The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America available in Paperback, eBook
The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America
- ISBN-10:
- 0521179637
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521179638
- Pub. Date:
- 03/15/2010
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0521179637
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521179638
- Pub. Date:
- 03/15/2010
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521179638 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2010 |
| Pages: | 470 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d) |
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Cambridge University Press
0521827450 - The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America - by Lee Ward
Excerpt
Introduction
Reexamining the Roots of Anglo-American Political Thought
This project is as an effort to address some of the problems contemporary political theorists and intellectual historians have encountered in writing about the Anglo-American political tradition. At least since the demise of Marxist and progressive methods of interpretation, with their emphasis on subrational interests and economic and material forces as the major, if not only, motivational springs for political and constitutional thought and practice, scholars of the Anglo-American tradition have largely agreed on one fundamental interpretive and conceptual premise: ideas matter.1 The broad, almost universal, consensus among scholars of the field is that early modern Anglo-American thought is defined by a set of principles and deeply held commitments to certain notions of government and law, rights and citizenship. It is now generally assumed that Anglo-American political thinkers and actors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries operated within a distinctive framework, or perhaps distinct frameworks, with established categories of thought, ideological assumptions, and philosophical premises.
The bad news, or at least the other side of this overarching "superconsensus," is the deep contentiousness that has characterized the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American thought in the past four decades. Ideas matter, but as we have come to realize, scholarly interpretations of these ideas may matter even more. The deepest fault line in contemporary scholarship on Anglo-American thought lies in the divide between the liberal and republican, or Lockean and civic humanist, schools of interpretation. This by now familiar, perhaps all too familiar, dispute pits different interpretive lenses often in search of comprehensive paradigms for understanding our political and constitutional tradition. A typical feature of the liberal-versus-republican debate is the dispute over the dominance, the relative importance, or even the existence of one or the other system of thought in Anglo-American early modernity.
The roots of the current debate go back at least as far as the middle of the last century. At that time, numerous distinguished scholars like Louis Hartz, Carl Becker, Clinton Rossiter, and Richard Hofstadter established a "liberal" consensus regarding the dominant mode of thought in the Anglo-American political and constitutional tradition.2 These scholars agreed that the prevailing mode of political discourse and constitutional theory in America was profoundly shaped by the overwhelming influence of Lockean-liberal ideas at the time of the Founding. This assertion of a dominant Lockean-liberal paradigm in American political thought mirrored the work of political theorists studying the early modern period such as Leo Strauss and C. B. MacPherson, who proclaimed that early modernity marked the triumph of Lockean-liberal notions of rights and government over the classical and Christian assumptions and principles of the premodern era.3 The distinctive features of this liberal consensus in the fields of both Anglo-American and early modern studies were an assertion of the centrality of individual natural rights, an instrumentalist or conventionalist understanding of government as a product of human artifice designed and directed to the securing of rights, and a statement of the importance of private property rights and the unleashing of essentially selfish and materialist passions channeled through the political and economic institutions of a competitive, individualistic, and capitalist society. In sum, early liberal modernity peaked in Locke, and Locke was America's philosopher.
The liberal consensus began to unravel in the late 1950s and 1960s when a body of scholarship emerged questioning the alleged univocity of Lockean liberalism ("Locke et praetera nihil") in the Anglo-American tradition. Robert Shalhope coined the phrase "republican synthesis" to describe this diverse, but interrelated, body of work.4 Caroline Robbins's classic Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman began the process of dethroning Locke by identifying him as only one of many figures in a diffuse stream of republican thought in Britain from the civil war and interregnum periods to the late-eighteenth-century radicals like Burgh, Priestley, and Price.5 In Robbins' analysis, long-neglected thinkers like Harrington and Sidney, as well as Trenchard and Gordon, took on new importance as influential voices in the English radical and libertarian traditions. Robbins' work was an impetus to other scholars and initiated a largely salutary correction to the monolithic Lockean-liberal consensus. J. G. A. Pocock, spurred in part by Hannah Arendt's rediscovery of classical republican politics, took Robbins' analysis to another level. In a vast collection of articles culminating in the monumental The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock identified a civic humanist republican tradition of thought originating in the city-states of Renaissance Italy. He argued that this civic humanist mode of thought, with its emphasis on mixed government, civic virtue, property as instrumental to citizenship, and the importance of participatory politics, was transmitted to the Anglo-American world via Machiavelli and his English followers, most notably Harrington. It was from this civic humanist tradition, Pocock argued, that Anglo-American thought inherited and developed a profoundly anti-Lockean and anti-individualist notion of liberty. This idea of liberty hearkened back to the classical Aristotelian ideal of citizenship as the fulfillment of the human personality through common political discourse and action. At some points, Pocock even suggests that civic humanism was more than a competing paradigm with Lockean liberalism - that it was actually the dominant political philosophy in eighteenth-century America.6 The impact of Robbins and Pocock's work on the study of American political thought was enormous.
Bernard Bailyn, for example, while not an advocate of the classical republican or civic humanist interpretation, plays down the significance of Locke in the formation of the eighteenth-century Whig mind by identifying Robbins' English Commonwealthmen as the chief inspiration behind the pre-Revolutionary American idea of liberty. It was in the subtradition of "Opposition" or radical "Country" party Whigs epitomized by Trenchard and Gordon's Cato's Letters, rather than primarily in Locke, that Bailyn discovered the most important and comprehensive statements on liberty and power, and virtue and corruption, in Revolutionary America.7 For Bailyn, the English radical opposition Whigs provided the conceptual frame of reference for American Whigs regarding the most important questions about government and liberty. Gordon Wood went further than Bailyn, and even Pocock, in developing the classical republican influence on Anglo-American thought. Like Pocock, and in contrast to Bailyn, Wood found the great alternative to Lockean-liberal interpretations of eighteenth-century American thought to be a tradition of republicanism rooted in classical antiquity. In Wood's formulation of the republican hypothesis, American Whigs were essentially classical republicans dedicated to an idea of community as a natural organic whole in which sacrifice of individual self-interest for the sake of the common good lay at the core of their notion of virtue. The deep tension between republican virtue and liberal individualism, which Pocock identified in the Whig distrust of commerce, becomes, in Wood's reinterpretation, open warfare, as Wood's classical republican Whigs are now seen as staunch anticapitalists and anti-individualists.8 For both Wood and Pocock, political liberty - the public share in government - is the central classical assumption underlying eighteenth-century Whig thought.
Thus, the crux of the liberal-republican debate centered on two pivotal issues. While the proponents of the republican interpretation were by no means monolithic in their positions (indeed, the term "republican synthesis" may itself be misleading), they did share a common tendency to de-emphasize, or at least seriously question, the once thought formative influence of Lockean-liberal thought on the Anglo-American tradition. For Bailyn, Wood, and Pocock, other voices such as Machiavelli, Harrington, and the Opposition Whigs gained a prominence hitherto unseen in the field. The other major question at issue between the liberal and republican schools was the status of premodern, especially classical, thought in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world. On one point at least the proponents of the liberal and republican theses were in agreement: Locke was thoroughly modern, and so is liberalism. Pocock and Wood, for example, argued that it was not from Locke's modern natural rights theory that the Whigs in England and America learned the fundamentals of government, but rather from the classical Romans and Greeks. It was from this classical source transmitted through the Italian civic humanists that the Whigs developed their most formative ideas about constitutionalism, virtue, property, and citizenship.
In the past two decades, following a steady republican onslaught, Locke and liberalism have made something of a comeback. In the wake of the bygone era of "Locke et praetera nihil" and the "omnia praeter Lockem" spirit of the republican school, another generation of scholars arose to challenge the newly minted republican orthodoxy- it was Locke redivivus.9 These scholars such as Joyce Appleby, Steven Dworetz, Isaac Kramnick, Thomas Pangle and John Patrick Diggins contested the republican interpretation on several counts. Thomas Pangle and Steven Dworetz argued that the republican interpretation overstated the importance of nonliberal thought in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American tradition while systematically muting and neglecting unmistakably Lockean modes of thought and discourse.10 Both Dworetz and Pangle attacked the civic humanist or non-Lockean credentials of Trenchard and Gordon's Cato's Letters, a central text in the Whig canon of Robbins, Bailyn, Wood, and Pocock. If, as the neoliberal school argued, Cato's Letters and other English Whig writings are fundamentally Lockean, then it was not civic humanism that was transmitted to the colonies via Cato and the others, but rather Locke, albeit in somewhat modified form.11 Joyce Appleby argued that it was the Lockean account of the origins of government to which American Whigs turned during the imperial crisis with Britain in the 1760s and 1770s. Whatever traces of classical republicanism there may have been in eighteenth-century America, she claims, disappeared with the demise of the Federalists and the rise of the thoroughly Lockean liberal philosophy of individualism and capitalism she associates with the Jeffersonians.12 Isaac Kramnick looks to late-eighteenth-century British radicals like Priestley, Price, Paine, and Burgh to illustrate the formative impact of Locke on the political thought of the period. By uncovering the Lockean roots of late-eighteenth-century British radicalism, Kramnick observed an underlying continuity of liberal thought from at least the 1760s on.13 John Patrick Diggins, in his study The Lost Soul of American Politics, regretfully but firmly confirms the centrality of Locke's teaching of economic individualism for the shaping of American political discourse. While Diggins bewailed the demise of the alternative nonliberal stream of American political thought, which he identifies with Calvinist Protestantism rather than classical republicanism, he nonetheless confirmed the great importance of Lockean liberalism in forming the American mind.14
In many respects, the neo-liberal Locke redivivus school is no more united than the republican synthesis it sought to correct or replace. It was not always the same Locke who appeared to reclaim his place on the stage. One essentially Hobbesian Locke would not have much truck with another theistic Locke. Likewise, the bourgeois capitalist Locke was not identical to the radical dissenting Protestant Locke. Where the new Lockean-liberal school did stand together, however, was in their criticism of the republican revisionists' tendency to mute or silence what the neoliberals took to be Locke's enormous influence on the Anglo-American tradition. They often attacked what they took to be weak (or nonexistent) evidence of classical influences on eighteenth-century Anglo-American thought.15 And they questioned the coherence of forming a republican paradigm out of materials - that is, books and authors - deeply penetrated by the pervasive spirit of Lockean liberalism.
Thus, the state of the debate in the wake of the republican revision and the liberal restoration is one of stalemate. Despite the fundamental differences between the two schools of interpretation, there is, however, almost universal agreement on at least one central question. One legacy of the republican revision of the old liberal consensus and the recent liberal response is the general concurrence regarding the importance of understanding the roots and character of English Whig political philosophy. In a sense, the liberal-republican debate has become an interpretive battle over the heart and soul of Whiggism. This is not to suggest that there are no other important elements in eighteenth-century Anglo-American thought such as Protestant theology or British constitutional custom and practice, but rather to observe the obvious and yet controversial influence of Whig thought in the period. The overwhelming evidence supplied by the republican and liberal revisionists suggests that English and American Whigs in the eighteenth century read, studied, quoted, plagiarized, and digested the works of both Locke and the radical Opposition Whigs. Is Whiggism essentially liberal or republican? Is Locke a Whig? Is there any reasonable basis to identify a Whig "canon" that excludes or marginalizes Locke? Does it make sense to speak of two competing, even contradictory, strains of thought emerging from the same root in late-seventeenth-century England? These are the questions that confront us, along with a growing suspicion that the stark liberal-republican dichotomy in the current debate in Anglo-American thought rests largely on distinctions and assumptions foreign to the subject matter itself.
I believe Lance Banning's 1992 restatement of the liberal-republican debate can help guide us through the conceptual minefields facing the contemporary student of Anglo-American early modern thought. Banning, himself a veteran of the liberal-versus-republican interpretive wars, observed that the most important legacy of republican and liberal revisionist scholars has been to show the deep complexity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American thought. Unfortunately, he argued, they have often not paid enough attention to the subtleties of each other's positions. While criticizing Pocock for perhaps going too far in the direction of minimizing Locke's influence, Banning also noted that the republican revision properly understood should be seen not as a replacement for, but as a vital supplement to, scholarship demonstrating the Lockean-liberal dimension in the tradition.16 Republican scholarship, in this view, brought to light important, but previously neglected, writers, ideas, and modes of thought. Banning observed that by illuminating the part, we often cast a shadow on the whole. By identifying diverse strains of thought and constructing paradigms based on this process of speciation, scholars have broken into disputing parts principles and ideas that often coexisted in a distinctive combination in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American Whig mind. Banning suggests that one approach to understanding the distinctive combination of liberal and republican elements in the Whig intellectual and political tradition is "to start with further exploration of its origins in seventeenth century England."17
In a number of important respects, this study reflects Banning's suggestions and concerns.18 First, we will examine the origins of the Whig politics of liberty in late-seventeenth-century England. Through detailed analysis of the major Whig Exclusion era tracts by James Tyrrell, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke, we will observe the emergence of distinctively liberal and republican modes of thought and discourse. Why start with the Exclusionists? On the one hand, it seems to be the most natural place to begin. It was during the Exclusion crisis that the uniquely modern term "Whig" made its first appearance in the political lexicon of the tradition.19 On a more fundamental level, the major Exclusion era writings of Tyrrell, Sidney, and Locke mark the first time three distinctive voices in the English libertarian mold were raised against a common enemy. It is often forgotten amid the contemporary clamor over competing paradigms that the "conservative" or "moderate" Whiggism of Tyrrell, the "republicanism" of Sidney, and the "liberalism" of Locke all entered the world at the same time, battling in common cause against Robert Filmer's defense of divine right monarchy, which was republished by the Tories during the turbulent days of the Exclusion crisis.20 Perhaps by understanding what it was that united the Exclusion Whigs - their opposition to seventeenth-century divine right absolutism - we may be in a better position to understand and account for the various strains of Whiggism that characterized the following century.
At this point, I should explain the principles of selectivity in my approach to the study of Exclusion period Whig thought and writings. In contrast to the historiographical methodology of Caroline Robbins and Bernard Bailyn, for example, who have elaborated the writings of innumerable figures in the Anglo-American tradition, this study focuses in its central part on the formative impact of three major tracts from among the vast collection of Exclusion Whig writings. However, this methodological approach is not idiosyncratic. The basis for the selection of Tyrrell, Sidney, and Locke rests on three criteria. First, Patriarcha, Non Monarcha, the Discourses Concerning Government, and the Two Treatises of Government evince, as I hope to demonstrate, a level of philosophical sophistication and depth that make them not just pieces d'occasion, but rather serious works of political theory in their own right. While an understanding of the historical context in which Tyrrell, Sidney, and Locke operated in the late 1670s and early 1680s provides invaluable insights regarding their motivations, assumptions, and rhetorical strategies, the works selected for special attention possess a degree of intellectual rigor and ideological clarity that surpassed that of the vast majority of the over 200 hastily crafted pamphlets and equally expeditious responses by the protagonists in this period.21 Tyrrell, Sidney, and Locke distill and articulate logical premises and philosophical principles typically implicit or inchoate in the works of their Whig associates. Second, I argue that the three Whig thinkers on whom I focus in Part Two are uniquely representative of the underlying philosophical and ideological strains among the Whigs. While Tyrrell's moderate constitutionalism reflected the political vision of most English Whigs at the time and long afterward, Sidney and Locke developed arguments for natural rights and popular sovereignty that took Whiggism in different and competing directions. These alternative directions, moreover, emerged as species of thought deriving their particular character from the logical thrust of the basic Whig position in the Exclusion Crisis. Tyrrell, Sidney, and Locke exemplify differing and discrete arguments that are still identifiably Whiggish.
Third, the selectivity of my approach is validated by the judgment of the historical development of the Anglo-American tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historically, Tyrrell, Sidney, and Locke were among the most influential Whig writers working (as opposed to publishing) in the earliest stages of the formation of the Whig ideology. The initial impact of Tyrrell's work during the Exclusion era, and the notoriety of Locke and Sidney's work in the years following the Glorious Revolution, ensured their prominence in the pantheon of early Whig champions of limited government. Whereas Tyrrell's moderate Whig argument represented the core of English Whiggism in the eighteenth century, among radical Whigs in England and America Locke and Sidney became the widely accepted authorities on the fundamental principles of popular resistance, political obligation, and constitutional government. Thus, the selection of these major Whig thinkers and their works as a kind of fulcrum for this study is justified by their degree of theoretical sophistication, their representative quality of important strains of Whig thought, and their historical legacy and impact.
The second element of Banning's restatement of the current debate that informs this study is his suggestion to resist the temptation to create "Kuhnian" paradigms or mutually exclusive interpretive syntheses. This study takes to heart Aristotle's caution to the student of political things not to expect the same degree of precision in moral and political studies as in the mathematical and natural sciences.22 Imagine this study as an archeological project of exploration into the very foundations of early modern Anglo-American political thought. Locke, Sidney, and Tyrrell each had access to the same theoretical and intellectual resources in the philosophical milieu of late-seventeenth-century England in their critique of divine right, yet they created substantially different edifices in response to the divine right challenge to the principle of natural liberty. Rather than following a synthesizing or paradigmatizing impulse, this study adopts a syncretic approach. The three major Exclusion Whig champions produced distinct but frequently intersecting and overlapping arguments. As such, we will illuminate the deep complexity and diverse streams of reasoning inherent in the Whig tradition. Only by digging down to the very roots of Whig thought will we find the materials necessary to reconcile the different strands of this early modern philosophy into the complex heterogeneous whole it originally was. We are faced with the prospect that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and American Whigs could and did draw on much richer theoretical and philosophical resources than our prevailing paradigms will admit.
In my attempt to gain a fuller understanding of the Anglo-American political tradition by reexamining the classic Whig texts of the late seventeenth century, this study builds on a number of previous efforts. Paul Rahe's landmark Republics Ancient and Modern traced the origins and development of republicanism from Greek antiquity until the early American Republic.23 In his breathtaking coverage and careful treatment of over 2,000 years of ancient and modern political and constitutional thought, Rahe demonstrated the profound conceptual and philosophical differences between classical thought and the early modern successors of the republican ideal. Rahe challenged prevailing assumptions about the republican project and exposed the deep antagonism of modern theorists such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Madison toward the classical republican principles of moral education and distributive justice.24 Rahe's work illuminated the formative impact early modern political theory had on the republican dimension of the Anglo-American political and constitutional tradition.
Jerome Huyler's Locke in America also went a considerable distance to point beyond the confining paradigms characterizing the contemporary liberal-republican debate. He argued persuasively that Lockean liberalism and classical republicanism were not antithetical modes of thought for eighteenth-century American Whigs. In the Opposition Whig classic Cato's Letters, Huyler discovered a carefully crafted synthesis of Lockean individualism and natural rights, on the one hand, and the "Old Whig" constitutional republicanism of Algernon Sidney, on the other. This synthesis of liberal and republican elements was ready made for digestion into the bloodstream of pre-Revolutionary America.25 A third important study, and one to which this project is deeply indebted, is Michael Zuckert's Natural Rights and the New Republicanism. Zuckert drew on a vast knowledge of the seventeenth-century natural rights and natural law tradition to illuminate distinct but related and connected strands of Whig thought. Zuckert examined Cato's Letters and made the same connection between the Lockean-liberal philosophy of natural rights and the Whig republican political science that Huyler identified. However, Zuckert identified both a distinctly Lockean form of Whiggism and a separate brand of Whig thought he associated with the philosophical authority of Hugo Grotius.26 Zuckert argued that it was Grotius who was the inspiration and guiding light for most English Whigs, while Locke's influence penetrated only on the margins of eighteenth-century English political discourse, though ultimately finding a home in the American colonies. Rahe's, Huyler's, and Zuckert's findings compel the contemporary student of the Anglo-American tradition to look anew and with fresh eyes at the rich and complex veins of argumentation and theoretical principles underlying the Whig politics of liberty.
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