Tensions in Early American Political Thought

According to the eminent historian of political thought J.G.A. Pocock, republican theory (or "civic humanism") was the most significant current of eighteenth-century English and American political philosophy. In the form of "country ideology," republicanism gave "left" and "right" critics of government policies a framework and believable rhetoric for their arguments. The so-called "radical Whiggism" of the American Revolution was itself, on this reading, merely an extreme and consistent version of the republican ideas of the English opposition.

From 1656, when James Harrington published a definitive statement of English republicanism in Oceana, down to the Americans' secession from the empire, republicanism furnished ideas for Tory party dissidents around Viscount Bolingbroke and their magazine, The Craftsman, and for various "commonwealthmen" and True Whigs on what we could perhaps call the original Left.

Civic humanism was an outlook grounded in the renewed classicism of the Renaissance. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) was its major prophet in his Discourses. His ideas rested on a view of ancient Greek and Roman political life that came to him via Aristotle, Polybius, and Titus Livy. For these writers, the ideal state had a "mixed constitution" that combined the virtues of monarchy, aristocracy, and commonwealth ("republic" in the narrow sense), and thereby avoided the degeneration into tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy (mob rule) inherent in unmixed systems. A substantial "middle class" was needed to provide stability by preventing exploitation of the masses by a narrow oligarchy or, alternatively, the plundering of the wealthy by a great mass of desperate poor. This middle class was not "bourgeois," or commercial, but a class of independent I landed yeomen.

In Machiavelli's republicanism, the monarchical element lessens as emphasis on the social "balance" grows. Machiavelli's English interpreter, Harrington, stressed that the key to preserving a republic was for "the soldiers [to] be citizens and the citizens soldiers." 1 The independent landed proprietor of small or middling fortune, able to bear arms on his own account, was the ideal citizen and the guarantor of the republic.

Pressed into the service of many causes, this ideal was at the heart of country ideology, or republicanism. An important difference over the interpretation of English history separated Harrington himself from later thinkers who were in other respects his disciples. The point of contention was the nature of England's "Ancient Constitution," which - allegedly - included the common law, Parliament (which thereby gained many centuries in antiquity and traditionalist prestige), fee simple tenures, and various rights and customs from "time out of mind." Aware of the feudal basis of medieval English society, Harrington knew that the Constitution was the work of recent times and sought its origins in the passing away of the "Gothick" (i.e., feudal) balance of power and property. Royal encroachments had overborne real feudalism and its basis in military tenures (great estates held by nobles in exchange for their bearing the costs of providing military forces for the King). A new social "balance" thereby came into being, one nearer to the republican ideal and one reflected in the political struggles of the seventeenth century.

Later "Harringtonians" inverted his analysis, arguing that the old order had corresponded to the proper balance and that later developments unbalanced state and Constitution. They were thus able to say that the Ancient Constitution-from as far back as Alfred the Great-had embodied republican liberty and that this libertarian inheritance was now under attack. The King's "standing army"-made possible by the financial revolution (in effect, the invention of national debt)--was the instrument of anticonstitutional forces. Hence the fundamental political division was between "Court" and "Country."

The Court was the clique of stockjobbers, placemen, pensioners, and courtiers who made policy by means of high taxation, monetized national debt, and all manner of "corruption" (in the narrow sense). Their program undermined the Constitution (the larger "corruption" in republican thought) by overthrowing the republican balance of "classes," property, and power. The Country, by contrast, consisted of the public-spirited opponents of such state-capitalism, or mercantilism. Over time, the concept of a Country party came to stand for an ever broader range of independent property owners, finally taking on board-in the radically altered American context-every farmer and planter on the land.

As Pocock sees it, republicanism influenced the English opposition from the seventeenth century onward, so that "there can be traced a major movement of Country ideas into the radical-democratic tradition; not only much of the Chartist program, but a good deal of its ideology as well, can be shown to possess a history continuous since the days of Shaftesbury." 2 An important strand of country ideology appears in the writings of the early eighteenth-century Tory leader Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and his allies (including Jonathan Swift). Tory in his basic principles, socially conservative, and not at all opposed to a strong monarch as such, Bolingbroke nonetheless expounded a sort of "Tory populism." Championing limited free trade, defending small craftsmen against statesponsored monopolies, and attacking Court corruption, Bolingbroke and his circle often took positions that overlapped those of the growing pro-commercial and anti-monopolist "bourgeois" opposition.

His attacks on social upstarts and economic change separate his views from those who criticized state grants of privilege as impediments to the market and the rise of new men. Thus this "right-wing" opposition would have opposed an unsettling laissez-faire political economy almost as much as the unsettling "growth" made possible by Court-sponsored mercantilism and rent-seeking. Many historians who deal with these questions muddy the waters by lumping together all opponents of Court policies as "agrarians" and throwing all others together as "capitalists" (or, for US. historians, "industrialists"). The groups on both sides of the water that were procommercial but anti-mercantilist and protaissez faire thus fall by the wayside.

Bolingbroke's group-dedicated to preserving an older England of gentry (large landholders below the ranks of the nobility) and retainers, ready to defend old established freedoms but seemingly radical in its assaults on the Court party-had an influence on the American colonists, however ambiguous. Certainly in the South, the conservatism of this kind of republican thinking proved attractive. (Jefferson, for one, had read his Bolingbroke.) The overlap between Bolingbrokean and bourgeois versions of republicanism made it easy for American radicals to treat the broad stream of English opposition ideas (including those of John Locke) as a unified inheritance.

Ah, a deep historian! Good. Perhaps you could help me with a certain aspect of Hamilton. He was concerned about our infant industries being victimized by dumping from England, and thus wanted to protect them with import tariffs as needed, until they were strong enough. I wonder what he would have said about late 20th century dumping and tariffs? He clearly was quite willing to use protectionism to level the playing field. But to what extent, I wonder? Or would he have put the finger on unions for raising costs? Or both?

Excellent post. If you are interested in reading further on this, you can do no better than "Novus Ordo Seclorum, the Intellectual Origins of the Constitution," by Forrest McDonald.

thanks. I've heard excellent things about that book; how do you think Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution rates? Would it fit in anywhere in such a discussion on early american thought, or is it too early?

honestly, i don't have a clue what Hamilton would think, lol. I'd suppose he'd believe the contemporary measures excessive or extreme, but i've got know sources to back that up.

Arthur, I think Hamilton would have seen unions as an excess of Jeffersonianism. Ironically, Jefferson himself would have feared unions because he saw this country's future as an agricultural entity and feared a landless urban proletariat gaining the right to vote. But I think Hamilton was enough of a financial genius to cut through all the modern cant and see that unions upset the natural functioning of capitalism.

Hamilton wanted our fledgling industries to be protected, but I think today he would have been a free trader because of our now mature industries -- unless he saw our industries being abused by other nations' trade polices. He certainly would have raised holy hell about the Japanese back in the Eighties.


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Thanks aconservaguy. Note: this topic is from August 17, 2002. Blast from the Past. A "Longer Perspectives" or "The Framers" topic. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.


GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe

Thanks aconservaguy. Note: this topic is from 8/17/2002. Blast from the Past. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

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