 128, 137–138, 159, 164–166, 169–170, 172, 181 Adams, John Quincy 22, 174 Addison, Joseph 58 Agreement of the People 123 American Federation of Labor 21 American Revolution 12, 27–28, 92, 95, 97–99, 101, 104, 114–115, 137, 146, 149, 153–154, 159, 178–179 Ames, Fisher 22–23 ancient constitution 161 ancients 9, 29–30, 35, 41, 56–57, 64–65, 105–106, 110, 115–116, 129–131, 148–150 anglomanes 181 Anti-Federalists 13, 16–17, 19, 30–31, 33, 36, 163–167, 170–173 antiquity i, 8, 28–29, 35, 40–41, 52, 56–57, 64, 67, 79, 105, 110, 115–116, 129–130 Appleby, Joyce viii, 2, 40 Argenson, René-Louis de Voyer, marquis d’ 176–178 Aristotle 2–3, 27, 36, 64, 75 Athens 2, 60, 64, 104, 130 Baker, Michael Keith viii, 1 Bancroft, George 21 Banning, Lance viii, 2, 40–41 Barlow, Joel 18 benevolence 64, 74, 102, 111, 116, 148 Bentham, Jeremy 53, 55, 60, 75 Berlin, Isaiah 40–42, 112 bicameralism and unicameralism 128, 165–166, 181 Bill of Rights (1689, England) 132 Bill of Rights (1789, America) 173

Blackstone, William 35, 97–98, 103, 118, 128, 150, 154–158, 160 Blanc, Louis 183 Blissert, Robert 38 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, first viscount 93, 115, 160–161 Broglie, Albert de 189 Broglie, Victor de 182 Brownson, Orestes 3, 168 Bryan, William Jennings 15, 33 Burgh, James 11 Burke, Edmund 10, 12, 28, 38, 93–94, 101–103, 112, 114–115, 118, 124–126, 132, 137, 146, 158–162, 188 Calhoun, John C. 23–24 Carlyle, Alexander 12, 149, 153 Carmichael, Gershom 34, 147–148 Catherine the Great 63, 85 Catholicism 67–68, 85, 127, 190 Cavaignac, Godfrey 182–183 centralization/decentralization 178, 184, 187 Charlemagne 83–84 Charles I 137, 158 Charles II 117 Christianity 9, 56, 65, 69, 84, 98, 100–101, 115–117, 148 Cicero 1, 27, 33, 60, 75, 79 civic virtue 8, 11, 26, 31–33, 36, 64, 72, 100, 105, 112, 116, 130, 163–164, 173 Clay, Henry 19, 174 Club of Honest Whigs 104 Colbert 176 Colton, Calvin 22 Commonwealth 9–12, 119, 123, 146, 153, 165

Index Commonwealthmen 10, 12, 92–93, 102, 114, 146–147 Condorcet, Antoine-Nicolas de 160, 176, 180 consent i, 3, 5, 9, 15, 31, 33–36, 39, 75, 78, 95, 99, 111, 121, 123, 129, 146, 150–151, 155–156, 173 conspiracy 32–33, 124 Constant, Benjamin 41–42, 188–189 Cooper, James Fenimore 185 Corneille, Pierre 55, 58–59 corruption 11, 31–33, 57, 62, 76, 98, 100–101, 105, 117, 125, 157, 179 Croce, Benedetto 145 Cromwell, Oliver 117, 119–120, 150, 154 Debs, Eugene 21 Declaration of Independence 5, 12, 27, 35, 42, 173, 180 Declaration of Rights, England 42, 182 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen 137, 179, 183, 188 Delolme, Jean-Louis 35, 97, 128, 154 Democratic-Republican Societies 13, 19 Dew, Thomas R. 39, 173 Dickinson, John 159 Diderot, Denis 10, 54–55, 100, 176, 178–180 Douglas, Stephen 15 Douglass, Frederick 42 Dulany, Daniel 159 Encyclopédie 177 English Constitution 35–36, 97, 111, 128, 132, 157, 169 equality/inequality 12, 16–17, 19–20, 26, 38, 61, 70, 77, 95, 98–99, 101, 123, 160, 166, 180 Estates-General 84–85 Evans, George Henry 27, 38 family 63, 65–66, 68–69, 183–184 Federalists 13–17, 31, 36, 94, 138, 163, 166, 168–170, 172–173, 185 Ferguson, Adam 12, 149–150, 164–165 feudalism 84, 187 Filmer, Robert 17, 76 Fitzhugh, George 2–3, 39 Foner, Eric viii, 26–27 Fox, Charles James 103, 161

199

Franklin, Benjamin 12, 96, 104, 159, 161, 165 Frederick the Great 63, 85 French Revolution 6, 19, 37, 41, 53, 85, 92–94, 101–104, 114, 115, 124, 126, 134, 138, 146, 154, 159–162, 168, 174, 184 Gallitan, Albert 14 general will 80, 82, 84, 190 generations 38–39, 135, 160, 173, 178, 184 Gentz, Friedrich 103–104 George, Henry 21, 33, 38 George III 12, 15, 127 Gingrich, Newt 2, 24 Glorious Revolution 28, 101, 111, 114, 121, 124, 137, 150, 155, 156 Goldwater, Barry 24 Gordon, Thomas 10–11, 92 Grotius, Hugo 35–36, 39, 42, 75–76, 78, 81, 83 Guizot, François 182–184, 186, 188 Halévy, Elie 53 Hamilton, Alexander 2, 9, 13–14, 16, 29–31, 34, 163–165, 168, 172–173 Hammond, James Henry 39 Harper, William 173 Harrington, James 2, 9–12, 36, 105, 116, 149, 164, 170 Hartz, Louis i, 25, 39–40 Hayden, Thomas 24–26 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien 10, 52–64, 67, 69–75, 78, 85 Henry, Patrick 13, 30–31, 163–164 Hexter, J. H. 25 Higham, John 39 Hobbes, Thomas 72, 116, 118, 147 Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’ 10, 52, 53, 63–79, 85, 100 Holland 119, 127, 176 Hume, David 9, 11–12, 34, 60, 71, 75, 93, 95, 98, 104, 108, 111, 120–124, 129, 145, 148–153, 157–159, 161, 164–165, 178 Hutcheson, Francis 34, 74, 147–148, 150–152, 164 Hutchinson, Thomas 152 Jackson, Andrew 15, 18, 21, 24, 33, 167, 172, 174, 185 Jacksonians 5, 15, 18–22, 24, 167–168, 185

200

Index

Jacobins 169 James I 117, 121, 124 James II 111, 118, 137, 155, 161 Jefferson, Thomas 12, 14–16, 19–23, 28–30, 32, 36–38, 94, 96, 133, 168–170 Jeffersonians 13, 18, 19, 41, 94, 168, 169, 175, 185 Johnson, Samuel 157 July (Orleanist) Monarchy 175, 182, 183, 185–187, 189 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 42 Kramnick, Isaac viii, 2 Kristol, Irving 24 Laboulaye, Édouard 189 laissez-faire 66 Lally-Tollendal, Gérard-Trophime, comte de 181 land reform 21, 27, 32, 37, 38, 70, 135 La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de 54, 73 Le Chapelier law (1791) 182 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre 182–183 Lee, Richard Henry 13, 126 Leggett, William 18–19, 32–33, 167 Levellers 123 Lewelling, Lorenzo D 33 Lincoln, Abraham 13, 15, 174 Lincoln-Douglas debates 15 Locke, John 2, 27, 35–39, 42, 56, 58, 72, 74, 76–79, 94–96, 101, 103, 112, 116, 120, 121, 127, 128, 133, 147, 148, 150, 151, 155, 156, 160, 171–174, 178 Loco-Foco/Equal Rights Party 38 Lodge, Henry Cabot 23 Louis XIV 117, 187 Louis XVI 12, 70, 85, 132 Louis Napoleon, Napoleon III 175 loyalists 34, 153 Luther, Seth 27 luxury 31, 61, 63, 66, 67, 99, 105 Lycurgus 37, 56, 57, 59, 60, 64, 79 Macaulay, Catherine 92–94, 114–126, 129, 138 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 162 Machiavelli, Niccolò 9, 10, 16, 27, 32, 33, 35, 36, 104–105, 115, 130 Madison, James 5, 12, 13, 14, 19, 23, 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 164, 165, 168, 172

Mandeville, Bernard 73, 164–165 Manifest Destiny 15 Mannheim, Karl 25 Mason, George 167 Maupeou, René-Nicolas 70, 81, 82 McCoy, Drew viii, 40 Melville, Herman 20, 28 mercantilism 32, 110 Millar, John 151 Milton, John 9, 10, 35, 94, 95, 101, 145–147 monarchiens 181–182 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Sécondat, baron de 9–11, 13, 30, 35, 36, 71, 73, 78, 92, 97, 104, 111, 128, 154, 163, 177, 180, 181 Moore, Ely 20 moral sense 74 Mounier, Jean-Joseph 131, 182 Moyle, Walter 147 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 24 Napoleon 135, 175, 184 National Origins Act (1924) 23, 24 negative and positive freedom 40–42, 150, 168 neoconservatism 3, 24, 26, 40, 41, 145 New Deal 15, 26 New Left 3, 24, 25, 40, 41, 145 nullification 23, 172 orators and oratory 21, 36, 56, 57, 69, 185 Order of the Cincinnati 16 O’Sullivan, John 29 Otis, James 36, 126, 159 Overton, Richard 133 Paine, Thomas 2, 10, 19, 28, 37, 38, 92–96, 104, 126–138, 155, 159, 165, 169, 170, 178 parlements 70, 81, 84, 176 Philp, Mark 2 Physiocrats 66, 70 Pitt, William, the elder 152, 154 Pitt, William, the younger 94, 103, 133 Plunkitt, George Washington 21 Pocock, J. G. A. 25, 27, 40 Polybius 16, 95 popular sovereignty 17, 35, 36, 75, 76, 151, 166, 178, 181, 182 Populists 15, 21, 23, 33

Index Powderly, Terence 38 prejudice 76, 107, 124, 136, 160 Presbyterians 152, 153 Prévost-Paradol, Lucien-Anatole 189–190 Price, Richard 93, 94–104, 105, 112, 114, 115, 118, 120, 153, 157, 158, 162 Priestley, Joseph 11, 28, 93, 94, 97, 104–114, 118, 126, 129, 138, 158, 160, 162 Proclamation of Neutrality 1793 14, 168 Providence 17, 101–109, 120, 136, 166 Pufendorf, Samuel 35, 36, 39, 75, 76, 78, 81, 83, 96, 112, 133, 147, 148, 171, 173 Puritan Revolution 10, 34, 92, 123, 150, 161 Racine, Jean 58 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François 178 Rawls, John 4–6 resistance 12, 34, 35, 98, 121, 133, 151, 152, 157, 159, 162 Restoration (Bourbon) monarchy 175, 182, 187 Revolution of 1800 14, 20 Richelieu, Cardinal 176 Robbins, Caroline viii, 34, 146 Robertson, William 60, 104, 149, 151, 157 Robespierre, Maximilien 19, 94, 175, 182 Robinson, Frederick 18, 21, 27 Rodgers, Daniel, T. viii, 2, 8, 25 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 16 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 11, 67, 79–82, 93, 116, 160, 178, 179, 181 Royer-Collard, Pierre 182–184, 188, 189 Rush, Benjamin 36, 37, 95, 159, 169 Saige, Guillaume-Joseph 1, 52, 53, 78–85 Sallust 32, 33 Sandel, Michael 2–6 Seabury, Samuel 34 Second Republic 183, 185, 187 self-interest/self-love 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 31–32, 53, 54, 57, 72–73, 78, 82–83, 105, 116–117, 130, 149, 153, 154, 163–165

201

Seven Years War 149, 154 Shakespeare, William 20 Sher, Richard B. viii, 2 Sherman, Roger 11, 170 Shklar, Judith viii, 5 Sidney, Algernon 2, 9, 10, 35, 94, 95, 101, 116, 145, 147 Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph 181 Simon, Jules 183 Simone v Simpson, Stephen 20, 27 Skidmore, Thomas 38 slavery 2, 3, 5, 23, 27, 39, 42, 52, 56, 57, 64, 75, 80, 83, 94, 99, 103, 110, 113, 116, 129, 131, 147, 173, 174, 185 Smith, Adam 34, 71, 105, 110, 111, 150–153, 158, 164, 165 Smith, Melancton 166 Social Darwinism 23 socialism 23, 26, 185 Sombart, Werner 26 Sparta 31, 56, 57, 60, 64, 65, 104, 116, 150 Staël-Holstein, Anne-Louise-Germaine 189 Stamp Act (1765) 35, 159 Stevens, John 17, 181 Stoicism 115 Stourzh, Gerald 34 Suard, Jean-Baptiste 11, 93 Sumner, William Graham 23, 24 Tacitus 83 Taylor, John 17, 18, 20 Thierry, Augustin 186 Thiers, Adolphe 182–184, 189 Tiffany, J. H. 170 Trilling, Lionel 25 Third Estate 84, 85, 124, 161, 176, 186, 187 Third Republic 189–190 Tocqueville, Alexis de 6, 25, 182, 184–190 Toland, John 10, 11 Trenchard, John 10, 11, 92 Tucker, St. George 28 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, baron de l’Aulne 101, 165, 176–178, 181 tyrannicide 146 unanticipated, unintended consequences 108, 109, 120, 123 Unitarians 94, 104

202

Index

Van Buren, Martin 22 Veblen, Thorstein 21–22 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, de 10, 30, 54, 70, 71, 93, 104, 111 Waite, Davis H. 15 Walpole, Horace 114, 157 Walpole, Robert 161 Warren, Mary Otis 126, 170 Washington, George 13, 16, 31–32, 37, 126, 164, 165, 168 Watson, Thomas E. 21

Weaver, James B. 33 Webster, Daniel 21, 29 Wilentz, Sean 26, 27, 29 Wilkes, John 113, 152, 153 Wilson, Arthur M. 53 Wilson, James 12, 16, 17, 29, 35 Wilson, Woodrow 21 women 5, 42, 59–60, 67–69, 108, 188 Wood, Gordon viii, 26, 30, 34, 40 Zuckert, Michael viii, 2