Virtue, Commerce, and History

IDEAS IN CONTEXT
Edited by Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner
The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and
of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims, and vocabularies that were
generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the con-
temporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the
evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it
is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their con-
crete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of phi-
losophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may
be seen to dissolve.

Forthcoming titles include the following:

Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (eds.),
Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy
David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined
Noel Malcolm, Hobbes and Voluntarism
Quentin Skinner, Studies in Early Modern Intellectual History
Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern
Europe
Lynn Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of
Science
Mark Goldie, The Tory Ideology: Politics and Ideas in Restoration
England
This series is published with the support of the Exxon Education Foundation.
Virtue, Commerce,
and History
Essays on Political Thought and History,
Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century

J. G. A. POCOCK

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
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© Cambridge University Press 1985

First published 1985

Reprinted 1986, 1988, 1991, 1995 (twice)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN 0-521-25701-8 hardback

ISBN 0-521-27660-8 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2002

 To my colleagues and friends in the
Conference for the Study of Political Thought
 Contents

1 Introduction: The state of the art

PARTI
2 Virtues, rights, and manners: A model for historians of political
thought 37
3 Authority and property: The question of liberal
origins 51
4 1776: The revolution against Parliament 73

PART II
5 Modes of political and historical time in early eighteenth-
century England 91
6 The mobility of property and the rise of eighteenth-century
sociology 103
7 Hume and the American Revolution: The dying thoughts of a
North Briton 125
8 Gibbon's Decline and Fall and the world view of the Late
Enlightenment 143
9 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price: A study in the
varieties of eighteenth-century conservatism 157
10 The political economy of Burke's analysis of the French
Revolution 193
X CONTENTS

PART III
11 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A history
of ideology and discourse 215
I
From the First Whigs to the True Whigs, 215
II
From the Financial Revolution to the Scottish
Enlightenment, 230
III From the Seven Years' War to the Constitution of the
United States, 253
IV From the response to the American Revolution to the
reaction to the French Revolution, 274
V From Cobbett's History of the Reformation to Macaulay's
History of England, 295

Index 311
 Introduction
The state of the art

Of the ten essays that compose the remainder of this volume, nine were originally
published between 1976 and 1982, though one or two were written for spoken
delivery substantially earlier than their appearance in print. The last, which con-
stitutes the whole of Part III, receives separate introduction. As a constellation
they represent work on the history of political discourse in England, Scotland,
and America, chiefly between the English Revolution of 1688 and the French
Revolution of 1789, though Part III pursues the intimations of this history into
the half-century following the latter event. This work has been done at a time
when perceptions of "British history" are continuing to change, perhaps more
drastically than for some time past, and when perceptions of what constitutes
"the history of political thought" have been undergoing intensive scrutiny and
restatement. Though the present volume is intended as a contribution to the
practice, not the theory, of its branch of historiography, it is necessary to intro-
duce it with a statement of where it stands in the process of change regarding the
history of political thought. To describe a practice and its entailments, however,
especially when these are understood to be in process of change, cannot be done
without employing, and to some degree exploring, the language of theory.
I have already used two terms, the history of political thought and the history
of political discourse, which are discernibly not identical. The former term is
retained here, and in the nomenclature of learned institutions and journals, be-
cause it is familiar and conventional and serves to mobilize our energies in the
right directions, and also because it is by no means inappropriate. The activities
it directs us to study are visibly those of men and women thinking; the speech
they employ is self-critical and self-refining, and regularly ascends toward levels
of theory, philosophy, and science. Nevertheless, the change that has come over
2 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

this branch of historiography in the past two decades may be characterized as a

movement away from emphasizing history of thought (and even more sharply,
"of ideas") toward emphasizing something rather different, for which "history of
speech" or "history of discourse," although neither of them unproblematic or
irreproachable, may be the best terminology so far found. To show how this
movement has come about, and what it entails, is necessary in order to introduce
its practice.
In a Cambridge-centered retrospect, some of this movement's origins may be
discovered in the linguistic analysis favored by philosophers in the 1950s, which
tended to present thoughts as propositions appealing to a limited number of
modes of validation; others in the speech-act theories developed in Oxford and
elsewhere about the same time, which tended to present thoughts as utterances
performing upon those who heard them, and indeed upon those who uttered
them. Both tended to focus attention upon the great variety of things that could
be said or seen to have been said, and upon the diversity of linguistic contexts
that went to determine what could be said but were at the same time acted upon
by what was said. It is obvious enough what the historians of political thought
have been doing with the perceptions thus offered them; but it is curious, in
retrospect — and perhaps evidence of the difficulty of getting philosophers to talk
about the same things as historians - that the series Philosophy, Politics and Society,
which Peter Laslett began to edit in 1956, devoted itself almost wholly to the
analysis and exploration of political statements and problems, and hardly at all
to determining their historical status or to the historiography of political argu-
ment.1 Paradoxically, at the very same time that Laslett was announcing that
"for the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead,"2 the history of political
thought, including philosophy (if philosophy can be included in anything) was
about to undergo a fairly dramatic revival, due in large part to Laslett himself. It
was Laslett's editorial work on Filmer and Locke3 that taught others, including
the present writer, the frameworks, both theoretical and historical, in which they
should set their researches.
There began to take shape a historiography, with characteristic emphases: first
on the variety of idioms, or "languages" as they came to be known, in which
political argument might be conducted (an example might be the language of

^ h e three exceptions that may be said to prove this rule are J . G. A. Pocock, "The History of
Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry," in Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series, ed.
Peter Laslett and W . G. Runciman (Oxford, 1962); Quentin Skinner, " 'Social Meaning' and the
Explanation of Social Action," and John Dunn, "The Identity of the History of Ideas," both in
Philosophy, Politics and Society: Fourth Series, ed. Peter Laslett, W . G. Runciman, and Quentin
Skinner (Oxford, 1972).
2
Peter Laslett, ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford, 1956), p. vii.
^Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford, 1949); John Locke: Two Treatises of
Government (Cambridge, I960; rev. ed., 1963).
 Introduction: The state of the art 3

the common law as a constituent of what we now know as ancient constitution-

alism)4 and second, on the participants in political argument as historical actors,
responding to one another in a diversity of linguistic and other political and
historical contexts that gave the recoverable history of their argument a very rich
texture. The republication of Filmer's writings in 1679 was seen to have evoked
responses as linguistically diverse as Locke's First from his Second Treatise, or Al-
gernon Sidney's Discourses on Government from either, and at the same time to have
evoked, from those concerned to reply to the Freeholder's Grand Inquest5 rather
than to Patriarcha, responses of yet another kind: the controversy between Petyt
and Brady, or the revision of Harrington by his associate Henry Neville. 6 All
these threads in the history of argument could be followed as they diverged and
converged again; there began to emerge a history of actors uttering and respond-
ing in a shared yet diverse linguistic context. The question why all this looked
like a revolution in the historiography of political thought requires one to de-
scribe the state of the art before all this happened, and it is difficult to do so
without setting up straw men. The immediate point is that there has ever since
been a felt (and answered) need to redescribe the historiography of political thought
and its entailments, and to define its practice in terms more rigorously historical.
It has been usual to suggest that in Mo tempore the disciplines of political theory
and the history of political thought had become confounded, and that the advent
of an analytic and linguistic philosophy that was severely ahistorical helped greatly
to disentangle them. But if the linguistic philosophers did not concern them-
selves with the writing of history, the historians were slow to draw upon or to
contribute to the philosophy of speech acts and propositions. The present writer
is aware that he did not so much learn from the contributors to Philosophy, Politics
and Society as discover that he had been learning from them; it was left to the
practice to discover its own entailments. The analysis of scientific inquiry in the
turbulent passage from Popper to Kuhn and beyond had its importance, but it
was only in the middle 1960s, with the first appearance of writings by Quentin
Skinner, that historians of political thought began to state the logic of their own
inquiry and pursue it into fields where it encountered the philosophy of language.
There began a discussion that continues to produce a vigorous and extensive
literature. 7 It would be difficult, and might not be useful, to trace all its intri-
4
J . G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in the
Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1957).
5
James Tyrrell and William Petyt regarded this work as of the same tendency as the writings
published under Filmer's name, and I do not therefore enter into the present controversy regarding
its authorship. See Corinne Comstock Weston, "The Authorship of the Freeholder's Grand Inquest,"
English Historical Review XCV, 1 (1980), pp. 74-98.
6
Caroline Robbins, ed., Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge, 1969).
7
Bibliographies complete to the moment of their compilation may be found in Quentin Skinner,
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1978), vol. 1, The Renaissance, pp.
285-6; Lotte Mulligan, Judith Richards, and John K. Graham, "Intentions and Conventions: A
4 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

cacies or attempt to write its history; yet the need to describe the present state of
the art obliges us to giwe an account of its chief characteristics.
Professor Skinner is known for having made, at different times, two pro-
nouncements on the objectives which a historian of this kind should pursue. The
earlier of these stressed the importance of recovering the intentions which an
author was carrying out in his text; the objections that have been made to this
proposal have not destroyed it, but have rather pointed out the need in some
respects to go beyond it. For example, it has been asked whether we can recover
the author's intentions from his text without becoming imprisoned in the her-
meneutic circle. The answer is that this may indeed be a danger when we have
no evidence regarding the intentions other than the text itself; in practice, this
is sometimes the case but not always. There may be evidence, unreliable and
treacherous but still usable, from the author's other writings or his private cor-
respondence; an admirable habit of preserving the letters of learned men has
prevailed among antiquaries for hundreds of years. The more evidence the histo-
rian can mobilize in the construction of hypotheses regarding the author's inten-
tions, which can be then be applied to or tested against the text itself, the better
his chances of escaping from the hermeneutic circle, or the more circles of this
kind his critics will have to construct in the attempt to dismount him.
A more penetrating objection has been that which asks whether a mens auctorts
can be said to exist independently of his sermo, that is, whether a set of intentions
can be isolated as existing in the author's mind, to which he then proceeds to
giwe effect in writing and publishing his text. Do not the intentions come into
being only as they are effected in the text? How can he know what he thinks, or
what he wanted to say, until he sees what he has said? Self-knowledge is retro-
spective, and every author is his own owl of Minerva. Evidence of the kind men-
tioned in the preceding paragraph can still be mobilized, on occasion, in order
to point out that an author of whom enough is known can be said to have had
before him a number of possible actions, giving effect to a variety of intentions,
and that the act he did perform, and the intentions to which he did give effect,
may have differed from some other act he could have performed and may even
have meditated performing. But the objection with which we are dealing cuts
deeper than this. It asks not only whether intentions can exist before being artic-
Critique of Quentin Skinner's Methodforthe Study of the History of Ideas," Political Studies XXVI,
1 (1979), pp. 84-98; J. G. A. Pocock, "The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History
and Ideology," Journal of Modern History LIII, 1 (1981), pp. 50-1 n. 9; James H. Tully, "The Pen
Is a Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinner's Analysis of Politics," British Journal of Political Science XIII,
4(1983), pp. 489-509.
It should be mentioned that there are said to be levels of language - having to do with computer
technology, market research,or something of the kind - at which the phrase "state of the art" has
taken on some short-lived significance. The present author has no desire to be read in that sense.
He believes himself to be practicing an art whose present state can be reflectively examined, and he
hopes that this note may be of interest to historians.
 Introduction: The state of the art 5

ulated in a text, but whether they can be said to exist apart from the language in
which the text is to be constructed. The author inhabits a historically given world
that is apprehensible only in the ways rendered available by a number of histori-
cally given languages; the modes of speech available to him give him the inten-
tions he can have, by giving him the means he can have of performing them. At
this point the objection has raised the question of langue as well as parole, of
language context as well as of speech act.
This had, of course, been part of Skinner's contention. His insistence on the
recovery of intentions had been to some degree destructive in its purpose; it was
aimed at eliminating from consideration those intentions an author could not
have conceived or carried into effect, because he lacked the language in which
they could have been expressed and employed some other, articulating and per-
forming other intentions. Skinner's method, therefore, has impelled us toward
the recovery of an author's language no less than of his intentions, toward treating
him as inhabiting a universe of langues that give meaning to the paroles he per-
forms in them. This by no means has the effect of reducing the author to the
mere mouthpiece of his own language; the more complex, even the more contra-
dictory, the language context in which he is situated, the richer and more am-
bivalent become the speech acts he is capable of performing, and the greater
becomes the likelihood that these acts will perform upon the context itself and
induce modification and change within it. At this point the history of political
thought becomes a history of speech and discourse, of the interactions of langue
and parole; the claim is made not only that its history is one of discourse, but that
it has a history by virtue of becoming discourse.
There seems no doubt, however, that the focus of attention has moved in some
measure from the concept of intention toward that of performance. At one level
of theory, this is reflected in Professor Skinner's writings on speech acts and
related matters; at one level of practice, in his dictum - to be seen in The Foun-
dations of Modern Political Thought and forming the second of those pronounce-
ments mentioned earlier — that if we are to have a history of political thought
constructed on authentically historical principles, we must have means of know-
ing what an author "was doing" 8 when he wrote, or published, a text. The two
words quoted prove to contain a wealth of meanings. In colloquial English, to
ask what an actor "was doing" is often to ask "what he was up to," that is, what
he was "playing at " or "getting at." What, in short, was the (sometimes con-
cealed) purposive strategy of his actions? The notion of intention has certainly
not been abandoned, as is evident also in the idiom - a favorite one with Skinner
- that speaks of an author as performing this or that "move." But we also find it
8
Skinner, Foundations, vol. 1, p. xi (the approach "might begin to give us a history of political
theory with a genuinely historical character") and p. xiii ("it enables us to characterise what their
authors were doing in writing" the classic texts).
6 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

possible to ask whether an actor "knew what he was doing," implying the pos-
sibility of a gap between intention and effect, or between consciousness of the
effect and the effect itself; to ask this is to ask what the effect was, to whom and
at what point in time it became apparent, and to confront the fact that actions
performed in an open-ended time context produce an open-ended series of effects.
The question what an author was doing therefore can have a great many answers,
and it is even theoretically (though somewhat figuratively) conceivable that the
author has not finished doing things yet. We need not, however, inquire whether
history can have a present (as Michael Oakeshott seems to deny)9 to discern that
Quentin Skinner did wisely to employ an imperfect continuous tense. In French
a future conditional perfect might have done duty, but to speak of "what an
author would (turn out to) have done" is to look at a future (to us a past) from
the standpoint of what he was doing, and is not quite identical with speaking,
from the standpoint of our present, of "what he has done" or (pace Oakeshott)
"is doing." It is not clear whether an author's action is ever over and done with;
but it is clear — and the use of the future conditional underlines it — that we have
begun to concern ourselves with the author's indirect action, his posthumous
action, his action mediated through a chain of subsequent actors. Such is the
necessary consequence of admitting the context to parity with the action, the
langue to parity with the parole.
It has been said in objection to Skinner's position that an author's words are
not his own, that the language he uses to effect his intentions may be taken from
him and used by others to other effects. To some extent, this is inherent in the
nature of language itself. The language he employs is already in use; it has been
used and is being used to utter intentions other than his. At this point an author
is himself both the expropriator, taking language from others and using it to his
purposes, and the innovator, acting upon language so as to induce momentary or
lasting change in the ways in which it is used. But as he has done to others and
their language, so shall it be done to him and his. The changes he has sought to
bring about in the linguistic conventions surrounding him may not prevent lan-
guage continuing to be used in the conventional ways he has sought to modify,
and this may be enough to nullify or distort the effects of his utterance. Further-
more, even when an author has succeeded in innovating, that is, in uttering
speech in such a way as to compel others to respond to it in some sense not
hitherto conventional, it does not follow that he will succeed in ruling the re-
sponses of others. They may — they usually will — impute to his utterance and
his innovation consequences, implications, and entailments he may not have in-
tended or wish to acknowledge, and they will respond to him in terms deter-
mined by these imputations, maintaining or modifying those conventions of speech
9
Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford, 1983), and the present writer's review,
(London) Times Literary Supplement, October 2 1 , 1983, p. 1,155.
 Introduction: The state of the art 7

they see as directly or indirectly affected by his real or imputed utterance. And
so far we are imagining only the actions of respondents contemporary with the
author, that is, inhabiting the same linguistic and historical context. Languages
display continuity as well as change; even when modified by their use in specific
contexts, they outlive the contexts in which they have been modified, and they
impose upon actors in subsequent contexts the constraints to which innovation
and modification are the necessary but unpredictable responses. The text, fur-
thermore, preserves the utterances of the author in a rigid, literal form and con-
veys them into subsequent contexts, where they compel from respondents inter-
pretations that, however radical, distorting, and anachronistic, would not have
been performed if the text had not performed upon the respondents. What an
author "was doing," therefore, includes evoking from others responses the author
could not control or predict, some of which would be performed in contexts quite
other than those in which he was doing that which he could possibly know he
was doing. Skinner's formula defines a moment in the history of the interactions
of parole with langue, but at the same time it defines that moment as open-ended.

II
A review of the state of the art must at this point present an account of its
practice. To describe is not to prescribe, and what follows is an account of some
practices the historian of political discourse will find himself10 pursuing, rather
than a rigorous injunction to follow them in their order. In the perspective sug-
gested here, however, it seems a prior necessity to establish the language or
languages in which some passage of political discourse was being conducted.
These "languages" will in strict fact have been sublanguages, idioms, and rhet-
orics, rather than languages in the ethnic sense, although in early modern history
it is not uncommon to encounter polyglot texts that combine vernacular with
Latin, Greek, and even Hebrew; we will chiefly be concerned with idioms or
modes of speech existing within a given vernacular. Those languages will vary in
the degree of their autonomy and stability. From "idioms" they shade off in the
direction of "styles" and toward a point where the distinction drawn here between
langue and parole may be lost; but we are typically in search of modes of discourse
stable enough to be available for the use of more than one discussant and to
present the character of games defined by a structure of rules for more than one
player. This will enable us to consider how the players exploited the rules against
10
The English language contains no third-person pronoun without gender. In writing of the authors
in the history of political discourse, most of whom were men, I am unembarrassed to find myself
using the masculine pronoun, but when it comes to the authors o/that history, a host of distin-
guished names occurs to remind me that it might just as well have been the feminine.
8 VIRTUE,.COMMERCE, AND.HISTORY

one another, and in due course how they performed upon the rules with the effect
of altering them.
These idioms or language games vary also in origin and hence in content and
character. Some will have originated in the institutional practices of the society
concerned: as the professional vocabularies of jurists, theologians, philosophers,
merchants, and so on that for some reason have become recognized as part of the
practice of politics and have entered into political discourse. A great deal may be
learned about the political culture of a given society at various moments in its
history by observing what languages originating in this way have become ac-
credited, as it were, to take part in its public speech, and what clerisies or profes-
sions have acquired authority in the conduct of its discourse. But other languages
will be encountered whose character is rhetorical rather than institutional; they
will be found to have originated as modes of argument within the ongoing pro-
cess of political discourse, as new modes invented or old modes transformed by
the constant action of speech upon language, of parole upon langue. There may be
less need to look outside the continuum of discourse in search of their origins;
equally, there is nothing to prevent languages of the former category, originating
outside the mainstream of discourse, from having entered into the process of
transformation just described and from having undergone the mutations that
engender new idioms and modes of argument. From all this it follows that the
generalized language of discourse at any given time — though perhaps this is
particularly true of early modern Europe and Britain — may possess a rich and
complex texture; a wide variety of idioms may have entered into it and may be
interacting with one another to produce a complex history.
Each of these languages, however it originated, will exert the kind of force
that has been called paradigmatic (though it has not proved economical to labor
the refinements of this term). That is to say, each will present information selec-
tively as relevant to the conduct and character of politics, and it will encourage
the definition of political problems and values in certain ways and not in others.
Each will therefore favor certain distributions of priority and consequently of
authority; should a concept of authority itself be under discussion - as is likely
to be the case in political discourse — it will present "authority" as arising in a
certain way and possessing a certain character, and not otherwise. However, once
we have defined political discourse as drawing on a number of diversely originat-
ing "languages" and arguments, we are committed to supposing the presence of
a number of these paradigmatic structures, distributing and defining authority
in a number of variant ways, at any one time. From this it follows — what is in
any case almost self-evident - that political language is by its nature ambivalent;
it consists in the utterance of what have been called "essentially contested con-
cepts" and propositions, 11 and in the simultaneous employment of languages
11
For this term, advanced by W . B. Gallie in 1956, see William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political
Discourse, 2d ed. (Princeton, N . J . , 1983).
 Introduction: The state of the art 9
favoring the utterance of diverse and contrary propositions. But it further follows
- what is nearly but not quite the same thing - that any text or simpler utterance
in a sophisticated political discourse is by its nature polyvalent; it consists in the
employment of a texture of languages capable of saying different things and of
favoring different ways of saying things, in the exploitation of these differences
in rhetoric and practice, and in their exploration and possibly their resolution in
criticism and theory. When a diversity of such languages is to be found in a given
text, it may follow that a given utterance is capable of being intended and read,
and so of performing, in more than one of them at the same time; nor is it at all
impossible that a given pattern of speech may migrate, or be translated, from one
language to another found in the same text, bearing implications from the former
context and engrafting them among those belonging to the latter. And the author
may move among these patterns of polyvalence, employing and recombining
them according to the measure of his capacity. What to one investigator looks
like the generation of linguistic muddles and misunderstandings may look to
another like the generation of rhetoric, literature, and the history of discourse.
It is a large part of our historian's practice to learn to read and recognize the
diverse idioms of political discourse as they were available in the culture and at
the time he is studying: to identify them as they appear in the linguistic texture
of any one text, and to know what they would ordinarily have enabled that text's
author to propound or "say." The extent to which the author's employment of
them was out of the ordinary comes later. The historian pursues his first goal by
reading extensively in the literature of the time and by sensitizing himself to the
presence of diverse idioms. To some extent, therefore, his learning process is one
of familiarization, but he cannot remain merely passive and receptive to the lan-
guage (or languages) he reads, and must frequently employ detective procedures
that enable him to frame and validate hypotheses asserting that such and such a
language was being employed and was capable of being employed in such and
such ways. Along this line he must inevitably confront the problems of interpre-
tation, ideological bias, and the hermeneutic circle. What evidence has he for the
presence of a language in the texts before him other than his own ingenuity in
reading it into them? Is he not programmed by emphases arising from his own
culture to detect similar emphases in the literature of the past and devise suppos-
ititious "languages" in which these were allegedly expressed? Can he proceed
from saying that he has read a certain language in the texts of a past culture to
saying that this language existed as a resource available to those performing acts
of utterance in that culture?
The historian is characteristically interested in the performances of agents other
than himself and does not desire to be the author of his own past so much as to
uncover the doings of other authors in and of it. This is probably a reason why
his politics are inherently liberal rather than aimed at praxis. In the kind of
inquiry under examination here, the historian is less interested in the "style," or
10 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

mode of utterance of a given author, than in the "language," or mode of utterance

available to a number of authors for a number of purposes, and his evidence for
holding that such and such a "language" existed as a cultural resource for actors
in history, and not merely as a gleam in his interpretative eye, tends to be related
to the number of actors he can show to have performed in this medium and the
number of acts he can show them to have performed. The more he can show (a)
that diverse authors employed the same idiom and performed diverse and even
contrary utterances in it, (b) that the idiom recurs in texts and contexts varying
from those in which it was at first detected, and (c) that authors expressed in
words their consciousness that they were employing such an idiom and developed
critical and second-order languages to comment on and regulate their employ-
ment of it, the more his confidence in his method will increase. Logically, per-
haps, he cannot prove that the whole mass of evidence he presents is not the fruit
of his ingenuity as an interpreter, but neither can he prove that he is not asleep
and dreaming the whole of his apparent existence. The greater the number and
diversity of performances he can narrate, the more the hypotheses erected by those
who seek to imprison him within the hermeneutic circle must come to resemble
a Ptolemaic universe, consisting of more cycles and epicycles than would satisfy
the reasonable mind of Alfonso the Wise; in short, the more it will exhibit the
disadvantages of nonrefutability.
The problem of interpretation recurs in a more pressing form when we consider
that the historian studies languages in order to read them, but not to speak or
write them. His own writings will not be constructed in a pastiche of the various
idioms they interpret, but rather in language he has devised in order to describe
and explicate the workings of these idioms. If in Collingwoodian terminology he
has learned to "rethink the thoughts" of others, the language in which he reiter-
ates their utterances will not be that used by them, but his own. It will be
explicatory in the sense that it aims constantly to render the implicit explicit, to
bring to light assumptions on which the language of others has rested, to pursue
and verbalize implications and intimations that in the original may have re-
mained unspoken, to point out conventions and regularities that indicate what
could and could not be spoken in the language, and in what ways the language
qua paradigm encouraged, obliged, or forbade its users to speak and think. To
quite an important extent, the historian's language will be hypothecatory and
predictive; it will enable him to state what he expects a conventional user of the
language under study to have said in specific circumstances, the better to study
what was in fact said under these circumstances. When the prediction is falsified
and the speech act performed is not that expected, it may be that the conventions
of language need further exploration; that the circumstances in which the lan-
guage was used were other than the historian has supposed they were; that the
language being employed was not precisely the language he has expected; or, the
 Introduction: The state of the art 11
most interesting possibility of all, that innovation and change were taking place
in the language.
It will be at such moments that the historian is most confident that he is not
merely the prisoner of his own interpretative ingenuity, but the fact remains that
his writings about the language of others will be conducted largely in a paralan-
guage or metalanguage, designed to explicate the implicit and present the history
of a discourse as a kind of dialogue between its intimations and potentialities, in
which what was not always spoken will be spoken by him. It does not make the
historian an idealist to say that he regularly, though not invariably, presents the
language in the form of an ideal type: a model by means of which he carries on
explorations and experiments. Since he is ultimately concerned with the perfor-
mances of agents other than himself, he is constantly alert for occasions on which
the explication of language has been carried out by actors in the history he is
studying; by the language's own users commenting upon its use critically, reflec-
tively, and by means of second-order languages developed among them for the
purpose. These will be occasions on which the actors passed from simple discourse
to discourse continued and modified by means including theory, but they will
also be occasions that provide the historian with information enabling him to
control his former hypotheses and construct new ones. The explication of the
languages he has learned to read is his means of pursuing his inquiries simulta-
neously in two directions: toward the contexts in which language was uttered,
and toward the acts of speech and utterance performed in and upon the context
furnished by language itself and the further contexts in which it was situated. He
will seek next to observe the parole performing upon the langue: upon the conven-
tions and implications of the language, upon other actors as users of the language,
upon actors in any further contexts of whose existence he may become persuaded,
and possibly upon those contexts themselves. Language, as we have been using
the term, is the historian's key to both speech act and context.
We have seen that the texts he studies may prove to have been compounded of
many idioms and languages. The historian is constantly surprised and delighted
to discover familiar languages in texts equally familiar, where they have not been
noticed before - the language of prophetic exegesis in Leviathan,u the idiom of
denouncing paper credit in Reflections on the Revolution in France13 - though mak-
ing these discoveries does not always enhance his respect for previous scholarship.
But if a proposition derives its validity from the language in which it is per-
formed, and part at least of its historicity from its performance upon the same

12
"Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes," in The Diversity of History:
Essays in Honour of Sir Herbert Butterfield, ed. J. H. Elliott and H. G. Konigsberger (London and
Ithaca, N . Y . , 1970) and reprinted in J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays in Political
Thought and History (New York, 1971).
13
See chap. 10, "The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution."
12 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

language, it follows that a text compounded of many languages may not only say
many things in as many ways, but also may be a means of action in as many
histories; it may be broken down into many acts performed in the history of as
many languages as there are in the text. To recognize this will commit the his-
torian to some radical, though not always irreversible, experiments in deconstruc-
tion, but before he can pursue these or examine their implications, he needs
means of understanding how an act of speech, utterance, or authorship, per-
formed in a certain language, may perform and innovate upon it. His attention
now turns from langue to parole, to the act performed in and on a context; but a
knowledge of the context remains necessary to a knowledge of the innovation.

Ill
Each of the distinguishable idioms of which a text may be compounded is a
context in its own right: a way of speaking that seeks to prescribe what things
may be said in it and that precedes and may outlast the speech act performed
within its prescriptions. We expect it to be complex and sophisticated, to have
been formed over time under pressure from a great many conventions and contin-
gencies entering into combination, and to contain at least some elements of a
second-order speech that permits its users to reflect on the implications of their
use of it. The process of "learning" it, which has just been described, may there-
fore be thought of as a process of learning its characteristics, resources, and lim-
itations as a mode of utterance which facilitates the performance of some kinds
of speech act and inhibits the performance of others; any act performed in it may
be viewed as exploiting, exploring, recombining, and challenging the possibili-
ties of utterance of which it consists. But language is referential and has a variety
of subjects; it alludes to those elements of experience out of which it has come
and with which it offers to deal, and a language current in the public speech of
an institutional and political society may be expected to allude to those institu-
tions, authorities, value symbols, and recollected events that it presents as part
of that society's politics and from which it derives much of its own character. A
"language" in our specialized sense, then, is not only a prescribed way of speak-
ing, but also a prescribed subject matter for political speech. We have reached a
point where we can see that each language context betokens a political, social, or
historical context within which it is itself situated; we are obliged at the same
point, however, to acknowledge that each language to some degree selects and
prescribes the context within which it is to be recognized.
Given that any such language has taken time to form, it must display a his-
torical dimension; it must possess and prescribe a past made up of those social
arrangements, historical events, recognized values, and ways of thinking of which
it has been able to speak; it discourses of a politics from which the character of
 Introduction: The state of the art 13

pastness cannot be altogether separated. The historian therefore cannot easily

satisfy the demand, often made of him, that he present acts of political speech as
determined (in the terminology criticized by Oakeshott) by the "primordial"
demands of a "present of practical action";14 because language characterizes the
present in speech loaded with intimations of a past, the present is difficult to
isolate or to state in immediate practical purity. Political speech is of course
practical and informed by present necessities, but it is none the less constantly
engaged in a struggle to discover what the present necessities of practice are, and
the most powerful minds using it are exploring the tension between established
linguistic usages and the need to use words in new ways. The historian has his
own relation to this tension. He knows what norms the language he is studying
usually implied, but he may also possess independent knowledge that these norms
and the society they presupposed were changing, in ways and for reasons the
language as yet lacked means of recognizing. He will therefore look for indica-
tions that words were being used in new ways as the result of new experiences,
and were occasioning new problems and possibilities in the discourse of the lan-
guage under study. It will be a problem for him, however, that nothing in that
language denotes changes in its historical context as satisfactorily as does the
language available to him as a historian, but not available to the actors whose
language and history he is studying. Faced with problems such as how far he may
use twentieth-century categories to explain the categories used in the seventeenth
century, he may impose on himself the discipline of explaining only how changes
in seventeenth-century language indicated changes in the historical context, what
changes were indicated, and what changes occurred in the ways of indicating
them. Since the language of seventeenth-century actors responded differently to
its historical context from the language he himself uses, it may be long before
seventeenth-century speech, interpreted in context, gives him occasion to use the
categories of historical explanation he would wish to use — and in some cases that
occasion may never arise. But the historian of discourse cannot get out of a lan-
guage that which was never in it.
The present of practical necessity in which past actors found themselves is not
immediately accessible, since it must come to us through the mediation of the
language they used; but this does not mean that it is not accessible at all. From
the texts they wrote, from our knowledge of the language they used, the com-
munities of debate to which they belonged, the programs of action that were put
into effect, and the history of the period at large, it is often possible to formulate
hypotheses concerning the necessities they were under and the strategies they
desired to carry out, and to test these by using them to interpret the intentions
and performances of the texts themselves. We are in search, however, less of the

14
See n. 9, this chapter.
14 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

text's "practical" than of its discursive performance. No one has tried to identify
the thousand gentlemen whose minds Hobbes once claimed 15 to have framed to
a conscientious obedience to the government of the Commonwealth, nor would
it tell us much about Leviathan to know if they existed. We do not much care to
know whether the first readers of // Principe (whoever they were) were moved to
accept or reject the legitimacy of rule by the restored Medici, especially as the
work seems capable of operating either way; what matters to us is to study the
differences that // Principe and Leviathan made to the premises on which political
discourse was conducted. This is to say, of course, that we are historians of dis-
course, not of behavior, but it is also to read Machiavelli and Hobbes as they
were read by everyone whose response to them we possess in written form; these
responses are, without exception, concerned not with their practical political
consequences, but with the challenges they present to the normal structures of
discourse. The history of discourse is not our arbitrary selection; it declares itself
in the literature.
The performance of the text is its performance as parole in a context of langue.
It may simply continue the operative conventions of which the language consists;
it may serve to indicate to us that the language was continuing to be used in a
world that was changing and had begun to change it; or it may perform on as
well as in the language that is its medium, innovating in ways that bring about
greater or smaller, more or less radical changes in the use of the language or of
second-order language about it. (I am writing here, for simplicity's sake, as if each
text were written in only one of the available languages of discourse, instead of
being compounded of several.) The historian therefore needs a means of under-
standing how a speech act is performed within a language context, and in partic-
ular how it is performed and innovates upon it.
When an author has performed an act of this character, we are accustomed to
say that he has "made a move." The phrase implies game playing and tactical
maneuver, and our understanding of "what he was doing" when he made his
move thus depends in considerable measure on our understanding of the practical
situation he was in, of the case he desired to argue, the action or norm he desired
to legitimate or delegitimate, and so on; we hope that his text will indicate such
a situation, one of which we have some independent knowledge from other sources.
The practical situation will include pressures, constraints, and encouragements
the author was under or perceived himself as being under, arising from the pref-
erences and antipathies of others and the limitations and opportunities of a polit-
ical context as he perceived or experienced it; it is obviously possible, but not
obviously necessary, that this situation will extend as far as the relations between
social classes. But the practical situation also includes the linguistic situation:
15
Thomas Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics . . . (1656); see William Molesworth,
ed., The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, 11 vols. (London, 1845), vol. 7, pp. 3 3 5 - 6 , 3 4 3 - 7 .
 Introduction: The state of the art 15

that arising from the constraints and opportunities imposed on the author by the
language or languages available for him to use, and it is often — perhaps predom-
inantly - within this context (or sector of the context) that the historian of dis-
course sees the author's "move" performed. Languages are the objects as well as
the instruments of consciousness, and the public speech of a society commonly
includes second-order languages in which the actors comment upon the languages
they are otherwise using. To the extent to which this happens, language is objec-
tified as part of the practical situation, and an author "making a move" in re-
sponse to some practical necessity may not merely be using some language in a
new way, but proposing that it be used in a new way and commenting on the
language uses of his society, or even on the character of language itself. It is at
this point that the historian of discourse must see philosophy and practice as
coexisting rather than as separable: Hobbes or Locke as both philosopher and
pamphleteer.
Whatever the idiom or language in which the "move" was performed, what-
ever the level of consciousness it presupposed, whatever the combination of rhet-
oric and theory, practice and philosophy it seems to have entailed, the historian
looks for ways in which it may have rearranged, or sought to rearrange, the
possibilities of language open to the author and his co-users of language; any
result of this order that the historian can obtain will furnish a large part of his
answer to the question of what the author was doing. In order to obtain knowl-
edge of how a speech act may modify or innovate upon the language it is per-
formed in, it is probably best to begin with utterances at a relatively simple
practical, rhetorical, or argumentative level; it also seems best, however, to bear
in mind that the act may be performed in a context compounded of several lan-
guages simultaneously in use (whether these be thought of as first-order lan-
guages interacting with each other or second-order languages interacting with
those on which they comment). If we wish to imagine a speech act innovating
within and upon a single idiom unconnected with others — and it may be neces-
sary to do so — we must imagine it performing or proposing a change in one of
the usages in which that idiom consists: a drastic reversal, perhaps, in the mean-
ing of a key term. But a change confined to a single idiom can reverse only the
usages already there, and we shall find ourselves imagining such simple but far-
reaching moves as a reversal of value signs: a proposal that what was formerly
considered bad be now considered good, or vice versa. Of this adikos logos there
are some notorious examples in our histories, though their shock effect is usually
enough to give rise instantly to second-order language, increasing the number of
idioms in use.
We may at this stage turn to the context of experience, rather than of lan-
guage, and suppose some term in a single idiom, familiarly used to denote some
component of experience, being used to denote an unfamiliar component, or to
16 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

associate the familiar with an unfamiliar component, or more generally to speak

of the familiar in an unfamiliar way. Once we have introduced the context (and
concept) of experience, we must concede that such innovations may be thought
of either as "moves" deliberately performed,16 or as changes in usage coming
about in ways of which the author was more or less unconscious and that indeed
took an indefinite number of speech acts to perform; there are wide twilight areas
to explore here. On the other hand, once we reintroduce the concept of second-
order language — which is likely to introduce itself whenever an actor becomes
conscious that a move is being performed — we have reentered the realm in which
language conveys consciousness of its own existence and comes to consist of a
number of concurrent idioms, from which coexisting first-order languages can-
not, as we have seen, be excluded. The context of language reasserts itself and
interacts with increasing complexity with the context of experience.
The historian now embarks on a search for ways in which a speech act may
innovate in and on a context consisting of several languages in interaction — or,
more brutally, how it may innovate in several languages at once. "Moves" of this
kind will be moves of translation, passing directly or indirectly from one available
language to another. A crucial term, topos, or pattern of utterance may be trans-
lated from the context of one idiom to that of another; that is, it may be simply
removed into a new context and left to undergo modification there. A problem
or subject normally considered by applying one idiom may be considered by
applying another, and this may carry the implication, subsequently explicated,
that it belongs to a context of experience different from that to which it has
previously been assigned. The richer the diversity of idioms or languages of which
a public discourse is composed, the more various, complex, and subtle the "moves"
of this kind that can be performed. These moves may be rhetorical and implicit,
performed without advertisement, and left to work their effects, or they may be
explicit and theoretical, explained and justified in some critical language designed
to vindicate and elaborate their character; and the use of second-order language
is known to set off an escalation with few if any upper limits. All the resources
of rhetoric, of criticism, of methodology, of epistemology, and of metaphysics
are therefore in principle at the disposal of the sophisticated performer in the field
of multilingual discourse; if they are not immediately available to him he has
means and motivation to set about inventing them for himself. There is an ex-
ponential progress toward — though it is a matter of historical contingency whether
there is ultimately attained - the appearance of the fully self-conscious linguistic
performer, the "epic theorist" depicted by Sheldon Wolin, 17 who seeks to expli-

16
A striking, not to say flagrant, example is James Madison's announcement in the tenth of the
Federalist Papers that the word "republic" denoted a state governed by representatives of the citizens,
whereas one governed by the citizens themselves was a "democracy." The force of Madison's state-
ment was retrospective, not enactive; he declared that this was, not that it should be, normal usage.
17
Sheldon S. Wolin, "Political Theory as a Vocation," American Political Science Review LXIII, 4
 Introduction: The state of the art 17

cate and justify all his moves and innovations, and to propose a radical reordering
of language and philosophy. Such beings appear from time to time in the histor-
ical record; Hobbes was one, though Machiavelli probably was not.
This does not mean that the epic theorist's performance is not historically
conditioned, only that it is self-elaborating without immediately apparent limit.
It now becomes a major problem for the historian to distinguish between what
the author might have done and what in fact he did, since even the epic theorist's
capability does not in every case imply intent. But we have reached a point where
it seems improbable that the historian's understanding will be advanced through
constructing a typology of moves that may in principle be performed or innova-
tions that may be effected; the possible variations seem too diverse to be econom-
ically classified, though useful theoretical work may still be done in this direc-
tion. The historian is likely to proceed through the location of the author's texts
in their contexts; through weighing what he might have done against what he
did, the historian attempts an exhaustive explication of the moves he performed,
the innovations he effected, and the messages about experience and language he
can be shown to have transmitted. This will constitute an account of "what he
was doing" insofar as these words can be confined to denoting the author's per-
formances in writing his text.

IV
Agents perform upon other agents, who perform acts in response to theirs, and
when action and response are performed through the medium of language, we
cannot absolutely distinguish the author's performance from the reader's re-
sponse. It is true that this is not invariably the case in the literature of politics.
The author's manuscript may have lain in an archive for hundreds of years before
being published — as did Clarke's report of the Putney debates and most of the
works of Guicciardini — and with regard to the period before publication, we
have to think of the text as less a performance than a document, less an act18
than an indication that a certain state of consciousness, and of language usage,
existed at an ascertainable time. We may indeed always arrest our study of the
text at the point where it indicates to us the state of the author's consciousness
and capacity to articulate it, and there are kinds of speech acts that are confined
to the expression and articulation of consciousness. An author may have been
writing merely to and for himself, or writing private memoranda of thoughts he
desired to conceal from others; texts so written do not lose the character of his-
torical actions performed by self-conscious agents. But speech is commonly pub-
(1969), pp. 1,062-82, and Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory (Los Angeles, 1970). For
comment, see John G. Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.,
1979), pp. 5 1 - 7 , 136-59.
18
"Less . . . than" does not mean "not . . . but."
18 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

lie, and authors commonly publish their works, though the act of writing a text
and the act of publishing it may be very different because performed in different
situations; Locke's Treatises of Government currently offer the most notorious in-
stance of this. The history of discourse is concerned with speech acts that become
known and evoke response, with illocutions that are modified as they become
perlocutions by the ways in which recipients respond to them, and with responses
that take the form of further speech acts and countertexts. The reader himself
becomes an author, and a complex mode of Rezeptionsgeschkhte is required of the
historian.
We are at a point where the history of discourse diverges from the history of
consciousness. We have the author's text, a cultural artifact inscribed with a
certain finality, and by setting this in the contexts furnished by his language and
experience, we can say what it was that he "did" down to the moment of his
completing it (or publishing it if he got so far); we can estimate his intention and
performance, his moves and innovations, as they stood at that moment, and state
what he "had been doing" to that point. But to ask what he "was doing" is to
employ the imperfect tense and ask an open-ended question; there are answers we
have not given and cannot give until we know what the author did to others and
to the languages in which he and others conducted their discourse. In order to
know this, we must have acts of discourse performed by others in response to his,
and in particular to the innovations in language that his acts had performed or
begun to perform; we must know what changes in their discourse occurred as
they responded to his utterances and performed countermoves to his moves. At
this point we move from author to reader, but to reader considered as author; for
unless they were performed in the medium — written and published speech —
that the author himself employed, the reader's responses have nothing to tell us.
There are two reasons for this, or rather there are two senses in which this is true.
It is true that we are compelled to work only with the evidence that has survived
for us to use, so that responses to a text that were never verbalized, or verbalized
only in unrecorded spoken words, are virtually impossible to recapture. It is also
true that an author who worked in a written medium may be thought of as
working on that medium, as intending to modify the things that could be said
and done in it; so that changes he induced in the performances of other writers
in that medium may indeed be the changes he intended and performed, or (if at
variance with his intentions) performed without intending. We need not there-
fore apologize for the unrepresentative elitism of studying only those readers
whose responses were verbalized, recorded, and presented. The mentalite of the
silent and inarticulate majority should indeed be sought after and if possible
recovered; it may have important information for us. But the history otmentalites
is not identical with the history of discourse.
The historian begins now to focus on other texts, written and published by
 Introduction: The state of the art 19

those who had read the text considered in the first instance and who were re-
sponding directly or indirectly to it. His chief need is for an understanding of
how the previous author's innovations, singled out from among the rest of his
speech acts, may impose themselves on readers in such a way as to force from
them responses congruent with the innovation. He begins by presupposing that
an utterance acts upon the consciousness of its recipient, that what is read cannot
be unread. There is something unilateral about the act of communication,19 which
does not take place wholly between consenting adults. By speaking words in your
hearing, by injecting script, print, or image into your field of attention, I impose
on you, without your consent, information you cannot ignore. I have demanded
your response, and I have also sought to determine it. I have indeed determined
that it is to an act of mine and to information introduced by me that you must
respond, and the more complex and intelligible the information imposed by this
act of verbal rape — this penetration of your consciousness without your consent
— the more I have tried to determine what your response shall be. It is true that
if we have shared a medium of communication consisting in a structure of shared
conventions, you have more of the freedom that comes of prior consent to the
form my acts took; but for this very reason, any challenge or innovation posed by
me to those conventions will be hard for you to resist recognizing, and you will
have to respond to that innovation as you recognize and understand it. Nor is it
likely (unless you are a Stalinist bureaucrat) that you will be able to respond
simply by reiterating the existing conventions of discourse as if I had never chal-
lenged them; such attempts are of course made and sometimes succeed, but they
fail in proportion to your awareness that I have said something you wish to
answer. You are more likely to respond to my move with a countermove of your
own, and even if the countermove is intended to restore the conventions I chal-
lenged, it will contain and register your awareness that I have said something
unprecedented and will to that extent contain something unprecedented of its
own. To my injection of new wine you will respond by presenting old wine in
new bottles. What I "was doing" includes obliging you to do something, and
partly determining what that shall be.
But language provides you with resources for determining your own response.
If there is a master-slave relationship between us, you may respond in language
that accepts and perpetuates my language's manipulation of you;20 but such
relationships are neither simple nor stable, and your understanding of the slave's
19
For more on this, see Pocock, "Verbalising a Political Act: towards a Politics of Language," Political
Theory I, 1 (1973), pp. 27-45, and "Political Ideas as Historical Events: Political Philosophers as
Historical Actors," in Political Theory and Political Education, ed. Melvin Richter (Princeton, N.J.,
1980).
20
For the language of the literature of absolutism, and comment on its manipulative strategies with
reference to the present writer's theories, see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature:
Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and their Contemporaries (Baltimore, 1983).
20 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

role may not coincide with mine, so that even the servility of your response will
be troubling to me and will pervert my language (the literature of slavery is
largely about this). The more your language, shared with me, permits you to
articulate your perception of the world, the more the conventions and paradigms
it contains will permit you to assimilate my speech and deflect my innovations
- although, paradoxically, these may also be the means of emphasizing and
dramatizing my innovations and rendering them nonignorable. And once you
begin verbalizing your response to my utterance, you begin to acquire the free-
dom to maneuver that arises from what Stanley Fish has termed "the infinite
capacity of language for being appropriated."21 The interpreter and counterau-
thor begins to "read" the text, taking the words and speech acts it contains to
himself and reiterating them in ways and in contexts of his own selection, so that
they become incorporated into speech acts of his own. In presenting this process,
we tend to speak of author and reader as if they were in an adversary relation, but
the process is essentially the same when the relation is that of instructor and
disciple, to say nothing of master and slave. The reader acquires a capacity to
perform "moves" not at all unlike the "moves" we saw being performed by the
author, whether or not these are thought of as countermoves to the author's
innovations; the resources of rhetoric, argument, and criticism become his as they
are those of any other language agent. He can alter the meaning of terms, remove
them from one idiomatic context into another, select and rearrange the order of
the various idioms out of which the author compounded his text, and alter the
elements of the context of experience to which the components of discourse are
taken to be referring. In short, any and all of the speech acts the text has been
performing can be reperformed by the reader in ways nonidentical with those in
which the author intended and performed them; they can also become the occa-
sion for the performance of new speech acts by the reader as he becomes an author
in his turn. In this matrix, it is easy to see how innovation by the author can be
- as we have already seen why it must be - met with counterinnovation by the
respondent. There is even a sense in which the respondent — let us imagine him
a disciple — cannot escape treating the text in this way, since not being the author
he cannot use the author's language exactly as the author did; and should the
respondent be confronted with a text whose author has been dead for centuries,
he inevitably acquires the freedom to interpret it in a historical context that the
author did not imagine and a language context that includes idioms he never
knew.
The history of discourse now becomes visible as one of traditio in the sense of
transmission and, still more, translation. Texts composed of langues and paroles,
of stable language structures and the speech acts and innovations that modify
2
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge,
Mass., 1980), p. 305.
 Introduction: The state of the art 21
them, are transmitted and reiterated, and their components are severally trans-
mitted and reiterated, first by nonidentical actors in shared historical contexts,
and then by actors in historically discrete contexts. Their history is, first, that of
the constant adaptation, translation, and reperformance of the text in a succession
of contexts by a succession of agents, and second, and under closer inspection,
that of the innovations and modifications performed in as many distinguishable
idioms as originally were compounded to form the text and subsequently formed
the succession of language contexts in which the text was interpreted. What the
author "is doing," therefore, turns out to have been continuing and modifying —
either more or less drastically, radically, and "originally" - the performance of
an indefinite diversity of speech acts in an indefinite diversity of contexts, both
of language and of historical experience. It is, on the face of it, unlikely that all
these histories can be circumscribed in a single history. Italian usage may be wise
in calling an author's posthumous history his fortuna, French in calling it his
travail22

It now becomes important to decide whether and when we are to close off Skin-
ner's open-ended context: to cease saying that an author "was doing" those things
that were performed by translation, modification, and discussion of a text origi-
nally his. This apparently verbal question proves to entail the whole problem of
authority and interpretation. Stanley Fish has argued that a text can be said to
exert no authority over those who interpret it, but rather becomes dissolved in
the continuum of interpretation to which it once gave rise. The historian will not
challenge this as a normative proposition; interpreters may legitimately behave
in the ways it presupposes, and the historian will not be at all surprised to find
them so behaving in history. But he will be no more surprised to find — indeed
he thinks he knows already — that human communities in history have sometimes
ascribed extraordinary and even divine authority to certain texts, have maintained
them in stable textual forms for centuries and even millennia, and have discussed
the various ways in which they may be established and discussed subject to the
premise that they possess the authority ascribed to them.23 When this has hap-
pened, there is a text in the historian's class, in the sense that he observes the
22
Giuliano Procacci, Studi sulla Fortuna del Machiavelli (Rome, 1965); Claude Lefort, Le Travail de
I'Oeuvre Machiavel (Paris, 1972).
23
Fish will of course argue that the ascription of authority is an interpretative act and that the text
can never be disentangled from the acts of those who ascribe authority to it. I agree with this, but
I wish to maintain that (a) the text, persisting over time as an authoritative artifact, is among the
determinants of those acts, and (b) the text may be, and in history often is, discerned as a complex
of former ascriptions of authority, among which the author's own affirmation of authority for his
text may possibly be one.
22 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

persistence of a literary artifact of a certain authority and duree, and he sets out to
investigate the historical occurrences that have accompanied its persistence. There
is an obvious contextual sense in which no application or interpretation of an
authoritative text is exactly like any other, because each is performed by a specific
set of actors in (and on) a specific set of contingencies or circumstances; but this
will not persuade the historian that the text has disappeared. If it is of the appro-
priate character, the text may sustain the existence — or it may be enough to say
the appearance — of a certain set of formulas or paradigms, which are to be
applied each time the authority of the text is invoked. It may be, of course, that
the principles require restating each time they are to be applied, and that every
statement of principle interacts with the statement of the case to which it is to
be applied. But the exegete may be linguistically capable of abstracting the prin-
ciple and stating it in an ideal form each time he applies it, and it has been
claimed for certain texts, over lengthy periods, that they do support principles
that can be, and de facto have been, so stated. The historian notes that authori-
tative texts vary in the extent to which this abstract rigor is claimed for them:
The lex scripta differs from the lex non scripta, the Posterior Analytics from the /
Ching (which appears to be an infinitely flexible operational matrix, for which
authority is claimed on no other ground than that of its flexibility). In the light
of such facts, he will not be unduly interested in dissolving the principle into its
application, or in showing that the claim that it can be repeatedly abstracted and
restated is false; it is not his business to convict the actors in his history of false
consciousness, until they begin so to convict one another.
The historian is now recognizing the persistence in certain historical sequences
of certain paradigms, institutionalized in certain texts. He recognizes that each
application of a paradigm is unique, and that no paradigm can be altogether
detached from its application; nevertheless, it is part of the character of a para-
digm as he is using the word that it can be sufficiently detached from its appli-
cation to be stated, and to be discussed in second-order language. If this can
happen once, it can happen again, and you can step more than once into the same
second-order river. To concede that this can happen more than once is to leave
open for historical investigation the question of how many times it has happened
in certain historical sequences, that is, how long these sequences have maintained
a certain kind of continuity. It is certainly the case that the whole thrust and bias
of his method, consisting as we have seen in the multiplication of agents, their
acts, and the contexts they have acted in, lead him to suppose that any paradigm
will be assimilated to contingency in a relatively moyenne duree; but should the
moyenne duree turn out to have been relatively longue, he will feel surprised but not
refuted. The longevity of paradigms is not predetermined, and the history of
literate discourse has lasted nearer two millennia than three in most cultures
where it is found.
 Introduction: The state of the art 23

The text may have had an author, and the paradigms it has conveyed over time
may have been established in it by the intended performances of that author.
Suppose — what we have seen to be improbable in most cases, but not impossible
in all - that (a) it has conveyed relatively stable paradigms over a long period of
time, and (b) these can be shown to have been continuous or congruent with -
to have given effect to — intentions it can be said were those of the author. Is
there not a sense in which it may be claimed that the author's intentions have
continued to exert authority over that period; that they have continued to be
effected; that the author "was doing" things long after his death? Clearly, the
idiom of posthumous action must be partly figurative, but the figure may convey
nothing more than that his intentions were being effected through the persistence
of his text and the actions of those who kept it in being and authoritative. We
might be able to add that his own speech acts and textual performances played a
part in inducing others to regard them as authoritative and maintain them in
paradigmatic form. The statement that we are still being acted upon (dare one
say "influenced"?) by Plato, Confucius, Hegel, or Marx would then acquire some-
thing like a verifiable meaning; it could be inquired into, and the outcome of
inquiry would not be predetermined.

VI

In enlarging the inquiry in the direction of these possibilities, I am of course

working against the grain of a mode of investigation normally focused on the
multiplicity of performances by a multiplicity of agents that discourse, including
the persistence of texts, makes possible. To many critics this method seems
alarmingly deconstructive of texts, of philosophy, of traditions, and even of au-
thors. Once an author has completed his text (and that text has survived), it may
be said that we possess it not merely as a matrix for the performance of diverse
speech acts, but as a complex series of statements, perhaps extended over hundreds
of printed pages, apparently produced by a single powerful mind concerned to
argue at a high level of abstraction and organization, and therefore informed by
the rhetorical, logical, or methodical unity its author imposed on it. There now
appear students of the text whose concern is to discover the postulates or princi-
ples — not immediately apparent to the reading eye but calling for techniques of
reconstitution — that endow the text with the unity it is presumed to have pos-
sessed or pursued. 24 If these students are concerned to recover the author's act or
intention in endowing his text, or texts, with unity, they are asking a historical
question to which there may be found an answer, though it is also a historical
question whether the author had any such intention. It is one thing to be dealing
24
See Howard Warrender, "Political Theory and Historiography: A Reply to Professor Skinner,"
HistoricalJournal XXII, 4 (1979), pp. 931-40.
24 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

with Thomas Hobbes, who claimed from the outset of his publications to be
embarked upon a philosophical enterprise of a specific kind, and another to be
dealing with Edmund Burke, who delivered speeches and wrote pamphlets on a
variety of occasions in the course of an active political life. The claim that the
latter's works are informed by conceptual and philosophical unity requires a dif-
ferent sort of justification from the same claim with respect to the former. Not
all the great intelligences who have engaged in political discourse have engaged,
directly or indirectly, in systematic political theorizing.
If, on the other hand, students appear who are in search of a principle on which
the text may be endowed with unity irrespective of whether the author can be
shown to have intended to proceed on any such principle, these students may
have ceased to regard the text as a problem in the reconstruction of performance
and may be looking at it only as a problem in conceptual resolution. If they say
simply that the text can be made sense of in such a way, and that it does not
matter to them whether the author or any previous reader has ever made sense of
it in such a way, they are informing us that their philosophical enterprise does
not oblige them to study the actions of any historical agent; after which they
have only to abstain — and it may not be easy — from inadvertently speaking as
if they are after all describing the actions of historical agents and writing history
with the disengaged hand. To attend meetings of the Hume Society is to encoun-
ter many statements made in the preceding mode, and with such clarity that the
only problem remaining is that of distinguishing between the word "Hume" used
to denote an actor in history and the word "Hume" used to denote an actor in a
philosophical scenario.
The historian invited to consider a text, or a corpus of texts, as a unified body
of argument will ask by what acts, performed at what moments and in what
contexts, the text was informed or endowed with the unity claimed for it; if he
hears it asserted that there exists some postulate on which the text can be seen to
possess such a unity, he will ask for information regarding the postulate's pres-
ence and action in history. He may learn that it was present in the langue that
the author of the text found himself using, or that it was asserted by the author
as he articulated his parole. In either case the historian will have returned the
postulate to the context furnished by speech act, language, and discourse, but he
will find himself asked by his interlocutor to consider the postulate in relation to
the various speech acts performed by the author over the period of time and in
the various contexts of speech action involved in the completion of the author's
text or texts. He is, in other words, being asked to consider the author perform-
ing only those acts that were necessary to complete the text and endow it with
whatever unity it possesses, that is, the author acting upon the text and upon his
own perceptions and performances in effecting it. At this stage the historian will
ask for evidence that the author both intended the production of a coherent text
 Introduction: The state of the art 25

and understood what would constitute its coherence. Since the historian is self-
trained to think of political speech as multilingual and polyvalent, he will want
to be assured that the author had both the will and the means to organize his text
as a single coherent parole; and since he is also self-trained to think of actions and
perceptions as performed at discrete moments in time, he will want to know at
what moments the author saw himself as organizing his text on the basis of the
postulate alleged. Did the author establish the postulate as defining his intentions
at the outset of his work? Did he come to see that there was such a postulate, and
that he was giving effect to it, only as his work proceeded? Did he discover that
he had organized his work on the basis of such a postulate only when his texts
were complete and he viewed them in retrospect?25 Any of these questions may
be answered affirmatively, and they may be answered in various combinations;
but the historian wants to be assured not only that they can be answered, but
also that they are the right questions to ask about the text before him.
Let us now suppose that all these questions have been satisfactorily answered:
that the author has been shown to have intended and effected the production of
a body of writing systematically in accord with the postulates on which he inten-
tionally based it. The latest moment at which he could have intended and effected
this was the moment of completing the text, but at that moment, and down to
it, the author has been considered only as in dialogue with his text and himself.
We may have considered his interactions with the "languages" in which he wrote
the text, and with other texts and authors to whom he responded in writing it;
nevertheless, to ask about an author's performance in investing his text with
unity is to ask about his performance in and upon his text and nothing more.
What he "intended," what he "was doing," was closed off at the moment when
the text was completed, and it is as if - it will help us greatly if it is the case
that — the text can be considered a purely solitary act, an articulation of the
author's consciousness and nothing more, a dialogue with himself and no one
else. Let us suppose this to be the case: that the text lay undiscovered in a drawer
and was read by no one for hundreds of years, until it was unearthed and pub-
lished (such cases are rare but not unknown). We should then study it as a
soliloquy or memorandum: a communication with the author's self. In the event,
it does not cease to be an act but, in ceasing to be an act of communication with
another, it becomes rather the record of a state, an indication that at a particular
time the state of language permitted the articulation of particular states of con-
sciousness. We do not simply pass from a private to a public language, because
there are highly private writings by intensely solitary men - Guicciardini's works
offer some examples — couched in highly public and rhetorical language, and
although uncommunicated writings cannot be said to have changed language,
25
If so, "what he was (had been) doing" was a question the historian himself found it necessary to
ask.
26 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

there is no reason why they should not be said to have indicated that it was
changing. Solilocutive writing does not depart from the history of discourse, but
occupies a very special place within it; there is indeed a sense in which the more
the text performs the function of expression or reflection, the more it enables us
to look away from the history of speech and toward the history of thought. Since
the study of political literature in history has been based on the paradigm of
philosophy rather than of rhetoric, we have been accustomed to treat texts as
philosophy: to isolate them as expressions of their authors' consciousness and to
explore the states of consciousness they articulate. Since a great many texts are
philosophical and were composed with that end in view, and since it is legitimate
and valuable to treat almost any text as articulating a state of mind rather than
as performing an act of communication, this method has been and will continue
to be practiced to the improvement of our understanding. The demand that every
text be considered, exclusively or primarily, as contributory to political action is,
quite simply, wrong; perhaps it only seems to have been put forward. 26
Yet authors communicate their articulations of consciousness. Not only has
philosophy since its beginnings been as much dialogic as solilocutive, but phi-
losophers, having completed texts of so great complexity that we can read and
analyze them only as self-contained, carry them to the copyist or the printer and
let them loose on publics whose size and membership they cannot for long con-
trol; and there have been intensely solitary writers, seemingly concerned only
with the self's introspection upon the self, who have not only caused their med-
itations to be printed but have done so with political as well as philosophical
intentions. For one Guicciardini we can find a Montaigne, a La Rochefoucauld,
a Rousseau;27 even Guicciardini may have meant to communicate with other
Guicciardini. At this point our study of the act of speech must become a study
of the act of publication, which is not quite identical with it; for as we have seen,
writing not intended for publication may be couched in public language and may
even perform moves and make innovations within it. The act of publication en-
sures that these innovations will become known to others, but may initially at-
tempt to control or limit who these shall be. The author who acts to procure a
limited circulation for his writings is trying to delimit his "public"; one who
commissions a printer to expose his works for sale on the market is not. Cases
have been reported of authors whose works are written in "twofold" language,
conveying an exoteric message to an open readership and at the same time an
esoteric message to a closed one. We may even examine the case of an author who
26
See Richard Ashcraft, "On the Problem of Methodology and the Nature of Political Theory,"
Political Theory III, 1 (1975), pp. 5-25, esp. 17-20; discussed in Mark Goldie, "Obligations,
Utopias, and their Historical Context," HistoricalJournal XXVI, 3 (1983), pp. 727-46.
27
See Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton, N.J., 1980). She character-
izes as "individualism" that introspective mode of political thinking that is concerned with the
identity and awareness of the self in political society.
 Introduction: The state of the art 27

withheld part of his works from publication and wonder what he "intended" by
this act of noncommunication or disinformation, as David Wootton has lately
done with the secret and irreligious jottings of Paolo Sarpi (but how did they
come to be copied?).28
Closed-circuit publication and "secret writing" notwithstanding, the act of
communication exposes one's writings to readers who will interpret them from
standpoints not one's own, and the act of publication in the normal sense of
"going public" abandons the attempt to determine who these readers shall be,
while attempting to maximize the number of those on whom one's writings shall
perform. It might be said, therefore, that publication as the attempt to determine
the thoughts of posterity is necessarily self-defeating. From the moment of pub-
lication the deconstructions of history begin, and we are left to pursue those
continua of interpretation, translation, and second-order discussion of interpre-
tation and translation, which we so unsatisfactorily term "traditions" (John G.
Gunnell has rightly warned us against supposing a "tradition" wherever we de-
tect a sequence).29 Here the historian I have described moves in, with his alert-
ness to the selectivities of reading and interpretation, and his propensity to de-
compose the "history" of a text into the performance of many mutations in many
idioms and contexts, for which the text at times appears little more than the
matrix or holding pattern. But among the recurrent phenomena of interpretation
we have already noted the habit of vesting texts and groups of texts with canon-
ical authority, and we must look out not only for the deconstruction but also for
the reconstitution of authoritative texts by readers, some of whom invest them
with that coherence and unity which the historian regards with some suspicion,
but which, it is not quite inconceivable, may turn out in some cases to have been
fed into them by their authors. Dominick La Capra has called for a history of how
texts considered as unities operate in history,30 and we are prepared to regard
texts as well as interpretative communities as vehicles of authority. It is because
so many things can go on under the heading of "tradition" that we ought to be
wary of using the word.
We have now separated, and subsequently recombined, the text as performing
28
David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983). He calls,
inter alia (p. 4), for a "history of intellectual deception," not unlike the "secret writing" made
famous by Leo Strauss. If such phenomena do not precisely have a history, they frequently occur in
historical situations. Like Goldberg (n. 20, this chapter), Wootton is interested in the manipulative
rather than the discursive possibilities of language; but you cannot manipulate all of a public all of
the time.
29
Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation, pp. 85-90, and generally; see also the ex-
change of essays between Gunnell and the present author, "Political Theory, Methodology and
Myth," Annals of Scholarship I, 4 (1981), pp. 3-62.
30
Dominick La Capra, "Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts," History and Theory XIX,
3 (1980), pp. 245-76. Reprinted in La Capra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Lan-
guage (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983).
28 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

an articulation of the author's consciousness and the text as performing an act of

communication in a continuum of discourse involving other actors. It is these
continua (sometimes misnamed "traditions") that the historian must study if he
wants to understand the actions and responses, the innovations and events, the
changes and processes, that constitute the history of discourse, though this is not
to say that the text as isolated artifact will not furnish him with valuable infor-
mation about what was going on in the history of the languages in which it was
written. A great deal of his attention will therefore be focused on texts undergo-
ing interpretation and deconstruction as they are absorbed into the history of
discourse; however, this does not entail his denying that a text may have per-
formed at certain moments in history with that unity that is claimed for it as art
or philosophy. When the historian encounters a "great" text - as this author
does once or twice in the essays that follow - he knows that the adjective indi-
cates, first, that it has been accorded high authority or adversary status by actors
in the history he is studying; second, that it has been recognized as possessing
exceptional coherence and interest by critics, theorists, philosophers, and (now
he become dubious) historians in the community of scholars to which he belongs.
He knows further that it will be his business to move between exploring its
structure as a synchronously existing artifact to exploring its occurrence and per-
formance as an incident in a diachronously proceeding continuum of discourse.
The fact that these two modes of reality are seldom identical constitutes what
might be termed das Second Treatiseproblem.

VII
The continua of discourse, which exhibit plenty of abrupt discontinuities, occupy
the center of the historian's attention and appear to him to be histories of lan-
guage taking place in contexts furnished by the history of experience. There is a
constant and justified demand that the two histories be connected: that the lan-
guage used by actors in a society be made to yield information regarding what
that society was experiencing, and — since we have come to accord something ap-
proaching absolute priority to social experience - that language be as far as possi-
ble presented as the effect of such experience. Here the historian is seen to con-
cede a measure of autonomy to language, and this troubles those who cannot tell
the difference between autonomy and abstraction. Because he perceives languages
as being formed over time, in response to many external and internal pressures,
he does not suppose that the language of the moment simply denotes, reflects, or
is an effect of the experience of the moment. Rather, it interacts with experience;
it supplies the categories, grammar, and mentality through which experience has
to be recognized and articulated. In studying it the historian learns how the
inhabitants of a society were capable of cognizing experience, what experiences
 Introduction: The state of the art 29

they were capable of cognizing, and what responses to experience they were ca-
pable of articulating and consequently performing. As a historian of discourse, it
is his business to study what happened in discourse (including theory) in the
process of experience, and in this way, which is one among others, he learns a
good deal about the experience of those he studies.
The historian is of course well aware that things happen to human beings
before they are verbalized, though not before the humans possess means of ver-
balizing them, and that language can be seen changing under pressures that
originate outside it. But this process takes time, and it is his business to study
the processes by which humans acquire new means of verbalization and new ways
of using those they already possess. They do this by engaging in discourse with
one another, conducted through the medium of languages loaded with para-
digms, conventions, usages, and second-order languages for discussing usages.
This is enough to ensure that the process of responding to new experience takes
time and must be broken down into many processes occurring in different ways
and at different speeds. The old image in which it was stated that language (or
consciousness) "reflects" society strikes the historian as paying insufficient atten-
tion to time. Language is self-reflective and talks largely about itself; the response
to new experience takes the form of discovering and discussing new difficulties
in language. Instead of supposing a single mirror reflecting happenings in an
exterior world at the moment of their occurrence, it would be better to suppose
a system of mirrors facing inward and outward at different angles, so that they
reflect occurrences in the mirrored world largely through the diverse ways in
which they reflect one another. Discussion between mirror watchers therefore has
to do with how the mirrors reflect one another, even before it focuses on the
possibility that there is something new in the field of vision. It would be better
still to suppose that the mirrors are arranged diachronously as well as synchron-
ously, so that while some of them share the same moment in time, others are
located in its past and future. This would allow us to recognize that the percep-
tion of the new is carried out over time, and in the form of a debate about time;
the historical animal deals with experience by discussing old ways of perceiving
it, as a necessary preliminary to erecting new ways, which then serve as means of
perceiving both the new experience and the old modes of perception.
The historian therefore expects the relation between language and experience
to be diachronous, ambivalent, and problematic. The tension between old and
new, between langue and parole, would be enough to ensure this, were it not for
the additional fact that language games exist to be played by nonidentical play-
ers, so that even actors using the same words have to stop and inquire what they
mean by them. This seems to account for the appearance of second-order lan-
guages (though other preconditions, such as literacy, may have to be met before
these are socially possible), and it seems to ensure that, in the histories with
30 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

which he grows acquainted the normal relation of language to experience will be

ambivalent, in the sense that words denote and are known to denote different
things at the same time, and problematic, in the sense that debate about how
they may be used to denote them is continuous. A society sophisticated enough
to have second-order languages will normally be found responding to new expe-
rience by conducting debates about problems arising in its discourse. The histo-
rian of discourse will therefore have to work outward from the capacities for
discourse enjoyed by his actors, toward what he sees (and they came to see) as
new elements in their experience, and the intimations of their language may, or
may never, intersect those of the language he employs to write the history of
their experience. To translate the perceptions of Gerrard Winstanley into those
of Christopher Hill is a most problematic enterprise, valiantly confronted.
What this reveals is the peculiar importance of that paralanguage described
earlier, which the historian employs to explicate the implications of the language
whose history, composed of the performances carried out in it, he is seeking to
write. We now see that he employs this paralanguage in two concurrent but
distinguishable ways. In the first place, he employs it to erect hypotheses; that
is, he affirms that the language carried certain implications that both enlarged
and defined the ways in which it could be used. He articulates these implications
in order to show what the normal possibilities of the language were, so that
should we encounter the anomalies and innovations that accompany paradigmatic
change, we will be able to recognize them, reiterate them, and begin to see how
they came to be performed. This provides the historian with a necessary matrix
for dealing with those moments in which he sees being performed the utterances
and responses, moves and countermoves, innovations and counterinnovations, of
which a history ofparoles performed in and upon langues has been held to consist.
The propositions into which the matrix may be resolved are hypotheses in the
sense that they state what the historian expects to have happened, and we may
compare them with the preserved language of the texts in order to see if we
believe it was what did happen. In the short term, the model provided by the
paralanguage is quite manageable.
The long term, however, arises when the historian wishes to write diachroni-
cally and in the form of narrative: when, that is, he wishes to write a history of
discourse in the form of the changing pattern of some language or constellation
of languages, and their uses and potentialities, over a long period of time. He
cannot stop to offer his hypotheses for testing each time an actor in his narrative
makes a move; economy apart, he may wish to offer accounts of changes in lan-
guage usage so compressed in meaning, yet so far extended over time, that they
cannot be ascribed to the moves performed by identifiable actors at specific mo-
ments. He will be driven to write in terms that suggest an ongoing dialogue
between the implications of the languages rendered explicit in his paralanguage,
 Introduction: The state of the art 31

and to that extent his history will be ideal and will be written as if it had hap-
pened in the world the paralanguage delineates.
Examples will be found in the essays that follow. "Virtues, Rights, and Man-
ners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought" supposes a dialogue between
the concepts of "virtue" and "right," and between their implied postulates, to
have gone on over some centuries in the context of a European political discourse
imagined as widely distributed in space and relatively stable over time. The ideal
character of this narrative, however, is circumscribed by the second part of its
title, where it is clearly stated to be a model, that is, a set of generalized hy-
potheses forming a matrix in which, it is suggested, the performances of specific
actors in the history of discourse may be situated, in order to see how far the
model succeeds in explicating their actions. The model will also come the closer
to being an account of reality as it becomes accepted that there was a mode of
discourse common to Western Europe, in which the key terms and their impli-
cations recurred and were discussed; that is to say, it offers hypotheses concerning
the being of a continuum as well as the performances of actors. Chapter 5, "Modes
of Political and Historical Time in Early Eighteenth-Century England," employs
a model procedure of a rather different sort; it supposes that the intellectual
predicament of actors at the time prescribed can be characterized in certain terms
and as arising from certain conditions, and that their performances can be inter-
preted as responding to this predicament with certain strategies said to have been
available. The same procedure was followed in the opening chapters of the au-
thor's The Machiavellian Moment,7'1 where a model situation was set up and certain
empirically traceable histories, or continua of discourse, were said to emerge from
it. That was, of course, no more than that common strategy in historical expla-
nation, whereby a situation is selected and the behavior of actors are said to be
intelligible in it. All such strategies expose hypotheses to the kind of criticism
devised as appropriate to them.
A less easily defensible case is that of "The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclu-
sion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse," which forms Part III of
this book. Here the attempt is not to characterize a single model or problem
situation - other than the division between contending "Whig" ideologies after
1689 - and to affirm that what follows becomes intelligible in its light. The
attempt is rather to characterize as many as possible — or, within the parameters
of the essay, as many as is convenient — of the diverse idioms in which British
political thought was conducted for the next century and a half, to trace the
history of discourse in terms of the possibilities intimated by each idiom, and to
use the resultant conversation was a commentary upon — but also by — the polit-
ical culture in which it was conducted. There is circumscription: I select these
il
Tbe Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Prince-
ton, N.J., 1975).
32 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

and not other idioms as those in which discourse went on; but the "model" is so
multiplex that it may not deserve the name, and the reader is bound to feel that
the conversation presented is not between individual or even group actors, but
between ideal and hypostatized modes of speech. Two points may be made here.
In the first place, I will claim that the explanatory and hypothetical matrix is not
lost; it is still being affirmed that the performances of specific actors will fit into
the patterns of discourse set out here, so that when they diverge we shall under-
stand them better. In the second place, I will reiterate that the more diachronous
the history, the more rapidly it moves through time and the succession of perfor-
mances, the more necessary we find it to abridge and intensify it in this way. The
figures32 of metahistory become harder to avoid, and the narrative becomes more
ideal precisely because it is more tentative. A history of Whig political discourse
in ten volumes would have room for many more individual performances and
would test the hypotheses advanced here as exhaustively as the heart could desire.
It would also be just as enjoyable to write. The relation of reconstruction to
deconstruction is not that of symphony to goblin.33

VIII
I conclude here with a few remarks on the "state of the art" that is British history.
In The Machiavellian Moment I emphasized the strength of the Old Whig and
Tory, Commonwealth and Country reaction against the financial (by extension
"commercial"), oligarchic, and imperial regime that came into being after 1688
and 1714, and I contended that the case for this regime and the society that
accompanied it had to be built on new modes of argument, hammered out with
difficulty in the face of opposing paradigms. Some readers have objected that this
case was nevertheless made, though it is hard to see how this can be an objection;
one suspects that their real complaint is that The Machiavellian Moment presents
the rise of a commercial ideology as contingent, whereas they want it to have
been primordial - a straight success story, the natural and undistorted accom-
paniment to the growth of commercial society. I claim in Chapter 3 to have
written an account more dialectical and less Whiggish than that. At all events,
the essays that follow are concerned mainly with authors of the eighteenth cen-
tury who expounded the values of Whig commerce and Whig aristocracy, and
the rapid modernization of both society and social understanding that the oli-
garchic regime witnessed and performed. They are concerned to explore, and in
some ways dispel, the paradox that oligarchy and modernity were related and not
antithetical.
32
See Hayden White, The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978).
33
1 mean, of course, the goblin heard walking over the universe, and emptying it of meaning, during
the playing of the symphony in E. M. Forster's Howard's End.
 Introduction: The state of the art 33
Being a study of historical Whiggism, the book is in some respects a Whig
history. It accepts that Whig rule is a crucial fact of modern British history; the
regime consolidated (at high cost) the parliamentary form of government, and it
established that imperial and exterior relation to Europe that Britain is still dazed
by having lost. It expresses no nostalgia for the Whig order, which was described
in deeply ironic tones by most of its supporters, but it takes that order seriously:
not seriously enough for liberal Marxists, but too seriously for Tory Marxists.
The Tory mind of the eighteenth century was a strange blend of Jacobite and
republican ideas, and much of that ambivalence survives in the anti-Whig his-
toriography of the present day. These essays join most recent interpreters in pre-
senting the oligarchic period as involved in a fermenting and ungovernable de-
bate over itself; "the deep peace of the Augustans" is a vanished historians' dream,
and we study the era in which English and Scottish writers for the first time
engaged in fully secular discussion of their society and its destinies, from which
point British intellectual history can begin to be written. Yet to present an oli-
garchic regime as a polity of discussion and self-criticism is in some ways para-
doxical, and the historian of discourse is always accused of maximizing the im-
portance of his subject. Those who frame this accusation, however, seldom ask
what the presence of discourse means.
Historians who stress, with much justice, the extent to which the Whig re-
gime was a dictatorship by its ruling groups and classes are tempted to see the
ruled as repressed and silent; deprived of the means of articulating a radical con-
sciousness, they must accept the speech of their rulers or formulate modes of
symbolic and semiotic opposition outside it (hence the debate as to how far crime
was a mode of social protest).34 But this oligarchy was notoriously incompetent
at thought control; the nobs and the mobs sometimes shouted and sometimes
shot at one another, and we do not have to regard elite and popular culture as
incapable of intertraffic. It is true that the great antinomian radicals of the Inter-
regnum appear to have been little known in the eighteenth century — though
this might well be further investigated - but enough of the Good Old Cause was
kept alive by some very unlikely groups in opposition to make the extent of Tory
contribution to later political radicalism a very real question. When the elite is
debating its own size, composition, and relation to the populace, the populace
may very well be listening, and the Whig oligarchy was not a ruling class, but
an oligarchy within the ruling classes, which generated such debate.
The last point is relevant also to those historians of the right wing — far to the
right of Edmund Burke — who mistrust the assignment of any role to the debate
34
See Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, Albion's
Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975); John Brewer and John
Styles, eds., An Ungovernable People: The English and their haw in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Cen-
turies (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980).
34 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

over principles. Post-Namierite historiography is in danger of settling into a

belief that there is no reality except the reality of high politics, and that the
practice of high politics always succeeds in reducing discourse to insignificance:
a belief, not far from a religion, currently set out in what has become the Peter-
house manner — stern, nonrefutable, and arcane. But had aristocratic politics in
England been so austere and insolent a domination that its practice was really
impervious to discourse, there really would have been a revolution against it.
Certainly we can examine the practice of high politics with such minuteness that
we do not see the articulation of issues playing any part in it. Although this kind
of politics was being practiced in Whig Britain, there was constant and intensive
debate as to why it was going on, what its social preconditions and effects were,
and whether it was necessary to be governed in this way at all; and in this debate,
the aristocratic regime was as animatedly defended, and by as powerful minds
and arguments, as it was criticized. There was discourse as well as practice, and
discourse must sooner or later furnish practice with one of its contexts, which is
why eighteenth-century theorists constantly debated the role of opinion in gov-
ernment. 35
Because Whig Britain was a highly discursive polity, an oligarchy in which
the nature of oligarchy was debated in a public space larger than the oligarchy,
there can be a history of Whig discourse. There is a further sense in which the
history of discourse is by its nature what we know as a "Whig history." It is a
history of utterance and response by relatively autonomous agents. The history of
discourse is not a modernist history of consciousness organized around such poles
as repression and liberation, solitude and community, false consciousness and
species being. It looks at a world in which the speaker can frame his own speech
and the utterance cannot wholly determine the response. The historian's world is
populated by agents responsible even when they are venal or paranoid, and he
distances himself from them as his equals, distinguishing the narration of their
actions from the performance of his own. To write history in this way is ideolog-
ically liberal and he may as well admit it; he is presupposing a society in which
one can utter and another utter a reply, made from a standpoint not that of the
first performer. There have been and are societies in which this condition is met
to varying degrees, and these are the societies in which discourse has a history.
35
See J. A. W. Gunn, "Public Spirit to Public Opinion," in his Beyond Liberty and Property: The
Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston and Montreal, 1983).
PART I
 Virtues, rights, and manners
A model for historians of political thought

The history of political thought is traditionally deeply affected by the study of

law. In recent years, however, there have been some interesting undulations and
oscillations. Modes of talking about politics which were strikingly remote from
the language of the law have emerged into historical prominence; and though
there are signs that the historiography of political thought is now moving back
into what I shall argue is the law-centered paradigm under which it has tradi-
tionally been conducted, it is an article of faith with us all that the needle does
not return to its starting point, and some modification of the paradigm is there-
fore to be expected. The title of this article is designed to circumscribe the mod-
ification which may have occurred.
Consult any classical work on this subject - Carlyle or Sabine or Wolin - and
we shall find that the history of political thought, at any rate from the Stoics to
the Historicists, is organized to a very high degree around the notions of God,
nature, and law. The individual is looked on as inhabiting a cosmos regulated by
rational and moral principles, essential to its being, which are of the nature of
nomos, and to these philosophically perceived or divinely revealed systems man-
made bodies of jurisprudence are assimilated. God Himself is looked on as a lex
loquens, and even His role as the author of inscrutable grace does not much detract
from this image. Philosophy and faith become modes of cognizing and acknowl-
edging law, with the result that jurisprudence gives access to all but the most
sublime forms of intellectual experience. All this is familiar to the point of being
most jejunely expressed, and it is a paradigm which very effectively organizes a
great deal of highly perdurable knowledge. Yet there are elements of relevant
historical reality which it does not fit and may distort — to say nothing of the

From J. G. A. Pocock, "Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought,"
Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 353-68, © 1981 Sage Publications, Inc.; reprinted by permission.

37
38 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

fact that there are civilizations like the Chinese which it obliges us simply to
ignore.1 Thinkers appear who, like Machiavelli, bear no relation to the natural-
law paradigm and must therefore be presumed to have been negating or subvert-
ing it. Changes in the dominant styles of political thought are brought within
the paradigm and treated as evidence of its destruction from without or its ex-
haustion from within, little attention being paid to the possibility that perhaps
they did not belong with it in the first place. Normative presumptions make
their appearance, and the historian is driven either to celebrate or to deplore the
mutation of naturalism into historicism; while at the center of the process appears
a tormented yet oddly triumphant entity by the name of liberalism, denounced
by the naturalists as insufficiently natural and by the historicists as insufficiently
historical, vindicated by some of its defenders on grounds robustly independent
of either nature or history, yet accorded by all three — in consequence of their
centralizing concern with it — a place in history a good deal more central (I shall
argue) than it has in fact occupied.
I have caused a platoon of straw men to countermarch before us, yet I do not
think I have done much violence to the organizing presuppositions within which
the history of political thought has been conducted. Recently, however — and in
pursuit of a now prevalent technique of discovering and recapitulating the voca-
bularies and idioms in which political thought has been articulated in the course
of its history — there have arisen presentations of that history in which the
natural-law paradigm occupies only a part of the stage, and we learn to speak in
idioms not reducible to the conjoined languages of philosophy and jurisprudence.
I propose to recount parts of this newly constructed history, and then to ask some
questions about the role of law in forming the political outlook of the Western
mind.
The central occurrence in this recent historiography has been the crucial role
accorded to what is variously termed civic humanism or classical republicanism.2
I continue to feel some preference for the former term in spite of the numerous
objections made to it; these arise from the confusions occasioned by the circum-
stance that there are nine-and-sixty ways of using the word humanism and a
strong desire to consolidate them, with the result that whenever one scholar
employs the term civic humanism, another will object that humanism wasn't

J
See, most recently, Kung-chuan Hsiao, A History of Chinese Political Thought. Volume I: From the
Beginnings to the Sixth Century A.D. Trans. F. W. Mote (Princeton, N . J . : Princeton University Press,
1979).
2
Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2nd edition (Princeton, N . J . : Princeton
University Press, 1966); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N . J . : Princeton
University Press, 1975); "The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,"
Journal of Modern History LIII, 1 (1981), pp. 49—72. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern
Political Thought, Volume I: The Renaissance. Volume II: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, Eng:
Cambridge University Press, 1978).
 Virtues, rights, and manners 39

always civic. Nevertheless, the affirmation of classical republicanism has some-

thing which is humanist about it; it entails the affirmation that homo is naturally
a citizen and most fully himself when living in a vivere civile, and humanist tech-
niques of scholarship and reschematizations of history are mobilized around this
affirmation whenever it is made.
What concerns me in this essay, however, is to set the civic humanist mode of
discoursing about politics alongside the philosophical and juristic, since it is here
that recent historiography has been most interestingly problematic. Though I see
Baron's book as a crucial beginning, I am not obliged thereby to review the
controversies to which it gave rise; however, one objection raised to his thesis,
by Riesenberg3 and others, was that citizenship in the Italian republics was for
the most part defined in jurisdictional and jurisprudential terms, rather than in
terms arising from a humanist vocabulary of pita activa and vivere civile. An Italian
commune was a juristic entity, inhabited by persons subject to rights and obli-
gations; to define these and to define the authority that protected them was to
define the citizen and his city, and the practice as opposed to the principles of
citizenship was overwhelmingly conducted in this language.
Those concerned to expound and explore the language of classical republican-
ism replied that while this was undeniably true, the two vocabularies were out-
standingly discontinuous. Francesco Guicciardini, for example, was a doctor of
civil law and had practiced as such; yet in his writings the language of republican
virtue is regularly if self-destructively employed, while the language of jurisprud-
ence hardly ever appears, least of all as a tool of normative political theory. Some-
thing very similar may be said of Machiavelli, though he was not to our knowl-
edge trained to the law. The argument that Guicciardini and Machiavelli were
impractical ideologues out of touch with civic reality does not seem to carry
conviction, though there is nothing that a systematically anti-intellectual histo-
rian may not be expected to argue sooner or later; and though there is an attempt
now going forward to interpret Machiavelli in the context of Roman civil law, it
will have to avoid the pitfall of arguing that while he never says anything which
is either about the law or expressed in its vocabulary, his silence is evidence of an
intent to destroy jurisprudence by ignoring it and talking in other terms.
We have, then, two vocabularies in which political thought has been con-
ducted that are markedly discontinuous with one another because they premise
different values, encounter different problems, and employ different strategies of
speech and argument. Their discontinuity becomes the more striking when we
see them used in the same context and to congruent purposes; and indeed Skinner
in the first volume of his Foundations has shown that from the late thirteenth
century the vindication of Italian republican independence was simultaneously
3
Peter N . Riesenberg, "Civism and Roman Law in Fourteenth-Century Italian Society," in Explo-
rations in Economic History, VII, 1-2 (1969), pp. 2 3 7 - 2 5 4 .
40 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

conducted in the republican and juristic modes. From Bartolus onwards, means
were found of arguing that a republic was sibi princeps and had acquired imperium
mixtum or merum over its citizens and territory; from Brunetto Latini onwards, it
was argued that a republic might demand libertas as the prerequisite of exercising
for itself and its citizens that civic independence and virtue which formed the
finest earthly life for man. The word libertas might be found in both contexts,
yet there was a profound distinction between its use in a juristic and in a human-
ist context, one connected - as has been pointed out by Hexter 4 - with the
distinction between liberty in the negative and in the positive sense.
Law, one may generalize, is of the empire rather than the republic. If one
argues in the tradition of Bartolus, the city acquires libertas in the sense of imper-
ium; possibly it reacquires it from a princeps or imperator; it acquires a freedom
to practice its own laws. If the citizen acquires libertas, he acquires a "freedom of
the city" — the original meaning of the French bourgeoisie — freedom to practice
his own affairs protected by the rights and immunities which the law affords
him, and also by the imperium which decrees and enforces the laws. But the libertas
of this bourgeois is not enough to make him a citizen in the Greek sense of one
who rules and is ruled. Guicciardini — and here perhaps (though not certainly)
he was thinking as a doctor of laws — could point out that the popolo could be
said to enjoy liberta from the oppression of powerful grandi, even when they did
not enjoy it in the sense of partecipazione in the governo dello stato.5 It could be
argued of course that they were most sure of it in the former sense when they also
had it in the latter, but Guicciardini could think of other ways of constituting a
public authority powerful enough to deter private oppression; what mattered
about a repubblica was that its authority should bepubblica. Nevertheless, to lower
the level of citizen participation in a republic could end by reconstituting it as a
legal monarchy, in which every man's libertas, even his bourgeoisie, was protected
by law which an absolute sovereign administered. In the last moments of his life
King Charles I was heard to proclaim from the scaffold that the people's liberty
under law had nothing to do with their having a voice in the government. The
juristic presentation of liberty was therefore negative; it distinguished between
libertas and imperium, freedom and authority, individuality and sovereignty, pri-
vate and public. This is its greatest role in the history of political thought, and
it performs this role by associating liberty with right or ius.
The republican vocabulary employed by dictatores, rhetoricians and humanists
articulated the positive conception of liberty: it contended that homo, the animale
politicum, was so constituted that his nature was completed only in a vita activa
4
J. H. Hexter, review of The Machiavellian Moment in History and Theory, XVI (1977), pp. 306-
37, reprinted as chapter 6 of On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of Modern History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
5
Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 126, 142-3, 146 n. 59, 232, 254.
 Virtues, rights, and manners 41

practiced in a vivere civile, and that libertas consisted in freedom from restraints
upon the practice of such a life. Consequently, the city must have libertas in the
sense of imperium, and the citizen must be participant in the imperium in order to
rule and be ruled. Only such a political system, said Guicciardini, was an excep-
tion to the general rule that government was a form of violent domination over
others. 6 But it was not central to this assertion that the citizen should claim
rights as against the imperium in which he was himself participant; and for this
reason Thomas Hobbes in the next century declared that the libertas emblazoned
on the towers of Lucca did not prevent that city exercising absolute sovereignty
over the lives of its citizens.7
James Harrington retorted that Hobbes had mistaken the issue, and the libertas
of the Lucchese citizen consisted in his membership of the republic - he once
called it "King People" — which exercised the sovereignty. 8 The two men were
talking past one another. Hobbes argued juridically: he held that there were
rights, that rights constituted sovereignty, that rights could not thereafter be
pleaded against sovereignty. But the vocabulary of the law is almost wholly lack-
ing from Harrington's discourse. He argued as a humanist: he held that there
was in the human animal something planted there by God, which required ful-
fillment in the practice of active self-rule, and to this something — which he was
prepared to call sometimes "nature," sometimes "reason" and sometimes "gov-
ernment" — he was also prepared to give the altogether crucial name "virtue." It
is central to the argument I am developing that "virtue" cannot be satisfactorily
reduced to the status of right or assimilated to the vocabulary of jurisprudence.
"Virtue" is a word with a long history and a great many meanings. It could
be used synonymously with "nature," "essence" or "essential characteristic" - as
when Moliere's doctoral candidate says that opium puts you to sleep because it
has a dormitive virtue; it could bear the Roman-Machiavellian meaning of a
capacity to act in confrontation with fortuna; it could mean little more than a
fixed propensity to practice one of several ethical codes, though this propensity
was usually said to require enhancement by Socratic philosophy or Christian grace
or both. As developed in the republican vocabulary, it seems to have borne several
further emphases. It could signify a devotion to the public good; it could signify
the practice, or the preconditions of the practice, of relations of equality between
citizens engaged in ruling and being ruled; and lastly, since citizenship was above
all a mode of action and of practicing the active life, it could signify that active
ruling quality — practiced in republics by citizens equal with one another and
devoted to the public good — which confronted fortuna and was known to Re-

6
Ibid., pp. 124-5 and nn. 21-22.
7
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), Book II, ch. 18, in any edition.
8
James Harrington, The Commonwealth ofOceana, 1656. J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), The Political Works of
James Harrington (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 170-1, 229.
42 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

naissance Italians as virtu, but which, as Machiavelli was to show, entailed prac-
tice of a code of values not necessarily identical with the virtues of a Christian.
The last-mentioned were not necessarily political at all, which is why Montes-
quieu, in the preface to the Esprit des Lois, found it desirable to distinguish be-
tween vertu morale, vertu chretienne, and vertu politique; the third of these was for-
mally unlike the others and entailed a devotion to equality before the laws of a
republic. 9 But we must now ask in what sense it is that the word ''laws" has just
been used, which is part of the problem of the sense in which the word lois was
used by Montesquieu.
Virtue as devotion to the public good approached identification with a concept
of justice; if the citizens were to practice a common good, they must distribute
its components among themselves, and must even distribute the various modes
of participating in its distribution. Aristotelian, Polybian, and Ciceronian analy-
sis had shown that these modes were highly various and capable of being com-
bined in a diversity of complex patterns; political science in the sense of the
science of politeia took this as its subject matter. Moreover, a particular mode of
participation might be seen as appropriate to the specialized social individual: to
be proper to him, to be his propriety or property. Ideas of suum cuique, of distri-
bution and of justice were therefore inherent in the civic republican tradition.
But there were a number of senses in which the republican or political conception
of virtue exceeded the limits of jurisprudence and therefore of justice as a jurist
conceived it.
The notion of ruling and being ruled entailed a notion of equality to which
that of distribution was not altogether adequate. When one had been accorded
the share or role in the political-distributive process appropriate to one's social
personality and another had been accorded his, it might be said that cuique had
been accorded suum; but the concept of ruling and being ruled demanded that
each of them should recognize that though by any standard but one the shares
accorded each were commensurate but unequal, there was a criterion of equality
(in ruling and being ruled) whereby each remained the other's equal and they
shared in the possession of a common, public personality. While this equality
presupposed both distribution and justice, there was a sense in which it tran-
scended them and was not distributable.
If partecipazione was distributed according to socially specialized needs and nothing
else, there would (said the advocates of republican virtue) be no res publica — in
Aristotle's terms, there would be nopolis - in which participation, equality, and
ruling and being ruled were possible; to distribute public authority as a matter
of private right was to them the classic definition of corruption, and under cor-
ruption there would in the end be no rights at all. Equality was a moral impera-
9
Charles Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, De /'Esprit des hois, 1751 (Oeuvres Completes, Paris: Galli-
mard, 1949), p. 4.
 Virtues, rights, and manners 43

tive, not as a matter of ensuring quisques right to suum - though it did discharge
that function among others — but as the only means of ensuring res publica: of
ensuring that imperium should be truly public, and not private masquerading as
public.
The republic or politeia solved the problem of authority and liberty by making
quisque participant in the authority by which he was ruled; this entailed relations
of equality which made in fact extremely stern demands upon him, but by prem-
ising that he was kata phusin formed to participate in such a citizenship it could
be said that it was his "nature," "essence," or "virtue" to do so. But nature may
be developed, but cannot be distributed; you cannot distribute a telos, only the
means to it; virtue cannot therefore be reduced to matter of right. The laws of a
republic — the lois obeyed by Montesquieu's vertu politique — were therefore far
less regulae juris or modes of conflict resolution than they were ordini or "orders";
they were the formal structure within which political nature developed to its
inherent end. This is the meaning of Harrington's dictum: "Good orders make
evil men good and bad orders make good men evil." 10 He said this not because
he did not believe that men were by nature good and political, but because he
did.
It begins to look, however, as if the characteristic tendency of jurisprudence
was to lower the level of participation and deny the premise that man is by nature
political. One might argue that this is because the overwhelming preoccupation
of the jurist is with that which can be distributed, with things and rights; if in
suum cuique we read suum as an adjective, the unstated nouns are res and ius. There
is much to be said regarding the meanings which res can assume in the juristic
vocabulary and the history of those meanings; but for the moment we may de-
velop the contention that since law is of the empire rather than the republic, its
attention is fixed on commercium rather than politicum. As the polis and res publica
declined toward the level of municipality, two things happened: the universe
became pervaded by law, the locus of whose sovereignty was extra-civic, and the
citizen came to be defined not by his actions and virtues, but by his rights to and
in things. We must resist the temptation to overdefine res as material objects;
but one major value of jurisprudence in the history of mental culture has been its
insistence upon, and enrichment of our understanding of, the thick layers of
social and material reality by which the animale politicum is surrounded and the
complex normative life which he must lead in distributing and otherwise man-
aging the things composing these many layers.
Jurisprudence reinforced by rhetoric — it was in the republic that the two
tended to become enemies — was the Renaissance mind's main key to understand-
ing the world of socialized things. In a recent essay, Donald Kelley has suggested

10
Harrington, Oceana; Works, p. 838.
44 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

that it was the legal humanists of that era who inaugurated a modern understand-
ing of history, and that the role of civic humanists has been overstated. 11 It is
not exactly news, but of course it is true, that the lawyers and not the republicans
were the first social historians. 12 It has always been the case against the classical
citizen that he is at heart a tragic hero, unsafe to associate with, who insists that
he is living in the realm of freedom and not that of necessity. This is why he is
concerned with nondistributable goods like equality and virtue, and it is also
why he is constantly confronted withfortuna. In The Machiavellian Moment, I was
concerned to study the material foundations - arms first and property after -
which he found it necessary that virtue should have in the realm of necessity.
I am allowing my language to become Arendtian because I am interested in
the possibility that jurisprudence can be said to be predominantly social, con-
cerned with the administration of things and with human relations conducted
through the mediation of things, as opposed to a civic vocabulary of the purely
political, concerned with the unmediated personal relations entailed by equality
and by ruling and being ruled. I am also a non-Marxist interested in finding
circumstances under which Marxist language can be employed with validity, and
I am intrigued by the connection we seem to be uncovering between law, liber-
alism, and bourgeoisie. "With a great price bought I this freedom," says the Ro-
man officer in Acts 21 according to the Authorized Version;13 but in the French
translation published at Geneva in 1588 he says: ilfay acquis ceste bourgeoisie avec
une grande somme d'argent." He is talking about citizenship in the limited sense of
a negative liberty to enjoy one's life and goods in immunity from arbitrary action
by servants of the prince (he has just discovered that he cannot flog St. Paul
because the latter enjoys bourgeoisie romaine too). We are discovering (1) that lib-
erty defined by law invests the citizen with rights but no part in imperium\ (2)
that law discriminates between the libertas which it guarantees to the citizen and
the imperium or auctoritas of the prince or magistrate who administers the law; (3)
that the law defines the citizen in terms of the ius ad rem and ius in re which he
acquires through his role in the possession, conveyance, and administration of
things. Civil law, then, presents us with possessive individualism in a form long
predating early modern capitalism, and it presents us with an ancient form of
that separation and recombination of authority and liberty which political theo-
rists term liberalism. It is of no small interest to find the word bourgeoisie em-
ployed to denote a negative citizenship, consisting of the possession and transfer-
ence of things subject to law and sovereign authority; for this casts light upon
II
Donald R. Kelley, "Civil Science in the Renaissance; Jurisprudence Italian Style," The Historical
Journal XXII, 4 (1979), pp. 777-794.
12
J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1957); Donald R. Kelley, The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language,
Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).
13
Hexter, On Historians, pp. 2 9 5 - 2 9 6 .
 Virtues, rights, and manners 45
that little-studied subject, the history of the noun and concept bourgeoisie before
it acquired its Marxist meaning.
Social first and political after, the civil and common law define individuals as
possessors by investing them with right and property in things, and ultimately
(as in Locke) in themselves. They define law itself as Janus-faced, because it is at
one and the same time the right of the subject and the command of the prince.
In a recent remarkable study of Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Develop-
ment, Richard Tuck has emphasized the extent to which individuals were invested
with rights that they might surrender them absolutely to the sovereign.14 He is
still playing one pole of the juristic magnet against the other, and is recounting
with renewed sophistication the classical history of what we have come to term
liberalism: the story of how rights became the precondition, the occasion, and
the effective cause of sovereignty, so that sovereignty appeared to be the creature
of the rights it existed to protect. It is impossible to deny that this is the principal
theme of the history of early modern political thought. But it has long been the
principal criticism of the liberal synthesis that because it defined the individual
as right-bearer and proprietor, it did not define him as possessing a personality
adequate to participation in self-rule, with the result that the attempt to ground
sovereignty in personality was not thoroughly carried out. I do not intend to use
history as a means of exploring this normative criticism; but I shall investigate
some historiographic consequences of the discovery that alongside the history of
liberalism, which is a matter of law and right, there existed throughout the early
modern period a history of republican humanism, in which personality was con-
sidered in terms of virtue.
In The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Skinner opened up a thirteenth-
and fourteenth-century scene in which the jurist and humanist vindications of
republican liberty were conducted side by side, as far as we can see without
overlapping and apparently without colliding. He carried his exploration of civic
humanist politics as far as 1530, when this form of thought is held to have been
eclipsed with the last Florentine republic; and after a study of the more Ciceron-
ian humanism of England and the more juristic humanism of France, he trans-
posed the second volume of his history into the key prescribed by the law-cen-
tered paradigm. That is, it became his business to deal with the themes of relations
between the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, the revolt against the Catholic
view of the divine order, and the problem of resistance within the civil order.
These questions were predominantly discussed in the vocabularies of law; and
even their philosophical matrix was one which presupposed that the truths of the
divine order were to be described as laws, and proceeded to ask whether these
laws were known to us as aspects of the divine nature or as commands of the
14
Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1980).
46 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

divine will. Skinner emphasized the historical role of the Ockhamist and'Sor-
bonnist adoption of the latter position, and showed the ways in which it was
conducive to proto-Protestant theses concerning man's relation to God, to Stoic
rather than Aristotelian views of the origin of the civil order, and to theories of
the locus of political authority in which choices between absolutist, populist, and
individualist alternatives tended to become starker. 15 He was thus able to con-
clude his book at a point where theories of the state, of resistance to the state,
and of civil society as the ground of such resistance, had become consolidated in
their early modern forms.
This enterprise could be conducted within the requirements of the law-
centered paradigm, and did not require much allusion to the vocabulary of re-
publican virtue. It is true that when Machiavelli was read by jurists and scholas-
tics, he tended to emerge in the company of Ockham, Marsilius, and Luther, and
there are Spanish Thomists who sought to refute him and them in a single pack-
age. But to do this it was necessary to translate Machiavelli into a language he
had altogether ignored; whether he intended anything by ignoring it is a question
past solution. The point here is that, if there is an independently evolving vocab-
ulary of republican virtue, it is not necessary to trace its history in order to deal
with that of the controversies pursued in Skinner's second volume; and because
his history of republican thought effectively concludes about 1530, and his book
as a whole comes to an end about 1590, he does not reach the point where
republican virtue somewhat unexpectedly resurfaced in the otherwise law-
centered, king-centered, and God-centered thinking of the Anglophone north.
There are good reasons for this hiatus, yet I continue to lament it; for we need
some answers to the question which Hexter has characteristically phrased as "how
the devil" did this happen? 16
To write the history of political thought in law-centered terms — which is
largely equivalent to writing it as the history of liberalism — is, as we have seen,
paradigmatically enjoined; and to contend, as is done here, that the languages of
right and virtue are not readily interchangeable is to make the latter appear an
intruder and anomaly in a field defined by the former. There are signs — not,
however, to be found in Skinner — of an impulse to ignore the civic humanist
paradigm or to assimilate it to the juristic. Kelley's essay suggests that civic
humanism has had its fair share of attention, and we should now get back to the
serious business of studying jurisprudence; Tuck, too, strives to bring the repub-
lican image within the rubric of civil and natural law. He seizes on the construc-
tion, by the Dutch theorists Pieter de la Court and Baruch Spinoza, of a classical
republic out of a jurist's state of nature, and suggests that I would have had to
15
J. G. A. Pocock, "Reconstructing the Traditions: Quentin Skinner's Historians' History of Political
Thought," The Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory III, 3 (1979), pp- 95—113.
16
Hexter, On Historians, p. 288.
 Virtues, rights, and manners Al

modify my conclusions if I had taken account of these writers. 17 It has been

shown, however, by Haitsma Mulier that they were polemicists of the States
party, anxious to invest the republic — i.e., the city or province — with sover-
eignty, and therefore going back to the creation of jus in a state of nature as a
means of establishing its majestas rather than its virtus.18
Prior at any rate to the Scottish jurisprudence of the eighteenth century — on
which we await forthcoming work by James Moore, 19 Nicholas Phillipson and
others — and to comparable developments in France and in the thought of Rous-
seau, it seems highly important to stress that the two modes remained incom-
mensurate. Virtue was not reducible to right, and if a full-bodied republic should
be found emerging from the jurist's state of nature, it was for the less than
republican purpose of creating and transferring the rights which were all that a
state of nature could generate. Populism, therefore, which arose from investing
a populus with dominium, jus, and imperium, was linguistically and politically dis-
tinct from republicanism, which arose from investing them with virtus. The for-
mer was in principle likely to generate bourgeoisie, the latter the vivere civile; and
much confusion exists because the German language uses the same word to de-
note "bourgeois" and "citizen."
Viewing the historiographical field in North American perspective, I am fur-
ther aware that to reassert the law-centered paradigm may have the effect of
maintaining the liberal paradigm in a form which I have come to find misleading.
There is a conventional wisdom, now taught to students, to the effect that polit-
ical theory became "liberal" — whatever that means, and whether or not for more
or less Marxist reasons - about the time of Hobbes and Locke, and has in America
remained so ever since. I find this a serious distortion of history, 20 not because
Hobbes and Locke did not take part in a great remodeling of the relation of right
to sovereignty, conducted within the premises of the law-centered paradigm, but
because to study that paradigm and nothing else leads to a radical misunderstand-
ing of the roles in history played by both liberalism and jurisprudence, as well as
of the relations between right and virtue with which this article has been con-
cerned. I propose in conclusion to offer what I consider a better historical inter-
pretation, which will permit me to deal with the third term of the triad compos-
ing my title: the concept of "manners."
17
Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 141, n. 58.
18
E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century
(Assen: Van Gorcum, 1980).
19
James Moore, "Locke and the Scottish Jurists," distributed by the Conference for the Study of
Political Thought in "John Locke and the Political Thought of the 1680s; papers presented at a
symposium sponsored by the Conference for the Study of Political Thought and the Folger Institute
for Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century Studies," 1980.
20
J. G. A. Pocock, "The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism," in J. G. A. Pocock
and Richard Ashcraft, John Locke (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1980); and ch. 3, this
volume.
48 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

Hobbes's work coincides in point of time with Harrington's, which played a

leading role in introducing concepts of republican virtue into England; and Locke's
Treatises are closely associated, and yet cannot be connected, with the establish-
ment of the eighteenth-century Whig commercial regime and the reaction against
it in the name of virtue. We may endorse the judgment of Skinner and Dunn
that Locke's work is "the classic text of radical Calvinist politics" 21 - which were
certainly constructed within the law-centered paradigm - and yet add the sug-
gestion that this was a seventeenth-century enterprise, and that Locke's politics
mark the close of one age rather than the beginning of another. From 1688 to
1776 (and after), the central question in Anglophone political theory was not
whether a ruler might be resisted for misconduct, but whether a regime founded
on patronage, public debt, and professionalization of the armed forces did not
corrupt both governors and governed; and corruption was a problem in virtue,
not in right, which could never be solved by asserting a right of resistance.
Political thought therefore moves decisively, though never irrevocably, out of the
law-centered paradigm and into the paradigm of virtue and corruption.
The appearance of a new ruling elite (or "monied interest") of stockholders and
officeholders, whose relations with government were those of mutual dependence,
was countered by a renewed (or "neo-Harringtonian") assertion of the ideal of the
citizen, virtuous in his devotion to the public good and his engagement in rela-
tions of equality and ruling-and-being-ruled, but virtuous also in his indepen-
dence of any relation which might render him corrupt. For this, the citizen
required the autonomy of real property, and many rights (including the right to
keep and bear arms) were necessary in order to assure it to him; but the function
of property remained the assurance of virtue. It was hard to see how he could
become involved in exchange relationships, or in relationships governed by the
media of exchange (especially when these took the form of paper tokens of public
credit) without becoming involved in dependence and corruption. The ideals of
virtue and commerce could not therefore be reconciled to one another, so long as
"virtue" was employed in the austerely civic, Roman, and Arendtian sense se-
lected at the outset of this essay and highly active in the eighteenth-century
debate; but now it was perceived that such a virtuous citizen was so much of a
political and so little of a social animal as to be ancient and not modern, ancient
to the point of being archaic.
Virtue was redefined - though there are signs of an inclination to abandon the
word - with the aid of a concept of "manners." As the individual moved from
the farmer-warrior world of ancient citizenship or Gothic libertas, he entered an
increasingly transactional universe of "commerce and the arts" — the latter term

21
Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, II, p. 239; John Dunn, The Political Thought
of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
 Virtues, rights, and manners 49

signifying both the productive and audio-visual skills - in which his relation-
ships and interactions with other social beings, and with their products, became
increasingly complex and various, modifying and developing more and more as-
pects of his personality.22 Commerce, leisure, cultivation, and — it was soon
perceived with momentous consequences - the division and diversification of la-
bor combined to bring this about; and if he could no longer engage directly in
the activity and equality of ruling and being ruled, but had to depute his govern-
ment and defense to specialized and professional representatives, he was more
than compensated for his loss of antique virtue by an indefinite and perhaps
infinite enrichment of his personality, the product of the multiplying relation-
ships, with both things and persons, in which he became progressively involved.
Since these new relationships were social and not political in character, the ca-
pacities which they led the individual to develop were called not "virtues" but
"manners," a term in which the ethical mores and the juristic consuetudines were
combined, with the former predominating. The social psychology of the age
declared that encounters with things and persons evoked passions and refined
them into manners; it was preeminently the function of commerce to refine the
passions and polish the manners; and the social ethos of the age of enlightenment
was built upon the concept of close encounters of the third kind.
"Manners," declared Burke, "are of more importance than laws . . . they aid
morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them." 23 I would like to sug-
gest that he had in mind ordini rather than statutes: the "laws" made by legisla-
tors framing a classical order; for the concept of "manners," though it does not
belong to the operational vocabulary of jurisprudence, was in fact enormously
advanced by and through the study of natural and civil law, particularly jus
gentium. We are now in the era of a revived and modernized natural jurisprud-
ence, based on the notion that an intensive study of the variations of social be-
havior throughout space and time would reveal the underlying principles of hu-
man nature on which the diversities of conduct were based and from which lois
took their esprit. Jurisprudence, whatever it was like as the formal study of law,
was the social science of the eighteenth century, the matrix of both the study and
the ideology of manners. Once again law was pitted against virtue, things against
persons, the empire against the republic. The tensions between virtue and com-
merce, ancient and modern, helped endow eighteenth-century jurisprudence with
the complex historical schemes and the nascent historicism which make Adam
Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence a theory of the progress of society through the
four stages of production. It has even been possible for Forbes and Stein to trace
this development of jurisprudence without ascribing it to the ideological need to

22
See ch. 6, this volume.
23
Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1796 (The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke,
London, 1826, vol. VIII, p. 172). See below, p. 209.
50 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

defend commerce against ancient virtue; 24 but there is no question but that this
need was being met and an ideological defense waged.
But the defense of commercial society, no less than the vindication of classical
virtue, was carried out with the weapons of humanism. The eighteenth century
presents us with a legal humanism, or humanist jurisprudence, whose roots were
in Kelley's "civil science of the Renaissance," being employed against the civic
humanism of the classical republicans in a way hard to parallel in the sixteenth
century. The effect was to construct a liberalism which made the state's authority
guarantee the liberty of the individual's social behavior, but had no intention
whatever of impoverishing that behavior by confining it to the rigorous assertion
of ego-centered individual rights. On the contrary, down at least to the end of
the 1780s, it was the world of ancient politics which could be made to seem rigid
and austere, impoverished because underspecialized; and the new world of the
social and sentimental, the commercial and cultural, was made to proliferate with
alternatives to ancient virtus and libertas, largely in consequence of the jurists'
fascination with the universe of res. Now, at last, a right to things became a way
to the practice of virtue, so long as virtue could be defined as the practice and
refinement of manners. A commercial humanism had been not unsuccessfully
constructed.
About 1789, a wedge was driven through this burgeoning universe, and rather
suddenly we begin to hear denunciations of commerce as founded upon soullessly
rational calculation and the cold, mechanical philosophy of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke,
and Newton. How this reversal of strategies came about is not at present well
understood. It may have had to do with the rise of an administrative ideology,
in which Condorcet, Hartley, and Bentham tried to erect a science of legislation
on a foundation of highly reductionist assumptions. But that is another chapter
in the history of both jurisprudence and humanism: one lying outside the confines
of the present model.
24
Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1976);
Peter Stein, Legal Evolution: The Story of an Idea (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,
1980). See also Pocock, "Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations
between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretations of Eighteenth-Century
Social Thought," in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment,
ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
 3
< =
Authority and property
The question of liberal origins

If one sought to characterize the drift of recent historical thinking about the crises
of seventeenth-century England, one might well say that it has been in the direc-
tion of a heightened awareness of the dialectic between authority and liberty in
both the politics and the political thinking of the period. In the field of general
history, J. H. Plumb's very important theses of the "growth of stability" and the
"growth of oligarchy" have shifted some of our attention away from the first crisis
period of 1640-60 and toward the second crisis period of 1680-1720.l We now
see the latter as culminating in the establishment of that oligarchical, commer-
cial, and imperial Britain against which the American Revolution was directed,
but whose problems America in some respects inherited;2 and the search for the
origins of this regime has obliged us to go back to the first crisis period and
examine it in terms of restoration as well as of revolution. It does not diminish
the radical or the revolutionary character of the things which happened at the
beginning and end of the 1640s to say that we cannot understand the revolution-
ary impulse without also understanding its exhaustion; the study of how revolu-
tions die is a little-known branch of political science.3 Perhaps the revival of
emphasis on this problem reflects the mood of our own society since 1970; whether
this is so or not, it is a problem we do well to study. We shall not understand
the way in which the traditional constitution and the rule of the established elites
were challenged and changed during the 1640s until we understand how and
why they were apparently restored in 1660, and how far that restoration was
apparent and how far real. We still lack a good conceptual vocabulary for dealing

From After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, edited by Barbara C. Malament, pp. 331—
54. © 1980 University of Pennsylvania Press; reprinted by permission.
1
). H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (London, 1967).
2
See chap. 4, this volume. Both chaps. 3 and 4 were first written in 1976.
3
Cf. James H. Meisel, Counter-revolutions: How Revolutions Die (New York, 1966).

51
52 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

with this problem; the various attempts which have been made to determine how
far the restored order was more commercially oriented than the prerevolutionary
are useful but by no means sufficient.
However, these are problems for historians; political theorists, on the other
hand, continue (rightly) to make assumptions in their own work which they base
on an understanding of what occurred in seventeenth-century political thought.
What Hobbes said and what Locke said is still supposed to be important to our
understanding of our own political culture; what have the historians been doing
to that? One must still begin by emphasizing that we cannot study the first crisis
period solely in terms of Hobbes, or the second in terms of Locke; each period
furnishes a complex texture of thought which both provides the context for Hobbes
(or Locke) and proves to have functioned autonomously, in ways which are im-
portant to us without necessarily including Hobbes (or Locke) at all. Thus, our
understanding of the thought of the first crisis period must continue to focus very
largely on the enormously significant topic of that great explosion of quasi-
democratic antinomianism which we call Puritan radicalism for short; and this is
a subject which seems to have grown more problematical as our understanding of
it has deepened. We know much more than we did twenty years ago about the
workings and inner logic of millennialism and antinomianism; one need only
mention the names of Norman Cohn, William M. Lamont, Sacvan Bercovitch,
and Christopher Hill in this connection;4 and we have moved away from the
problem, much debated a generation ago, of how far religious perception was a
mask for perception of material and social change, to the extent that we can now
see that, for the Puritan radical, spirit and matter were virtually interchangeable
terms, so that arguing for the primacy of the one mode of thought over the other
is like arguing about the chicken and the egg. There is even a tendency to see
this hylozoistic spiritual materialism as the mainstream of radical thought, and
the scientific revolution of the Restoration period as, in ideological terms, a con-
servative reaction aiming at the separation of spirit and matter in the name of
authority and rational order.5
But there are problems here for those who wish to interpret Puritan radicalism
as part of the consciousness of a revolutionary bourgeoisie: a radical antinomian-
ism which is essentially part of the continuing protest of the Brethren of the Free
Spirit seems to cut too deep into social and spiritual experience to be dismissible
(even though it is partly explicable) as the ideology of discontented small trades-
men and craft-masters, and when one compares the earlier with the later writings
of Christopher Hill — a major student of this subject — one seems to detect
4
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, rev. ed. (New York, 1967); William M. Lamont,
Marginal Prynne, 1660-1669 (London, 1963) and Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660
(London, 1969); Sacvan Bercovitch, Typology and Early American Literature (Amherst, 1972). For
Hill, see n. 6 below.
3
M . C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Ithaca, 1976); Charles Web-
ster, The Great Instauration (New York, 1976).
 Authority and property: The question of liberal origins 53

something like a shift from an Old Left to a New Left: perspective. In his earlier
works, Independents and Levellers appear as pioneers of an entrepreneurial and
market society, much as they do in the interpretations of C. B. Macpherson; but
as Hill continues his investigations of chiliasm and antinomianism,6 we move
left even of the Diggers, into the society of Seekers, Ranters, Familists, and
Muggletonians, and the social setting is less that of a nascent bourgeoisie than
that of the roving masterless men from the margins of craft and cultivation in a
preindustrial society — social types who might appear at any time from the thir-
teenth to the seventeenth century, and who look more like intellectual equiva-
lents of Eric Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels? or the "wandering braves" of early
Mao, than the "industrious sort of people" about whom Hill has often told us. I
do not doubt - knowing my Marxists - that a diligent attempt will be made to
sort out the protobourgeois from the prebourgeois among the English radicals;
and I do not doubt - knowing my seventeenth century - that this classification
will not turn out to be very satisfactory. Writing as one no more committed than
Hexter to a sequential class interpretation of history, I suspect that what we have
found is the radical consciousness of Laslett's World We Have Lost8 — that of a
society of masters and servants.
A further set of problems in the interpretation of Puritan radicalism is created
by that shift of emphasis from revolution toward restoration which furnishes the
general background of this survey. If we are to organize our thinking around the
fact that the first crisis period culminated in the apparent re-establishment of the
traditional elites and the second in the confirmation of Whig oligarchy, we must
look back at that marvelous explosion of radical consciousness which occurred
around 1649 and ask where it all went to. It is very tempting to reply — we
would all like to believe - that it went somehow underground in Restoration
London, or in the English villages under the game laws, and resurfaced a century
and a half later, in the era of Tom Paine and William Blake. There is a roman-
ticism of the English Left which feels that this must have happened, and it is
perfectly possible that it did; but neither the school of Christopher Hill, with
their emphasis on the middle seventeenth century, nor the schools of George
Rude and E. P. Thompson,9 with their emphasis on the late eighteenth, have
6
Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the
Seventeenth Century (London, 1958; New York 1964); Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution
(Oxford, 1965); Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, 2d ed. (New York, 1967); God's
Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York, 1970); Antichrist in Seventeenth-
Century England (London and New York, 1971); The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas
During the English Revolution (New York, 1972).
7
Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York, 1965).
8
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: English Society Before and After the Coming of Industry (London,
1965).
9
George Rude, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730—
1848 (New York, 1964); The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959); Wilkes and Liberty: A
Social Study of1763 to 1774 (Oxford, 1962); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working
54 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

yet brought to light evidence which enables us to speak very confidently about
what happened to underground radicalism in the intervening period. What, after
all, do we mean by "underground"? Where does popular or populist radicalism
go in an era of repression? Is it kept going as an underground tradition by obscure
articulate groups, or does it retreat into silence, to a level of subconscious or
subarticulate potentiality, waiting to become actual again? If we are unsure which
of these to look for, it is for lack of evidence rather than lack of theory.
But in a restorationist perspective — one in which the recovery of authority
looks as important (if not as attractive) as the assertion of liberty — we find
ourselves re-examining the radical tradition itself and asking what elements of
authority may be found even there. 10 The reality of antinomian libertarianism is
not to be denied; all the same, the origins of all Puritan political thought are
largely to be found in the search for the godly magistrate, and there is a sense in
which the true meaning of antinomianism was that the individual must be pre-
pared to act as his own magistrate — which imparted a peculiar tension to the
definition of the individual as male family head, and to what the prophetic women
of the Puritan sects thought about that. 11 The point is, however, that we must
be prepared to find magisterial as well as radical elements at the heart of the
antinomian tradition itself; even Gerrard Winstanley has been shown to be in-
volved in the search for magistracy, and William Sedgwick — a friend but not an
ally of Reeve and Muggleton — can be shown to have employed the antinomian
scepticism of all claims to authority as a paradoxical justification of submission
to whatever authority exists. 12 And this was Sedgwick's central and permanent
position; we should not think that every antinomian retreated into quietism only
after his radical and revolutionary impulses had been defeated. In a world of
magistracy, the antinomian effect could start at several points and move in several
directions, and this is to say nothing of the broader theoretical contention — one
not limited to the seventeenth century - that it is impossible to assert even the
most radical liberty without asserting some conception of authority at the same
time. Even the Putney debaters, even George Fox, even Lawrence Clarkson, would
have agreed unhesitatingly with this thesis.
Class (New York, 1964); Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London, 1975); "The Moral
Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, 50 (February 1971):
76-136.
10
J. H. Hexter, "A New Framework for Social History," in Reappraisals in History (Evanston, 1961),
was the first to propose this restorationist perspective.
11
Keith Thomas, "Women in the Civil War Sects," in Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660, ed. Trevor Aston
(New York, 1965).
12
The distinction between the "magisterial" and "radical" Reformations may be studied in S. H.
Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962). On Winstanley, see G. E. Aylmer, ed.,
"England's Spirit Unfoulded," Past and Present 40 (July 1968):3-15; J. C. Davis, "Gerrard Win-
stanely and the Restoration of True Magistracy," Past and Present 70 (February 1976): 76—93. On
William Sedgwick, see article in Dictionary of National Biography; works in Donald Wing ed., Short
Title Catalogue . . . , (3:224—25); and in particular Animadversions upon a Letter and Paper,firstsent
to His Highness by certain gentlemen and others in Wales (London, 1656).
 Authority and property: The question of liberal origins 55

The shift which I am trying to describe in our understanding of the first critical
period can now be stated in another way. From William Haller to Christopher
Hill, the emphasis has rested upon the idea of liberation, upon the rediscovery
by the saint of his own radical liberty, in salvation, in society, or in both.13 There
is no need to abandon that emphasis; it retains validity; but we have been obliged
to set beside it the perception that seventeenth-century men were still pre-
modern creatures for whom authority and magistracy were part of a natural and
cosmic order, and that the starting point of much of their most radical thinking
was the unimaginable fact that, between 1642 and 1649, authority in England
had simply collapsed.14 In this reading, the central polemic of the English Rev-
olution is not the Putney Debates, but the Engagement Controversy; and to say
this is not to be describing an ideological reaction by conservative scholars to the
events of 1968 or 1970. The line of research in question is some years older, and
it presents English thinkers as responding with the greatest radicalism to the
proposition that since authority had disintegrated, and God had withheld his
word as to where it was now lodged, the individual must rediscover in the depths
of his own being the means of reconstituting and obeying it. The pessimism of
Anthony Ascham was a protest against the individual's being placed in this di-
lemma;15 the patriarchalism of Sir Robert Filmer now became a demonstration
that he did not possess the natural freedom which would otherwise place him in
it;16 but we can tabulate a list of singularly tough-minded responses to the chal-
lenge. Antinomianism itself was one: if the law had been withdrawn from men,
it was that the spirit might take its place, and we can think of antinomianism as
egg as well as chicken, as effect as well as cause of the English dilemma. But it
is only one such response, and both Hobbes and Harrington can be depicted as
answering the question what it was in men that ultimately made authority pos-
sible. To say that the individual sought to preserve himself, drew the sword to
do so, but gave up his sword to Nimrod or Leviathan when he discovered the
futility of the method, was one way of defining the roots of political capacity;17
13
William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1955, 1963).
14
J. G. A. Pocock, Order and Authority in Two English Revolutions (Wellington, 1973).
15
Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London, 1954); Irene Coltman,
Private Men and Public Causes (London, 1962); and above all, John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice:
the Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1968).
16
For Filmer's role in the Engagement Controversy see Wallace, Destiny His Choice, and for a full and
serious study of his thought, Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford, 1975).
Also James W . Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto, 1978). Wallace has
since argued that Patriarcha itself was written about 1648.
17
Wallace, Destiny His Choice; and Quentin Skinner, "Hobbes's Leviathan," Historical Journal 1 (1964):
321—33; "History and Ideology in the English Revolution," Historical Journal 8 (1965): 151—78;
"The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought," Historical Journal 9 (1966): 2 8 6 - 3 1 7 ;
"The Context of Hobbes's Theory of Political Obligation," in Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters (New York, 1972); "Conquest and
Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy," in The Interregnum: The Quest for
Settlement, ed. G. E. Aylmer (Hamden, Conn., 1972).
56 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

to say that the individual whose sword was rooted in property was free from
fortune to pursue the goods of the mind, and could now join with others to form
a political body whose soul was collective intelligence, was another and a very
different way;18 but both were answers to the question how men left with nothing
but the sword could restore the rule of reason and authority. It is important to
add that for both Hobbes and Harrington - and forming the closest link between
their respective systems — a principal motive in reconstituting a natural politics
was to deny separate authority to the clergy;19 but nearly all the threads in the
inconceivably complex texture of English thought in the first critical period can
be attached to and often deduced from the radical need to reconstruct authority,
and though this is not the only valid mode of approach, it was quite certainly the
one uppermost in the minds of most people then engaged in systematic thought.
There can be no question of diminishing the radical libertarianism of the period
when one points out the significance of the conservative impulse; the two were
inherent in one another.
I want next to apply aspects of this analysis to the question of authority and
property, which furnishes the first part of this paper's title. Debaters during the
Puritan revolution had much to say about property, and began, as we know, to
distinguish between the various historical modes in which it operated in society;
and it is one of the most difficult, and valuable, questions before us to determine
how far these discussions were based upon actual, if mediated, perceptions of the
changing forms of property in contemporary reality. To begin with, it does us
no harm to recall that the word is spelt in seventeenth-century printings both as
property and as propriety; there is no consistent change in meaning between the two
spellings, and had there been a tape recorder as well as a shorthand writer in the
church at Putney, we might have learned something by hearing how Ireton and
Rainborough pronounced the word. The point is that property was a juridical term
before it was an economic one; it meant that which was properly one's own, that
to which one properly had a claim, and words such asproprium andproprietas were
applied as much to the right as to the thing, and to many things as well as the
means of sustenance or production. Clearly, the word was often used in its crudely
obvious sense; when a speaker in Richard Cromwell's Parliament says, "All gov-
ernment is founded in property, else the poor must rule it," 20 there is not much
point in being sophisticated about him; and it is often valuable to search behind

18
J. G. A. Pocock, The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), particularly book I of
The Prerogative of Popular Government (1658).
19
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), pp. 396-400; "Time, History and
Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes," in Politics, Language and Time (New York 1971);
introduction to The Political Works of James Harrington; "Contexts for the Study of James Harring-
ton," // Pensiero Politico XI, 1 (1978): 2 0 - 3 5 .
20
Adam Baynes; see J. T. Rutt, ed., The Diary of Thomas Burton . . . , 4 vols. (London, 1828),
3:147-48.
 Authority and property: The question of liberal origins 57

the word in its juridical uses for perceptions of what we mean when we employ
it in its economic-productive sense. This is what some important seventeenth-
century analysts were doing. It is now naive to become excited whenever we espy
the word "property" in seventeenth-century debate, and to suppose that masks
are being cast aside and we now see what the debate was really about. Sometimes
they are not being cast aside, and sometimes we cannot be sure that they were
masks at all. We have to know a good deal about the strategies of contemporary
debate and the structures of contemporary language before we start peeling these
down to assumptions about or perceptions of productive relations; and if this is
going to be possible on some occasions, there are going to be other occasions on
which analysis can only take us in other directions. This will have to be kept in
mind even when we are dealing with seventeenth-century people who specifically
talked about changes in social relations consequent upon changes in the modes of
holding or exploiting land or movable goods.
Thus, when Ireton at Putney says that all he is arguing for "is because I would
have an eye to property," 21 and proceeds to affirm that the property that confers
the franchise must be an inheritable freehold, he is not so much defending a
particular form of property as seizing the high ground in debate. The Levellers
are visibly uncertain whether they are trying to extend the franchise to people
who hold property in other legally determined ways, or querying the necessity of
the association between property and franchise altogether, and Ireton is exploit-
ing their uncertainty. Had the Levellers seen themselves as playing the former
role, the debate at Putney could have resolved itself — as it never did — into
specific discussion and negotiation about the legally or economically defined cat-
egories of proprietor to whom the franchise might be extended; and there might,
when all is said and done, have been an agreed compromise about that. Ireton
had no commitment to freehold or to historic right as such; we know this from
other proposals which he was prepared to entertain. But once the Levellers got
upon the ground of manhood suffrage, or anything near enough to it to suggest
that the right to suffrage might be established on grounds to which property was
only marginally related, they were raising the question of what the political
personality and its freedom really were and on what grounds they could be estab-
lished and talked about. This was the question quite consciously before the minds
of the variously sophisticated debaters at Putney; it returns us to a known sev-
enteenth-century mental universe, one for which people at that time had a wide
range of words and ideas; and it reopens for us the question of the authority by
which people claim and exercise their liberty. Again and again in the Putney
transcript, we encounter moments at which the debaters get off the unfamiliar
ground of trying to clarify their feelings about property and pursue instead what

21
A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty (London, 1949), p. 57.
58 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

really concerns them and they really know how to argue about: the problem of
establishing the title by which they are acting as they are; the real center of debate
in the first critical period—the basis in right of the de facto.
Right and principle, it can be no surprise to anyone to hear, were more real in
the minds of these debaters than social structure and change. Different assump-
tions concerning the basis for action in right would have different consequences
in action undertaken, and of course they knew that; but Ireton was not simply
aligning himself with those whose property was freehold and defending their
monopoly of the franchise — there is nothing to suggest he would have objected
to going some way outside that group — so much as anchoring in social and
historical reality his authority for being and acting as he was, and insisting that
rights must be confined to those whose authority could be similarly anchored.
And he did not see in the Levellers the spokesmen of a different group of propri-
etors with alternative claims to the franchise — a description they would not have
recognized themselves — so much as people with no understanding of how to
anchor authority in society at all, and no theory of property to be pitted against
his. The fear that the poor will use an authority not rooted in property to redis-
tribute property is, of course, present at Putney; but it is rather a stick to beat
the Levellers with than a fear of anything specific. It is crude and unelaborated
by those who express it, and rather ignored than answered by those who defend
themselves against it; whereas the problem of authority at large can be and is
discussed at great length by debaters on both sides, and by all contributors to the
mid-century polemic, in language whose complexity defies reduction to the sin-
gle issue of property.
On the assumption, then, that people think about what they have the means
of verbalizing, and that relations between the center and the margins of a lin-
guistically structured world must be problematical, we must often say that prop-
erty in the midseventeenth-century crisis was discussed as part of the problem of
authority, and rather less often that this order was reversed. This does not mean
that minds of the period were unaware that the ways in which men held and
exploited property, and behaved as social and political beings in consequence,
were changing; on the contrary, a few contemporary theorists grounded their
explanations of the whole crisis on precisely this perception, and it is of enormous
importance in the history of social thought that this should have happened. But
it is clearly not a sufficient explanation of its happening to say (1) that changes
in property relationships were happening; (2) that a few people noticed; and (3)
that everybody who did not notice nevertheless reflected the changes without
noticing them. The patterns of human thinking at any period are more complex
than that; and, especially when this order of change has never been noticed be-
fore, there must have been reasons inherent in the patterns of thought which led
some people to notice — reasons which may or may not have been immediately
 Authority and property: The question of liberal origins 59

connected with the changes that were noticed. On the assumption that ideas
about authority and ideas about property were independent variables, I would
like next to look into the seventeenth-century perception that property itself was
changing.
C. B. Macpherson, as we all know, put forward some years ago, in The Political
Theory of Possessive Individualism, the hypothesis that seventeenth-century political
thought was importantly affected by the growth of a perception of property as
marketable. 22 He constructed a model — an excellent one — of the social and
political consequences of a set of market assumptions, and then tested for the
presence of his model, or elements of it, in various seventeenth-century thinkers.
As a result he was led to award middling high points to the Levellers and Har-
rington, much higher points to Hobbes and Locke, in proportion as he was able
to find elements of the model in their thinking; and he concluded that the median
score, so to speak, was high enough to justify the hypothesis that market as-
sumptions were a constant determinant of thought in this period. Some of us
were never altogether happy with this, because it never seemed quite dialectical
enough; it all sounds rather as if something is known to have been going on, and
various more or less sensitive instruments have recorded it with greater or less
precision; and our notion of the behavior of consciousness in history has always
been rather less barometric than that. We also thought that Macpherson's model
tested for the presence of one thing at a time, and that if one started from the
assumption that there were several kinds of possessive individual, and so of pos-
sessive individualism, and that there was argument going on as between several
modes of property and individuality, a more dialectical and less barometric pic-
ture might result. In particular, there was doubt concerning his interpretation of
Harrington, because Harrington had two models of property relationships, one
denned by the presence of dependent military tenures and the other by their
absence, and there was little need to involve the market in stating the difference
between them. Everything relating to that debate is now in print elsewhere;23
but it is possible to push the issue a little further, in a direction which takes us
to the second part of my title: the question of liberal origins.
There is now a paradigm of liberalism, though one set up more by those who
would attack than by those who would practice it. It is interesting to observe
how the notion of liberalism is defined in much the same way, and attacked for
22
C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962). Cf.
Joyce O. Appleby, Ecoonomic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978).
23
J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957), chap. 6; Mac-
pherson, Possessive Individualism, chap. 4; Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, chap. 4; The Machia-
vellian Moment, chap. 11; Macpherson, chap. 5, and Pocock, chap. 3, of Feudalism, Capitalism and
Beyond, ed. Eugene Kamenka and R. S. Neale (Canberra, 1975). See also the debate between
Macpherson and John F. H. New, reprinted in The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century,
ed. Charles Webster (London, 1974), I-V.
60 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

much the same reasons, among political theorists and ideologues: on the one hand
by socialist humanists - followers of Macpherson or Wolin or Me Williams or
Lowi — and on the other hand by the classical conservative followers of Strauss or
Arendt or Oakeshott. 24 Liberalism, as they all define it, is a view of politics
founded on the conception of the individual as a private being, pursuing goals
and safeguarding freedoms which are his own and looking to government mainly
to preserve and protect his individual activity; and it is suggested that because
this individual withholds from government so much of his personality — which
he says is not the government's business but his own — government tends to
become highly impersonal, and therefore paradoxically authoritarian in those areas
from which it does not altogether abstain. The paradox of liberty and authority,
on which I am basing my interpretations of seventeenth-century thought, was
stated in these terms by Hume, and it is highly arguable that his formulation
was prophesied by Hobbes; but through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
there has grown up a long tradition of attacking it. The attack is always, at least
in form, humanist, and entails the charge that the liberal concept of individuality
omits too much in the interactions of personality with politics and society which
is essential to personality, and so tends to dehumanize both government and the
governed. On the left the charge is one of failure in social humanism: the liberal
individual is said to be engrossed in acquisitive activity, and so to detach himself
from a politics which he pays to repress those whom acquisitiveness excludes. On
the right the charge is one of failure in civic and intellectual humanism: both the
acquisitive individual and the wage-earning individual who looks to the state for
protection against him are charged with abandonment of politics - by which is
meant the heroic moralism of political and philosophical decision, practice, and
contemplation. It is perhaps because the socialist concept of individuality has
been heroic since its beginnings that the socialist and nonsocialist versions of
antiliberalism so often look like mirror-images of one another. One has to have
been attacked, from right and left simultaneously, for depoliticizing thought and
dehumanizing history, 25 to realize just how far this brand of humanist heresy-
hunt has been allowed to go.
Both versions of antiliberalism are intelligible and to that extent convincing,
and there is a wide range of historical phenomena to which both are in various
ways applicable. But the accusations which they level are becoming routinized —
which is what one means by a heresy-hunt — and this gives one reason to believe
that the range of phenomena to which they apply may have been exaggerated.
24
Macpherson, Possessive Individualism; Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston, I960); Wilson
Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley, 1973); Theodore Lowi, The End of
Liberalism (New York, 1969). For Oakeshott, see Of Human Conduct (Oxford, 1975).
"Richard Ashcraft, Political Theory 3 (1975): 13, 15, 2 2 - 2 3 ; Dante Germino, Virginia Quarterly
Review 51 (1975): 6 2 8 - 3 2 ; Neal Wood, Political Theory 4 (1976): 104. Compare Hexter's review
of The Machiavellian Moment in On Historians.
 Authority and property: The question of liberal origins 61

The antiliberals of both camps tend to write as if the liberalism which they define
had held the field - or had expanded its control of the field without effective
opposition — from the days of Hobbes and Locke even to the days of Marx; and
it is this supposition which recent historical research has tended to modify. If one
expresses scepticism of the historic reality of such concepts as "liberal," or for
that matter "bourgeois," the heresy-hunter will of course interpret that as mean-
ing that one is a "liberal" or "bourgeois" in disguise; but among reasonable
beings, there is a useful purpose to be served by going back to some doubts
concerning Macpherson's "possessive individualism." We shall be engaged in the
exercise of trying to get a paradigm into perspective, though readers of Kuhn
will know that a covert attack on the paradigm may be entailed.
There is one English thinker of the first critical period who fits the Macpherson
model very well indeed - so much so that his possessive individualism does not
need to be brought to light by a complicated exegesis, but is expressly rendered
in his own words. He depicted men in society as creatures who drove hard bar-
gains with one another, the stronger party always dictating the terms of the
bargain to the weaker; he said that this was peculiarly the characteristic of a
society where property consisted in movable goods and wealth; he proposed that
what was needed in so individualist a society was a sovereign and indeed absolute
central authority to regulate the bargaining process; and he pointed out that in a
commercial society such a sovereign could govern with the aid of salaried profes-
sional soldiers. So here we have one full-blooded possessive individualist in the
middle of the seventeenth century, and where there was one there were doubtless
more; we must not play the trick of isolating this man by seeming to empha-
size him. But his name was Matthew Wren; his father was a Laudian bishop
currently a prisoner in the Tower; and the circumstance that his grandfather had
been a mercer will not really make a business spokesman out of him. Further-
more, he expressed these views in the form of a critique of James Harrington's
Oceana, of which he was the leading contemporary opponent; 26 and he was at-
tacking Harrington's doctrine that the form of property determining politics was
land, whose stability - as opposed to the mobility of goods and money - set men
free to be the rational political creatures which they were by nature. Harrington
was, to some degree, an agrarian Utopian, and he had affirmed that two girls left
to share a cake would construct the choice rationally, by having one girl cut the
cake and the other choose her piece. It was Wren who replied that the stronger
girl would offer the other a small piece of cake to fetch her some water to drink

16
[Matthew Wren], Considerations upon Mr. Harrington's Commonwealth of Oceana, restricted to therst Fin
Part of the Preliminaries (London, 1657); Matthew Wren, Monarchy Asserted, or the State of Monarchi-
call and Popular Government, in Vindication of the Considerations upon Mr. Harrington's Oceana (Oxford,
1659). Harrington's replies are The Prerogative of Popular Government, book 1; The Art of Law-Giving,
book 3, and Politicaster (1659); see Works (1977).
62 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

with her larger share; as succinct a statement of the possessive individualist po-
sition as could be found.27
In the parable of the cake Harrington saw the image of the aristocracy propos-
ing a range of choices and the democracy exercising the actual decision between
them, which was not only his basic conception of the political process, but - he
insisted — the essential means of infusing into the body politic a rational and
political soul. This was the true target of Wren's attack: he was specific in de-
nying that the body politic could possess a soul, and went so far as to remark
that before we could even discuss such an idea we should have to know what the
soul was and what the philosophy pertaining to it 28 — a rather startling remark
from the son of a bishop and one who was much admired by other bishops.
Harrington's ideas about the soul-body relationship in politics are rooted in an-
cient and medieval physics and medicine — "the contemplation of form," he once
wrote, "is astonishing to man, and hath a kind of trouble or impulse accompany-
ing it, that exalts his soul to God" 29 — and his agrarianism links him (though
not directly) with the tradition of radical hylozoism, which I mentioned earlier:
he is not immeasurably remote from Gerrard Winstanley, who conflated the re-
lations of reason with matter, soul with body, Christ with mankind, and men
with the earth in a system of social justice. It was Wren who was the modern,
and only in the next century was Harrington seen as a pioneer of experimental
science.30 If we relate him in any degree to radical Puritanism, we commit our-
selves to emphasizing the extent to which Puritan thought was rooted in antiq-
uity.
The alliance with which Harrington felt himself confronted was that of math-
ematicians with clerics. From the time he read Wren's Observations, he began
denouncing "mathematicians" as people who would reduce political society to a
calculus of interested forces in order to deprive it of its rational soul. We might
expect, given everything we have read or been given to understand concerning
Hobbes, that Harrington would rank him among enemies of this stripe, and it
is of course possible to argue that he should have. But the significant fact is that
Wren attacked Hobbes as well as Harrington, and that Harrington defended
Hobbes against both Wren and the Laudian doctor Henry Hammond, 31 the rea-
son being that Harrington and Hobbes both desired to assert that Israel, from
Moses to Samuel, had been a pure theocracy, and that consequently no order of
clergy could claim a divine right to political authority. 32 We might suppose that
this adventitiously deflected Harrington's attention from the fact that Hobbes
27 28
Wren, Considerations, p . 36. Ibid., p. 20.
29
Harrington, A System of Politics, the last political work he wrote.
30
Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), chap. 1, contains interesting evi-
dence on this.
31
H a r r i n g t o n , The Prerogative of Popular Government, b o o k 2 .
32
The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 3 9 7 - 9 8 .
 Authority and property: The question of liberal origins 63

also was among the mathematicians, were it not that Wren belonged to a largely
clerical circle who repudiated Hobbes's mathematics as energetically as they re-
pudiated everything else about him. Wren was a layman, but he was a protege
of John Wilkins, warden of Wadham College and founding father of the Royal
Society, who serenely made the transition from being Cromwell's brother-in-law
under the Protectorate to being bishop of Chester under the Restoration. It was
Wilkins who had urged him to undertake the criticism of Harrington;33 and the
Oxford professors of mathematics, whom Hobbes had attacked in 1656, were all
of the same kidney as Wilkins.34 Harrington could see as little difference between
protectoralists and royalists as he could between Presbyterians and Anglicans,
and he was justified by his own perspective. Wren's commercially based theory
of politics is the foundation of an antihylozoism which enables him both to un-
dermine Harrington's republicanism and to restore the position of the clergy
against the attacks of Harrington and Hobbes. It would be delightful to conclude
by finding an ideological aspect to the differences between Hobbes's mathematics
and those of the Oxford circle, but I do not know if this can be done.
At all events, here is the ideological context for the most specific piece of
possessive individualism known so far. It was the bishops who promoted the
"bourgeois ideology," the Latitudinarians who were the liberals. We have fallen
in with that tradition which sees Restoration Arminianism, rather than Puritan-
ism, as the ideological reinforcement of the scientific revolution and particularly
with the important work of Margaret C. Jacob, who has argued that Newtonian
science was promoted by a Latitudinarian clergy, many of whom had made some
sort of transition from the Laudian ranks, as an antidote to a lingering and poten-
tially radical hylozoism, which had survived from the Puritan revolution and
forms a kind of underground or dark underbelly to Restoration philosophy.35
One can see how both a physics based on laws of motion, and a politics based on
interest and acquisition, would serve their purpose, and there is much to be done
with the notion of a hylozoistic and in some respects occultist underground,
running through the Restoration and the clandestine aspects of the early En-
lightenment, to surface again in the late eighteenth century. The immediate
point I should like to make, however, is that the thesis that individualism points
toward authoritarianism seems to be holding up well, but that we are obliged to
leave a good deal of room for the possibility that the authoritarians promoted
individualism for their own ends. I have been suggesting in this paper the use-
fulness of remembering that the notion of property might subserve that of au-
33
Wren, Considerations, unpaginated introduction; Barbara Shapiro, John Wilkins, 1614-1672: An
Intellectual Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), pp. 116-17.
34
H o b b e s , Six Lessons to the Savilian Professors of the Mathematics ( 1 6 5 6 ) , in The English Works of Thomas
Hobbes, e d . W i l l i a m M o l e s w o r t h , 11 vols. (London, 1845), vol. 7 .
35
W e b s t e r , Intellectual Revolution, p p . xiv—xxv, is a useful a n t h o l o g y of w r i t i n g s o n this q u e s t i o n ;
J a c o b ; The Newtonians and the English Revolution.
64 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

thority, rather than the other way about; and we seem to have been looking at
cases where a possessive-individualist view of society was promoted by members
of a recovering ruling class, rather than by members of any new class which was
replacing it. That the ruling classes of England became significantly more com-
mercial in their membership and behavior during the first critical period seems
much harder to maintain than that, during the same period, some of them dis-
covered the utility from their point of view of a commercially based ideology.
The clergy and other administrative elites may have invented a bourgeois ideol-
ogy without belonging to, or recognizing the predominance of, any bourgeoisie
that practised the ethic they described. This does not tell us, of course, how it
became possible to invent such an ideology; but there has to be a non-Marxist
reading of English history in which the ruling elites use the commercial classes
without surrendering to them. This suggests an answer to the only problem that
arises from Jacob's excellent study: if - as she insists - Hobbes was the apologist
of market society, and the Latitudinarians and Newtonians were the apologists of
market society, why was Hobbes the principal enemy whom the latter desired to
overthrow?
But the Restoration of 1660 was the restoration of the established landholders
as well as of the clerical and bureaucratic elites; 36 and therefore a view of political
power based on the acquisition of movable goods is only one of the ideologies of
property and authority possible in the era of history that then began, though it
would be fair to say that the individual as magistrate was very rapidly replaced
by the individual as proprietor. The second critical period, which we date from
about 1675 to 1720, marks the beginnings of the verita effettuale of that tension
between real and movable property which Harrington and Wren had prefigured,
and our use and understanding of the liberal paradigm has to be re-examined in
this light. Our histories of political thought in this second period have tradition-
ally been dominated by the figure of Locke, and it has been established practice
to interpret all contemporary and subsequent thought about politics with refer-
ence to his theories of consent, trust, and dissolution, and all thought about
property with reference to his theories of labor and acquisition. But for about
twenty years the received image of Locke has been subjected to some powerful
solvents, as a result of which his role has been not so much diminished as ren-
dered problematical. Peter Laslett demonstrated that the Two Treatises were writ-
ten well before the Revolution of 1688, as a by-product of the Filmerian contro-
versy of 1679—81; work carried out by myself on the ideological climate of the
years beginning about 1675 seemed to uncover whole universes of discourse —
the controversy over parliamentary history, the neo-Harringtonian revival — which
were of great importance to Locke's closest associates, but which Locke himself

36
For the last mentioned, see G. E. Aylmer, The State's Servants (London, 1973).
 Authority and property: The question of liberal origins 65

ignored while doing nothing to terminate; Philip Abrams and John Dunn brought
to light readings of the theory of consent, and of Locke's politics in general, a
good deal more angled toward the problem of authority than we used to think,
and of such a character that it was doubtful how usefully the concept of liberalism
could be employed in speaking of him. 37 There is now going forward a revision
of the ideology of 1688, both in the months of revolution itself and in the ensu-
ing twenty-five years, which indicates that Locke's position — his insistence that
a dissolution of government was not a dissolution of society — while seemingly
moderate, was in fact too radical to represent the emerging political reality. Some
Whigs in the Convention not only insisted that there had been a dissolution of
government, but were prepared to fill the vacuum with structures that recall the
1650s as much as anything in the Two Treatises?* but those Tories who had
reluctantly accepted the revolution — and whose ideas dominate the thinking of
the next quarter-century 39 - not only successfully maintained (and obliged the
Whigs to agree) that there had not been a dissolution of government, but forced
a general revival, reconsideration, and even reprinting 40 of the debate of 1649—
51 concerning obedience to a de facto regime, which was to be of great importance
to Edmund Burke a full hundred years later. 41 This was why the Whigs had to
settle for a constitutionalist rather than a contractualist legitimation of the Rev-
olution.
The effect of all this has been to create problems in the historical if not the
philosophical understanding of Locke's political thought; our perception of the
context in which he operated has been so greatly enlarged and complicated that
we now have great difficulty in seeing how he should be connected with it, and
this is rendered no easier by Locke's own secrecy regarding his authorship and
denials of concern in aspects of debate which almost certainly did concern him. 42
37
P e t e r Laslett, ed.,John Locke: Two Treatises of Government ( C a m b r i d g e , I 9 6 0 , 1 9 6 3 ) ; P o c o c k , The
Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, chaps. 8—9; Politics, Language and Time, chaps. 3—4; The
Machiavellian Moment, pp. 4 2 3 - 2 4 , 4 3 5 - 3 6 ; Philip Abrams, ed.,John Locke: Two Tracts on Govern-
ment (Cambridge, 1967); John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the
Argument of the Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, 1969). On Locke and liberalism, cf. M.
Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke (London, 1969), for whom the elements of authoritarianism
in Locke are inherent in the liberal tradition. Dunn argues that they are anterior to it.
38
J u l i a n H . F r a n k l i n , John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty ( C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 7 8 ) ; M a r k G o l d i e , " T h e
Origins of True Whiggism," History of Political Thought, I, 2 (1980), pp. 195-236.
39
See J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of'Party, 1689-1120 (Cambridge, 1977); Martyn
P. Thompson, "The Reception of Locke's Two Treatises ofGovernment," Political Studies 24 (1976).
40
See Skinner, "History and Ideology in the English Revolution."
41
See Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs
(1794). H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lon-
don, 1978).
42
T h u s , it is not possible to discover Locke's connection w i t h t h e n e o - H a r r i n g t o n i a n w r i t i n g s spon-
sored by Shaftesbury in 1 6 7 5 - 7 7 , t h o u g h he m u s t have been very close by; K . H . D . Haley, The
First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968), p p . 391—93. For other instances see Laslett, passim, and
Maurice C r a n s t o n , John Locke: A Biography (London, 1957).
66 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

It is not possible any longer to regard him as, in isolation, the philosopher of the
Revolution, and it will be some time before this reconstruction of the context
restores us to having the means of assessing his real importance in the history of
ideas and ideology. That importance was probably great, but we have at present
no very satisfactory way of evaluating it.
It is clear — to begin moving from an emphasis upon government toward an
emphasis upon property — that Locke played no predominant role in the forma-
tion of what Caroline Robbins has called "the Whig canon" in the tradition of
"the eighteenth-century commonwealthmen." 43 That group of middle and late
seventeenth-century writers, and the Tories as well as Whigs of the second criti-
cal period who singled them out for canonization, are denned by their relation to
the classical republican tradition, with which Locke had little if anything to do.
They took a "country" as opposed to a "court" view of the ideal of the balanced
constitution, which, following Corinne C. Weston,44 we now date back to Charles
I's Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Parliament, published in 1642; and they
saw this balance as threatened by the renewal of the crown's command of parlia-
mentary patronage, which had first surfaced about 1675. For a century and a
half, from the Bill of Exclusion through the American Revolution to the First
Reform Act, the secret of English government, and the matter of English polit-
ical debate, was to be the role of patronage, or, as its enemies termed it, "corrup-
tion"; and what still requires emphasis is that this was to be discussed in terms
of the relation of property to personality. What troubled the "country party" or
"commonwealth" thinkers — among whom, we now know, nearly all articulate
Americans of the Revolutionary generation are to be included 45 - was less the
encroachment of the executive's constitutional powers on those of the legislature,
than the growth of the executive's capacity to bring the members of the legisla-
ture, and of society in general, into personal, political, and economic dependence
upon it. This destroyed the balance of the constitution by destroying that per-
sonal independence which could only belong to men whose property was their
own and did not consist in expectations from the men in government; and the
moral quality which only propertied independence could confer, and which be-
came almost indistinguishable from property itself, was known as "virtue." What
we used to think of as the Age of Reason may just as well be called the Age of
Virtue; or rather, what used to appear an age of Augustan serenity now appears
an age of bitter and confused debate over the relations between reason, virtue,
43
Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development
and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the
Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).
44
Corinne C. Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords (New York, 1965).
45
There is now an extensive literature on this subject; see Robert E. Shalhope, "Toward a Republican
Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,"
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 29 (1972): 49-80.
 Authority and property: The question of liberal origins 67

and passion.46 I am looking ahead from a "second critical period" ending about
1720 to an "eighteenth century" which ended about a hundred years later because
it is important to emphasize that the polemic against Alexander Hamilton which
Jefferson and Madison conducted in the 1790s was to a remarkable degree a
replay of an English polemic which had begun in the 1670s47 — but which could
not have been conducted in the sixteen-fifties because the relation of patronage
to property was not then in question.
What revisions may all this suggest in our thinking about possessive individ-
ualism, about the paradigm of liberalism and that antiliberal interpretation of
modern political history whose different versions we looked at earlier? In the first
place, it must be observed that our emphasis has moved forward in time. We no
longer see the essential shifts in either the structure or the ideology of English
property as taking place in the middle seventeenth century, still less in the so-
called Tawney's century preceding it,48 but in the.quarter-century following the
Revolution of 1688. It was then that what had been a highly theoretical debate
between Harrington and Wren exploded and became a public issue, and a com-
monplace of debate came to be that major changes had occurred in the character
of property itself, and consequently in the structure, the morality, and even the
psychology of politics. All these things began, with spectacular abruptness, to
be discussed in the middle 1690s; and compared with this great breakthrough in
the secular consciousness of political society, the attempt to discover market con-
notations in Hobbes, or even Locke, sometimes looks rather like shadow play.
There are some reasons for thinking that the great debate over property and virtue
was conducted on premises not apparent to Hobbes or even Wren; as for Locke,
the point to be made is that the debate seems to have been conducted with very
little reference to anything he had said. An analysis of his writings will certainly
define for him a position in relation to it, and we will some day find out when
this analysis and definition were first conducted; but if one desires to study the
first great ideologist of the Whig system of propertied control, one may study
not Locke, but Defoe.49 The articulation of political thought in the second crit-
ical period was moving from the control of philosophers into that of men of letters
and semiprofessional journalists. Again, let me say that Locke will return to us,
but he is at present moving along a remote orbit.
In the second place, the great debate over property was conducted in terms to
which the Macpherson market model does not seem altogether crucial. Harring-
46
See chaps. 1 3 - 1 5 of The Machiavellian Moment. Such a synthesis, still necessary in histories of
political t h o u g h t , would be redundant to a historian of literature or philosophy.
47
See Lance B a n n i n g , The Jeffersonian Persuasion (Ithaca, 1977).
48
For a study of the historiography of the period from 1540—1640, see Lawrence Stone, Social Change
and Revolution in England, 1540-1640 (London, 1965), p p . x i - x x v i .
49
The Machiavellian Moment, chap. 13. T h e history of political t h o u g h t — a s distinct from that of
social awareness in literature—seems to be w i t h o u t a full-length study of h i m .
68 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

ton — who remained a significant figure in the next century — had operated with
a simple distinction between feudal and freehold tenure; Wren and others had
pointed to the possible importance of commercial wealth; but there had really
been, and was to be, very little attention paid to the thought that freehold land
was liable to become a marketable commodity. What Harrington and Wren both
desired to say, from opposite value positions, was that land, or real property,
tended to make men independent citizens, who actualized their natural political
capacity, whereas mobile property tended to make them artificial beings, whose
appetites and powers could and must be regulated by a sovereign. If we are to
move Hobbes into the latter camp — as is certainly possible — it was not apparent
to the debaters in the 1650s that he belonged there, or that he was an advocate
of a mobile-property society in the way that Wren was. But Harrington and
Wren lived on the eve of a great reassertion of control by the landed elites in
society, fully as important as the expansion of commerce andfinancewhich was
to accompany it; and the debate they had begun was to be continued in the
context of a dialogue between real and mobile property within the post-1660 and
post-1688 political order.
If we look at the history of events in the growth of political consciousness, we
find that there was a confrontation between real property and government patron-
age before there was a confrontation between real and mobile property, and that
when the latter occurred it was because mobile property presented itself in the
guise not of a marketable commodity, so much as of a new and enlarged mode of
dependence upon government patronage. The ideal of property as the basis of
independence and virtue was first stated as against the revival of patronage by the
court politicians in the 1670s. No conflict with mobile property was entailed or
implied, and the critique of patronage was as acceptable in London as in the
shires. What escalated the great debate was not the political revolution of 1688,
but its largely unanticipated consequence, the so-called financial revolution of
the 1690s;50 and this confronted the ideology of real property with a threat from
the operations not of a trading market, but of a system of public credit. At very
high speed there was created a new class of investors great and small — Locke was
one of them - who had lent government capital that vastly stabilized and en-
larged it, and henceforth lived off their expectations of a return (sometimes a
marketable one) on their investments. The landed classes, and still more their
ideologues to the right and left, saw in this process a revolutionary expansion less
of a trading and manufacturing market, than of a system of parliamentary pa-
tronage. The mode of property which they now began to attack, and to denounce
as a new force in history, transforming and corrupting society, was not property
in exchangeable commodities — they called this "trade" and greeted it as a means
50
P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit
(London, 1967).
 Authority and property: The question of liberal origins 69

to independence and virtue — but property in government office, government

stock, and government expectations to which the National Debt had mortgaged
futurity: there is a real sense in which the sense of a secular future is the child of
capitalist investment. 51 They called this "public credit," a mode of property
which rendered government dependent on its creditors and creditors dependent
on government, in a relation incompatible with classical or agrarian virtue. It
was a property not in the means of production, but in the relationships between
government and the otherwise property-owning individual; these relationships
could themselves be owned, and could be means of owning people. The percep-
tion of credit in many ways preceded and controlled the perception of the market;
it can be traced in the literature how the Tory and Old Whig ideologues came to
perceive "commerce" as a new and ambivalent force in history mainly in propor-
tion as they came to perceive it as the precondition of "credit." It was the latter
concept that was and remained crucial.
Once we are prepared to admit that the first widespread ideological perception
of a capitalist form of political relations came into being, rapidly and abruptly,
in the last years of the seventeenth century and the two decades following, a
number of consequences follow. I have tried to show elsewhere that since capital-
ism in this form was perceived in terms of speculation rather than calculation, its
epistemological foundation appeared as fantasy rather than rationality — with
some interesting sexist implications — and that goods had to be reified, and the
laws of the market discovered or invented, in order to restore reality and ratio-
nality to an otherwise purely speculative universe. 52 The interests succeeded the
passions - as is beginning to emerge from the researches of scholars53 - as a
means of disciplining and rendering them manageable and intelligible. But it
was the individual as classical political being whose capacities for self-knowledge
and self-command — expressed in the ideal of virtue — were rendered uncertain
and dissolved into fantasy, other-directedness, and anomie by the corruptions of
the new commercial politics. The social thought of the eighteenth century has
begun to look like a single gigantic querelle between the individual as Roman
patriot, self-defined in his sphere of civic action, and the individual in the society
of private investors and professional rulers, progressive in the march of history,
yet hesitant between action, philosophy, and passion. It seems perfectly possible
that both classical economic man and classical socialist man were attempts to
rescue the individual from this Faustian dissociation of sensibility.
This suggests that we might keep intact that important element of the antili-
beral paradigm which presents classical political man as somehow destroyed by
the advent of eighteenth-century capitalism; and we should indeed keep this
31 52
See chap. 5, this volume. See chap. 6, this volume.
53
Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Prince-
ton, 1976).
70 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

generalization in view and try to state it correctly. But the juxtaposition of polity
and economy — to borrow the language of Joseph Cropsey54 — ought not to be
stated as a simple antithesis; I want to argue that it was an unending and unfin-
ished debate. The main historical weakness in the antiliberal position is that all
its practitioners, right and left, are so anxious to find, that they antedate and
exaggerate, some moment at which economy became emancipated from polity
and market man, productive man, or distributive man declared that he no longer
needed the patdeia of politics to make him a self-satisfactory being. I cannot find
such a moment (not even a Mandevillean moment) 55 in the eighteenth century,
because the dialogue between polity and economy remained a dialogue, and be-
cause both political man and commercial man were equipped with theories of
property as the foundation of political personality which could not be separated
from each other. Once political virtue was declared to have an agrarian base, it
was located in the past; and the movement of history toward credit, commerce,
and the market was defined as a movement toward culture but away from virtue.
Subject to these definitions, the formulation of a "bourgeois ideology," in the
naive sense of a declaration that market behavior was all that was needed to make
a human being a human being, was an extraordinarily difficult task, and we
should doubt if it was ever naively accomplished. If we find someone who seems
to us to have formulated such an ideology, we have to remember that he emerged
from a context in which it was openly problematic whether such a thing could
be done, and we should not be surprised to find in his ideology unresolved con-
tradictions of which he was well aware. It might even be that the ideology of
market society was perfected as an antithesis by those who desired to destroy it.
I return in conclusion to the suggestion that Macpherson's market model ex-
plained only one group of phenomena and did not account for their opposites. I
think that both socialist and classical antiliberals have been so intent on the
location of economic man that they have taken account only of those phenomena
which indicate his presence, and have suggested that one set of chromosomes
always drove out another, with the result that somewhere in the eighteenth cen-
tury or the nineteenth must be found the moment when political man died and
economic man reigned in his stead. It is now in doubt if such a moment ever
occurred at all. It seems that the classical ideal quite simply did not die; that it
was reborn with the great recovery of aristocracy which marks the later seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries, with the result that property was always
discussed in the political context of authority and liberty. 56 Property was the
foundation of personality; but the acid test of personality was whether it required

54
Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (Chicago, 1957).
" T h o m a s Home, The Social and Political Thought of Bernard Mandeville (New York, 1977).
56
For a study of Adam Smith contrary to the liberal paradigm, see Donald Winch, Adam Smith's
Politics: An Essay in Historiographical Revision (Cambridge, 1978).
 Authority and property: The question of liberal origins 71

most to be affirmed in liberty or governed by authority. When modes of property

arose that did not favor political virtue, they suggested private freedom and po-
litical sovereignty, and to that extent the antiliberal paradigm holds good; but —
the strength of the classical ideal remaining — the apparition of an individual
rendered nonpolitical and nonvirtuous by his property occasioned terrible concep-
tual problems. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the historically problem-
atic individual, who could neither return to ancient virtue nor find means of
completely replacing it, had made his appearance; and he was present, uneasily
but effectively occupying the stage of history, before classical economic man,
American democratic man - a close relative - or German dialectical and in due
course socialist man, had arisen to suggest ways of escaping or resolving his
problems. In this scenario, we can, of course, find highly systematic liberal phi-
losophies occurring from time to time; but they always appeared in response to
problems which they did not persuade everybody they had succeeded in solving,
and they can be made to look as much like incidents as like turning points in the
history of social consciousness. I am not calling in question the historical reality
of "liberalism" or "possessive individualism," so much as those "liberal," or rather
antiliberal, interpretations of history, in which everything leads up to and away
from a monolithic domination of "liberal" ideas somewhere in the nineteenth
century. I see the formulation of these ideas as always problematic and precarious,
and I am even prepared to entertain the notion that "liberal" or "bourgeois"
ideology was perfected less by its proponents than by its opponents, who did so
with the intention of destroying it. What went on in the eighteenth century was
not a unidirectional transformation of thought in favor of the acceptance of "lib-
eral" or "market" man, but a bitter, conscious, and ambivalent dialogue. In
contemporary scholarship, it is the Marxists who are the Whigs, 57 their critics
who command a dialectic.
57
Professor Macpherson was heard, at this point in the original reading of this essay, to remark that
he had been called many things in his time, but never that before. I remain impenitent.
 1776
The revolution against Parliament

We come at last to consider a truly British revolution;1 one which even involves
a revolt against being British. In 1641 and 1688 the kingdom of Great Britain
did not exist, and the events in Scotland which preceded one English Revolution
in 1637 and followed another in 1689 took place in what was still, though it was
ceasing to be, an autonomous political culture; while the unsuccessful last stands
of the Old Irish and Old English aristocracies in 1641 and 1689 occurred in an
Ireland whose political development had not yet reached the point where so so-
phisticated a term as "revolution" in its modern sense would be appropriate. John
Pym and John Adams may have been revolutionaries; Sir Phelim O'Neill and
Swearing Dick Talbot were not. But in the high eighteenth century provincial
variants of Whig political culture had established themselves in Lowland Scot-
land, among the Anglo-Irish, in New England, in Pennsylvania, and in Virginia;
there was a kingdom of Great Britain and, briefly, there was an Atlantic British
political world - rather vaguely termed an empire - which reached from the
North Sea to the headwaters of the Ohio. But within this greater Britain there
occurred a revolution which must be thought of as the outcome of its common
development, but which resulted in the detachment of its English-speaking sec-
tor on the mainland of North America, to become a distinct nation and a highly
distinctive political culture. The first revolution to occur within a "British" po-
litical system resulted in its partial disruption and the pursuit by one of its

From Three British Revblutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, edited by J. G. A. Pocock for the Folger Shake-
speare Library, pp. 265-88. ® 1980 Princeton University Press; reprinted by permission of Princeton
University Press.
x
This essay was read to a symposium on "Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1116," held at
the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1976.

73
74 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

components of an independent history; and the same is true of the second, oth-
erwise known as the Irish Revolution of 1912-22.
Since, when we talk of "Britain," we mean an English domination of associated
insular and Atlantic cultures, there is a profoundly important sense in which the
American Revolution can only be understood by placing it in a series of crises
occasioned by the growth and change of English political institutions. To Amer-
icans, its significance must be national; an American personality had taken shape
in an American environment, and the Revolution is the crisis of its independence.
This, obviously, is beyond refutation. But in the "British" context, we have to
see it, first as a crisis in the history of the Anglo-Scottish consortium set up in
1707, second as a crisis in the history of that central and most English of its
governing institutions, the King-in-Parliament. In 1641—60 and in 1688—89,
crises occurred in the relations between the English Crown and English proper-
tied society, from which the King-in-Parliament emerged reinforced, if pro-
foundly transformed; the ability of England to create and consolidate "Britain"
and to pursue an Atlantic empire was one of the byproducts of 1688. But in
1776, or rather between 1764 and 1801, the capacity of Parliament for provincial
government — and in lesser degree, the way in which it currently governed En-
glish society — were severely challenged. In the American colonies there occurred
the revolution against Parliament which I have chosen for my title; the authority
of Parliament was successfully overthrown, its appropriateness as a form of gov-
ernment was denied to the satisfaction of Americans, and there emerged a new
political society, a transformed version of a quasi-republican alternative to parlia-
mentary monarchy which had been latent in the English tradition since the rev-
olutions of the seventeenth century. In Britain proper, however, the authority of
Parliament was shown to be so deeply rooted in the conditions of society that its
overthrow was unthinkable anywhere to the right of Thomas Paine; the revolt of
America did very little to shake it, and after fifty harsh years of industrialization
and war it proved capable of enlarging and later democratizing its own electoral
base. To complete the post-American picture of the now sundered North Atlan-
tic, we must add the Anglo-Irish relationship as a case intermediate between
independence and parliamentary union; the former was only marginally at-
tempted during 1780—1801, but the latter did not take root.
In a context of British history, therefore, the origins of the American Revolu-
tion present two characteristics: the inability of Whig parliamentary government
to extend itself to colonies of settlement, and the existence within the parliamen-
tary tradition of a republican alternative which could be used to deny Parliament
its legitimacy and to suggest that other modes of government were possible. It
is not hard to see why the colonial elites could not develop into parliamentary
county gentries, but I must leave to others the description of what manner of
political beings they did become; it should be emphasized, however, that for a
 1776: The revolution against Parliament 75

long time they imagined themselves as parliamentary gentries, and only in rev-
olutionary trauma admitted that they must be something else. The importance
of the alternative ideology — the republican, commonwealth, or country tradition
- is that it provided Americans with a radical but rather shallow explanation of
why they could no longer be parliamentary Englishmen, and a rather profound
understanding of what else they might become. But in tracing history in terms
of contemporary self-understanding — which is what the history of ideology really
amounts to - one is not playing a barren game of pitting one cause against
another cause, or one factor against another factor; one is exploring the contem-
porary perception of possibilities and impossibilities, and the limitations of that
perception. It can also be shown, I believe, that ideology offers a commentary on
the growth and change of the parliamentary institution, which assists us in un-
derstanding the limitations of parliamentary reality: the reasons why governing
America, but not governing Ireland, confronted Parliament with challenges it
preferred not to meet.

II

When James Harrington - who insisted that domestic and provincial govern-
ment were different in kind — surveyed in the late 1650s the imminent failure of
the first English revolution, he felt quite sure of two things. The first was that
the government of Charles I had collapsed because there was no longer a feudal
aristocracy to support it; the second was that the government of Charles II - if
restored, as seemed increasingly likely - would not have the support of any viable
hereditary or entrenched aristocracy, because such could exist only in a feudal
form. There was a good deal to be said for the first of these perceptions, but a
good deal less for the second; Harrington had failed altogether to predict that
spectacular reconstitution of a governing aristocracy which followed the decline
of the Tudor magnate class whose crisis has been charted by Professor Stone. In
1642 the House of Lords could do little to arrest the drift toward civil war; in
1688 those peers who happened to be in London could come together of them-
selves to exert a measurable influence on the situation precipitated by the flight
of James II. 2 The Restoration of 1660 - which may be said to have begun with
the solid determination in Richard Cromwell's Parliament to bring back the
House of Lords3 — had marked the recovery of parliamentary and political aris-
tocracy. The creation of peers by Charles II had furthered, though it had not
caused, the growth of a class of habitual politicians who frequented the Court,
2
David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (Oxford, 1955), pp. 217, 219-20. See
also David H. Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North: Aspects of the Revolution of 1688 (Hamden,
Conn, 1976).
3
J. T. Rutt, The Diary of Thomas Burton . . . (London, 1828), in and iv; Harrington, Works,
Pocock, ed., Introduction, pp. 102—4.
76 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

the Town, and to some extent the City, knew each other well if they hated each
other heartily, and maintained that inner world of high politics whose existence
continues to fascinate English neo-conservative historians to the point where they
are reluctant to acknowledge the political reality of anything else. It is the pres-
ence and efficacy of this coterie which marks the real difference between 1641
and 1688; but though the word "Court" was in use in both eras, the decline of
the old palace-centered political world of courtiers and councillors was irremedi-
able. The new Court was attendant upon Parliament as much as upon the King;
and it was made up of men who understood the simpler arts of parliamentary
management, of acting as a "screen or bank" between King and Commons, at
any rate better than their predecessors had done, and who found in the House of
Lords a very tolerable political club.
In the reign of Charles II it was already understood that there existed a class of
parliamentary managers and magnates — moving steadily into the hereditary peerage
but never identical with it - whose strength consisted in their closeness to exec-
utive authority and in (what was not quite the same thing) their command of
political patronage, influence, and what its enemies termed corruption. One need
not deny the importance of economic change - of the strict settlement, the mort-
gage, and improved techniques of estate management - in permitting a class of
great landowners to survive and engross its estates,4 if one emphasizes that the
governing aristocracy of late Stuart and Hanoverian England was a parliamentary
aristocracy; and though we may debate the control and efficacy of patronage as a
technique of government, we need not doubt its reality as an issue and a value.
Whig England, it may be said, held as a self-evident truth that every political
man was entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of influence. One might even
question, in tracing the growth of this governing order, the importance of 1688
itself, considered as an isolated episode. Too many reluctant Tories, cursing their
King and themselves with equal fervor, went along with that amazing and un-
desired upheaval to give it the immediate character of a shift in social power. The
stress might fall rather upon two of the Revolution's admitted consequences: the
"financial revolution" of the mid-l690s and, twenty years later, the Septennial
Act, which formed the keystone of what J. H. Plumb has termed "the growth of
oligarchy."5 In the first of these were created the great institutions of public
credit — the Bank of England, the National Debt, and, less auspiciously, the
South Sea Company — which brought the postrevolutionary regime the political
4
The classic views are those of Sir John Habakkuk; see most recently, "The Rise and Fall of English
Landed Families," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 29 (1979), pp. 187-208, and
30 (1980), pp. 199-221. For a criticism, see Eileen Spring, "The Family, Strict Settlement, and
Historians," Canadian Journal of History XVII, 4 (1983), pp. 379-398.
3
P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit
(London, 1967); J. H . Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1660-1730 (London,
1967).
 2776: The revolution against Parliament 11

stability, founded on a large class of investors, and the financial resources neces-
sary to wage war in Europe, to absorb a Scotland ardently desirous of commercial
opportunity, and to pursue empire in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and India.
In the second — after two decades of Country and Tory rebellion against war,
high taxes, and government by patronage and finance — the parliamentary aris-
tocracy and gentry deliberately moved to reduce the competitiveness of politics
even if this meant confirming the supremacy of influence and patronage. Long
parliamentary terms and uncontested elections opened the way to the England of
Walpole and Newcastle, the Scotland of the Dukes of Argyll.
This was the Britain, at once oligarchic and imperial, against which the Amer-
ican Revolution was directed; and it is important for us to realize that its person-
ality was a deeply divided one. The function of parliamentary oligarchy was to
maintain unity between government and landed society, that unity of the polit-
ical nation without which there could be no government; but among the neces-
sary means of doing this was the maintenance of a unity between government,
commerce, and finance which was dynamic in its pursuit of mercantile, naval,
and military empire and a specific role in the European power system. Every
perceptive observer of eighteenth-century reality recognized this harnessing of
the static and the dynamic; the political nation desired stability more than em-
pire, but pursued empire as a byproduct of its means of maintaining stability.
Out of this there was in due time to emerge a kind offixedlaw of modern British
politics, that empire is to be yielded when it threatens the normal conduct of
political competition — an experience unknown to Americans until very recently.
But to eighteenth-century minds there was another and more immediate neces-
sary consequence: the necessity of a sovereign Parliament. Whether one looked
at the need to maintain the unity of government and society, or at the need to
pursue the policies of war and empire, it was clear that executive and legislature
must be linked by the same ties as those that bound the governing oligarchy to
the nation which it both ruled and represented; and, whether symbolically or
practically, the two most obviously necessary modes of this unity were legislative
supremacy and a politics of influence. The latter did as much as the former to
root executive in legislature and government in society.
This was the system to which the not altogether narrow political nation of the
age of oligarchy was to find itself committed; but it was at once the strength and
the weakness of opposition ideology that it altogether denied this system's valid-
ity. Here we encounter that quasi-republican alternative which I mentioned ear-
lier, and to understand its origins and character we must return to the first En-
glish Revolution. As early as 1642 it had been argued on behalf of the traditional
constitution that King, Lords, and Commons corresponded to the monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy of a theoretical republican balance, and more vaguely
to the executive, judicial, and legislative powers; and that between them there
78 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

existed an equilibrium in which each was restrained by the other two from the
excess which led to degeneration.6 After 1649 it was contended that a hereditary
King and Lords had proved harmful to the balance, and Harrington's Oceana is a
blueprint for a balanced republic with no hereditary element; but the theory had
originally been advanced on behalf of the traditional constitution, and continued
to figure in its justification in 1660 and in 1688. Balance presupposed the inde-
pendence of each of the three constituent parts, and it could be asserted that
hereditary tenure effectively guaranteed the independence of a nonelected aristoc-
racy, so long as these did not hold the Commons in dependence, which in a post-
feudal society they no longer did. There were only two features of the eighteenth-
century constitution which were really incompatible with the paradigm of bal-
ance, and of these one was generally recognized, but the other hardly at all. What
was not well understood was that the independence of executive and legislature
from one another would not ultimately mesh with the indisputable fact that the
legislative authority was that of King-in-Parliament, executive in legislature, and
must ultimately collide with the principle of the sovereignty of Parliament. The
King's ministers were not attacked for sitting in Parliament, but they were at-
tacked for allegedly filling Parliament with the recipients of government patron-
age. For what was universally acknowledged was that if the members of the
legislature became dependent upon patronage, the legislature would cease to be
independent and the balance of the constitution would become corrupt. Corrup-
tion on an eighteenth-century tongue—where it was an exceedingly common
term—meant not only venality, but disturbance of the political conditions nec-
essary to human virtue and freedom.7 The only self-evident truth mentioned in
Paine's Common Sense is that the King exercises despotic authority because he has
monopolized parliamentary patronage.8 To us it may seem that this would not
have been self-evident even if it had been true, but to Paine's contemporaries it
was a necessary and inescapable consequence.9
The remarkable fact here—another of the profound cleavages in the Whig
mind—is that though the conscious practice of the age was founded upon the
necessity of influence no less than upon the independence of property, its moral
theory was almost unanimous in declaring that the two were incompatible and
that corruption was fatal to virtue. The most sophisticated thinkers of the cen-
tury—Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton—were those who
conceded that though patronage and the commercial society on which it rested
6
I n His Majesty's Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Parliament (London, 1642); see Corinne C.
Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords (New York, 1965).
7
J . G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1971), ch. 4.
8
Philip S. Foner, The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine (Secaucus, N . J . , 1974), pp. 8, 116.
9
The revolutionary Paine was here only stating as a fact what the conservative Hume had predicted
as a probability; see his essay, "Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Mon-
archy or to a Republic" (Essays Moral, Political and Literary, VJA1).
 1776: The revolution against Parliament 79
must destroy virtue, the conditions of human life were such that virtue could
never be fully realized, that it was dangerous to pretend otherwise, and that
alternative social values must be found. This was perhaps the most fundamental
problem in eighteenth-century political and moral philosophy, but here is not
the place to pursue it;10 what matters more immediately is that we have found
the ideological fault-line along which British and American political beliefs and
practices were to break apart.
There was a quasi-republican critique of parliamentary government which de-
clared that corruption must be ended and the independence of the component
parts of the balance restored. This commonwealth or Country ideology11—there
are various names for it—was on both shores of the Atlantic considerably better
articulated than was the defense of existing practice, but in the American colonies
it came to have an importance far greater than it ever possessed in Britain where
it originated. In England, and to a far lesser extent in Scotland, two groups
normally excluded from the citadels of power—Tory gentlemen and Old Whig
urban radicals, Bolingbroke at one extreme and Catherine Macaulay at another—
perfected the critique of Whig oligarchy and patronage in the hope of mobilizing
independent country members against whatever ministry they were attacking.
But such attempts almost invariably failed, with the last years of Queen Anne as
the only serious exception; and they failed not just because the country gentry
were as keen in the pursuit of influence as the next man, but because they had an
understanding of their role in the parliamentary system a good deal more satisfy-
ing than any they found in the commonwealth and Country ideology. The front
benches were there to provide the King with ministers, the back benches to act
as the grand jury of the nation; and there they sat, far better Tories than Boling-
broke could ever be, stolidly supporting the ministry of the day because in the
last analysis it was the King's ministry, until there arose one of those very rare
occasions on which they could support it no more. The commonwealth or Coun-
try ideology,12 of vast importance in the history of thought, was therefore of very
little importance in the history of English practice; and I say that as one who
considers the life of the mind quite as important as the life of politics. But in the
American colonies, where political experience and practice were of a different
kind—where the intimate union of executive with legislature, of monarchy with
aristocracy and gentry, of government with society, could not be duplicated in
microcosm—it was another matter. The balance provincial, as Harrington had
10
Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), chs. 1 3 - 1 5 .
11
Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Isaac F.
Krammick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge,
Mass., 1968); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.,
1967).
12
The term "Commonwealth" suggests urban Old Whigs, the term "Country" Tory landowners; the
ideology is much the same whoever expresses it.
80 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

said, was not the balance domestic; and an ideology that presented parliamentary
practice as normally corrupt looked very different when it was a question first of
fearing, then of repudiating, the authority of Parliament itself.

Ill
There is no need to retell here the story of the 1760s and 1770s from the Amer-
ican point of view. A galaxy of distinguished historians have explained how the
colonists found Parliament claiming to legislate for them in ways which they
found unacceptable, and came as a result, after many crises and reversals of feel-
ing, to discover and proclaim that they were no longer subjects of the King, even
in Parliament; and these historians have rightly moved on to consider the social
structure and historical experience of the peoples who made this claim, and how
it was that they came — as Edmund Burke, an Irishman, was one of the first to
observe13 — to constitute a distinctive nation which must be governed in its own
way. History is normally written in terms of national development, and a history
of divergence is written in terms of the development of divergent nationalities.
But the value of considering the American Revolution as a British revolution is
that it obliges us to consider it in terms of a divergence of political styles within
what had been a common tradition, and so to ask how it happened that the
divergent nationalities acquired the political styles that they did. When Burke
spoke in 1775 no one knew that there would be an independent America or how
it would be governed, and the form of government it ultimately acquired was
certainly not the simple product of its autonomous experience. I have suggested
so far that the parliamentary institution could not take root under colonial con-
ditions, and that the ideology of parliamentary opposition was sufficiently radical
in its criticism of the way in which the institution had developed to provide
conceptual means of first repudiating and then replacing it. But the implication
seems plain that we must return to the history of the parliamentary institution
itself and reexamine its failure to deal with provincial government; a possible
question is whether this failure may have arisen from the circumstance that the
institution itself was in a state of crisis.
The early part of the reign of George III was certainly one of confusion and
abnormality in the politics of oligarchy. There had been, before the King's acces-
sion, the wartime ministry of the elder Pitt, himself afiguredynamic and demagogic
enough to cause discomfort to the Old Corps of Whigs, which had brought
unexpected global victories and an unlimited prospect of empire on the North
American continent. From the Stamp Act to the Quebec Act, the legislation to
which the colonies objected was designed to rationalize this empire and make it
governable; and both the great contemporary historian David Hume14 and the
13
In the Speech on Conciliation with America (1775).
14
J. Y. T. Greig (ed.), The Utters of David Hume (Oxford, 1932), II, 301.
 1776: The revolution against Parliament 81
15
great modern historian Sir Lewis Namier - neither of them English - made it
their charge against Pitt, later Earl of Chatham, that he had saddled Britain with
unlimited empire and then collapsed into irresponsibility at the height of the
crisis generated by its acquisition. Hume indeed thought that the empire should
never have been acquired at all, and I have no idea what Namier thought on that
subject. But the implication is plain at least that empire was contingent and not
necessary to the purposes of British government. Pitt had not conquered the St.
Lawrence and the Ohio to open the way to Daniel Boone and George Rogers
Clark; an empire of settlement was of less interest than controlling the riverine
aspects of a system of Atlantic commerce. Americans were indeed beginning to
say that the empire of settlement would be theirs and would some day transfer
the seat of government from Britain across the Atlantic; and deep in such expres-
sions of manifest destiny, the dim outlines of what might have become a struggle
for British independence can be sighted. Chatham once declared that the day
Parliament ceased to be supreme over America, he would advise every gentleman
to sell his lands and emigrate to that country; the greater partner, he said, must
ever control the less.16 More immediately, England was the ruling partner and
the roots of Parliament were in English landed and commercial society. It was
this which was to render conciliation with the colonies ultimately impossible.
A further cause of disruption in the normal conduct of parliamentary politics
had been the ministerial initiative taken, soon after his accession, by the young
George III and his friend Lord Bute. The meaning of this has been intensively
debated, but it seems clear that the King had no intention of overthrowing the
oligarchical order and no means of doing so; and though his private as well as his
public rhetoric is somewhat flavored by the language of Tory opposition, it was
to prove important that he had certainly no intention of coming forward as that
"patriot king" which was Bolingbroke's final contribution to the ideology of
separated powers. But in driving Pitt and then Newcastle from office, the King
and Lord Bute overplayed their hand sufficiently to provoke both Whig and
radical — not to mention Tory — opposition. Radical displeasure erupted in Lon-
don and took the form of the Wilkite movement; and the circumstance that
George's chief adviser for a year or two was a Scot, and a Stuart into the bargain,
produced a wave of venomous anti-Scottish chauvinism, such as lay always at the
roots of eighteenth-century opposition, and regrettably reappears in the writings
of both Adams17 and Jefferson18 years later. Radical opposition — which was
15
Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution, 2nd ed. (London, 1961), pp. 159—60.
16
Max Beloff (ed.), The Debate on the American Revolution (London, 1949), p. 102 (from Chatham
Correspondence, n, 369—72). See also "Josiah Tucker," Chap. 9, this volume.
17
John Adams, Autobiography (The Adams Papers, ed. L. H. Butterfield {Cambridge, Mass., 1961],
m, 352): "an insolent, arbitrary Scotch faction, with a Bute and a Mansfield at their head for a
ministry . . . "
18
See Jefferson's drafts for the Declaration of Independence: "Not only soldiers of our common blood,
but Scotch and foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us . . ." Carl Becker, The Declaration of
Independence (New York, 1933), pp. 169, 172.
82 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

necessarily popular in the sense that it was outside the intimate proceedings of
oligarchical politics — automatically took the form of an outcry against corrup-
tion, and the King, who had set out with some vague idea of reducing the
aristocracy's control over patronage, found himself tagged as its chief upholder.
It was much easier to denounce the influence of the Crown when the Crown
proposed to exert that influence with the aid of advisers whom neither radicals
nor aristocrats liked.
When Bute left the scene, George III punctiliously sought his ministers within
the established world of English politics; but his own activities, coupled with
those of the opposition in the streets of London, Boston, and Philadelphia, were
bringing the oligarchy into a state of disarray from which it did not fully recover.
Chatham's retreat into psychic instability was an accident of personality; but Sir
Lewis Namier's detestation of Edmund Burke - which ran very deep indeed -
was in part the effect of his belief that Burke's rhetoric escalated into a moral and
constitutional issue the perfectly natural desire of a Whig faction to return to
power. The point, however, about the Rockingham Whigs — a rather inarticulate
group whom Burke served in the role of hyperarticulate genius — is that they
simply did not know what to do with power when they had it; and when in due
course the King found in Lord North a minister who could hold Parliament
together, he was merely filling a vacuum left by the inefficacy of Whig politi-
cians. Though it may not show up in their day-to-day maneuverings within the
world of high politics, these were caught between two fires. They could not run
with the London, country, and American radicals whose denunciations of corrup-
tion were increasingly turned against aristocracy as well as Crown; and this de-
prived them of one of their normal rhetorical means of attacking a ministry they
did not like. They would never have made very good leaders of a Country move-
ment, and in the era of Jack Wilkes and Sam Adams — insofar as they knew about
the latter — they did not even want to try. The case for Burke's Thoughts on the
Present Discontents, if there is one, is that he was looking for an alternative rhetoric
to that of the commonwealth ideology; to his formidable critic Catherine Macau-
lay, however, it seemed that he was merely watering down the language of the
radical tradition.
A simple dialectic would suggest as the outcome of this situation a wave of
reform originating with leaders out of doors; 19 but in Britain this did not hap-
pen, whereas in the American colonies it did. The two phenomena are of course
discontinuous: only externally and rhetorically were the American radicals a Country
movement originating in the context of British politics, and they made it their
aim not to reform Parliament, but to repudiate its authority. But it is of vast
importance in the setting of American history that they found the only ideolog-
ical means of doing this to entail the assertion that the parliamentary institution

19
John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George HI (Cambridge, 1976).
 1776: The revolution against Parliament 83
itself was corrupt-not just accidentally, but inherently - and must be replaced
by drawing upon the quasi-republican alternatives supplied by the opposition
tradition. And one cannot consider the political culture of the Founding Fathers
without discovering that the language of commonwealth ideology, however in-
adequate as a rhetorical tool in parliamentary Britain, offered superlative intel-
lectual equipment for debating the problems of eighteenth-century politics and
society, and for founding institutions which have endured. The Nixon Admin-
istration was immolated on altars originally built by the Old Whigs; and the
knives were still sharp.
In the context of British history, however, to which the view of 1776 as a
British revolution commits us, we have to ask not only why there was a revolu-
tion against Parliament in the American colonies, but what this means in terms
of the history of Parliament itself. Is there, for instance, any deep relationship
beween the attempts to legislate for the colonies in the 1760s and the ministerial
upheavals which followed the intervention of Bute and George III? It seems plau-
sible to suggest that there was not - that more or less any ministry might have
started legislating for America with no sense of doing anything out of the ordi-
nary — but we continue to find the thought enticing that more stable ministries
might have proved less stubborn and might have desisted before the crisis became
irremediable. There persist, both in American and in British thinking, various
forms of nostalgia (the reasons for their existence are themselves historically in-
teresting) which continue to suggest that the severance of America from Britain
might, and almost should, have been avoided. I cannot imagine that these feel-
ings run very deep, and my main reason here is a firm conviction that parliamen-
tary institutions and a continental empire of settlement were, in no long run,
incompatible. But a subsidiary theme of this nostalgia on the American side is
the will to believe that the loss of America was a terrible shock to the British
nations and marked a profound crisis in the stability of their governing institu-
tions. It seems important to explain, in conclusion, some reasons for thinking
that this was not the case at all; that the loss of America was an effect of the
stability of eighteenth-century politics, much more than of their instability or of
the fact that they were beginning to change, and was accepted in a way which
did their stability no harm at all.

IV
If there was a moment at which an American Revolution became inevitable, it
was the moment at which it became unalterable that the colonies thought of
themselves as (to use a phrase of the time) "perfect states," which must - demo-
cratically or otherwise — generate legislative governments with all the attributes
of sovereignty. Perhaps this did not happen until 1776, when they declared
84 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

themselves "states" and set about just such a pursuit of sovereignty in formally
revolutionary terms; but a powerful cause in precipitating this Revolution was
the discovery that sovereignty was indeed legislative and was therefore unshara-
ble. The British had always been perfectly clear that this was the case, and that
Parliament must legislate for the colonies if it had any claim to govern them at
all; but we all know that the ideological history of the Revolution consists largely
of the extraordinary difficulty with which Americans brought themselves to ac-
knowledge this self-evident truth. Because they began with believing themselves
to be British, living under a free constitution, they supposed themselves to enjoy
the civil rights, the constitutional liberties, the political virtues, and the natural
freedoms that went with it; and so indeed they did, until they began trying to
plead these things against the supremacy of Parliament. Then they discovered
how far away Parliament really was and how little they understood that institu-
tion or those whose lives were intimately bound up with it. The British, except
insofar — and it was to a considerable extent — as their thinking was confused by
the commonwealth ideology of separated powers, had a very clear understanding
that liberty depended upon the supremacy of Parliament, upon its legislative
sovereignty (perhaps symbolic rather than active), and upon the continuation of
a government of influence and patronage. The great American discovery was to
be that the commonwealth ideology provided many of the conceptual bases for a
new and successful form of government, but this came about only after it had
helped render a revolution inevitable by delaying their recognition of the revo-
lutionary nature of what they were asking. Perhaps this is why one of thefirstto
call for revolutionary independence was Thomas Paine - an Englishman in some
ways closer to Puritan and Cromwellian than to Whig or even Old Whig ways
of thought.
When the Americans and some of their supporters argued that the King should
offer his protection to a number of legislatures virtually equal with one another,
Lord North observed that the argument was that of a Tory.20 When Jefferson, in
A Summary View of the Rights of British America, virtually invited George III to
assume the role of Bolingbroke's "patriot king," who dealt with Parliament in-
dependently of the channels provided by ministers, their connections, and their
influences, he invited him to deal in this way with an indefinite number of par-
liaments at the same time. We know that George never had the intention of
acting as a patriot king, and it seems in the highest degree unlikely that Jefferson
thought he was going to; the strategy of the Summary View is surely to offer the
King a role in order to denounce him for refusing it. But the reason why George
could never be a patriot king is also the reason why a plurality of legislatures was
an impossibility under eighteenth-century conditions. He never thought of mov-
ing outside the established patterns of oligarchical politics because he knew,
20
G . H . Gutteridge, English Wbiggism and the American Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963),
p. 62.
 1776: The revolution against Parliament 85

without having to think about it, that the only way to govern Britain was for
him to find ministers who could sustain his government in Parliament (his errors,
which were many, did no more than raise a few questions about the monarch's
personal role in finding and maintaining ministries) and that this could not be
done unless there was a consistent and exacting symbiosis between King, minis-
ters, and the two houses; one in which influence, patronage, and touchy personal
relationships required constant attention; one which certainly could not be sus-
tained with more than one truly sovereign legislature at a time. This was why
the Parliament of Scotland had been absorbed in 1707; and Josiah Tucker, the
most astute of conservative English observers of the American crisis, drew the
conclusion that a separate Irish Parliament had become intolerable. 21 There was
no middle way between legislative union and legislative independence; Ireland
must be drawn into union, America must become independent. Tucker's advice
for Ireland was not taken till twenty years and a bloodbath later; but that is about
the norm for Irish history.
There were conservative as well as radical reasons why Englishmen should
welcome American independence, and the former of these were very like the
reasons for supporting American subjugation. Our thinking on these matters is
often confused by the memory of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
British Commonwealth, in which independent legislatures under the same Crown
proved to be perfectly feasible; but what needs stressing about that by now some-
what unreal association is that it came into being at a time when electoral poli-
tics, both British and colonial, had become more democratic and less dependent
on the exercise of influence by the Crown. Under the conditions of the age of
oligarchy nothing of the kind was feasible. Since we know that English radicals
in the age of the American Revolution were demanding a wider franchise and a
reduction of influence, we vaguely feel that they were demanding both what
might have rendered the Revolution unnecessary and what Americans were de-
manding for themselves. But such thinking is not very exact. In April 1777,
Edmund Burke wrote to his constituents at Bristol:
But if the colonies (to bring the general matter home to us) could see that in Great Britain
the mass of the people are melted into its government, and that every dispute with the
ministry must of necessity be always a quarrel with the nation, they can stand no longer
in the equal and friendly relations of fellow-citizens to the subjects of this kingdom.22
Burke was talking about what he hoped would not happen; he was attempting
both a tortuous justification of the Rockinghams' withdrawal from Parliament
and a protest against the wartime state of mind. But there is a deeper meaning
21
A Series of Answers to Certain Popular Objections against Separating from the Rebellious Colonies and Dis-
carding them Entirely (Gloucester, 1776), pp. 5 7 - 5 8 . The point is repeatedly made in Tucker's
works; he insists that a plurality of independent legislatures can lead only to Tory consequences.
22
"A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol," in A. J. George, ed., Edmund Burke: Speeches on the American
War (Boston, 1891), p. 194.
86 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

to his words. Since the summer of the preceding year the Americans had in fact
been engaged in a quarrel with the British nation — they had declared as much
in a public document now dated July 4, 1776 — and a reason for this state of
affairs was that, even in the age of oligarchy, there was a real sense in which the
mass of the people was melted into its government. Those out of office might
have a quarrel with the ministry, but they must support the sovereignty of its
Parliament; those excluded from the franchise might have a quarrel with the
oligarchy, but it was in Parliament that they must seek representation. The par-
liamentary institution had taken root in the nation, and influence was for the
present among the means implanting it there. These conditions had not been
established in America, and nobody had ever thought of ways of implanting
them.
This was why no British politician - certainly not Burke - had ever envisaged
a solution of the colonial problem which did not involve the ultimate sovereignty
of Parliament; Burke had only said that Parliament should refrain from exercising
it. This was why Burke and his friends found themselves totally powerless in
politics; the political nation was supporting its Parliament as usual. And this was
why neither the war against the Americans, nor the peace which consented to
their independence, was so overwhelmingly unpopular as to threaten the stability
of institutions; you might almost say that the sovereignty of Parliament was the
end to be sustained, and that subjecting an empire or letting it go were but two
ways of doing it. If- to borrow language from leaders of the historical profession
- Plumb's "growth of oligarchy" was the remedy found in the eighteenth century
for the problems occasioned by Stone's "crisis of the aristocracy" in the seven-
teenth, it might seem that the loss of an empire was a high price to pay for
institutional stability. But the empire was surrendered, and the stability of insti-
tutions maintained. There is this to be said for the old and misleading adage
about the British empire being "acquired in afitof absence of mind": the British
are more interested in maintaining than in expanding themselves (and will always
let their overseas loyalists go when it suits them). By way of contrast, let us think
for one moment about the Northwest Ordinance, about Jefferson's "empire of
liberty," about Clay and Monroe, Jackson and Polk; and we shall realize the
paradox that the new republic, born of the revolt against empire, had a commit-
ment to empire — and to empire of settlement — built into its structure in a way
that the parent system never had. The American Revolution was, among other
things, the greatest revolt of white settlers since the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, which it did not otherwise resemble; for the Romans allowed
themselves to become absorbed by their own empire, and the British never made
that mistake.
It may seem that I am giving somewhat too conservative an interpretation of
the radical tensions of mid-Georgian England; but the immediate future lay with
 1776: The revolution against Parliament 87
conservatism. The attempts at parliamentary reform made in the 1780s had es-
sentially failed before the French Revolution and the great reaction against it;
and it can be argued that one reason for their failure was that the commonwealth
ideology, on which their rhetoric was still founded, was by now visibly out of
touch wih reality. According to conventional reforming wisdom, corruption had
destroyed the balance of the constitution, and its principles must be restored by
a return to its uncorrupt democratic component. But the nation had just passed
through a painful and inglorious war to maintain its parliamentary institutions
as it understood them, and neither radical, nor Tory, nor American arguments
could stand against that. The election of 1784 marked the end of the old style of
opposition, as the political system turned decisively toward a minister — the
younger Pitt — who could hold power, and who looked as if he could conduct
reforms, on terms which held the parliamentary institution together. Burke man-
aged to be on the losing side as usual, but his ideology had the future before it.
There could be no return to first principles, he said, within a prescriptive system.
It is not without significance that he had first enunciated his hatred of doctrinaire
politics in order to castigate ministers for opening up the problem of colonial
legislation when there existed no answer to it.
But across the Atlantic, the republic born of the great revolution against Par-
liament was engaged in the return to first principles because there was nowhere
else to go. On discovering that parliamentary government had never included
them, they had turned to the quasi-republican alternative which the parliamen-
tary tradition had brought them, and were now studying the commonwealth
ideology in all its intellectual richness in the attempt to get themselves a form of
government. This is not the place to speak of the extraordinary ingenuity with
which they transformed their intellectual legacy as they thought suited them
best. But we can understand the depth and bitterness with which Hamilton was
accused of wanting to restore the British form of government,23 if we reflect that
the repudiation of Parliament entailed the idea that it was founded upon execu-
tive corruption. Since Hamilton wanted a strong executive, with a base in public
credit and a supply of political patronage, he must be plotting to restore the
monarchy and hereditary aristocracy; these truths were, very nearly, self-evident.
But Hamilton's spirit went marching on, past this particular misunderstanding,
and the final paradox of this episode in British history remains to be noted. In
the course of the nineteenth century, parliamentary monarchy democratized and
reformed itself, in ways which may well have entailed a restatement of the prin-
ciple of oligarchy but did involve the elimination of most of the classic and
familiar forms of patronage, influence, and corruption. Democratic federalism
grew into the greatest empire of patronage and influence the world has known,
23
Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, 1970); Lance
Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion (Ithaca, N . Y . , 1978).
88 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

and remains to this day dedicated to the principle that politics cannot work unless
politicians do things for their friends and their friends know where to find them.
New democrat is but old Whig writ large; and the Federal Constitution, that
great triumph of the eighteenth-century political art, seems to have perpetuated
the eighteenth-century world it was designed to deal with. Far more than Trol-
lope's Duke of Omnium, Richard Nixon was a figure of the Old Whig political
imagination. Far from his being an anomaly within the American political tra-
dition, the only aspect of his downfall that would have surprised a Founding
Father is that his was the only presidency to end in removal for causes shown in
the space of two hundred years. But do not our governing assumptions determine
realities? America may have guaranteed the survival of the forms of corruption it
was created to resist.
PART II
 Modes of political and historical
time in early eighteenth-century
England

History - in all but a few, rather esoteric, senses of the term - is public time.
That is, it is time experienced by the individual as public being, conscious of a
framework of public institutions in and through which events, processes and
changes happened to the society of which he perceives himself to be part.
The public realm, unlike the social realm, must be conceived as institution-
alized and formalized, since otherwise the distinction between public and private
cannot be maintained; and the institutionalization of the public realm leads to
the institutionalization of social experience and of modes of apprehending it, and
consequently to the institutionalization and differentiation of apprehended time.
To say that "history is public time," therefore, is to say that individuals who see
themselves as public beings see society as organized into and by a number of
frameworks, both institutional and conceptual, in and through which they ap-
prehend things as happening to society and themselves, and which provide them
with means of differentiating and organizing the things they apprehend as hap-
pening. This is why the archaic dictum that "history is past politics" has more
to be said for it than we are disposed to recognize, and why the history of histo-
riography is to so large an extent part of the history of political discourse.
There are a number of ways of classifying the conceptual frameworks by which
people order their consciousness of public time. One may classify them profes-
sionally and institutionally, in such a way as to suggest that the law provides one
ordering of time, the church another, parliament a third and so on; but in
eighteenth-century England such orderings and their languages had drawn to-
gether to a point where it seems truer to say that time and history were ordered
by consciousness of a public realm or political nation, which could itself be or-
From Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 5, edited by Ronald C. Rosbottom for the American
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, pp. 87-102. © 1976 University of Wisconsin Press; re-
printed by permission.

91
92 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

dered and conceptualized in a number of different ways. A preferable mode of

classification, therefore, may be one which enumerates different ways in which a
political society may order consciousness of its existence in time and of time as
the dimension of its existence. This classification can be arranged around two
dominant notions, that of continuity and that of contingency. Under continuity
we may see society describing itself as perpetuating its usages and practices,
transmitting its different forms of authority and, in these and other ways, main-
taining its legitimacy.1 Society will be seen as a complex of institutions and as
an institutionalized whole; and its continuity as a whole will be predominantly
defined in terms of the modes of continuity characteristic of those institutions
held to be peculiarly important to its structure. Under the heading of contin-
gency, however, we become aware of other and less institutionalized phenomena.
We are in the domain of fortune, as it used to be called: of the unpredictable
contingencies and emergencies which challenge the human capacity to apprehend
and to act, and which may appear either exterior or interior to the institutional
structure of society.2 In either case, however, what is institutionalized is now the
capacity to act in response to contingency, and the institutional structure is now
a continuous capacity for action rather than a continuous transmission of legiti-
macy - a change of emphasis which cannot but operate to diminish institution-
ality and render the institutional more of a short-term response to contingency
than it was before.
When time is the dimension of continuity, the institutional structure is seen
as successfully creating its own time — though if it is fully successful in doing so,
this will by no means be the same as creating its own future, but rather ensuring
that no future ever comes into existence. When time is the dimension of contin-
gency, the structure is seen as striving to maintain itself in a time not created by
it, but rather given to it by some agency, purposive or purposeless, not yet
defined. It may succeed or fail in maintaining itself; and if it succeeds, this may
mean that it succeeds in preserving its own existence in the midst of a history it
does not otherwise modify, or that it succeeds in imposing itself on exterior time
and re-creating the latter in the image of its own continuity - thus absorbing
history into itself - or that it succeeds in adapting itself, together with its own
continuities and their time-dimensions, to exterior contingencies and their his-
tories, while at the same time imposing its changing continuities on exterior
contingencies in such a way as to bring about a dialectical relationship between
l
J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1957); "Time, Institutions and Action: An Essay on Traditions and their Understanding,"
in Politics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971); "Modes of Action and their Pasts in
Tudor and Stuart England," in Orest Ranum, ed., National Consciousness, History and Political Cul-
ture in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).
2
J . G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
 Modes of political and historical time 93
continuity and contingency, the political society and history. To the student of
the patterns of historical consciousness that arise in these ways, the important
question to determine is that of what the time-creating agencies are — institu-
tional or extra-institutional, human or extra-human - and whether they act to
perpetuate simple continuities, to perpetuate simple domains of contingency, or
to create new futures.
As English political and historical thought — to which I shall here confine
myself — passes from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century, we encounter
some interesting and important case studies of this order. We seem - though it
is possible to overstate this point - to be passing out of a period in which it was
generally supposed that contingent time and its events were the creation of God,
and that the history thus created was more than merely contingent, in the sense
not only that faith in the goodness of providence entailed our believing that it
had a pattern we did not know, but also that belief in the content of revealed
prophecy gave us certain keys to the pattern of its eschatological climax. To
seventeenth-century intellects, the fulfillment of types by antitypes, or the literal
or symbolic fulfillment of specific prophecies, could be utilized, in expectation,
to build up scenarios for sacred futures, in the movement towards which favored
secular societies might realize their history as latter-day Israels. But in the wake
of the Puritan failure England - if not New England - had opted for a less
prophetic form of religion which made less demand for an Elect Nation;3 and the
millennial and messianic projections of the sacred future, which had formed so
important a constituent of secular historical consciousness, seem to have survived
mainly in the form described by Tuveson in Millennium and Utopia, where the
long-standing tendency to see the millennium as the resurrection of mankind's
Adamic potential had led to its being described as the rational and even scientific
perfection of human society in a future no less secular for being providential. This
kind of religiose progressivism figures in eighteenth-century thought, but not as
one of its major political rhetorics; one is tempted to call it the opium of the
Unitarians, though the idea of a providentially ordained increase of rationality
was not without its contribution to the formation of associationist Utopias.4
At the other end of the cosmic scale from that at which God created the
phenomena of time from the standpoint of a nunc-stans which knew no future,
traditional thought had located the humblest and least rational or sacred - though
3
William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (New York: Columbia University Press,
1963); William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660 (London: Macmillan and
Co., 1969).
4
Ernest Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1949); Jack Fruchtman, Jr., The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley: A Study in
Late Eighteenth-Century English Republican Millennialism. Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, vol. 73, pt. 4 (Philadelphia: 1983).
94 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

far from the least important — of the time-creating agencies: that "custom" which
was "recorded and registered nowhere but in the memory of the people."5 Founded
upon the individual's ability to recall and summarize his own experience and to
presume its continuity with the experience transmitted to him as that of his
ancestors, this conception had generated two distinct but closely-linked ideolog-
ical patterns. The first of these was the ideology of the Ancient Constitution,
properly so called: the elaborate set of historical arguments by which it was sought
to show that the common law, and the constitution as it now stood, had been
essentially the same since pre-Conquest times and - if the argument were pressed
home - since time immemorial, or at least since an unrecorded beginning in the
woods of Germany. The second, which could, though with difficulty, be ex-
pressed without reference to the first, was the more highly sophisticated philos-
ophy of prescriptive conservatism outlined by Sir Matthew Hale after the Resto-
ration and perfected by Burke a century and a quarter later. This emphasized that
in a purely traditional system, where everything was known simply by the fact
of its transmission, there was no more to be known concerning any institutional
fact than that it must be presumed continuous with some antecedent fact or set
cf circumstances. Consequently, we could never locate a customary institution in
any context, whether of universal laws or contingent circumstances, which might
permit of its being evaluated or compared with what had been done under other
circumstances - we might only accept it, on grounds which entailed acceptance
of the whole complex of traditions or transmitting institutions from which it
came.
These two ideological constructs, it should be noticed, entailed two images of
public time, sharply opposed yet as intimately connected as the two faces of
Janus. In the one, time appeared as pure transmission, the image and perpetua-
tion of a past in which was contained, yet contained without a beginning, every-
thing which was needed by way of an institutional complex — somewhat as Cru-
soe finds on the wreck everything he can want, without knowing how it got
there. In the other, each moment in the creation and transmission of a custom
could be depicted in such a way that the stress on the absence of beginnings made
it possible to speak of each act as at once uniquely itself and perfectly continuous
with all that had gone before it. The custom-creating people were now housed
wholly within the continuity of their own transmission, and it became possible
to speak of each act as uniquely theirs, performed in and out of their own historic
individuality "as the silkworm spinneth all her web out of herself only." 6 It is
the paradox of custom in Old Western thought that it deals with the wholly

5
Sir John Davies, Irish Reports (London, 1674), preface dedicatory, unpaginated. See The Ancient
Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 3 3 - 3 4 , and for the antithesis between custom and the nunc-
stans, The Machiavellian Moment, chs. 1-2.
6
Davies, Irish Reports; Ancient Constitution, pp. 33—34.
 Modes of political and historical time 95
particular by making it appear wholly continuous, immemorial and self-creating;
and part of the paradox is that the philosophy of custom has helped to generate
the philosophy of historicism.
This way of thinking, however, while far from extinct at the beginning of the
eighteenth century - and massively revived in a changed form by Edmund Burke
at the end of it - had during the second half of the seventeenth undergone severe
and damaging challenge from the resurgence of feudal studies, which had pro-
duced an image of the Norman-through-Plantagenet past as historically autono-
mous in the sense that it was founded upon a web of social relations which could
be studied in detail and shown to be structurally unlike anything prevailing in
either the antiquity which had preceded it or the modernity which had taken its
place. The feudalization of the middle period of English and Western history —
as it may be called — had produced two sharply differing ideological polemics, in
the debate between which much of the significant historiographical activity of
the eighteenth century goes on, and which may be compared in respect of the
structures of institutionalized time to which each gave rise.
The first polemic — Tory at the time of its inception in the 1680s, but suc-
cessfully taken over by the Whigs some twenty years later — was authoritarian in
its implications and in due course gave rise to a kind of presentistic conservatism.
(The ugliness of this adjective is the result of our having no familiar or elegant
term for thought which uses the uniqueness of the present as a source for political
authority; "modernist," while slightly less abrasive, probably carries too many
irrelevant connotations.) This line of argument emphasized that neither law nor
parliament nor constitution was immemorial, and consequently that none could
make claims against the sovereign authority on grounds of its supposed prior
antiquity. Filmerian advocates of divinely appointed hereditary monarchy could
of course go on to argue that if the constitution was not immemorial the kingship
itself was, being rooted not in mere custom but in patriarchal and even Adamic
antiquity and an original divine sanction. But after 1688 this argument—which
had been widely but not monolithically adopted by Tories - became harder to
maintain and the appeal to a feudal past was seen as carrying conservative impli-
cations of another and a less antiquarian kind. If the constitution constantly
underwent historical change — from pre-feudal to feudal to post-feudal — it would
follow that it contained no principles of antiquity on which claims either to or
against authority might be based; and consequently the case for sovereignty be-
came the case for some final, uncontrollable and in this sense absolute authority
to which appeal might be made in fluctuating and lawless circumstances, and
which was above the law for the simple reason that no law which might limit it
could otherwise be found.7 This was rather the case for sovereignty than the case
7
The Machiavellian Moment, chs. 13-14. This interpretation replaces that stated in the concluding
chapter of The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, where it was suggested that belief in the
96 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

for divine right; on grounds which were in their own way historicist it looked
back to the de facto controversy of 1649 and after, to Hobbes, who was in some
measure a participant in that debate,8 and to those pioneer "bourgeois" and "lib-
eral" theorists — these are not adjectives which I find specially illuminating —
who had begun to argue that a sovereign was necessary because men in the pursuit
of their natural freedom imposed bargains on one another to the limit of their
power. This argument was present is t to the extent that it denied that any morally
regulating principle was immanent in time, and saw nothing but the moment
and its strategies as providing the context in which the effort to moralize and
regulate must be made. There also seems to have been a fairly clear ideological
association between the use of this argument and the tendency to see the economy
as consisting in exchange rather than inheritance; the early economic individual-
ists were all theorists of sovereignty, whether they believed that the sovereign
should regulate the actors in the economy or should laisser les aller. It was in part
on the question of commerce that presentist sovereignty, in its Whig phase, was
to become the opponent of the second polemic, to which I now turn.
This second polemic founded on the feudalization of the past had a career even
more complicated than the first. In party terms, it moved from Whig to a com-
bination of Old Whig and Tory; in terms of content, it originated with the
specialized brand of anti-Normanism — or more precisely anti-Gothicism — em-
ployed by James Harrington, under the Protectorate, to suggest that the Ancient
Constitution was feudal and outmoded, and therefore ripe for revolutionary trans-
formation. For Harrington, there were no organizing principles immanent in the
English past; what he called "ancient prudence" was Spartan and Roman, a com-
monwealth of armed freeholders which had been corrupted and feudalized by
emperors and their Gothic mercenaries, but might now be restored to its true
principle in England in consequence of the decay of military tenures.9 This was
to place England at a crucial point on an agrarian version of the Polybian cycle of
constitutions, a vision of time more Hellenic than Christian, but to make that
point a Machiavellian occasione at which there was opportunity to escape from
history into the timeless stability of a true republic. By invoking cyclical im-
agery, Harrington invoked also the idea of a set of organizing principles, from
which there could be only degeneration and to which there must be return; but
he integrated English history into the classic cycle, and by insisting that freedom
must be rooted in individual autonomy, itself rooted in the individual's posses-
antiquity of the constitution reigned supreme after 1688. See also Isaac F. Kramnick, Bolingbroke
and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age ofWalpole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1968).
8
Quentin Skinner, "Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,"
in G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum: The Quest for a Settlement, 1646-1660 (Hamden, Conn.:
Archon Books, 1972).
9
Ancient Constitution, ch. 6; Politics, Language and Time, ch. 4; The Machiavellian Moment, ch. 11.
 Modes of political and historical time 97
sion of land, he further kept alive the time-structure of the natural economy, in
which property was better if inherited than if exchanged. His successors, the so-
called neo-Harringtonians,10 retained the essentials of his time-scheme, but re-
versed the pattern of his history; re-affirming in the conditions of the Restoration
the orthodox ideology of the Ancient Constitution, they located the stable com-
monwealth of armed freeholders in a Gothic and parliamentary past, and imposed
upon the present the burden of escaping corruption. The principles which must
be preserved if corruption were to be avoided — the principles of republican
balance - were now imputed to the English past, and the Ancient Constitution
depicted as an equilibrium of king, lords and commons. To maintain the inher-
itance of immemorial custom now became the necessary means of escaping the
anakuklosis.
We might term this a process of classicization. The principles - balance in the
constitution, virtue and independence in the individual - on which the polity
must rest were now represented as a stable and stabilizing structure, located in
the past as a source of legitimacy, and any movement from them was represented
as degeneration. The classical politics in Western thought included by this time
the disturbing suggestion, made by Machiavelli, that since virtue was action, it
must sooner or later alter the conditions on which it rested and so render itself
impossible; but eighteenth-century classicism seldom conveyed Machiavellian ideas
in their full dynamism and rigor, and intimations of political mortality usually
took the form, first of hints that no system of virtue could hope to endure forever,
and second of warnings that the process of corruption, once begun, was almost
impossible to check, even by the one known cure of drastic return to the consti-
tution's original principles. The stakes were high when the individual was en-
gaged in the practice of civic virtue, for he must commit his entire moral person-
ality to the preservation of a classic ideal amidst a history not inherently friendly
to it. If the individual was to be virtuous, he must live in a virtuous city; in a
corrupt city, the individual himself must be corrupted.
The historical scene was rendered far more precarious by the late seventeenth
century's realization that the personal autonomy, necessary if the individual was
to practice virtue in a republic, needed a material foundation in the form of
property. If the function of property was to confer independence on the individ-
ual, it must involve him in as few as possible contingent relations with other
individuals; and the ideal form of property thus came to appear the inheritable
freehold or fee simple in land, on which the Roman or Gothic citizen warrior had
based his capacity for self-defense and self-government. But this ideal existed in
the past. By the closing decade of the seventeenth century English and Scottish
social critics were increasingly disturbed by the rise of professional armies, in

10
Politics, Language and Time, chs. 3 - 4 ; The Machiavellian Moment, ch. 12.
98 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

which the citizen alienated the vital function of self-defense to a hired and banausic
specialist, and thus became in some measure corrupt; and it had already been
perceived that what enabled him to take this fatal step was the increased circu-
lation of goods and money, which enabled him to pay a substitute to defend him
while he both enjoyed the benefits of an expanding culture and accumulated
further riches as the means to further enjoyment. But what soon became known
as "the progress of the arts" was an irreversible process, whether one thought of
it as the expansion of culture or as the corruption of virtue; the uncomplicated
Roman or Gothic world lay far in the past; and profound changes were beginning
to occur in Western man's understanding of history, as a result of the perception
that economic and cultural growth must be thought of as both progress and
corruption. Culture and liberty, it began to appear, were ultimately incompati-
ble; the Goths were both despicable as artists and admirable as freemen; and what
raised man above the condition of the savage must ultimately sink him below the
level of the citizen. Man's quarrel with his own history, that most characteristic
feature of the modern mind, may be dated in England from about the foundation
of the National Debt. And should anyone wish to challenge my use of the mas-
culine gender, I will point out that the classical ideal in politics and history was
still a profoundly masculine way of thinking, and that its perception of the fem-
inine was part of the crisis in awareness which I am seeking to explore.
The National Debt was a device permitting English society to maintain and
expand its government, army and trade by mortgaging its revenues in the future.
This was sufficient to make it the paradigm of a society now living to an increas-
ing degree by speculation and by credit: that is to say, by men's expectations of
one another's capacity for future action and performance. Since a credit mecha-
nism was an expansive and dynamic social device, the beliefs men had to form
and maintain concerning one another were more than simple expectations of an-
other's capacity to pay what he had borrowed, to perform what he had promised;
they were boomtime beliefs, obliging men to credit one another with capacity to
expand and grow and become what they were not. Far more than the practice of
trade and profit, even at their most speculative, the growth of public credit
obliged capitalist society to develop as an ideology something society had never
possessed before, the image of a secular and historical future. Without belief in
the progress of the arts, the investing mercantile society literally could not main-
tain itself.
But in what was belief in such a future to be rooted? Not in experience, since
there is no way of experiencing a future; not in reason, since reason based on the
perception of nature cannot well predict the exercise of capacities that have not
yet been developed; not in Christian faith, since the most apocalyptic of proph-
ecies is not concerned to reveal the future state of the market. There remained
imagination, fantasy or passion; and Augustan social thought is visibly obsessed
at times by the spectacle of a society advancing at high speed into a world it can
 Modes of political and historical time 99

only imagine as existing in the forms which it may desire. Not only must the
speculative society maintain and govern itself by perpetually gambling on its own
wish-fulfillments; a new dimension was added to that dependence of all men upon
all men which thinkers in the classical tradition wished desperately to avoid -
though Christian and Hobbesian thinkers alike rather welcomed it — by the
imminence of a state of affairs in which not only was every man in debt to every
other man, but every man was judged and governed, at every moment, by other
men's opinion of the probability that not he alone, but generations yet unborn,
would be able and willing to repay their debts at some future date which might
never even arrive. Men, it seemed, were governed by opinion, and by opinion as
to whether certain governing fantasies would ever become realized.11
If the speculative society constantly gave itself credit for attaining levels of
wealth, power and satisfaction which it had not yet achieved, and so sought to
advance towards them, it constantly sought to transform itself by actualizing the
imaginable but not predictable. Now it is an evident fact in the history and
sociology of inter-sexual perception that masculine minds constantly symbolize
the changeable, the unpredictable and the imaginative as feminine, though why
they do so I would rather be excused from explaining. The random and the
recurrent, the lunar and the cyclical, were summarized by Roman and Renais-
sance minds in the figure of Fortuna, who symbolizes both the history in which
the republic endeavors to maintain itself, and the contingent with which virtue —
that obviously virile quality — contends. It frequently occurs, in that Augustan
journalism concerned with evaluating the impact of public credit upon society,
that Credit is symbolized as a goddess having the attributes of the Renaissance
goddess Fortune, and even more than she equated with fantasy, passion and dy-
namic change. 12 She stands for that future which can only be sought passionately
and inconstantly, and for the hysterical fluctuations of the urge towards it. There
seems to be an important link between capitalism and romanticism in this re-
newed feminization of time and of the process of actualization of fantasies on
which - though never quite completed - the speculative society depends.
The Augustan political journalists - Defoe, Steele, Addison, Mandeville -
display an uneasy concern with the increasingly visible public role of women,
and it would appear that this is connected with their increasing perception of the
growth of credit finance. Defoe and Addison both employ a female figure to
denote the idea that the credit mechanism has endowed society with an exces-
sively hysterical nervous system, and both suggest solutions in terms of what
Montesquieu was later to describe as the conversion of credit into confiance.13 That
is, credit was no longer to fluctuate wildly with the hopes and fears of the invest-
11
For detail see The Machiavellian Moment, ch. 13. I would not now use the word "Augustan" so
confidently; see pp. 248-9.
12
Defoe, Review, III, nos. 5-7, 92, VII, nos. 55, 57-9, 116; Addison, Spectator, no. 3.
13
De I'Esprit des lois, book XIX, ch. 27.
100 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

ing public, but to acquire a stability based on continued experience of the real if
mobile goods of society. Addison's famous parable of how the vaporish virgin
Public Credit is cast into the depths of despair by one set of phantoms and raised
to manic heights by another depicts only the beginnings of the process. Clearly,
the lady was Danae; she needed to be fertilized by a shower of gold; but was it
continued experience that gave the gold its value, or only fantasy in another
form? The conversion of paper into bullion, of credit into confiance, was at best no
more than the conversion of fantasy into opinion, and it did not appear that even
that conversion could ever be quite completed. In the world of credit finance,
government was founded on opinion and reason was the servant of the passions;
and though Montesquieu had depicted a society which converted credit into con-
fiance by borrowing to expand its commercial and military power, even this mode
of controlling and determining the future must remain dependent on the fears
and fantasies of those who must continue to invest. If Credit was like Machiavel-
li's prophet in needing a sword in reserve in case the people should cease to
believe, she needed it for the further reason that having once begun to prophesy,
she could not stop. The secular future was open and indefinite, and society must
go on advancing into it.
The frugal merchant appears at this point, as one whose willingness to invest
in the future was the product of his confidence in the present. In a sense he was
engaged in the process of reifying the exchange of fantasies, and thus creating an
actual future; but what we earlier called presentist conservatism makes its return
with him, because a present, no matter how solid in appearance, which consists
in a series of steps towards an imagined future, can never be purged of fantasy
and passion, or endowed with any set of principles more morally stable than the
laws of the market. Bating an invisible hand — a concept whose presence even in
Adam Smith can be overstated — there could be no moment in such a present at
which human fantasies and passions were not less than perfectly self-disciplined,
and the intervention of a sovereign, ultimate and uncontrollable power might
not be called for. But the actions of sovereign and subject alike in such a scenario
must remain imperfectly rational or moral, and the Machiavellian divorce be-
tween politics and morality retained its status as a decree nisi. But there was the
other side of the Machiavellian formulation: if virtue was not absolute it was
corrupt, and if it was corrupt must it not degenerate further? Neither David
Hume nor Adam Smith denied that a society might be so heavily in debt to itself
as to collapse altogether. 14
There were in all this the makings of a historical dialectic, an ideology of self-
transformation. But it is notorious that English culture, though it may produce
great historians, does not produce philosophers of history; though there was a
generation when Scotland produced the latter in some abundance, and the need
14
Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, "Of Public Credit"; Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book
V, ch. 3, "Of Public Debts."
 Modes of political and historical time 101

to discover reliable laws of the market, inherent in the situation I have described,
was among their motivations. But in England proper the dialectic between virtue
and commerce did not reach a crisis. The Whig constitution, alleging its peculiar
blend of classical balance and customary antiquity, worked too well. The Amer-
ican colonies broke away, proclaiming incorrectly the irredeemable corruption of
the mother country, 15 and set up a republic of their own, on new principles
which, as Gordon Wood has shown, 16 blended a new form of dynamism with the
classical struggle to preserve virtue against change. But to Britons it seemed that
either the repression or the surrender of the colonies would be worth while if it
preserved the sovereign authority of parliament; and the writings of Josiah Tucker,
perhaps the most authoritative presentation of the British theoretical response to
the American crisis, form a classic of presentist conservatism.17 They are overlaid,
in our vision of the history of political thought about this time, by the fact that
a few years later Edmund Burke, responding to Yorkshire radicals before he re-
sponded to French revolutionaries, began a re-statement of English conservatism
along lines which display, as well as the realistic modernism of the commercial
Whigs, dominant elements of the customary and traditional vision inherited from
the seventeenth century. There were no original principles of the constitution,
he declared, from which degeneration might occur or to which a return could be
made; but this was not because a new world of commerce had come to replace
that of Gothic agrarianism, but because, in a constitution whose every part was
presumed to be immemorial, no such principles could be located. 18 Burke was
effecting a return from presentist to traditionalist conservatism, though it should
be remembered that in a properly articulated tradition, every moment is its own
present; and he might well have assented to the interpretation, put forward by
Hume before him and by Coleridge after him, of English history as an ongoing
dialogue beween conservators based on the land and innovators based upon com-
merce. The complexity of the institutions through which the dialogue was con-
ducted helped guarantee its continuation.
A liberal interpretation of the constitution, of the relations between virtue and
commerce, and of the relations between personality, polity and economy, ensured
that England did not develop a dialectical historicism based on the need to main-
tain consciousness of a self being constantly transformed into its antithesis. 19 Nor
15
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press, 1967); The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968); Pocock, "Virtue and Com-
merce in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3 (1972).
16
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1969).
17
See ch. 9, this volume.
18
See Politics, Language and Time, ch. 7, "Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the
History of Ideas."
19
See Mollyanne Marks, "Renovation of Form: Time as Hero in Blake's Major Prophecies," in Ronald
C. Rosbottom, ed., Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 5 (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1976).
102 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

did the younger Pitt's war finance produce, in the third cycle of major French
wars, the sort of reaction against the alliance between the military and monied
interests which Swift had launched against Marlborough and Godolphin. In 1776
— a year whose significance in the history of political thought has been celebrated
elsewhere — there appeared, among other notable documents, Adam Smith's Wealth
of Nations and Jeremy Bentham's Fragment on Government, each signifying in its
own way that the interaction between the ideas of balance and corruption, virtue
and commerce, which had marked what I am tempted to call the first eighteenth
century, was beginning to be played out. In the second eighteenth century, that
of the democratic revolutions and the struggle against Napoleon, new perceptions
of institutionalized time were to be generated by political discourse, at once
less classical and - for all the convergence of Coleridgean and German thought -
less dialectical. England, having done much to transform the historical self-
perception of Europe, was now moving away from France and Germany along
paths of her own, while at the same time English and American thought were to
develop along sharply divergent lines.
 The mobility of property and the
rise of eighteenth-century
sociology

Property appears in the Western tradition of political discussion under a number

of heads, which might be summarised as follows: First and foremost, there is the
tradition begun by Aristotle and continued by Aquinas, in which property ap-
pears as a moral and political phenomenon, a prerequisite to the leading of a
"good life," which is essentially civic. In the form of the Greek oikos, a household
productive unit inhabited by women, minors and slaves, it provided the individ-
ual with power, leisure and independence, and the opportunity to lead a life in
which he (not until Mary Wollstonecraft do we encounter a thinker systemati-
cally interested in adding "she" to this context) could become what he ought to
be. Property was both an extension and a prerequisite of personality (and we
should be aware of the possibility that different modes of property may be seen
as generating or encouraging different modes of personality). The citizen pos-
sessed property in order to be autonomous and autonomy was necessary for him
to develop virtue or goodness as an actor within the political, social and natural
realm or order. He did not possess it in order to engage in trade, exchange or
profit; indeed, these activities were hardly compatible with the activity of citi-
zenship. Greek politics were not based on bourgeois concepts, which seems odd
when you consider that "politics" and "bourgeois" have the same root meaning
of "living in a city." The polls and the bourg, Burg or borough were profoundly
different places, and it is hard to estimate the amount of confusion caused by the
circumstance that the German word for "citizen" is Burger. But we are constantly
reminded not merely that Karl Marx can be considered a thinker among the
classical Western moralists, but that the Western moral tradition displays an
astonishing unity and solidarity in the uneasiness and mistrust it evinces towards
From Theories of Property: Aristotle to the Present, edited by Anthony Parel and Thomas C. Flanagan for
the Calgary Institute for the Humanities and the Wilfred Laurier University Press, pp. 141-66. ©
1978 Wilfred Laurier University Press; reprinted by permission. Some revisions to this text.

103
104 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

money as the medium of exchange. Because so many of the components of the

good life can be had for money, we are under a constant temptation to mistake
money for the summum bonum, and an individual drawn wholly into the life of
monetarised exchange relationships would be living in a commodified parody of
the natural and divine order, tempted to regard himself and his wealth idola-
trously. In every phase of Western tradition, there is a conception of virtue -
Aristotelian, Thomist, neo-Machiavellian or Marxian — to which the spread of
exchange relations is seen as presenting a threat. In this perspective those thinkers
of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries who argued on individualist,
capitalist or liberal premises that the market economy might benefit and trans-
form human existence appear to be the great creative heretics and dissenters.
In the form of oikos within polls, property appears as an item within a scheme
of relationships which are essentially political and obtain between citizens set free
by their property to engage in them. But there is another face of the Western
tradition of no less importance to the understanding of property: the language of
jurisprudence, inaugurated by the Roman civilians, strongly present in Aquinas,
and carried on by a succession of jurists and natural-law theorists into the age
of Locke. In this tradition property, without losing any of its significance to
personality, was defined less as that which makes you what you are than as that
to which you have a right. With this interpretation we enter upon that fascinat-
ing and elusive relationship between the notions of right and ownership, and
upon that world of language in which "property" - that which you owned - and
"propriety" - that which pertained or was proper to a person or situation - were
interchangeable terms. The distinction between persons and things gained in
prominence; and instead of being the mere prerequisite to political relations be-
tween persons, property became a system of legally defined relations between
persons and things, or between persons through things. Since the law defined
justice in terms of suum cuique, it was possible to define the good life in terms of
property relations, or of human relations as the notion of property served to define
them, though the thought which stemmed from the polls constantly asked whether
this definition of justice was adequate. The social relations which law and prop-
erty defined included many which obtained between men engaged in transfer-
ring, exchanging and conveying possessions and even rights; and the vision of
the law was therefore less hostile than that of the polls towards trade, profit and
accumulation. Because jurisprudence and the jurist's conception of justice were
concerned with men and things, they were less concerned with the immediate
relations between men as political actors or with the individual's consciousness of
himself as living the good life. Consequently, under jurisprudence, the notion of
the political itself changed and became less the system of relations between citi-
zens and more the system of relations between authorities and subjects necessary
to a life lived under law.
 Mobility of property 105

Both views, however, incorporate the notion of property in, and subject it to,
a complex moral universe; and in both contexts we have learned to talk about an
"ancient" view of property as opposed to a "modern" view. We associate "mod-
ern" ideas of property with both capitalism and socialism, which entail those very
complex schemes of production and exchange that we call "economics," a word
derived from the ancient oikos and oikonomike, which it supplants; and we see
reason to believe that the transition from ancient to modern was bound up with
the advent of capitalism. We also incline to think that as this transition took
place, two other things happened: the notion of unlimited acquisition escaped
from many if not all traditional moral restraints — an escape which was itself
legitimised — and the increasingly complex and dynamic relationships and pro-
cesses which we call "economics" began to surpass in importance the political
relations among people, swallowing up the ancient polis as they swallowed up the
oikos. It is reasonable to inquire after the actual or perceived effects of this upon
personality.
I dwell on all this because I want to establish a setting in which to pursue the
next phase of the transition from ancient to modern notions of property: the
problem posed by Professor Macpherson in his writings since he coined the notion
of "possessive individualism" in 1962. He laid down the paradigm of an unre-
stricted right of acquisition emerging from legal and moral constraints, which
were those of the scholastic jurisprudence elaborated by Aquinas and Suarez. The
recent book by James Tully has explored the relation of Locke to Suarez and
Grotius. 1 I am going to put forward an alternative thesis, in which I shall lay
emphasis on the revival in the period denned of ideas about classical politics and
the view of property that went with it. I shall suggest that it was against these
civic, rather than juristic, conceptions of property that new economic forces were
recognized and denned as asserting themselves, in such a way that capitalist
property was recognized as historically new because it was post-classical and mod-
ern, and man as proprietor and political animal was seen as existing in the his-
torical dynamic that economic and moral forces created. But if one employs the
paradigm of classical politics, rather than that of natural jurisprudence in inter-
preting this great revolution in the concept of property — this transformation of
the relations between polis and oikos, and between polity and economy, in the
words of Joseph Cropsey2 — one is not discounting the importance of ideas about
property derived from natural jurisprudence. Tully shows us that these ideas were
operative in the case of Locke; Duncan Forbes and others have insisted on their
importance in the case of Hume. 3 We shall have to return to them, but for the
1
James Tully, A Discourse Concerning Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge University
Press, 1980).
2
Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (The Hague,
1957).
3
Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975).
106 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

present it will be contended that the story can be better understood by operating
with the ideas of classical politics.
In England after 1649, a shattering collapse of civil authority faced theorists
with the necessity of re-conceptualising it from its foundations. In this enterprise
both ways of thinking about property played a role. Thomas Hobbes operated
within the paradigm of natural jurisprudence; he showed individuals acting in
and from a state of nature, extending their power over things and in so doing
coming to interact with one another, acquiring possession and right over things
against one another, and even acquiring possession over rights in such a way that
they could transfer them to a sovereign whom they instituted by the act of trans-
fer.4 His individuals move from the pre-possessive to the possessive, the pre-
political to the political, the pre-human to the human.
James Harrington operated within the paradigm of classical politics so com-
pletely that the concepts of right and obligation make no appearance in his works
at all.5 His individuals never occupy a state of nature; they are naturally political,
having been created by God in His image as capable of intelligent self-rule. But
because they live between heaven and earth, they occupy a dimension of secular
history, which is partly governed by fortune. This agency redistributes property,
which is to redistribute the capacity to act as fully political beings. Property
brings power: the power of masters over servants, the power of masters over
themselves; but whenever fortune has brought about the existence of a sufficient
number of masters, these may leave the domain of power and enter that of au-
thority. Authority is not distributed by property, but by the free masters' rec-
ognition of one another's political capacity; in instituting it among themselves,
they enter upon the world of political relations and begin to act as the images of
God which they are.
Property and power are the prerequisites of authority and virtue. They dis-
charge no other function than that of the oikos in Aristotle and need not (though
they do) possess any other social or economic characteristics than those which
distinguish masters from servants. Because they are liable to redistribution by
fortune, they bring to Harrington's politics an historical dimension, and he was
able to organise history around the distributions of property; but at bottom his
theory of history is simple, binary and cyclical. The oikos exists in sufficient
numbers, or it does not. In the ancient republics it existed in the form of the
yeoman smallholding of the citizen warriors; then it was overcome by the feudum;
now it is restored in the shape of the yeoman or gentleman freehold, and military
4
See Quentin Skinner, "The Context of Hobbes's Theory of Political Obligation," in Hobbes and
Rousseau, ed. Maurice Cranston and R. S. Peters, (New York, 1972), and "Conquest and Consent:
Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy," in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement,
1646-1660, ed. G. E. Aylmer (Hamden, Conn., 1972).
5
See also chap. 2, this volume.
 Mobility of property 107

and political capacity are restored with it. One should note, however, that Har-
rington's first readers early assumed what he had never said, that the breakup of
feudal tenures had had something to do with trade. There was a perception of
such a thing, though it had small enough place in the vocabulary of classical
politics.
Since Harrington thought it the function of property to provide a large but
limited number of people with the basis of independence from which they could
practise the equal relations existing among republican citizens, he found that this
could be best performed by the relative stability of landed realty. But there were
others (of whom, pace Macpherson, Hobbes is not necessarily the best example)
who aimed to present men as acquisitive and competitive beings whose activities
required regulating by a powerful and independent sovereign. Some of these
theorists found that a commercial society best illustrated both the subject's com-
petitiveness and the sovereign's independence. In their hands mobility, exchange
and acquisition furnished so many arguments for absolute monarchy; and some
latter-day criticisms of the liberal order were in this sense anticipated and ac-
knowledged.
A generation later, Sir William Temple produced a carefully constructed anti-
Harringtonian statement when he declared that "power," which he called "strength"
and "riches," was always on the side of the governed, and nothing but what he
called opinion (a crucial term in this story) could prevail on them to submit to
the "authority" of government. 6 The next century was to be passed in elaborating
the theme that it was in the multiple activities of commercial, cultivated and
specialised societies that opinion in Temple's sense could best develop. The com-
mercial, which Marxists call the bourgeois, order was from its first appearance in
theory geared to the stabilisation of authority.
But the 1670s saw the revival of Harringtonian theory. Neo-Harringtonianism
supplied an idealisation of propertied independence with which it was hoped to
mobilise the country gentry in parliament against the crown's revived power of
parliamentary patronage, known as corruption. Here classical politics became for
the first time a staple of English political rhetoric; and its persistence for more
than a hundred years in the face of every discouragement and defeat suggests that
it answered some fairly profound ideological needs. From then on there were to
exist two parallel and competing doctrines of propertied individualism: one which
praised the gentleman's or yeoman's independence in land and arms as perform-
ing the functions of the oikos in an English or Virginian polis, and one which
praised the mobility of the individual in an increasingly commercial society as
teaching him the need for free deference to authority.
In pursuit of the dialectic between these two modes of individualism, these
6
The Works of Sir William Temple (London, 1770), vol. I, pp. 29-57; "An Essay on the Origin and
Nature of Government," written in or after 1672.
108 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

two definitions of the political function of property, we shall not linger upon that
remarkable episode in the history of property theory associated with the names of
Filmer and Locke. If we fully analysed the debate of the 1680s, we should doubt-
less learn a great deal; but in a history of property theory organised around the
duality of classical and commercial politics, it is difficult to retain the image of
Locke as the hinge on which history turned. As Tully has shown, he stands in
the lineage of those thinkers who approached the politics of property through the
language of natural jurisprudence. He was, as far as can be told, utterly indiffer-
ent (though at the same time very close) to that revival of classical politics taking
place in the neo-Harringtonian ideology of the country opposition. He cared
nothing for the virtue of independence threatened by corruption, and it is tempt-
ing to try and place him among the philosophers of the commercial order. But
neither the refutation of Filmer in 1680 nor the justification of revolution nine
or ten years later necessitated the assertion of the commercial order; it was not
yet a crucial issue in English ideological debate. Within a very few years it was
to become so, and Locke was to be personally involved; but its presence is not to
be detected in his Treatises on Government, and when the great debate began it is
hard to detect Locke's presence in it.
I am alluding here to what we now call the Financial Revolution of the middle
1690s, which saw the foundation of the Bank of England and the successful and
lasting creation of a system of public credit whereby individuals and companies
could invest money in the stability of government and expect a return varying in
proportion to the success of the government's operations.7 Over the quarter-
century that followed, contemporaries came to hold that this had led to the
creation of what they called a "monied interest," and that this new class of credi-
tors and speculators was tending to dominate politics. This conviction led critics
like Swift8 and Bolingbroke to say what had certainly not been said before, that
a new form of property had arisen, one unknown in previous history. Conse-
quently the relation of property to power, studied by Harrington, and the rela-
tion of property to the need for government, studied by Locke, seemed to have
been transformed and to need reconsideration. This was a momentous intellectual
event: there had been a sudden and traumatic discovery of capital in the form of
government stock and a sudden and traumatic discovery of historical transfor-
mation as something brought about by the advent of public credit.
The century that followed the Financial Revolution witnessed the rise in West-
ern thought (something not dissimilar may have been occurring in contemporary
Japan)9 of an ideology and a perception of history which depicted political society
7
P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit,
1688-1756 (London, 1970).
8
Jonathan Swift, The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1964),
pp. 68-78.
9
See Masao Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Tokyo and Princeton
University Press, 1974).
 Mobility of property 109

and social personality as founded upon commerce: upon the exchange of forms of
mobile property and upon modes of consciousness suited to a world of moving
objects. This eighteenth-century perception of "commercial society" was not based
in the first instance upon a perception of trade, or upon an increased hold which
market values were gaining upon the thought of social theorists. If we pay atten-
tion to the actual records of debate, to the concerns which were expressed and the
doctrines which were developed, we find that the origins of commercial ideology
lay largely in the controversy between "virtue" and "corruption" and in the as-
sociated debate between "landed interests" and "monied interests" which was re-
vitalised by the Financial Revolution. 10 There existed an ideal of the social and
political personality epitomised by the term "virtue," entailing a conception of
property which had more to do with Harrington than with Locke and more to do
with classical than with feudal values. It extolled the image of the "patriot," the
individual rendered independent by his property and permitted an autonomous
engagement in public affairs. This image was regularly opposed to that of the
man of commerce and the latter had to fight its way to political recognition in
the teeth of the "patriot" ideal. Though the image of the patriot was of compar-
atively recent vintage, its roots were deep in classical antiquity, and on these
grounds it asserted a rejection of feudal values as vigorous as anything in "com-
mercial" ideology.
Thus we can no longer hold that the beginnings of a modern political theory
of property are to be found in Locke's refutation of Filmer, or in any simple
transition from feudal to bourgeois values. We must think instead of an enduring
conflict between two explicitly post-feudal ideals, one agrarian and the other
commercial, one ancient and the other modern. The roots of the conflict in the
world of theory and ideology lie not in the perception of two conflicting ways of
gaining wealth, so much as in that of two conflicting ways in which property
might determine the relations of personality to government. The ideal of the
patriot or citizen entailed the image of a personality free and virtuous because
unspecialised. The function of his property was to give him independence and
autonomy as well as the leisure and liberty to engage in public affairs; but his
capacity to bear arms in the public cause was an end of his property and the test
of his virtue. As far back as Harrington, we find it stated that while in principle
the function of assuring arms and leisure can be discharged by property in goods
as well as in land, in practise merchants and craftsmen will find it harder than
will landowners and tenants to leave their productive activities to engage in self-
defence. Therefore a commercial and manufacturing society like Holland is likely
to be defended by mercenaries and governed by oligarchs. By the end of the
century, this had been expanded into a general history of society. Medieval Eu-
rope was presented in a strangely non-feudal light as a society of warrior freehold-

10
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 436-61.
110 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

ers. But with the revival of commerce and culture in the fifteenth century, these
freeholders succumbed to the temptation to pay mercenaries to defend them while
they pursued the profits and pleasures of civilization, and so they passed under
the rule of absolute kings, the specialists in government by whom the specialists
in warfare were paid. 11 The freeholders' loss of liberty was identical with a loss
of virtue.
Here for the first time we hear that there is a process of specialisation in history
and that specialisation may be incompatible with the unity of the moral person-
ality which can only be found in the practice of civic virtue. It is also clearly
implied that moral personality in this sense is possible only upon a foundation of
real property, since the possession of land brings with it unspecialised leisure and
the opportunity of virtue, while the production and exchange of goods entails
activities too specialised to be compatible with citizenship. The merchant and
the consumer are mistrusted as liable to pay the mercenary and the bureaucrat;
yet it is seldom dogmatically stated that they constitute an inferior and banausic
class. It was not the merchant trading upon his own stock who transformed and
corrupted the relation of property to government; he might — though he would
find it difficult - retain his civic virtue, his autonomy and his right to keep and
bear arms. The danger lay with the owner of capital, great or small, who invested
it in systems of public credit and so transformed the relations between govern-
ment and citizens, and by implication those between all citizens and all subjects,
into relations between debtors and creditors. It was not the market, but the stock
market, which precipitated an English awareness, about 1700, that political re-
lations were on the verge of becoming capitalist relations; and this awareness
could never have developed as it did without the unspecialised agrarian ideal of
the patriot to serve as antithesis. The merchant became involved in the indict-
ment of capitalism, and the credit society became known as the "commercial"
society, because it was observed that there was a fairly obvious relation between
trade and credit. However, an obstinate conviction survived that the individual
entrepreneur ought to be free from the machinations of those who determined
the rate at which capital might be got. There was always urban as well as agrarian
opposition to the alliance of government and bank.
If this alliance - developed with varying degrees of success by Dutch, English,
Scottish and French projectors - was to be successfully defended against its crit-
ics, an ideological defence of specialisation, speculation and exchange would have
to be provided. Though Locke took a hand in the Recoinage of 1696, one of the
major proceedings of the Financial Revolution, he did not engage in the ideolog-
ical manoeuvres which characterise the defence of credit politics. To understand
this profound shift in sociological and historical perspective, we have to turn to

11
The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 427—32.
 Mobility of property 111

other publicists, such as Daniel Defoe and Joseph Addison. Defoe argued vigor-
ously that society could defend itself better against its own professional soldiers
by controlling the money that paid them than by sending its citizens to serve in
their place. Out of this thesis he developed a contrast between a commercial
society which could pay to have services performed and one without money which
could secure them only in return for grants in land.12 The stereotype of a pre-
commercial "feudal" society — or one more primitive still, like that of the Scot-
tish Highlands — was in large measure the invention of defenders of the Whig
system of government. It was harder to meet the neo-Harringtonian argument
that a people who paid others to rule them would be exploited in both purse and
liberty by their rulers. Here Defoe was on the brink of depicting a people en-
grossed in their commercial and personal concerns, who maintained a constitu-
tional system of government with a view to keeping their rulers in leading-strings
by retaining the power of the purse.
The conventional wisdom of today refers to this image as "liberalism" — though
the word was unknown in this sense during the eighteenth century — and en-
courages us to think that it obtained paradigmatic dominance during the century
which divided John Locke from Adam Smith. The challenge of virtue to com-
merce and specialisation remained constant and only half met; otherwise there
would never have been a Rousseau. The reason of most importance to our pur-
poses emerges quite clearly from the record of debate. The criticism based upon
the concept of virtue presented a clear and coherent image of the unity of human
personality, in its relation to both society and property. Arguments like Defoe's,
which clearly implied that the ideal of patriot virtue was being abandoned and
treated as historically unreal, could not be complete until an alternative image of
personality had been provided. It is possible to show how this was done, and the
story is in some respects familiar. Yet we cannot tell it properly if we ignore the
complex struggle between the two images, or treat one as antique and the other
as taking its place; both were formulations of the late seventeenth century. There
is, however, extremely strong pressure from the existing paradigms to take the
triumph of "liberalism" for granted. Both the classical and the socialist critics of
modern society appear to need the "liberal" antithesis so badly, as a prelude to
stating their own positions, that they exaggerate its paradigmatic control while
simplifying and antedating the history of its emergence.
We have now to consider what problems necessitated the construction of a new
image of social personality and why these problems were hard to overcome. It
was common ground that the political individual needed a material anchor in the
form of property no less than he needed a rational soul. If he found that anchor
in the shape of land, it guaranteed him leisure, rationality and virtue. If he

12
The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 4 3 2 - 5 .
112 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

acquired land by appropriation or by inheritance, these things were guaranteed

him as part of a natural order. Locke had argued that this was not enough to
necessitate government and that a pattern of exchange relationships must figure
among its preconditions. But Locke was ever indifferent to the ideal of patriot
virtue, and it was this which the Financial Revolution seemed to challenge. Gov-
ernment stock is a promise to repay at a future date; from the inception and
development of the National Debt, it is known that this date will in reality never
be reached, but the tokens of repayment are exchangeable at a market price in
the present. The price they command is determined by the present state of public
confidence in the stability of government, and in its capacity to make repayment
in the theoretical future. Government is therefore maintained by the investor's
imagination concerning a moment which will never exist in reality. The ability
of merchant and landowner to raise the loans and mortgages they need is similarly
dependent upon the investor's imagination. Property — the material foun-
dation of both personality and government — has ceased to be real and has become
not merely mobile but imaginary. Specialised, acquisitive and post-civic man has
ceased to be virtuous, not only in the formal sense that he has become the creature
of his own hopes and fears; he does not even live in the present, except as consti-
tuted by his fantasies concerning a future. The National Debt has rendered soci-
ety more Hobbesian than Hobbes himself could ever have envisaged, since it has
placed the performance of covenants forever beyond the new Tantalus's reach and
left him to live by dreaming of it. 13
When the stability of government in the present became linked to the self-
perpetuation of speculation concerning a future, something happened which forms
an important part of the history of ideas concerning unlimited acquisition and
accumulation. Government and politics seemed to have been placed at the mercy
of passion, fantasy and appetite, and these forces were known to feed on them-
selves and to be without moral limit. This is not to suggest that this was the
origin of the idea of unlimited acquisition or of the need to legitimate it; Joyce
Appleby's studies of early market theory may well have shown that observation
of mercantile behaviour itself generated a good deal of thought upon this ques-
tion. 14 But it was observance of the revolution of public credit that generated the
idea that political relations were becoming relations between debtors and credi-
tors — a thought which the publicists of Queen Anne's reign discussed unend-
ingly — and this was seen as leading not merely to corruption, but to the despo-
tism of speculative fantasy. Booms and busts, bulls and bears, became the
determinants of politics. The value of public stock - the Dow Jones ratings of
the eighteenth century — became the index to the stability or instability of gov-
13
See the preceding chapter.
14
Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1976).
 Mobility of property 113

ernments, and all this was seen as placing politics at the mercy of a self-generated
hysteria (in the full sexist sense).
The intellect of the early eighteenth century can be seen applying itself to the
stabilisation of this pathological condition. Defoe and others wrote about the
conversion of "credit" into "opinion," 15 Montesquieu about the conversion of
"credit" into "confiance."16 Defoe, a moralist, meant that men should behave in
such ways as to giwe one another good grounds for believing that promises would
be performed and expectations fulfilled; Montesquieu, a Machiavellian, meant
that by making themselves promises, men would discover that they had increased
their credit, wealth and power. Both had in mind the conversion of the pure
fantasies of speculation upon the future into the well-grounded opinions of con-
tinued experience in an on-going and dynamic political economy. It was the
problem of how the bags of wind, which we meet in the imagery of Addison as
well as Montesquieu, might be filled, and seen to be filled, with real gold. 17 (The
problem of paper currency is acutely relevant here.) Such thinkers had recognised
that, in the credit economy and polity, property had become not only mobile but
speculative: what one owned was promises, and not merely the functioning but
the intelligibility of society depended upon the success of a program of reifica-
tion. If we were not to live solely in terms of what we imagined might happen —
and so remain vulnerable to psychic crises like those of the Darien Scheme, the
South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Company — experience must teach us when
our hopes were likely to be fulfilled, and confiance teach us that we might create
conditions in which their fulfilment would be more likely.
The conversion of passion into opinion was only one of the programs which
theorists devised for the remedy of the situation. Albert Hirschman's The Passions
and the Interests1* suggests another, and there is a clear relation between the prob-
lem of speculative politics and economics, and the existence in the eighteenth
century of so many moral and philosophical writings on the conversion of passion
into reason and of rational egoism into socially desirable behaviour. But there
was far more at work here than a mere recognition that English society had been
taken over by hard-faced homines economici obedient only to the laws of market
behaviour. These laws were present and there was thought about them. There
was an anxious desire to discover what these laws were; but it is equally true, and
perhaps more prominent, that it was the hysteria, not the cold rationality, of
economic man that dismayed the moralists. Systems of rational egoism were de-
vised less to explain and legitimise what he was doing than to offer him means
of controlling his own impulses. It might be possible to distinguish between
"hard" and "soft" rationalisations of this order, of which the former accepted the
uncontrollable acquisitiveness of entrepreneurs who knew what they were doing,
l5 l6
The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 4 4 0 - 1 , 4 5 4 - 6 . Esprit des Lois, XIX, 27.
17 18
The Spectator, no. 3; Lettres Persanes, CXLII. Princeton University Press (1976).
114 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

and the latter hoped to teach self-discipline and self-understanding to entrepre-

neurs who did not. Mandeville might be a "hard," Addison a "soft." But there
is reason to believe that the latter might preponderate; and certainly a main
theme of Hirschman's study is the emergence of a strategy whereby passion and
commerce could be presented as self-limiting forces in a new and remarkable way.
Economic man as masculine conquering hero is a fantasy of nineteenth-century
industrialisation (the Communist Manifesto is of course one classical example). His
eighteenth-century predecessor was seen as on the whole a feminised, even an
effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with
interior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites, and symbolised
by such archetypically female goddesses of disorder as Fortune, Luxury, and most
recently Credit herself. Pandora came before Prometheus: first, because to pursue
passions and be victimised by them was traditionally seen as a female role, or as
one which subjected masculine virtu to feminine fortuna; and second, because the
new speculative image of economic man was opposed to the essentially paternal
and Roman figure of the citizen patriot. Therefore, in the eighteenth-century
debate over the new relations of polity to economy, production and exchange are
regularly equated with the ascendancy of the passions and the female principle.
They are given a new role in history, which is to refine the passions;
but there is a danger that they may render societies effeminate - a term whose
recurrence ought not to be neglected.
A contrast in these terms between "patriot" and "man of commerce," between
"virtue" and "politeness" or "refinement," emerges during the first half of the
eighteenth century, with Montesquieu as not the first but an authoritative expo-
nent. The patriot's virtue — his autonomy and engagement — cannot well be
questioned, so long as there exists upolis or republic in which it may be exercised;
but it can be shown to have rested on an archaic and restrictive foundation. The
ancient city existed in a world where neither commerce nor agriculture were
properly developed, and for this reason, argues Montesquieu 19 (Josiah Tucker
half a century later greatly enjoyed turning this argument against the Virgini-
ans), 20 the virtuous citizen was usually a slaveowner. His devotion to the laws of
his city was characteristic of a world in which neither commerce nor culture —
frequently bracketed as "the arts" — furnished social ties capable of holding men
together and only the "stern paideia" (the phrase is Marvin Becker's) of civil
discipline could perform the task. It was a world in which there was no god but
Lycurgus and Plato was his prophet. With the rise of commerce and culture, new
forms of social relationship emerged and virtue in the antique sense became ar-
chaic. Yet Montesquieu, though he describes at length how "le doux commerce"21

19 20
Esprit des Lois, IV, 8. A Treatise Concerning Civil Government (1781), pp. 1 6 7 - 8 .
21
This phrase is not Montesquieu's (for its history, see Hirschman, op. cit.), but "partout ou il y a
des moeurs douces, il y a du commerce; et partout ou il y a du commerce, il y a des moeurs douces"
(Esprit des Lois, XX, 1).
 Mobility of property 115

refines and moderates behaviour — how polis is replaced by politeness, even as

oikos is absorbed by economics — does not give the name of "virtue" to that which
takes the place of the old. Consequently, though we can glean from his text that
something comes after the republic whose principle is virtue, he does not explic-
itly categorise what it is and does not escape from the possibility that modern
refinement corrupts antique virtue without replacing it.
Notions of refinement and politeness, then, were crucial elements in the ide-
ology of eighteenth-century commerce. We have examined some epistemological
reasons why this should have been so. If speculative man was not to be the slave
of his passions, he had to moderate these by converting them into opinion, ex-
perience and interest, and into a system of social ties which these things rein-
forced; and the reification followed by exchange of the objects on which his pas-
sions focussed was an excellent means of socialising them. When the polite man
of commercial and cultivated society looked back into his past, what he necessar-
ily saw there was the passions not yet socialised, to which he gave such names as
"barbarism" and "savagery"; and his debate against the patriot ideal could be far
more satisfactorily carried on if he could demonstrate that what had preceded the
rise of commerce and culture was not a world of virtuous citizens, but one of
barbarism. To demonstrate that the citizens of antiquity were barbarians them-
selves was plausible, but for most people too destructive. The apologists of com-
merce therefore preferred, to any scheme of history based on civic humanism,
those schemes of natural law and jus gentium propounded by Grotius, Pufendorf,
Locke and the German jurists, which stressed the emergence of civil jurisprud-
ence out of a state of nature, since the latter could be readily equated with bar-
barism. 22 The tradition of natural jurisprudence thus makes its reappearance in
the story — though there are scholars who would say that I ought to have been
telling it in these terms all along — joining hands with many moral philosophies
which focussed on the notion of passion, and using the state of nature to show
how the passions were moderated in history by the progress of commerce and
politeness.
We are contrasting a conception of property which stresses possession and civic
virtue with one which stresses exchange and the civilisation of the passions, and
thereby disclosing that the debate between the two is a major key to eighteenth-
century social thought. What is perhaps of greatest concern in the present context
is the spectacle of property moving from a situation in a structure of norms and
rights to a situation in a process of history, of which changes in its character and
function are seen as being largely the occasion; but we have not yet reached the
point where the concept of property becomes absorbed into the larger scheme of
productive relations. That point lies only a little way ahead, however, and we
shall not have to distort the history of social theory in order to get there.
22
See Hont and Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 1983), for several
essays on this theme.
116 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

It may have been the injection into the debate of a concept of barbarism, that
social or pre-social condition in which there was neither ownership nor exchange
- or so it was thought - which helped occasion the still imperfectly-understood
appearance in Western theory of the famous four-stages theory of human history:
that men were first hunters, then shepherds, farmers, and finally merchants. 23
To us, and soon to contemporaries, this meant a series of stages of production;
but it is in the logic of the historical debate that it should have been primarily a
scheme of the rise, diversification and control of the human passions, which the
preoccupation with property served to anchor in history. It was by this time
common ground that the passions were aroused and satisfied (if satisfied at all) by
material goods and by perceptions and expectations of human behaviour impor-
tantly, if not exclusively, associated with the distribution of these goods, their
reality or non-reality being an important part of the problem. The relation be-
tween commercial society and its possible predecessors had done much to make
this a historical problem and to make it hinge upon the refinement of the pas-
sions. The four-stages theory marked an important step in the direction of a
historicisation of the human personality, in which the character and control of
the passions, together with the psychologies and epistemologies associated with
the notion, were organised into a historical sequence of the modes of production.
The ninth chapter of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, in which he elaborates upon
Tacitus's account of the primitive Germans, is an excellent specimen from which
to illustrate what operations could be performed with the aid of this schema.24
Gibbon tells us that the German tribes were pre-agricultural and illiterate; con-
sequently they lacked both money and letters, the two principal means of com-
munication by which goods and information are exchanged within more civilised
societies. By placing exchange ahead of ownership, Gibbon indicated a historical
perspective in which agriculture, which he calls "the useful parent of the arts,"
is seen rather as a necessary pre-condition of commerce than as a stage of society
existing in its own right. He places himself in that tradition which we have
traced from Defoe rather than from Locke and in which to exchange is seen as
more important than to possess. But he does not neglect to emphasise that be-
cause the Germans lacked an effective agriculture, they lacked a sense of property
which could reinforce and moderate the sense of self. The tribesman's passions
were violent but unfocussed; he alternated between periods of lethargy and mel-
ancholy and moments of uncontrolled warrior action which roused him, says
Gibbon, to "a more lively sense of his existence." For this Angst the only remedy
was property. Had the German possessed land of his own to till, productive
labour would have cured his physical and psychic lethargy. The sense of honour
23
R o n a l d L. M e e k , Social Science and the Ignoble Savage ( C a m b r i d g e U n i v e r s i t y Press, 1 9 7 5 ) .
24
For t h e following references, see J . B . B u r y ' s e d i t i o n of t h e History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire {"London, 1 9 0 2 ) , vol. 1, p p . 2 1 8 - 2 6 .
 Mobility of property 117

- of an exposed and vulnerable personal identity - which Gibbon tells us was all
that the tribesman understood of liberty, would have been transformed into a
sense of law and a capacity for military discipline by an awareness of responsibility
for his material possessions and for the relations with others which possession
involved.
There are obvious enough echoes of Locke here, though Gibbon does not make
them explicit by citation. It may be added, on the one hand, that he is repeating
Machiavellian doctrine about property as the sole source of social responsibility
in the warrior as well as Machiavelli's views about mercenary and citizen militias.
But on the other hand, a level of sophistication, not to be derived simply from
Locke, is to be found in Gibbon's association between property and the passions.
Property as such does what "le doux commerce'' was seen to do by writers such as
Montesquieu: it refines and moderates the passions by making us aware of what
we share with others; without it there can only be a barbaric sense of honour
based upon a profound psychic insecurity. Unless the passions are focussed upon
objects outside the self, the self cannot be socialised or reconciled to its own
existence. This is not the moment to embark upon a history of the concept of
alienation, but certainly the above is an early statement of its association with
the notion of property. If we are to be social beings, then we must become what
we own in relation to others, what we share and exchange with others; and since
the concept of labour has put in an appearance (though I do not ascribe to Gibbon
a labour theory of value) the step from exchange to production is not far away.
In the same chapter, when writing of the history of sexuality, Gibbon makes
further use of the concept of honour - the only value which can arise from the
pre-social and pre-commercial self's awareness of its identity. 25 Echoing Tacitus
on the role of women in primitive German society, he tells us that they were as
warlike as the men and were respected as their equals. This occurred because
warrior honour was literally the only value available at this stage of human de-
velopment and was consequently adopted as one by either sex without differen-
tiation. Since honour and equality are valuable, the tribal women were and are
to be respected; and they added another value possessing a sexual basis: that of a
ferocious chastity, since "the first honour of the sex has ever been that of chas-
tity." But what was the role of women as property relations developed in society?
We know that it was the perceived function of property and commerce to refine
and polish human passions and behaviour. At this point Gibbon joins himself to
a widespread and momentous tendency in eighteenth-century thought - that of
ascribing precisely the same role to women and associating their performance of
it with the rise of commercial society. It would be easy, and entirely justified, to
point out how far this association was based on the still surviving view of women

25
Bury ed., I, pp. 227-8.
118 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

as a species of property, or as a medium of exchange between proprietors. How-

ever, a case might be made for the view that women could expect more mobility,
and even active agency, from a commercially conceived society than from the
alternative model of the masculine and self-contained classical patriots.
The Enlightenment certainly saw women in the role of cultural entrepreneurs,
encouraging the exchange of politeness and refinement in a variety of forms. The
notions of commerce and culture were, as we have seen, intimately allied. But it
is noteworthy that Gibbon, having remarked that the women of the German
tribes might be admirable but not very feminine, goes on to express the fear that
as property and commerce civilise society and as women play their role in the
promotion of refinement, the latter may grow less chaste. Chastity's "most dan-
gerous enemy," he says, "is the softness of the mind. The refinements of life
corrupt while they polish the intercourse of the sexes." Gibbon is saying about
sexuality precisely what Montesquieu had said about commerce itself, and there
is more at work here than the standard imbalances of intersexual perception. We
are being told that something is lost with the disappearance of barbaric honour
and that the process of civilisation is at the same time a process of corruption.
The unity of the undifferentiated personality — whether property or sexuality be
seen as the source of differentiation — may have been relegated to a savage and
irrecoverable antiquity, but it has not lost its uniqueness as a value.
The associations in Gibbon's ninth chapter between property and personality
and between commerce and sexuality are not the only threads which may guide
us in tracing the history of the ideology of commerce, and they are far from being
confined to his writings alone. His contemporary William Robertson, for exam-
ple, in his History of America, goes so far as to indicate (following Buffon) that the
savage - in this case the Amerindian - is sexually cold, or at least devoid of
affection in his sexual relationships, because he is not producing and distributing
a sufficient diversity of goods to permit his passions to begin growing towards
sociability and civilisation. 26 The point in the four-stage series (or was it really a
cycle?) at which the sexual and economic Arcadia might be found, Robertson (as
it were) left Rousseau to determine; but in his companion work on India he
depicted an Asian society so far civilised by commerce that Europeans might
trade with it and be neither impoverished nor corrupted. 27 Given the presump-
tions of the time, he would have to admit that Indians understood law but not
liberty, private but not public virtue, thereby raising the question of whether
European public values could have existed without the antithesis of the commer-
cial principle — without barbaric and feudal honour, without classical citizenship
and virtue.
26
Tbe Works of William Robertson (London, 1824), IV, pp. 297-8.
27
"An Historical Disquisition concerning Ancient India," Section II; Works, IX, pp. 44-86; cf.
Gibbon, Bury ed., I, pp. 54—56.
 Mobility of property 119

In his View of the Progress of Society in Europe, Robertson attempted what may in
the proper sense be called a "bourgeois" interpretation of history by isolating the
growth of trading towns as the agency which had introduced into feudal society
the principles of modern liberty. 28 But the contrast with Asia was alone enough
to show that the pre-commercial component must be allowed some positive role
in the process. Gibbon touched on the same problem when he wrote, in language
once again significantly sexual, that "the fierce giants of the north" — the savage
Germans — "broke in" to a Roman world privatised to the point where person-
ality had been stripped of its civic relationships. "They restored a manly spirit of
freedom; and after the revolution of ten centuries, freedom became the happy
parent of taste and science."29 What happened during those ten centuries, whether
savage freedom became civic virtue, and whether freedom fertilised politeness or
politeness freedom, Gibbon does not tell us, since the later Decline and Fall does
not focus on the history of the medieval West; but the essays of David Hume on
the relations between liberty and the arts are enough to tell us that the problem
was a difficult one.
We have seen how property moved from being the object of ownership and
right to being the subject of production and exchange, and how the effect of this
on the proposition that property was the basis of social personality was to make
personality itself explicable in terms of a material and historical process of diver-
sification, refinement and perhaps ultimate decay and renewal. We have now to
consider more closely the politics of the commercial ideology, and in this regard
it is crucially important to recall that the ideological necessity throughout had
been to provide an alternative to a view of politics as founded upon the autonomy
and unity of the patriot personality. The relegation of that unity to a barbaric or
economically primitive past, in which it must itself disintegrate and seem never
to have existed, was a powerful critical weapon in the hands of the modernists.
Yet the ideal of unity obstinately refused to disappear. We find this interestingly
illustrated in the writings of Josiah Tucker, a vigorous and original conservative
- he calls himself a constitutional Whig - of the era of the American Revolu-
tion. 30 In A Treatise Concerning Civil Government which he completed in 1781,
Tucker set out to deny that political capacity could be immediately anchored in
human personality; but he did not locate the doctrine he attacked — as his lan-
guage shows he knew he might have done - in concepts of classical citizenship
or of man as by nature a political animal. He located it instead — as his choice of
a title reveals — in the political theory of Locke, whose doctrine of property he
did not explore because he believed himself confronted by English and American
democrats who were using Locke to divorce property from personality and make
2S 29
Works, III, pp. 36-46; IV, pp. 52-54. Bury ed., I, pp. 56-58.
30
He was one of those insignificant Englishmen of whom the history of political thought so largely
consists. This remark is dedicated with irritated affection to Judith N. Shklar.
120 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

the latter alone the sufficient and necessary condition of political right. If moral
personality entailed a right of consent, and if without that consent government
could have no authority over the individual, then government would be forever
philosophically as well as practically impossible, for moral rights and obligations
could not be deputed by one individual to another, whereas all government was
founded upon the transfer of rights to representatives and rulers. Talk of "inalien-
able rights" was therefore political nonsense, and if— as Tucker believed — it was
as a moral being that Locke supposed the individual to possess the right of con-
sent, that premise made the latter incapable of choosing a representative to ex-
ercise his rights for him: a truth which only the "honest, undissembling" — but
unfortunately mad — Rousseau had been able to perceive and declare. The capac-
ity to transfer rights and become the subject and beneficiary of government must
be sought for in man not as a moral, but as a social being; and the two, declared
Tucker, who was an Anglican clergyman with an acute sense of sin, were not
simply identical. 31
Tucker was not a stupid man, and we should have to work hard to demonstrate
that Locke was on his side and not, as he thought, against him. But when he puts
forward his account of the social origins of government, he says things which the
conventional wisdom of modern scholarship has encouraged us to deduce largely
from the supposed principles of Locke. Government, he says, originates not in
the inherent moral nature of men, but from the diversity of social activities in
which they engage. These set up a variety of relationships among men, in which
some individuals necessarily exert greater authority than others; in their origin
these may be violent and unjust, but by experience men learn to recognise their
necessity and conduct them properly. The various patterns of authority cohere
into what may be called a "government" or "state," which experience similarly
vests with codes of rules and systems of elaborate conventions. Though certainly
constitutional in character, nothing prevents this government from exercising an
ultimately uncontrolled sovereignty. At least it is not controlled by any rights or
other moral characteristics inherent in men, which need be understood as preced-
ing and going into the making of government. 32
Tucker was a correspondent of Hume's, and we may recognise the latter's voice
in some of the things he says. But it is of greater importance to see that he was
situating himself in a by no means discontinuous tradition descending from Sir
William Temple, who had written a hundred years before that nothing but opin-
ion could prevail upon property to submit itself to authority; and what had hap-
pened during the interval was that it had become increasingly possible to see how
property might itself be the source of opinion. Tucker uses the term "natural
authority" when describing its civil and social genesis, but he repeatedly makes
51
Treatise, pp. 27, 32-3, 167-8, 236-8.
^Treatise, section II, generally. Tucker relies heavily on Robertson's America.
 Mobility of property 121

it clear that the "natural society" which this term entails can only exist by becom-
ing a commercial society. Not only is the paradigm of commerce necessary in
order to describe the diversity of activities which generate "natural authority";
Tucker also emphasises that in the pre-commercial society - and here he men-
tions the classical polis to which republicans appeal - the exchange of goods and
services is so underdeveloped that the normal human relationship is that between
master and slave, lord and serf.33 Only as commerce develops do social relations
become capable of generating civil authority. Tucker uses no English equivalent
for bourgeoisie, because there is none, but he does argue at length that it was the
growth of the borough, under the patronage of the kings and barons of medieval
England, which permitted the conversion of the latter from barbaric into civil
rulers, exercising "natural authority." 34 Commerce, and the complexity of ex-
change which it generates, teaches both rulers and subjects the conventions ac-
cording to which government must be conducted. Being rooted in experience,
these lessons take the form of opinion, and we have heard enough by now of the
process through which it had been decided, since Temple, that the conversion of
passion into opinion was the function of commerce.
In this projection, the personality was related to government only through a
series of social relationships of which commerce was the paradigm if not the
efficient cause. Government was restrained and determined by convention but
not by natural right; and far from there being any such things as "inalienable
rights," the very foundation of government lay in the alienation of rights and, in
a certain sense, of personality itself. For if government is merely the aggregate of
the diverse forms of "natural authority," there is no one social or political relation
to which the personality as a whole, or in its unity, is naturally committed.
Today we call this political theory "liberalism," and though the word itself
was not so used in the eighteenth century, the criticisms which we use it to
express were in many cases already in circulation. The indictment to be levelled
against such a system would be not only that it denied the individual his natural
right and his liberty of consent, but that it denied him his virtue. Commercial
man might be a social but he could never be a wholly political being. There was
no moment at which he addressed himself undividedly to the public good; con-
sequently he risked the privatisation which Gibbon had seen overcoming the
Romans of the middle empire and which Adam Smith thought a criticism to be
most validly levelled at the conditions of life in commercial society.35 He might
under modern conditions have the social solidarity necessary to resist the barbar-
ian invaders who had brought down ancient society, but it was a good deal less
certain that he could resist the corruption of society from within. For if all his
34
™ Treatise, pp. 130-2, 1 6 7 - 8 , 170-201. Treatise, section III.
35
"Of the Influence of Commerce on Manners," Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, Part II,
Division 2, section 3.
122 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

political relationships were mediated, he must in the last analysis be governed by

intermediaries, whether these took the form of mercenaries, courtiers, clergy or
representatives; and every theory of corruption, without exception, is a theory of
how intermediaries substitute their own good and profit for that of their supposed
principals. The theory of surplus value itself may be considered an extension of
corruption theory from the political to the economic realm. Virtue — a synonym
for autonomy in action — was not merely a moral abstraction, but was declared
to be a human necessity.
To all this the apologists of commerce replied that the unity of personality in
political action was imaginable only under conditions so archaic and remote that
it could not currently exist and, if we looked closely, would appear not to have
existed even then. They added that the growth and diversification of human
potentialities through the development in history of the capacity to produce and
distribute was the true story of the human personality in society and that any loss
of virtue which specialisation entailed was a price well paid for the increase in
economic, cultural and psychic capacity. But the fact that the apologists so reg-
ularly admitted the possibility of a loss of virtue is a proof that the ideal of the
undifferentiated personality, even when driven from history, refused to disappear
as a norm. Montesquieu had called it "le plainte de Platon" that "le commerce
corrompt les moeurs pures,"36 and we may call it "le plainte de Rousseau" that
"les moeurs pures" had never been fully realised in a history conceived as a process
of commerce and specialisation. There were innumerable treatments of the ten-
sion between virtue and commerce, and innumerable attempts to resolve it, some
of which satisfied their authors and may satisfy the modern critic; but there is no
greater and no commoner mistake in the history of social thought than to suppose
that the tension ever disappeared, that the ideals of virtue and unity of personality
were driven from the field, or that a commercial, "liberal" or "bourgeois" ideol-
ogy reigned undisturbed until challenged by the harbingers of Marx.
We have been tracing, from the era of Hobbes and Harrington to that of Hume
and Rousseau, a complex dialectic based first, on the perception that there were
now two ways — an ancient and a modern, a classical and a commercial — in
which property might be seen as the foundation and determinant of social and
political personality, and second, on an increasing awareness that the latter way
furnished the human creature with a history, the former with a means of protest-
ing against it. Real and mobile property formed the substratum of a quarrel
which ended as that between the unity of personality and its increasing diversi-
fication in history, and it is hard not to link the problems perceived by Rousseau
36
Esprit des Lois, XX, 1: "On peut dire que des lois du commerce perfectionnent les moeurs, par la
meme raison que ces memes lois perdent les moeurs. Le commerce corrompt les moeurs pures:
c'etait le sujet des plaintes de Platon: il polit et adoucit les moeurs barbares, comme nous le voyons
tous les jours."
 Mobility of property 123

and Smith with Marx's indictment of specialisation and diversification, though I

shall not attempt to consider how this link might be established. The problem
of personality persisted as the core of the matter. But by the time of Marx there
existed the powerful paradigm of the classical economics, of which Adam Smith
was said to be the father and Locke the somewhat shadowy ancestor.
There is an enterprise, to which Joyce Appleby is the most recent contributor,
of providing Smith with a pedigree of earlier analysts of market behaviour; but
she does not seem to have shown how the analysis of the market could become a
problem in political theory, and her dismissal in a footnote of anti-commercial
ideologists as diverse as the Diggers studied by Christopher Hill and the country
ideologists studied by myself as "reactionary" (and so presumably not worth thinking
about) appears to hinder her from doing so.37 I suggest that we cannot under-
stand the vindication of commercial society unless we understand the grounds on
which it was assailed and acknowledge the attack's continuous vitality. This obliges
us to take a route which leads through Mandeville and Hume to Ferguson and
Smith, and to encounter classical economics at the end of it, after long debate
between virtue and commerce, virtue and corruption, virtue and passion. In a
recent work by Donald Winch, 38 Smith is interpreted in this light, and we are
reminded that he was a professor of moral philosophy and his first major work
was a study of the theory of moral sentiments.
But if classical economics emerged in this way, if the last of the civic human-
ists was the first of the Scottish economists, if the quarrel of the ancients and
moderns furnished the context in which the developing understanding of market
relations took on problematic meaning, then the classical economics seem rapidly
to have hardened into a paradigm which operated to deny the ambivalent his-
toricism of late Whig culture. Bentham and the elder Mill, as well as McCulloch
and Ricardo, would seem to have much to do with this, and we are left trying to
see how their thought emerged in history. The space from Smith to Ricardo is
replete with problems and possibilities.
37
Appleby, Economic Thought, p . 2 6 8 , n . 6 1 .
38
Donald Winch, Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge University
Press, 1978).
 7

Hume and the American

Revolution:
The dying thoughts of a North Briton

This essay begins by exploring the second part of its title and then enlarges upon
some wider implications of the first. That is to say, I want in the first instance to
consider Hume's perception of the crises in English and American politics that
marked the last decade and a half of his life and were at a crescendo when he
died; and I want to consider what doing so may tell us about his perception of
the historical world he was about to leave. I have emphasized the words "English"
and "American" in order to hint, by exclusion, at something already implied by
the title: that Hume's view of the British world in disruption was very much a
view from Edinburgh; and my concern will be with Hume as publicist, historian,
and political theorist, prior to Hume as philosopher. From Hume's perception of
the American Revolution, I shall turn in conclusion to say something about his
role in the ideological history of that great event, one as replete with paradox as
even Duncan Forbes1 could desire.
The thrust of this paper is historicist, in the sense that it emphasizes Hume's
consciousness of history and of the moment in history that his individual life had
occupied and was about to leave. Neither his historiography nor his philosophy
is historicist in any of the principal senses that word was later created to express.
But Hume was a historian as well as a philosopher and, in the former role as well
as the latter, one of the greatest of his century. Edward Gibbon, who thought
Tacitus the greatest historian of all time, once called Hume "le Tacite de l'E-
cosse,"2 and he did not mean the compliment to be an empty one. Discussions
of Hume are predominantly discussions of his philosophy in the strict sense.

From McGill Hume Studies, edited by David Fate Norton, Nicholas Capaldi, and Wade L. Robison,
pp. 325-43. © 1979 Austin Hills Press; reprinted by permission.
1
Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
2
The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton, 3 vols. (London: Cassell, 1956), 2:107.

125
126 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

which may perhaps appear as much a contemporary as a historical phenomenon.

But it seems desirable to draw attention to Hume as a historian, as a historical
figure, and as a figure in history as he himself perceived it. The second related
point that needs to be made is that, as well as a philosopher, Hume was diphilosophe,
a leader in the great eighteenth-century secularization of the intelligible universe,
when secular man, ceasing to be the subject of a miraculous redemption, became
instead an actor in civil history. The earthly city with its ideals of political virtue
and cultivated taste replaced the heavenly; and the political city, or common-
wealth, together with the opportunity for virtue it afforded, had since the Flor-
entine Renaissance been seen as involved in increasingly complex historical con-
tingencies. These - the processes that built up or broke down commonwealths -
had come, from about a century before Hume's lifetime, to be discerned more
and more in terms of political economy, or of the interactions between polity and
economy. Like his bicentennial peers Gibbon, Smith, and Jefferson, Hume was
deeply involved in patterns of thought that had descended from Machiavelli,
Harrington, and Montesquieu. He both employed and criticized these as historian,
essayist, moralist, and commentator on his own times; and in so employing them,
he took part in their profound and important modification. We therefore have a
Hume who was an analyst of his own moment in history and in the same act a
maker and changer of intellectual history. It is this historical Hume I mean to
discuss. The aim will be to consider his handling of the historical and political
vocabularies of his age, without making very much attempt to connect this with
his analyses of natural and moral philosophy.
A superficial reader of Mossner's still unsurpassed Life might gain the impres-
sion that, following the disastrous imbroglio with Rousseau and hisfinalstint as
an amateur diplomat, Hume retired to Edinburgh in the late 1760s and did little
more than potter amiably about the New Town until the onset of his fatal illness.
Hume's letters, however, leave a different impression; there is much about them
in these concluding years that is not particularly cozy. Hume wrote many letters
to his London publisher, William Strahan, that are outstandingly though not
abnormally cantankerous in their kind,3 though he was always distressed when
he discovered he had distressed his correspondent. Poor Strahan indeed lived to
be denounced by David Hume as an English Whig, and by Benjamin Franklin
as a British Tory, a fate perhaps unduly severe even for a London Scot with
ambitions in eighteenth-century politics. Hume, for instance, affected to hold
Strahan blameable for the City of London's 1770 petition for a dissolution of
Parliament and the removal of evil ministers.4 This letter comes close to one
3
For letters in this tone on business as opposed to political matters, see The Letters of David Hume,
ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:212, 218f., 223f., 225, 227f.,
236, 277f., 279f., 359-61 (hereafter cited as Utters).
4
Ibid.,pp. 217-18.
 Hume and the American Revolution 127

addressed to Gilbert Elliot, in which Hume declares from Edinburgh: "Our Gov-
ernment has become a Chimera; and is too perfect in point of Liberty, for so vile
a Beast as an Englishman, who is a Man, a bad Animal too, corrupted by above a
Century of Licentiousness. The Misfortune is, that this Liberty can scarcely be
retrench'd without Danger of being entirely lost . . . I may wish that the Catas-
trophe shou'd rather fall on our Posterity; but it hastens on with such large
Strides, as leaves little Room for this hope." 5 There is little reason to think that
the philosopher's feelings were more moderate in the last months of his life.
Hume tells Elliot that he is revising the text of his History, with sentiments
like the above in mind, and is bent upon purging it of the last taint of Whig
prejudices. He is blowing off steam, no doubt, but there is too much of this kind
of thing to be neglected. The vigor with which he denounced the excesses of
liberty have led some readers to suppose that he swung to a reactionary and even
a Tory political attitude in his last years, though Giuseppe Giarrizzo's attempt
to relate this to changes in his philosophy has been vigorously opposed by Duncan
Forbes. 6 I shall not try to consider whether Hume's philosophy, in the technical
and academic sense, can be said to have changed in ways that can be politically
explained, but it will further my theme if I offer some consideration of why both
the word "reactionary" and the word "Tory" fail to do justice to the ambivalence
of contemporary political thought in general, and of Hume's political thought in
which it is many times redoubled. Giarrizzo's study was an admirable contribu-
tion to the study of this ambivalence, which Forbes has carried into further de-
grees of elaboration.
Ambivalence indeed is our keynote; we have to understand how it was that the
fierce enemy of popular liberty also wrote, "I am an American in my Principles,
and wish we would let them alone to govern or misgovern themselves as they
think proper," adding in the same letter that "to punish those insolent Rascals
in London and Middlesex" was a far worthier object of government in October
1775. 7 The entirely typical letter of 1770, from which I first quoted, can help
us reach this goal if we analyze two of its components: first, its Anglophobia,
which in Hume's case is never to be forgotten; second, the thinking it reveals on
the relations of authority and liberty, which the English constitution had carried
to greater heights of fruitful complexity than had been attained elsewhere. If
Hume thought the English a bad lot, he considered their constitution a marvel-
lous creation in its way — ambivalence again, which can be explained in terms of
national identity.
Hume may be termed a North Briton, a term signifying a Scotsman who in
5
Ibid., p. 216.
6
Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Hume politico e storico (Turin: Einaudi, 1962); review by Forbes, The Historical
Journal 6 (1963):280-95.
1
Letters, 2:303.
128 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

the eighteenth century believed that the Union of 1707 had established either a
common nationality or an equality between two nationalities. But the insecurity
of referring to Scotland as North Britain is underlined when we consider the
unsuccessful experiment (which was also made) of referring to England as South
Britain. Eighteenth-century Scotsmen had no reason to believe that they had been
admitted to an equal partnership, nor did the English attempt to persuade them
that they had. Not the least revealing fact uncovered by Mossner is the circum-
stance that Hume all his life conversed in broad Scots and yet gave anxious care
to the complete Anglicization of his and his friends' written and spoken lan-
guage. He advised William Robertson on the elimination of Scotticisms from
the latter's histories; and he was active in the importation of an Irish elocutionist
to Edinburgh to teach a perfectly English manner of speech,8 the reason being that
any trace of a Scots accent was considered a bar to professional or political ad-
vancement in London, supposed to be the British capital. Hume's generation, in
short, confronted a problem in bilingualism, but once it was considered a matter
of the relation between the metropolitan and a provincial version of the same
culture, the Scots had no alternative to outplaying the English at their own
games. That is what lies behind Hume's pronouncement that this was the histor-
ical age and this the historical nation. 9 There was no political nationalism in
Scotland because no Scot had any belief in his country's ancient constitution or
any desire to hear the auld sang sung again. But from David Hume to John
Millar, the Scottish historical intellect developed enormously, in part as a con-
sequence of the attempt to understand the English constitution better than the
English did themselves. It was the abrasive Hume who wrote a History of England,
the far smoother Robertson who wrote a History of Scotland, and there is no ques-
tion to which of the two the English paid attention.
A North Briton, then, was a Scotsman committed to a restatement of English
culture in such terms that it would become British and that Scotsmen would
make their own way in it. The vehement Anglophobia that Hume at times al-
lowed himself to express may be attributed to insuperable doubts about whether
this enterprise was succeeding. The place of men of letters in eighteenth-century
society was always of profound concern to him: as a young adult he diagnosed his
own psychosomatic disorder as entirely occasioned by this problem, 10 and as a
classical humanist of his age he saw it as very largely a question of political order.
It is desirable to stress how many of the Essays Moral, Political and Literary are
essays about the politics of culture. This concern persisted to the end of his life,
as when in March 1776 he wrote to congratulate Gibbon on the first volume of
the Decline and Fall and expressed surprise that it was possible for an Englishman
8
E . C. Mossner, The Life of'David Hume (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1954), pp. 3 7 0 -
75.
10
^Letters, 2:230. Mossner, pp. 66-88.
 Hume and the American Revolution 129
11
to write history in a society given over to faction for more than a generation.
Perhaps we should not make too much of Hume's disappointment, some thirty-
five years before, over the failure of his Treatise to attract public attention; but
when in 1741—42 he set about reestablishing his reputation with the Essays, he
addressed himself to the great paper war among Walpole, Bolingbroke, and the
wits of England, kept alive as an issue by Walpole's recent fall from power. He
warned both parties against factionalism, in language showing that his sympa-
thies were already leaning toward Walpole's side of the constitutional issue. But
the 1742 volume contained a "Character of Sir Robert Walpole," in which we
find the judgment that under this minister "trade has flourished, liberty de-
clined, and learning gone to ruin."12 Hume suppressed this verdict in later years,
but in 1742 it clearly if mildly echoed the hatred that Pope, Gay, and Swift had
felt for Walpole as for one whose corruption of politics was destroying the arts.
Hume's judgment of Walpole is ambivalent, and the Essays are in large part a
reconsideration of the relations of the three elements he had named: trade, liberty,
and learning. Here is as good a point as any at which to begin our journey over
that "terrible campaign country" that Forbes has described Hume as presenting
to the reader,13 in the hope of arriving at some understanding of that hatred of
English faction so evident in the letters of Hume's last years.
The political ideology - Commonwealth and Country, Old Whig and Tory in
restless but stable combination - which had united Bolingbroke and the English
poets in the denunciation of Walpole,l4 supposed that the constitution was founded
upon a principle of balance between independent parts. To abandon balance or
to compromise independence was to corrupt both constitution and virtue, since
the political balance offered the only conditions under which the individual could
flourish as a moral and civic being. To think of the poet, scholar, or man of
letters as engaged in the practice of public virtue was to affirm that he, too, was
corrupted and frustrated by the rule of a corrupt minister; hence the great polem-
ics of the so-called Tory satirists. Walpole was supposed to be wielding two great
instruments of corruption, of which the first was parliamentary patronage and
the second public credit. The latter, which produced rule by a class of investors
interdependent with the executive, had much to do with the expansion of trade,
"Letters, 2 : 3 0 9 - 1 1 .
12
For the bibliographical history of this passage see Mossner, pp. 142-44. See also Bertrand A.
Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722-1742 (Lincoln, Nebr.:
University of Nebraska Press, 1976).
13
Hume's Philosophical Politics, p. viii.
14
Isaac F. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement
and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969);
Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1959); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1975).
130 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

though the two were logically separable. The Commonwealth ideology, which
appealed to urban and suburban Old Whigs, was also a Country ideology with
appeal to Tory gentry, because the ideal of independence within balance sug-
gested that ultimately the civic individual should be a proprietor of land — real
property conferring independence, mobile property tending to corruption and
dependence. But at this point there arose a contradiction within the politics of
culture. Thefinancialpolitics of Walpole might be said to corrupt the arts: but
were not the arts themselves a source of corruption? It was widely held that at
the end of the agrarian Middle Ages the revival of trade and the revival of learning
had tempted the warrior freeholders to pay others to defend and govern them,
sacrificing liberty and virtue the better to enjoy commerce and culture. The arts
might therefore be the cause of their own decline, and trade, liberty, and learning
might be at odds rather than in harmony.
Scots were less liable than Englishmen to the temptations of agrarian primitiv-
ism. It was all too easy to remind them that if they wanted to know what a
society of warrior peasants was really like, they had only to look north of the
Highland Line, and that the journey to Darien or Hudson Bay was well worth
making in order to overcome such barbarism. The Scotland of 1707-45, in which
Hume grew up and began to write, was one deeply committed to the pursuit of
trade and taste, commerce and culture; and Hume's own commitment to the life
of a man of letters must hold him back from any kind of primitivist romanticism.
This was why he was never happy with his friend Adam Ferguson's Essay on the
History of Civil Society,15 and why his emotions discharged themselves on the
evident fraud of Macpherson's Ossian with something like relief.16 And yet, his
deep fascination with the personality of Rousseau shows that he was anything but
insensitive to the underlying dualities of his age; on the contrary, he was like
every other philosopher of the time seeking to work them out in his own terms.
He could not join with the Bolingbroke circle in the desperation of their assaults
on Walpole and preferred to suggest that both parties were overstressing the
importance of a single minister's impact on the health of the constitution.17 To
say this was to undermine the ideology of virtue and corruption at its source, and
if it was Tory to assail Walpole and Whig to affect a pose of moderation, then
Hume's argument at this point is Whig in a somewhat Addisonian sense. But he
could not deny that Walpole had been the enemy of letters; for it was an evident
fact that English letters at their most polite — and Hume held that the first author
of polite English prose had been Swift18 — considered Walpole their enemy. To

15 16
Utters, 1:304, 308; 2:120, 125-26, 131-32, 133, 136. Ibid., 2:310-11.
17
See the latter part of Hume's essay "That politics may be reduced to a Science," in The Philosophical
Works, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 4 vols. (London, 1886), 3:98-108 (hereafter cited as
Works).
18
"Of Civil Liberty," Works, 3:159 and note.
 Hume and the American Revolution 131

grasp the next stage in the analysis of paradox, it is necessary to understand that
the ideology of the anti-Walpolean polemic was quite as much republican as it
was Tory. Bolingbroke's nominally Tory circle had embraced the ideology of
constitutional balance to the point of representing the principles of English gov-
ernment as those of a commonwealth based on a landed interest. To defend mon-
archy in the teeth of such an assault was to defend the commercial oligarchy of
the Hanoverian Whigs, of which the Anglo-Scottish Union was one of the props.
We may consequently abridge19 the Hume of the Essays as, first, adopting the
position — from which he was never altogether to retreat — that a virtuous and
frugal republic is in theory the ideal form of human government; and second, as
arguing that it is under republican government that commerce and culture ini-
tially flourish. Because republics are ruled by public law, property and expression
are guaranteed their safety, and prosperity and politeness can develop. The foun-
dations of the republic are therefore not in agrarian austerity, and we find in the
Essays the beginnings of the suggestion, to be carried further by Montesquieu,
that where ancient republics were violent and harsh in their politics or their
manners, it was precisely because commerce and politeness were lacking. It is
therefore not certain that the growth of civilization necessitates the continuance
of the ancient republican form; there are ways in which polite letters and manners
can be seen to develop best under monarchy, and it is possible for monarchies to
learn from republics the discipline of public law.20 Hume can be seen at this
point sharing with Montesquieu and Gibbon the widespread eighteenth-century
conviction that Bourbon France is the most friendly, gracious, and polite to men
of letters of all societies the world has seen.21 In republican and partly republican
societies, on the other hand - and England is one of these - liberty and equality
beget a necessary ungraciousness,22 a social style unfriendly to the man of letters
(especially, we may surmise, if he is a provincial or a foreigner). It may be ob-
served, first, that virtue is still political and has found no other supportive envi-
ronment than the free republic; second, that the gap between liberty on the one
hand and culture on the other has in no sense been bridged. It seems of impor-
tance to the interpretation of Hume to put forward the suggestion that it never
was to be.
Hume was no ideologue and could not for obvious reasons carry out the sche-
matic logic of suggesting that Walpole's commercial society was more friendly
to politeness than were its adversaries. But he did not join with the poetic coun-
terculture of Pope and Gay (one wonders if he knew how bitterly its members
despise Scotsmen who were not as Anglicized as Arbuthnot). By the end of his
19
"Of Civil Liberty," "Of Eloquence," and "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences"
contain most of what is summarized here.
20
"Of Civil Liberty," Works, 3:157-59; "Arts and Sciences," Works, 3:176-81, 184-87.
21 22
"Of Civil Liberty," Works, 3:159. "Arts and Sciences," Works 3:187-88.
132 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

life he was to decide that both government and opposition in England were
altogether incapable of politeness in any form, but one suspects that this was a
discovery of the 1760s. Meanwhile, the Essays contain two important adjust-
ments to the anti-Walpolean polemic: Hume accepts one and rejects the other of
the great devices of corruption attributed to Walpole, but he does both in a
manner that implies rejection of the pure country-commonwealth tradition. He
accepts the premise that government in a society such as that of eighteenth-
century England requires a plentiful supply of parliamentary patronage, in the
form of offices the executive may distribute to aspiring politicians.23 This was to
reject the opposition thesis that government must be a pure balance, and to
concede that the executive must have a dominant role; and it was to reject the
republican ideal that government must rest on a foundation of virtue, and to
concede that passion and interest must be recognized and even harnessed. But
the ideal is rejected only as incapable of realization, not as an ideal in itself, for
Hume is conceding that a measure of corruption is necessary and beneficial in a
world of commerce - and we already know that commerce is a prerequisite to the
development of culture. Virtue and politeness therefore remain nonidentical, and
the latter has taken an important step away from the republican matrix in which
it developed.
The second great device of Walpolean government was supposed to be public
credit, which brought the executive and its creditors into dependence one upon
another. Here Hume is unqualified in his condemnation, though he characteris-
tically remarks that it is republics rather than monarchies that tend to contract
increasing public debts: a despot can declare himself bankrupt with impunity,
but in commonwealths, where the public authority rests upon the public faith,
the machinery of public credit becomes irreversible.24 Hume never receded from
this position. Duncan Forbes, who sometimes yields to the temptation to torpedo
a conclusion before we know exactly what it might have been, emphasizes the
circumstance that Hume invested in the public funds and wrote a letter about
selling part of his holdings at a profit.25 But the philosopher's awareness of the
gulf between ideal and practice is surely enough to make it clear that he knew
what he meant when he wrote such sentences as "Either the nation must destroy
public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation."26 Hume was on friendly
terms with Isaac de Pinto, the only political economist of the age to argue that
national debt was a thoroughly healthy phenomenon,27 but he retained a vivid
23
"Of the First Principles of Government," Works, 3:112-13; "Of the Independency of Parliament,"
Works, 3:120—21; "Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to a
Republic," Works, 3:123-26.
24 25
"Of Civil Liberty," Works, 3:162-63. Hume's Philosophical Politics, pp. 126-27.
26
This sentence was added in 1764 to "Of Public Credit" (Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, pp.
174-75; Works, 3:370).
27
See Richard H. Popkin, "Hume and de Pinto," Texas Studies in Literature 12 (1970) 417-30; idem,
"Hume and Isaac de Pinto: Five Unpublished Letters," in William B. Todd, ed., Hume and the
 Hume and the American Revolution 133
image of a society destroying itself by heaping up the public indebtedness to the
point where trade and agriculture were both brought to ruin. We shall see that
this was an important feature of contemporary interpretations of the American
Revolution.
But if virtue and culture are ultimately unreconciled, and if the commerce the
republic begets leads to a condition of public debt that destroys both liberty and
prosperity, we are left with an account of the forces at work in history that is
based upon a fundamental and acknowledged contradiction. The civilized mon-
archy Hume has begun to show signs of preferring is no more than a temporary
compromise with these warring forces. To summarize the contradiction in a sin-
gle sentence is to express it in more dramatic and dialectical a form than was
congenial to the mind of Hume, yet his essay "Whether the British Government
inclines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic" clearly indicates that it
must incline one way or another, and must end sooner or later in an easy death
or a violent one.28 Hume's temperament, his politics, and his philosophy were
such that he chose to express the historicist contradiction of his age in terms not
of the dramatic juxtaposition of opposites but of the inexhaustibly subtle ambiv-
alence that provides Forbes with his "terrible campaign country." There is no
statement that does not contain its own ambiguity or is not offset by another
statement somewhere else. But there is Hume's fascination with the personality
of Rousseau, inviting the explanation that he recognized him as one who sensed
as many and as complex contradictions as he did and who dramatized every one
of them in his own personality. Rousseau was the undramatic Hume's antiself;
the tragic farce of the encounter arose from the circumstance that Rousseau was
by this time so paranoid that he was antiself to everybody he met. If we follow
Forbes through the debatable marches and borderlands of the Hume country, it
is to study one who converted his awareness of the ambivalent forces at work in
history and personality into polite letters, skeptical philosophy, and magisterial
history. We may try to pursue some of these themes down to Hume's farewell to
existence in 1776.
A historicist explanation of Hume's philosophy - that is, one that related it
to his historical awareness - would be a bold attempt if pursued in detail and
would certainly encounter far more phenomena than it could hope to explain.
But if we see him as one aware, like so many others in his age, that virtue must
give way, for good and ill, to the commerce and refinement it generates in the
course of history, we can add that trade and letters were perceived by the age as
resting upon imagination and the passions, and as necessitating forms of govern-
ment unlike those that rested upon republican austerity. A Marxist explanation
of Hume would certainly stress that the eighteenth century was caught between
Enlightenment: Essays Presented to Ernest Campbell Mossner (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press;
Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1974).
28
Works, 3:125-26. The same antithesis occurs in "Of Public Credit," Works, 3:372-74.
134 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

an intensely realistic conception of the rationality of real property and an equally

intense awareness of the mobile character of the property that was coming to
replace it (and eighteenth-century thinking is sufficiently proto-Marxist to con-
vince non-Marxists such as myself that it often invented Marxist explanations of
itself). In this sense there is a relationship between the shift from real to mobile
property and Hume's thought on the connection between reason and the pas-
29
sions.
In Hume's social history of ideas the independence and self-knowledge of the
virtuous citizen helped bring into being a commerce and culture bound to trans-
form his nature because they rested upon passion and imagination rather than on
reason. An empire of reason had raised up one of passion to succeed it. But it
followed that reason was incomplete without the passion it partly generated,
especially once it was decided that the virtuous citizen was less rational, because
less polite, than the inhabitant of a commercial society. History would here rein-
force any epistemology that might otherwise suggest that reason required the
imagination to feed on, but a history that started from the ancient citizen would
retain the precommercial republic as a paradigm of virtue. The world of imagi-
nation would continue to require the discipline of classical criticism; the civilized
monarchy — the form of government best suited to a polished and commercial
nation - would continue to require the discipline of republican freedom. But if
this suggested that liberty was linked with freedom and government with the
passions, it would be equally convincing to equate liberty with the empire of the
passions, government with the insecure supremacy of reason. Hume held that
authority and liberty could never be reconciled and that neither could replace the
other.30 Following Sir William Temple, he reworded Harrington to suggest that
property and force were on the side of the governed and that it was opinion and
interest that operated in favor of the government,31 and he held a very similar
view of the unstable relations of reason and passion. His historicism was therefore
in a double relationship with his skepticism: he held that reason always gave way
to passion and therefore had never really preceded it; but his image of the role
that reason might enjoy was classical as well as modern.
Consequently, Hume saw history as the work of passional forces converted into
rationality by a variety of agencies of which government was the chief. Commerce
and culture were important but could not do its work for it and contained their
own tendencies toward unreason. The Commonwealth and Country ideology, to
which Hume was attracted, but which he could never accept, professed an eigh-
teenth-century version of Ancient Constitution thinking, according to which the
principles of balance were original to a constitutional system that must be pre-
29
Cf. The Machiavellian Moment, chaps. 1 3 - 1 4 .
30
"Of the Origin of Government," Works, 3:116.
31
"Of the First Principles of Government," Works, 3 : 1 0 9 - 1 2 .
 Hume and the American Revolution 135

vented from moving away from them. But Hume had no belief in original ratio-
nality; he saw governmental forms as disciplining the original dynamism of pas-
sion, whose primacy was so complete that only experience and custom, rather
than rational prudence or legislative wisdom, could bring government into being
and maintain it. He therefore preferred to see government as modern and to look
back in time toward periods when it had been less coherent than it was now.
This modernism, however, did not originate with Hume or with his philosophy.
It had been the position of Walpole's apologists about 1730, and half a century
earlier of the High Tory historians around Robert Brady, who had defended the
monarchy of the 1680s by arguing that feudal history made it impossible that
there should ever have been an Ancient Constitution. Writers of the eighteenth
century, both English and American, did not fail to notice the curious way in
which Tory arguments in one age had become Court Whig arguments in another,
and Hume's cautious sympathy for the Walpolean position laid him open to the
charge of being a seventeenth-century Tory at a time when eighteenth-century
Tories were using Commonwealth arguments. He was not without sympathy for
the latter position, for it contained elements no eighteenth-century mind could
altogether reject. But it may be true — at least we have his word for it — that as
he grew older he eliminated from his History more and more elements he had
come to regard as Whig, at a time when he considered English Whiggism in-
creasingly factious.32 The ambiguity of the word "Tory" in England, however,
coupled with its relative inapplicability in Scotland, should warn us against con-
sidering that Hume became a Tory in any eighteenth-century sense as his inter-
pretation of the past became more Tory in a seventeenth-century one.
The changes in the History of England, it has been thought, tend to shift the
emphasis from the view that the pre-Civil War constitution was ambiguous and
incoherent toward the view that, given its ambiguity and incoherence, the case
for the prerogatives of the crown was much stronger than Whig historiography
would admit. Hume saw political history as a tug-of-war between authority and
liberty, and it appears as if his sympathy for the element of authority increased
as his disgust with faction - which is the excess of liberty - grew. The opinion
that the English constitution allows too much to liberty, which we find in the
letters about 1770, is echoed nearly thirty years before, in such essays as "Whe-
ther the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Re-
public." We read here that the balance between authority and liberty is inher-
ently unstable - as philosophically it must be. Property and the passion for
liberty are all on one side, and the government has only its command of patronage
and the power to corrupt leaders of opposition with which to counter the im-
pulses of the governed. However, patronage is on the way to becoming so dom-

32
"My Own Life," Works, 3:5.
136 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

inant a species of property that an absolute monarchy having the whole kingdom
in its grip is perhaps the likeliest outcome, and very arguably we should prefer
this "easiest death" or "euthanasia" to the violent death of faction and republi-
canism. This essay, however, could easily be read as a pessimistic version of a
Country tract; and when we find it claimed in Tom Paine's Common Seme that the
King of Great Britain exercises despotic authority because he has come to mo-
nopolize parliamentary patronage,33 we must recognize that Paine is saying (con-
sciously or otherwise) that Hume's prophecy has been already if violently ful-
filled. By the year of his own decease, on the other hand, Hume saw British
government as threatened by the violent death of faction if not by that of bank-
ruptcy as well. To understand his attitude to the American crisis we must con-
sider how this came about.
Hume saw liberty and authority as in unstable relation, and liberty as always
liable to break down in faction, because he saw both philosophy and history as
necessarily — he was no pessimist — the partial discipline of passion by reason.
He thought in this way because he was a historian of enlightenment as well as of
civil society; and the philosophe historian had to explain the persistence of religion,
just as the historian of taste had to explain the persistence of the barbaric. To
account for the persistence of irrational elements in culture and politics he had to
resort to the combination of passion with habit. The undisciplined imagination
generated absurd ideas in the mind; the personality then folded itself around
them; and the undisciplined sociability of mankind led to the rise of combative
sects, in taste and philosophy34 as well as in religion and politics,35 that pitted
one irrationally retained habit of mind against another. Hume knew far too much
about the role of imagination in creating liberty, commerce, culture, and knowl-
edge itself to take a merely negative and repressive view of the need for rational
and political discipline. The great originality of his history of the Puritan Revo-
lution is his insistence that the fanaticism of the Puritan sects was both an exces-
sive threat to rational freedom and a necessary step toward its establishment. But
like other observers of the first three decades of George Ill's reign, Hume was
troubled by the revival of quasi-revolutionary slogans in the confused politics of
the time. Here we may link him directly with the tradition of Bolingbroke; for
he concurred with that analyst36 in thinking of parties and factions as irrational
survivals of seventeenth-century principles in an age when they had lost their
meaning, and also in thinking that the equilibrium of eighteenth-century society
was threatened by corruption from above as by faction from below, so much so
that it might have to choose the manner of its death. But where Country and
Commonwealth thinkers united in considering corruption the enemy, it is part

33 34
Common Sense, chap. 1. "Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature," Works, 3:150-51.
35
"Of Parties in General," Works, 3:129-33. 36 See Bolingbroke's Dissertation upon Parties, passim.
 Hume and the American Revolution 137

of Hume's skeptical Whiggism (rather than his conservatism) that he saw faction
as the principal danger.
It is safe to suppose that part of Hume's detestation of the London radicals, in
whom he saw English liberty as mere licentiousness, originated from the savage
anti-Scotticism of Wilkes and Churchill and of Number 45 of The North Briton.
Hume had always been careful not to carry his History into the era between 1688
and his own time, or to give his analysis of recent and contemporary British
politics. But his acquaintance Tobias Smollett, the London Scot, had not hesi-
tated to publish an avowed continuation of Hume's History,37 in which he ana-
lyzed post-Revolution Britain in terms more Tory and Country than Hume would
have permitted himself. This had left him in the role of professional apologist for
Lord Bute and the young George III; and faced with the anti-Scottish frenzies of
The North Briton, Smollett had been destroyed. His health and his position in
journalism were wrecked, and he retired to Italy to complete Humphry Clinker -
a novel of the interactions of Scotland and Wales with a highly corrupt England
— and to die soon after. Hume was not especially close to Smollett or to Bute,
and his political outlook was very different from theirs, but the incident is very
likely to have been connected with Hume's conviction that political faction was
making the life of the man of letters impossible in England.
We may think of the leaders of the London radicals at this juncture as a break-
away movement originating among the followers of William Pitt, who throve on
patriot and Old Whig rhetoric until he destroyed his position by accepting a
peerage. But if Pitt was a lost leader to the Londoners and Americans, in Hume's
eyes he was the evil genius - "that wicked Madman, Pitt" 38 - who had done
most to precipitate the crisis of the sixties and seventies. If we anatomize the sins
and lunacies of Pitt as Hume saw them, we shall find three elements. In the first
place, he had encouraged the growth of populist, factious, and fanatical rhetoric
and had quite obviously done so for his own ends, in the manner of the classical
demagogue. In the second place, however, he had been responsible for a vast and
unneeded expansion of empire; for it was clear to Hume that a mixed form of
government, in which authority and liberty, reason and passion, stood in a pre-
carious relationship, ought not to expand,39 because - as Polybius had accurately
prophesied in the case of Rome - to do so placed too great a strain on the
relationship among its components. When empire was a popular cause it meant
the expansion of liberty and faction at the expense of reason and authority. Hume
wanted to see the Americans independent not because he thought the London
radicals right but because he thought them foolish and wicked, like their evil
angel Pitt, and wanted to see them deprived of their rallying cry. There are some
37
Tobias Smollett, A History ofEngland (1757).
38
Hume to Wm. Strahan, 26 October 1775, Letters, 2:301.
39
Ibid., pp. 300-301, and the following two letters, pp. 303-5.
138 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

remarkably splenetic passages in the letters, in which Hume hopes to see America
in revolt, London depopulated, and authority restored to the nobility and gentry
of both kingdoms.40 Empire breeds faction, and faction fanaticism.
Like Adam Smith in Scotland and Josiah Tucker in England, Hume desired
American independence for the strictly Tory reason — Tory, that is, as that word
would be used in the generation following his own — that empire had come to be
a radical burden on the structure of British politics. The Whig regime had been
among other things a balance between the forces of landed oligarchy, making for
stability, and London commerce, making for empire. Faced with a choice be-
tween the two, the conservative mind would sacrifice empire to stability without
hesitation — especially if it meant jettisoning Pitt's and Wilkes's radical London-
ers along the way. Hume's increasing Anglophobia — his conviction that English
factions were the enemy of Scottish intellect - makes him prophesy the violent,
not the easy, death of the constitution; but it would probably be a mistake to
impute to him any nationalist desire to see the Union undone, even if he was
disposed to think the Anglo-Scottish experiment a failure. We make him a man
of theory rather than practice, however, when we stress his inability to visualize
any via media between the violent and the easy death; he did not foresee the
Britain of the younger Pitt, and he did not live to see it.
Hume had stiven all his life to adhere to the mainstream of Court Whig think-
ing, accepting the rise of commerce and politeness in full awareness of the moral
and political price they exacted. But the repudiation of empire, even in the form
of a repudiation of faction, was bound to aggravate the anti-Whig and anti-
commercial strain in his opinions. The third of his reasons for calling the elder
Pitt a wicked madman turns out to have been that the great war for empire that
Pitt had waged had increased the national debt to near the point at which Hume
thought it must prove ruinous to society.41 Like Adam Smith on the one hand
and the English radicals on the other, Hume may have thought the American
crisis had originated in an attempt to make the colonies contribute revenue to-
ward the debt's reduction. Smith thought this demand not in itself unreasonable.
If the colonists would not contribute to the costs of imperial partnership, they
should cease to form part of it. Not being an Englishman, Smith did not feel it
so imperative to maintain Parliament's authority as a necessary shibboleth.42 But
no less vehemently than Smith, Hume contended that empire was not worth
having at the price of expanded debt and ought to be repudiated as the main

40
Hume to Gilbert Elliot, 22 July 1768, Letters, 2:184; Hume to Strahan, 25 October 1769, Letters,
2:210; Hume to Adam Smith, 8 February 1776, Letters, 2:308.
4l
Hume to Strahan, 11 March 1771, Letters, 2:237; Hume to Strahan, 22 July 1771, Utters, 2:248.
42
The Wealth of Nations, concluding chapter, "Of Public Debts," and the closing sentence of the
entire work.
 Hume and the American Revolution 139
cause of debt's expansion. Hume here seems to step right back into the tradition
of Swift and Bolingbroke, denouncing Pitt, as they had once denounced Marl-
borough, as the author of war, debt, and corruption; but there are important
dissimilarities, as well as similarities, between the positions.
Hume's conviction that national debt could reach the point of subverting the
whole fabric of society may be thought of as a blockage in his economic thinking,
one that not even Smith could quite overcome or de Pinto persuade him to aban-
don. But there is evidence that it had a wider meaning. As far back as Anne's
reign, we find signs that the overinvested society was perceived as one in which
the value of everything was reducible to the fluctuating loan rate or the daily
price of government stock and was no more than an index to the state of confi-
dence in society's ability to meet its obligations in an unforeseeable future. Such
a society could be governed only by imaginary hopes and fears; it was the eco-
nomic equivalent of religious superstition. Many analysts, and Hume among
them, had argued that speculation, like other modes of the empire of passion,
could be disciplined and rendered creative by subjection to the checks of political
control by the owners of land; but if the empire of debt expanded to include the
value of land, all might still be lost. We can now see why Hume might feel that
the expansion of debt in the war for empire was, if not a cause, at least a linked
phenomenon with faction in politics, barbarism in taste, and fanaticism in reli-
gion. The demagogues of London - like those of Boston, if he ever thought about
them - were part of the state of things they affected to denounce, and it was a
marvel that Gibbon should have produced a great work of letters in so insane a
society.43 The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century strands of Toryism in Hume
are beginning to come together, in a pattern not altogether unlike that of Swift's
rhetoric under Marlborough or Pope's under Walpole.
"Among many other marks of Decline," wrote Hume to Gibbon that March,
"the Prevalence of Superstition in England, prognosticates the Fall of Philosophy
and Decay of Taste."44 The language suggests that of Pope at the close of the
Dunciad, but what is more curious is that the fear of a revival of Puritan fanati-
cism had not yet reached the heights it was to attain. Had Hume lived to hear
about the Gordon Riots in 1780, he would have had a new item to add to his
jeremiad. It is therefore the more piquant to discover, as a warm admirer of
Hume's diagnosis of the American crisis, none other than Dr. Richard Price —
dissenting minister, radical Whig, torchbearer of the natural rights of Ameri-
cans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen, Unitarian millennialist, and futute object of
the passionate denunciations of Josiah Tucker and Edmund Burke. And what
43
Hume to Gibbon, 18 March 1776, Letters, 2:309-10; Hume to Adam Smith, 1 April 1776, Letters,
2:312.
44
Hume to Gibbon, Letters, 2:310.
140 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

Price most applauded in Hume was the support he could give to the reduction of
the whole crisis to the single issue of the National Debt.45 Needless to say, Price
believed that the growth of debt had corrupted the executive and set it conspiring
to take away the liberties of Americans first and Englishmen after; whereas Hume's
point was that debt had encouraged faction and fanaticism — the very character-
istics that, though he liked Price personally, he might well have joined Tucker
and later Burke in seeing him as embodying - while leaving the euthanasia of
executive corruption as the only if preferable alternative. Hume and Price are the
two sides of the Tory-radical medal; and the question with which we are left in
conclusion is that of how far Hume's irony, ambivalence, and skepticism were
contained within tensions that, in the year of his death, he saw as having passed
out of control. He died peacefully, without patriotic lamentations for the fate of
his country. But that may mean simply that he found it easier to surrender
existence than to trouble about solving the riddles of history. Gibbon, whether
as an Englishman or as an expatriate, probably knew in his heart that what was
happening to Britain was not a Decline and Fall. Hume seems to have built
himself the scenario of an almost insuperable contradiction. That his philosophy
enabled him to quit the scene with equanimity we know; whether his history
permitted him to prognosticate the next act is a question we may leave open.
Hume was a name to conjure with among the American founders, and I will
revive the theme of ambivalence by adding a few words about that by way of
coda. The late Douglass Adair showed46 how he might be considered a contrib-
utor to Madison's tenth Federalist Paper, in which the conversion of passions and
interests into a multiplicity of groups checking and balancing one another be-
comes a solution to the problem of the republic of great size, at payment of the
usual cost of compromising the ideal of classical virtue. In Gerald Stourzh's mas-
terly study of Alexander Hamilton, we see how the reading of Hume helped the
greatest of Federalists accept the view that the United States must be a commer-
cial empire, with a strong system of executive patronage and public credit fi-
nance.47 But though Hume could live with a politics of patronage, the combi-
nation of empire and public credit sat ill with him. These were the very points
at which Madison broke with Hamilton and moved into his alliance with Jeffer-
son. To that purest of Commonwealth and Country thinkers, Hume was the
posthumous ideologist of a conspiracy of British exporters, American merchants,
and Federalist politicians to fasten the horrors of a Walpolean constitution upon
the infant republic. Jefferson was at pains to exclude him from the reading of

45
Price, Two Tracts on Civil Liberty, the War with America, and the Debts and Finances of the Kingdom
(London, 1778); "Additional Observations," pp. xiii-xiv, 25, 38-39, 47, 51-52, 153n.
46
Fame and the Founding Fathers (Williamsburg and New York: Institute for Early American History
and Culture, 1974), pp. 93-123.
47
Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970).
 Hume and the American Revolution 141

students at Charlottesville, and he encouraged the publication of a revised version

of the History of England by an obscure London democrat, with all the facts left
in and all the conclusions corrected. 48 After death, as in life, Hume was a master
of the ambiguities of eighteenth-century historiography. It may be doubted that
he expected to escape them.
48
Craig Walton, "Hume and Jefferson on the Uses of History," in D. Livingstone and J. King, eds.,
Hume: A Re-evaluation (DeKalb, 111.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976). It would be appro-
priate, if iconoclastic, to apply to Jefferson Hume's observation that William Tytler "confesses to
me & all the World that I am . . . right in my Facts, and am only wrong in my Inferences" (Hume
to [Lord Elibank?}, [late 1759 or early 1760], Letters, 1:321).
 8

Gibbon's Decline and Fall and the

world view of the Late
Enlightenment

In that otherwise memorable year, 1776, Edward Gibbon published the first
volume of The Decline and Fall, carrying the narrative to the conversion of Con-
stantine and concluding with the two famous chapters on the rise of Christianity.
In 1781, he published the second and third volumes, carrying the narrative to
the deposition of Romulus Augustulus and concluding with a chapter which
anatomizes Merovingian Gaul, Visigothic Spain, and Anglo-Saxon Britain, and
is itself closed by what is really a separate essay - the "General Observations on
the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West." The three remaining volumes -
which are concerned less with the Latin-Germanic West than with the "world's
debate" between Byzantium and Islam in the East - did not appear until 1788.
Gibbon died in 1794, at the outset of what would otherwise have been an exile
from his beloved Lausanne occasioned by the wars between old Europe and revo-
lutionary France. These dates reveal that The Decline and Fall is in chronology a
product of the last years of the Enlightenment, the uneasy years between the
American and French revolutions; this essay will examine the respects in which
it is that also in spirit.1
Gibbon was a conservative in politics if a radical modernist in philosophy and
religion, and his scholarship belonged in some ways to a generation earlier than
his own: to Oxford - however he may have disliked it in his own time - of the
Ancients against the Moderns and to Paris of the great years of the Academie des

From Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 2 8 7 - 3 0 3 . © 1977 American Society for Eigh-
teenth-Century Studies; reprinted by permission.
!
This essay develops and elaborates some points put forward in "Between Machiavelli and Hume:
Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian," in Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Vail
of the Roman Empire, ed. G. W . Bowersock and John Clive (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). I hope to
complete a full-length study, to be entitled Barbarism and Religion: Civil History in Gibbon's Decline
and Fall.

143
144 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres. But it is possible to disentangle from his vol-
umes a historical sociology — or "philosophy of history" as the age would have it
— based on the most advanced ideas of the French2 and Scottish Enlightenments:
on Buffon and Mably rather than Montesquieu - whom he greatly if critically
admired - and on David Hume and Adam Smith rather than Voltaire - whom
he came to despise. And this sociology is also an ideology; that is, it presents a
clear image of the world view of the Late Enlightenment - its view of its own
place in history and of the forces which threatened its future. Gibbon was some-
times evasive, but he was never complacent; he knew very well why he should
think of civilizations as fragile, and the most he allowed himself to hope was that
in the greatest of catastrophes, there were gains this side of savagery which could
never be entirely lost. But it cannot be without a sense of irony and pathos that
we read the words in which, on 1 May 1788, he presented his last volumes to
the public and wondered aloud if he would write any more history: "I am fairly
entitled to a year of jubilee; next summer and the following winter will rapidly
pass away."3 Within not much more than a year, Gibbon's Europe was to be
destroyed by events which he certainly did not foresee; but in examining the fears
for the future which he did entertain and temperately consider, we may inquire
not only into the extent of his pessimism, but into the extent to which his fears
foreshadowed what was to come.
Peter Gay has termed the Enlightenment "the rise of modern paganism," and
it could not have persisted without that profound concern for the ancient world
which moved Gibbon to write his history. The rejection of Gallican and Triden-
tine Catholicism, Calvinist and sectarian Protestantism, necessitated the erection
of a secular ideal which found its location in the ancient city. In Voltaire and
Hume, as well as in Gibbon, we find an avowed preference for Greco-Roman
polytheism as permitting philosophy to develop independently of the gods, whereas
the assertion — whether Platonic or Semitic — of a single godhead condemned it
to the embrace of theology. Ancient philosophy, in the proper sense, is therefore
a problem for Gibbon; since by "philosophy" he means nothing more or less than
a methodical skepticism which frees the mind for its proper concerns, he is obliged
to recognize it only in Lucretius or Cicero, and to dismiss the whole Athenian
and Alexandrian endeavor as metaphysics and esprit de systeme.4 The revival of
Platonism ranks among the forces which destroyed ancient civilization, and seems

2
For Gibbon's relation to French thought see the contributions of Robert Shackleton, Giuseppe
Giarrizzo, Jean Starobinski, and Frank E. Manuel to Bowersock and Clive, eds.; and Giuseppe
Giarizzo, Edward Gibbon e la cultura europea del Settecento (Bari, 1954).
3
Decline and Fall, Vol. IV (1788), v (introduction). Subsequent references to The Decline and Fall
are given as "DF," followed by the chapter number, and the volume and page number in the fifth
edition of J. B. Bury (London, 1902-09). The quotation above may be found at Bury, I, xiii.
4
DF, ii (Bury, I, 30). See also Gibbon's Essai sur Vetude de la litterature, chs. xlvii, lxxx, The Miscel-
laneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Vol. IV (London, 1814).
 Gibbon and the Late Enlightenment 145

at times an agency even more subversive than the Christian combination of rev-
elation with superstition. Gibbon comes nearest to a tragic awareness when he
finds himself obliged to condemn the Emperor Julian — for whom he felt some-
thing like love — as a neo-Platonic metaphysician and magician who betrayed the
philosophic paganism he struggled to revive, and the inferior of Athanasius in
statemanship and public morality. 5
It is possible to discover the sociology of religion — even the sociology of ideas
- which enabled Hume and Gibbon to explain why the philosophy that flour-
ished in an age of superstition must be flawed by systematization and metaphys-
ics. Before we do so, however, we must consider the second reason why the
secular ideal of the Enlightenment had to be located in the ancient city. Philo-
sophic man in a secular universe must act and contemplate the reason for his
actions, and it was in Athens and Rome that the philosophy of this combination
had been worked out with the greatest finality. The hatred of metaphysics, how-
ever, combined with a Polybian veneration for the laws and arms of Rome, en-
sured that political philosophy would be admired in its Roman and Stoic rather
than its Athenian and Academic form; the ideal city of the Enlightenment is
populated not by illumined and contemplative philosopher kings, but by judi-
ciously skeptical senators and magistrates. In consequence, the Anglo-French
Enlightenment (including its American variant) was condemned to carry on the
civic humanist and classical republican tradition of the Renaissance, and to see
the failure of ancient philosophy as one with the failure of ancient politics.
This does not mean that all philosophes were doctrinaire republicans: Voltaire
remained in spirit a man of the grand siecle and the these royale to the end of his
days. But it does mean that every philosophe was in some degree involved in the
contradictory vision of history which arose from accepting the Montesquieuan
premise that virtue was the principle of republics; Gibbon, as we shall see, was
no exception, and The Decline and Fall is written around this thesis. Ideally to be
virtuous - as either the Renaissance or the Enlightenment understood this crucial
term - a man should be the citizen of a republic. Property should give him
independence and the ability to bear arms in the city's cause, and the community
of arms-bearing proprietors should be the community of citizens obedient to the
laws which they themselves made. The citizenry might be distributed into an
aristocracy and a democracy, and a superstitious many might worship gods whom
a philosophic few knew to be only modes of worshiping the city, but this did not
detract from civic virtue so long as there was equality in arms and under the laws.
The philosopher needed to be a senator, but was quite content to be a citizen.
The element of contradiction in this vision - in which the Enlightenment was
deeply entangled - arose from the republic's historical fragility. The republic was

5
DF, xxi-xxiii; see particularly Bury, II, 361-81, 432-50, 473-78.
146 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

vulnerable to corruption, to political, moral, or economic changes which de-

stroyed the equality on which it rested, and these changes might occur not acci-
dentally, but in consequence of the republic's own virtue. Because it was virtuous
it defeated its enemies; because it defeated its enemies it acquired empire; but
empire brought to some citizens — chiefly military commanders and economic
speculators — the opportunity to acquire power incompatible with equality and
uncontrollable by law, and so the republic was destroyed by success and excess.
This was why Gibbon's original Capitoline vision of writing the history of the
decline and fall of the city6 became a commitment to write the history of the
decline and fall of the empire; quite simply, the empire had absorbed the city
and destroyed its virtue, as Polybius had prophesied, Sallust and Tacitus had
narrated, Machiavelli and Montesquieu had analyzed; and it is why hisfinalver-
dict on the Western empire was that "the story of its ruin is simple and obvious
. . . the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness."7
But had this been all, Gibbon's history would have been an essentially simple
narrative of the effects of corruption — a corruption arising from the separation of
civil from military virtue, started by Marius and Sulla, completed by Caesar and
Pompey, and institutionalized by Augustus, under whom the military institution
began to govern the empire independently of the republic and so embarked on
the long history of its own decay. This is Gibbon's narrative; it is his explanation,
whenever he pauses to look back and analyze the Decline since the conquests of
the republic. To the extent that this is so, he is still writing in the tradition of
Tacitus whom he admired above any other historian; he can see only one locus of
civic virtue, only one city destroyed by interaction with its empire, and Alexan-
dria and Constantinople are part of the ruin because they are not cities in the
political sense and have no virtue. But in fact this is not all. By the time we
reach the "General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West,"
from which the last quotation was taken, we know that the theme of corruption
does not explain everything, and that there are strands in Gibbon's pattern with
which the "General Observations" themselves - found slightly disappointing by
nearly every reader — fail to deal. The corruption of the republic and the princi-
pate will not explain why Gibbon persisted in his design — after hesitation —
through three more volumes of mainly Eastern history, or why, seven years later
and near the end of his labors, he was moved to the famous remark that he had
"described the triumph of barbarism and religion."8 To find the strands in the
pattern from which these concepts emerge, we must return first to the instability
of virtue, and second to the relation between virtue and philosophy; and at each
point we shall encounter Gibbon's response to the greatest mind of his genera-
6
It does not seem to matter whether or not he had this vision on the day or at the place he claimed.
7 8
DF, xxxviii (Bury, IV, 161). DF, lxxi (Bury, VII, 308-9).
 Gibbon and the Late Enlightenment \Al

tion, that of David Hume, to whom he paid the highest compliment in his power
by calling him "le Tacite de l'Ecosse."9
It was not only the mutation of republic into empire as the main theme of
ancient history which impressed the eighteenth-century mind with a sense of the
mutability of virtue. It was widely held that virtue had subsequently been re-
stored in a barbaric form by the Gothic and Germanic invaders, who had set up
primitive but effective communities of armed freeholders, to which feudal rela-
tionships had been no more than marginal. There are traces of this perspective in
Gibbon's first volume: he tells us that "the fierce giants of the north broke in and
. . . restored a manly spirit of freedom; and after the revolution often centuries,
freedom again became the happy parent of taste and science." 10 But the image of
Gothic freedom, like that of primitive Roman virtue, rested on the assumption
that the form of property which gave the individual arms and independence,
liberty and virtue, must necessarily be land; and since the last years of the sev-
enteenth century, it had been a commonplace to inquire what had been the con-
sequence of the rise of commerce and of movable forms of property at the end of
the supposedly agrarian Middle Ages. A quarrel of the ancients and moderns
ensued: to some it seemed that the rise of commerce had spelled the end of virtue,
as formerly free arms-bearing citizens had become content to pay mercenaries to
defend them and absolute monarchs to govern them, the better to enjoy the
wealth, leisure, and cultivation which commerce made possible. To these an-
cients - Thomas Jefferson among them - Europe under the enlightened monar-
chies was like Gibbon's age of the Antonines, enjoying an interlude of prosperity
and politeness under the protection of a military establishment which law and
liberty no longer controlled, and which must sooner or later become tyrannous
and degenerate. But there were moderns — Defoe, Montesquieu, Hume, Smith,
and Gibbon — who conceded that virtue had rested upon a foundation of arms
and agriculture, but insisted that it had been so inhumanly harsh and restrictive
as hardly to deserve the name; hence, they said — and Jefferson agreed — the
nightmare Utopias of Lycurgus' laws or Plato's republic. 11 The rise of commerce
and culture had been worth the loss of virtue which it had entailed; it had vastly
enhanced the human capacity for production and consumption, exchange, inter-
dependence, and sympathy, and on this foundation there might be erected new
ethical systems which displayed how man's love of himself might be converted
into love of his fellow social beings. But the ancient image of virtue was never
overthrown or abandoned, and in consequence it had to be recognized that the
virtue of commercial and cultivated man was never complete, his freedom and
independence never devoid of the elements of corruption. No theory of human
9
J. E. Norton, ed., The Letters of Edward Gibbon (London, 1956), II, 107. wDf, ii (Bury, I, 58).
"Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, IV, 6, 8; V, 19; XX, 1; Machiavellian Moment, pp. 491-92.
148 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

progress could be constructed which did not carry the negative implication that
progress was at the same time decay, that culture entailed some loss of freedom
and virtue, that what multiplied human capacities also fractured the unity of
human personality. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had not restored this
unity, but had learned to live, resignedly or hopefully, with personalities sun-
dered by history. They were already finding themselves cast in the role of Faust
to the Mephistopheles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Gibbon, in this analysis, emerges as a modern, and one relatively untroubled
by the accusing finger of Rousseau; Lausanne was at a safe distance from Geneva.
That is, he accepts the thesis that the Decline and Fall was ultimately due to the
expansion of the empire, the professionalization of the armies, the institution of
the principate, and the decay of virtue, but while he agrees that commerce, po-
liteness, and luxury grew up behind the shield of the principate and the legions,
he will not accept that luxury is to be considered a major cause of the Decline.
There were more radical contemporaries who held that it was the affluent society
which paid mercenaries to defend it, so that wealth was a cause of the loss of
virtue; in their view of Roman history, the rise of the mercenary legions went
together with the rise of the equites and the publkani, and they started from Sallust
rather than from Tacitus. Gibbon - though he had written an essay about the
dubious financial dealings of the tyrannicide hero Brutus 12 - resisted this inter-
pretation. He was regularly at pains to point out that it was despotism, not
luxury, which corroded the ability of ancient society to defend itself, and that
the relation between despotism and luxury was not a simple one. When he paused,
in the chapter which recounts Alaric's sack of Rome, to review the last stage in
the history of the senatorial aristocracy, he made or strongly implied two striking
points: the first, that the luxury of the senators was the effect of their living in
an economy of conspicuous consumption, not of profitable exchange; the second,
that if we look back into the primitive age of republican virtue, we find that the
warrior yeoman was regularly plunged into debt because he preferred going off
with the legions and seizing the lands of others to peaceably increasing by indus-
try the yield of his own farm. 13 Virgil's Georgics - Gibbon had written in his
youth - were written at Augustus' instance to persuade the soldier-farmer to
civilize himself.14 We can infer from this that Gibbon was awake to the modern
argument — found in Defoe, Montesquieu, Hume, and others — that ancient
virtue was warlike because it was economically primitive, and that a productive
market economy had no need of virtue in this sense and would not be corrupted
by its disappearance.
An implication would be that eighteenth-century commercial Europe was not
threatened, like Rome, by corruption from within. Gibbon in 1781 had some
12
"Digression on the Character of Brutus," Miscellaneous Works, IV, 9 5 - 1 1 1 .
15 l4
DF, xxxi (Bury, III, 2 9 2 - 9 5 , 302-3). Essai, pp. xix-xxii; Miscellaneous Works, IV, 3 2 - 3 7 .
 Gibbon and the Late Enlightenment 149

personal motivation for presenting this argument. The author, possibly Charles
James Fox, of some satiric verses on Gibbon's dual role as historian of the Roman
empire and parliamentary placeman under the North administration had written:
"His book well describes / How corruption and bribes / O'erthrew the great
empire of Rome; / And his writings declare / A degen'racy there / Which his
conduct exhibits at home." 15 The revolt of the American provinces, as a matter
of historical correctness, faced Britain with a Social War rather than a Decline
and Fall, and came about precisely because the institutions of British liberty had
not merged in those of imperial government; but it would not have been surpris-
ing if Gibbon had been at pains to destroy the very fashionable, almost radical-
chic, parallel between contemporary Britain or Europe and Sallustian or Tacitean
Rome. We have found that he had the means of doing so. But his historical
intellect was a good deal stronger than its ideological promptings, and when we
reach the "General Observations" at the end of Volume Three, we find this theme
present indeed, but played down almost to vanishing point. Gibbon does indeed
stress that the late empire was a military despotism which had destroyed its own
capacity to replace and renew its virtue, whereas modern Europe is, he says, a
great republic, 16 composed of diverse states which by emulation maintain each
other's military virtue — though he also says that the advanced technology of war
has rendered this virtue neither possible nor necessary17 — correct each other's
forms of government, and by trade and competition strengthen each other's
economies.18 In this peaceable and progressive society, military and political vir-
tue are, in a way which recalls Montesquieu, kept at a level of moderate but not
essential importance, and there is no need to worry too much about their neces-
sary imperfection. But what renders the "General Observations" puzzling and
disappointing to most readers is, one suspects, that this theme is dealt with in
terms far less of internal decay than of the extreme improbability of barbarian
assault from without. Gibbon elects to consider how Europe would stand up to a
new nomad invasion, though he prefaces his observations with the admission that
the Russians and the Chinese have reduced the nomads to a species verging on
extinction. 19 American critics like to believe that he did this in order to avert his
eyes from the painful spectacles of Saratoga and Yorktown; 20 but it is hard to find
that the British cared enough about America to experience its loss as a trauma,
and this emphasis on the nomads can be explained — the explanation will be
15
There are various printings ot these verses, of which the first ("King George, in a fright / Lest
Gibbon should write / The story of Britain's disgrace . . .") is the best known. They are said to
have been written in Fox's copy of The Decline and Fall, and found there when his books were
auctioned.
16 l7
DF, xxxviii, "General Observations" (Bury, IV, 163). DF, xxxviii (Bury, IV, 166-67).
18 19
DF, xxxviii (Bury, IV, 165-66). DF, xxxviii (Bury, IV, 164, note 6).
20
See Bowersock and Clive, eds., pp. 30, 65, 182-83, 239-40. I am unpersuaded by the contention
that Gibbon means "America" when he mentions "Armorica."
150 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

partly ideological - in terms of Gibbon's developing ideas on the sociology of

barbarism.
Theorists in search of a modern equivalent for ancient virtue had already placed
themselves on a road which, for Anglophones at any rate, led from John Locke
to Adam Smith. The mind formulated its ideas in response to the sensations and
objects encountered in experience; as men advanced in productive capacity through
the successive stages of history, they enlarged their own minds by multiplying the
objects to which they responded. In chapter nine of The Decline and Fall, Gibbon
reviewed Tacitus' De moribus Germanorum in the light of this body of theory. The
Germans were savages, he said, possessed of neither money nor letters, the media
of exchange which multiplied and preserved the objects nourishing the mind, 21
and this was the case because their social condition was preagricultural. 22 They
neither labored nor produced, and were consequently totally incapable of contem-
plation and almost incapable of action. Self-awareness was an existential burden
of which they could discharge themselves only by violence;23 war was their only
activity, and honor — which was a fierce sense of personal though hardly of civil
liberty — as near as they got to virtue. 24 If honor and liberty are precivil charac-
teristics, Gibbon is devoid of serious nostalgia for the primitive virtues; he would
have rather liked to believe in the authenticity of Ossian, 25 but he knew too well
what Hume would have to say on the subject26 and his own thesis commanded
him to believe that virtue was civil and could exist only when the barbarian had
been socialized into productive capacity and cooperative labor. He next con-
sidered the subject of barbarism in the very important chapter twenty-six, near
the end of Volume Two, when the approach of the Goths obliged him to analyze
the Huns and write a chapter on "the manners of the pastoral nations."
The notion of a pastoral, shepherd, or nomad stage, preceding agriculture in
the order of historical development, was one recently discovered by eighteenth-
century social theorists. 27 Adam Smith, as Gibbon could have known, argued
that this was the stage at which private ownership and specialization of function,
class division and consequently government, first made their appearance;28 but
Gibbon put forward a very different evaluation. All shepherd societies, he ar-
gued, were essentially alike, 29 because they presented humanity at its nearest to
2l 22 2i
DF, ix (Bury, I, 218-20). DF, ix (Bury, I, 222-23). DF, ix (Bury, I, 221).
24
DF, ix (Bury, I, 225-26). Note (a) the closeness of this argument to Montesquieu's concept of
honneur; (b) its application to the condition of women in barbaric and civilized society (Bury, I,
227-28).
25
DF, vi(Bury, I, 129-30).
26
See H u m e ' s l e t t e r as g i v e n i n G i b b o n ' s Memoirs of my Life, e d . G e o r g e s A . B o n n a r d ( N e w Y o r k ,
1966), p. 168.
27
R . L. M e e k , Social Science and the Ignoble Savage ( C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 7 5 ) .
28
S m i t h , Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, I, 1, 2 ; Lectures on Jurisprudence, e d . R . L. M e e k ,
D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1978), 404-5.
29
DF, xxvi (Bury, III, 71). See also Pocock, "Gibbon and the Shepherds: The Stages of Society in
the Decline and Fall," History of European Ideas II, (1981), 193-202.
 Gibbon and the Late Enlightenment 151

the animal condition; since herdsmen did not labor but followed their grazing
flocks, they developed no cultural individuality or diversity and their principal
characteristic was a uniform mobility and ferocity in war. Gibbon was merely
repeating in a cruder form the analysis he had already given of the Germans, and
when he lays it down that this is the final analysis of barbarian society, to which
by the nature of the case there can be nothing to add, we may feel that he is
narrowing and indeed closing his equipment as a historian of culture. As a matter
of fact, he is vastly enhancing his spatial capacity; chapter twenty-six is the pre-
lude to the great panoramas of the later Decline and Fall, in which we see the
interactions of the Desert with the Sown reaching all the way from Rome to
China - Joseph de Guignes's Histoire des Huns7'0 is one of the seminal books in
Gibbon's reading — but as regards the history of Western Europe, the reduction
of barbarism to a negatively characterized pastoralism does indeed enable him to
carry out a gigantic and tendentious abridgment. As he describes, in chapters
thirty-seven and thirty-eight, Germanic society taking shape in the conquered
provinces of the West, the Gothic or Frankish settler is consistently presented as
a hunter, shepherd, and warrior, exploiting an agrarian society he could never
shape for himself. The first feudal lords who appear in Merovingian Gaul are
essentially hunters, who conduct razzias to supply themselves with serfs and cat-
tle, and let land revert to forest to supply themselves with game. 31
Gibbon is systematically if not avowedly destroying the myth of Gothic agrar-
ian virtue, by whose means feudal society had so often been equated with the
primitive republic of warrior freeholders. His modernism appears at its extreme
when he virtually confronts nomadism with urbanism and permits agriculture,
"the foundation of manufactures,"32 to appear only as the precondition of the
latter. A determination to have none of the fashionable thesis that commercial
society had degenerated from an agricultural condition helps explain why the
"General Observations" do not consider Europe as threatened from within, but
only by a purely conceptual nomad danger from without. Agriculture appears in
the "General Observations" in two roles only: first, as the instrument by which
civilization eradicates savagery - the Russians are plowing up the steppe, English
navigators are introducing useful plants and animals to Polynesia;33 second, as
the indestructible germ by which civilization survives catastrophe - since it de-
pends neither on individual genius nor on complex social diversification, the
peasant household is unlikely to forget what it has learned about the arts of tillage
in even the greatest of disasters. 34 The happy peasant, virtuous because unspe-
cialized, yet specialized above the level of savagery, has made his reappearance

30
"Histoire Generate des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols et des autres Tartares Occidentaux. Par M. de Guignes
. . . , 5 vols. (Paris, 1756).
il
DF, xxxviii (Bury, IV, 131-33). i2DF, ii (Bury, I, 53).
55
DF, "General Observations" (Bury, IV, 164, 168-69 and note 15).
34
DF, "General Observations" (Bury, IV, 168).
152 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

after being held back to the last page of Volume Three. Not even Gibbon could
exorcise him from the eighteenth-century mind forever.
The relation of barbarism to religion can be explored when we realize that the
Enlightenment's sociology of barbarism, which Gibbon knew very well, was also
a sociology of superstition, and rather less certainly of fanaticism; superstition
and fanaticism being the two categories into which the philosophes distributed
most religious phenomena. In Gibbon's early Essai sur Vetude de la litterature, and
in the two masters to which that work chiefly refers, Freret and Hume 35 — we
can read how the savage, idly and fancifully (because nonproductively) respond-
ing to the phenomena of experience, erects the multitude of gods and myths
which make up the religions of superstition. Later in the progress of society
appears the archaic philosopher, who endeavors to reduce religion from absurdity
to rationality, but constructs the system of abstract ideas and occult qualities to
which the philosophe gives the name of metaphysics. Should the metaphysician
excogitate as part of his system the otherwise reasonable concept of a single god,
there will arise a theology - one of those fatal unions of superstition with meta-
physics for which the correct term is fanaticism or enthusiasm. 36 This was the
baleful legacy of Plato, whose error was to think the godhead a subject for system-
atic philosophy; 37 it was an error natural enough in the historical context, but
not one to which the ancient city was condemned. As empire and commerce made
possible the comparative study of gods and metaphysics, the philosopher-magis-
trates of the ruling city could reduce philosophy to that rational and tolerant
skepticism, and methodical curiosity, which is all Gibbon ever means by the
word. 38 The skepticism of the ruling few forms a happy enough partnership with
the superstition of the unreflective many, because neither attribute much truth-
status to what they say; but the metaphysicians persist outside the pale, fanati-
cally asserting the truth of what they take to be philosophy. The Platonic legacy
is the potential enemy of the Roman order. 39
Outside the natural history of religion altogether lie the great Semitic and
Iranian 40 monotheisms, founded not on philosophy but on revelation. There is
no sociological explanation of the prophet: he must be either a madman or an
impostor - preferably, because more rationally, the latter;41 but he erects a fa-
naticism more terrifying than that of the metaphysician, because it has no share
in the progress of society from superstition to philosophy. The Jews, for whom
35
For this relationship see Giarrizzo's volume and his essay in Bowersock and Clive, eds.
36
H u m e ' s The Natural History of Religion was one of G i b b o n ' s principal sources; and see t h e quotation
from Freret in Miscellaneous Works, I V , 16«.
37
D F , ii (Bury, I, 30); xv (Bury, I I , 76); xxi (Bury, I I , 3 3 5 - 3 6 ) .
38
DF, ii, is G i b b o n ' s chief account of this ancient esprit philosophique.
39
See t h e account of the neo-Platonic revival at t h e end of DF, xiii (Bury, I, 392—93).
40
D F , viii, is largely an account of Zoroastrianism (Bury, I, 1 9 7 - 2 0 3 ) .
4I
S e e t h e accounts of Zoroaster, O d i n (DF, x; Bury, I, 2 4 0 - 4 1 ) and especially M u h a m m a d (DF, 1;
Bury, 333-96).
 Gibbon and the Late Enlightenment 153

Gibbon has the philosopher total abhorrence, kept their god to themselves so
jealously that the wars which destroyed them did nothing to the fabric of an
empire in which they had no part; 42 but they left behind them the dangerous
knowledge that the unity of the godhead might be more convincingly asserted
on the foundation of prophecy than on that of philosophy. The way was prepared
for that union of Mosaic revelation with Platonic metaphysics which was what
Gibbon really dreaded in Christianity.
Gibbon saw the Decline and Fall as the failure of ancient skepticism, but not
merely as the triumph of popular superstition. In the history of Christianity,
superstition played a late and ambivalent role; it was preceded in the patristic era
by fanaticism and enthusiasm. At a time when the populace of the empire, robbed
of belief in their gods by the belated discovery that their masters thought them
ridiculous, 43 were becoming exposed to a variety of restatements of the Jewish
and Persian revelations, the masters themselves — perhaps because their role as
magistrates was ceasing to satisfy in the decay of the principate — were turning
to a variety of neo-Platonic and Gnostic metaphysics; and this apostasy of the
philosophers played a major role in both the triumph of Christianity and the
Decline and Fall. The great heresies which destroyed both civil and ecclesiastical
discipline were all, Gibbon emphasizes, of neo-Platonic and Gnostic origin; 44
and the same disastrous ways of thinking were responsible for the failure of Julian
to restore philosophic magistracy and virtue. Julian was the inferior of Athanasius
in these qualities, and Athanasius is one of a chain of Church Fathers — Am-
brose, 45 Gregory the Great, 46 and John Chrysostom47 are others — of whom Gib-
bon writes with far more respect than mockery. The reason seems to be that these
Fathers were leaders, effective and not without statesmanship, of their peoples in
Alexandria, Milan, Rome, and Constantinople; the Christian republic — as Gib-
bon repeatedly calls it — was being led by Christian virtue. 48 It is true that this
virtue was fanatical; both leaders and people were governed by a union of proph-
ecy and metaphysics. It was anticivic and otherworldly, and could not be har-
nessed to the defense of the empire. But Gibbon was beginning to make use of
Hume's distinction 49 between enthusiasm, which was fanatical and intolerant but
drove men to assert their liberties against their rulers, and superstition, which
42
Gibbon's main account of Judaism is in DF, xv (Bury, II, 2-6). All other references to the Jews
display occasional pity and unvarying contempt. Observe that Hadrian's Jewish war is not con-
sidered an exception to the general peace of the empire (DF, i; Bury, I, 29 and note). I suspect this
footnote to be deliberate and not an afterthought; cf. Bowersock and Clive, p. 64, n. 17.
43
DF, xv (Bury, II, 55-56).
44
DF, xxi (Bury, II, 336-54); xxxvii (Bury, IV, 95); xlvii (Bury, V, 96-106).
45
DF, xxvii (Bury, III, 155-61, 174-76).
46 47
DF, xlv (Bury, V, 33-38). DF, xxxii (Bury, III, 374-80).
48
For this language see DF, xv, passim; and cf. DF, xix (Bury, II, 328).
49
Hume, Essays, "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm." See also Pocock, "Superstition and Enthusiasm
in Gibbon's History of Religion," Eighteenth-Century Life VIII, 1 (1982), 83-94.
154 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

was passive and law-abiding but disposed men to accept their rulers even when
these were priests. Christian enthusiasm wins its greatest victory in The Decline
and Fall when the temples of paganism are destroyed under the Theodosians; but
almost immediately it is transformed into superstition, as the cults of saints and
relics and shrines and miracles renew ancient polytheism in a Christian guise. 30
About all this it is evident that Gibbon had ambivalent feelings, and saw
history as an ambivalent process. Religion as superstition had originally been an
aspect of barbarism, and it would be possible to see its revival as a return to
barbarism. In chapter thirty-seven Christianity is shown reaching its nadir in the
form of monasticism, and it is emphasized that the monk, deprived of property,
the reward of his labor, and all membership in society, regresses to an apathy
very like that of the savage; we are even told that one or two monks were of
shepherd origin, and that a certain sect of solitaries grazed in the field like beasts. 51
But in the same chapter Christianity is shown helping to convert the barbarians,
and Ulfilas is called the Moses of his branch of the Goths because he taught them
letters and led them across the Danube to fertile pastures where their nomadism
might become settled. 52 The image of agriculture has flashed across the page
again, and it is used to distinguish between religion as a decivilizing and as a
civilizing agency.
But religion as enthusiasm belonged to a more complex, because more civi-
lized, phase in the historical process. Once Gibbon's knowledge of Hume re-
minded him that liberty and virtue might rest - as in the Reformation and the
Puritan Revolution they had rested53 - on a foundation of fanaticism, he was
bound to remember his modernist skepticism on the subject of virtue. There was
something to be said for superstition, if it was compatible with the rule of en-
lightened and tolerant magistrates; but in recounting "the corruption of Chris-
tianity" (his own phrase)54 in the Theodosian age, he had reached the brink of
that standard Protestant polemic against the rule of superstition by priests, to
which as a philosophe he was in no way indisposed. In the later volumes of The
Decline and Fall, however, this polemic, while of course present, is relatively
undeveloped. These volumes carry out a plan, laid down as far back as Volume
One in 1776, 55 of pursuing the history of the Eastern Empire beyond the fall of
the Western; we are not to look to them for a history of how modern Europe,
that great republic of states, emerged from the respublica Christiana which had
succeeded the Roman empire. But there is an extraordinary chapter in Volume
Five — chapter fifty-four — in which Gibbon deduces the history of Protestantism

50
DF, xxviii(Bury, III, 188-215).
51
Bury, IV, 70—73. The shepherds turned monk may befoundat pp. 64, note 30, and 73 (Simeon
Stylites).
52 53 54
Bury, IV, 76-77. DF, xvi (Bury, II, 138-39). DF, xxxvii (Bury, IV, 57).
55
Bury, I, v—vii.
 Gibbon and the Late Enlightenment 155

from origins not only Greek but neo-Platonic. The Gnostics begat the Paulicians,
it seems, the Paulicians the Albigensians, the Albigensians the Western heretics
in general, and these begat the Protestants.56
Gibbon is examining the interweavings of the rational and the enthusiastic
components in Protestantism. At the end of this chapter he indicates what he
applauds in contemporary religion - the restoration of the Antonine Enlighten-
ment as the rule of an undogmatic clergy over congregations who no longer know
or much care what they are meant to believe - and what he fears: those "Armi-
nians, Arians and Socinians . . . who preserve the name without the substance of
religion, who indulge the license without the temper of philosophy." A footnote
draws the attention of the civil magistrate to the teachings of Joseph Priestley.57
It is not known what Gibbon said if he ever heard that mobs, set on by magis-
trates, had destroyed Priestley's house in Birmingham, but this was just the sort
of thing he feared. In Priestley's blend of unitarianism, materialism, and millen-
nialism, he diagnosed the union of philosophy with fanaticism, and the structure
of this chapter tells us that he saw Priestley as a second Arius, who would have
been quite at home in the streets of fourth-century Alexandria. Gibbon as an
undergraduate had been converted to Catholicism by reading Bossuet, and his
return to Protestantism, even as a convenient home for an English philosophe, had
never been free from uneasiness. He chose after 1781 to write the history of
barbarism and religion in a new form: the history of how a prophet-legislator had
civilized a pastoral people by teaching them enthusiasm for a religion of their
own, and set the house of Islam at war with the city of Constantine.
Gibbon feared in Priestley exactly what Burke feared in Richard Price: the
democratic fanaticism which they and many others thought was latent in English
Dissent. After the Gordon Riots Gibbon wrote: "forty thousand Puritans, such
as they might be in the time of Cromwell, have started out of their graves";58
after the French Revolution, Burke wrote that nine-tenths of the Dissenters were
devoted to its principles.59 This analysis of The Decline and Fall - which disen-
tangles some of its preoccupations without suggesting that these explain why it
was written - indicates that Gibbon thought his world had laid the ghosts of
virtue and corruption, but still went in fear of the spirit of fanaticism. The thesis
of chapter fifty-four is not anti-Illuminist nonsense; there was enough neo-Pla-
tonism and Gnosticism abroad in the England of Blake, Shelley, and Coleridge
to give us something to think about. But of the French Revolutionaries them-
selves, Gibbon said that they were fanatics, and also that they were barbarians;
and he endorsed, like most gentlemen of his time, Burke's analysis and denun-

56
Bury, VI, 110-29.
57
Bury, VI, 129, note 49. See also Letters, II, 3 2 0 - 2 3 , and Memoirs, pp. 171-72.
™Letters, II, 243.
59
The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland (Cambridge, 1958-69), VI, 4 1 8 - 2 2 .
156 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

ciation of the fanaticism of natural right.60 But there was room for another analy-
sis, which Gibbon might perhaps have written: that of the fanaticism of civic
virtue. We cannot regret that Gibbon died when he did; to think of him eking
out an exile in a London he never much liked, aware that some nasty French
commissary was living in the villa at Lausanne, and obliged to meet Wilberforce
at dinner parties, should convince us that the age of Pitt was no age for him. But
we must wish we had his account of Robespierre at the Feast of the Supreme
Being.
60
Letters, III, 321; for Burke, III, 216. Epithets such as "wolves," "savages," "cannibals" abound in
Gibbon's correspondence in 1792.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke,
and Price
A study in the varieties of eighteenth-
century conservatism

I
Early in 1946, an assistant lecturer and a lecturer in history found themselves
sharing an office, as it would now be called, of Victorian granite and fiberboard
partitions, forming part of what had been a gallery running above the archway of
the Rolleston Avenue entrance to the old buildings of what was then Canterbury
University College in the University of New Zealand. Both were newly appointed
to their duties, the one just graduated and the other just returned from the wars.
Between them, they increased the teaching members of their department from
two to four. Both were men of independent personality who came to think it a
matter of credit to each that they shared their quarters so cordially. In time,
however, their ways parted. The assistant lecturer went in pursuit of a doctorate
and entered upon a complex orbit that was to pass through Canterbury's gravi-
tational field again. The lecturer, a more stable and powerful luminary unafraid
of dog days, remained to become a professor of history and in due course vice-
chancellor of the University of Canterbury in the times of its centennial and its
migration to a new campus. Under whatever signs are now in the ascendant, the
assistant lecturer offers the lecturer an essay upon a subject, and related to a
personality, both of which have always meant much to him.
If the writings and addresses of Neville Phillips were to be collected, the
language and mind of Edmund Burke would be found to have colored them
deeply, and there would also be found a continuing concern with the conservative
temper, coupled with the knowledge that this temper commands something more
complex than surrender to it. In his writings on eighteenth-century history, there
This essay, in an earlier form, first appeared in Essays Presented to Professor N. C. Phillips, edited by
Marie Peters, S. A. M. Adshead, and J. E. Cookson and printed for limited distribution at the
University of Canterbury. Reprinted here by arrangement with the editors.

157
158 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

may be found the troubled and often troubling presence of Burke as a political
actor, who not only responded unforgettably to the melee of his times but gen-
erated from the depths of a tormented personality a secondary melee of his own.
"From chaos and cobwebs could spring even Burke."1 He was capable of extrav-
agance and even radicalism, and some modern exponents of the political order to
which he belonged have detested him for these qualities;2 yet it is a commonplace
that conservatism, properly understood, can exist only in response to radical chal-
lenge, and to find a potential radicalism latent within the conservative himself is
not therefore surprising. But the commonplace just mentioned raises a problem
concerning conservatism in the age of Burke, which cannot be resolved through
the study even of Burke alone. In the American and still more in the French
Revolution, there appeared for the first time a predominantly secular revolution-
ary challenge, but the regimes against which it was directed were Whig as well
as Anglican, Enlightened as well as Tridentine, and had just been celebrated by
Gibbon as the most secular ruling order Europe had known since Roman antiq-
uity.3 We are not to forget the religiosity of Burke or Coleridge, Maistre or
Chateaubriand, but we are faced with the problem of diagnosing both revolution
and conservatism for the first time as secular principles, at work in a world where
society and history counted for more than the church. There is an apparent par-
adox, however, in speaking of conservatism's existing "for the first time"; it
cannot be a simple continuation of established ways and manners, but must mo-
bilize them to meet a challenge never presented before. In the language of Joseph
Levenson, a traditionalism is other than a tradition.4
We think of Burke as the philosopher of traditions: natural law and common
law, Roman piety and prudence, Christian faith and medieval chivalry; no doubt
this is how he intended his readers to think. But we must also see him as the
active exponent and defender of Whig aristocratic politics, and not only was his
attitude toward this order marked by the ambivalence of the novus homo, but the
order itself was in fact far from traditional. Its pillars were the Revolution Settle-
ment, the Toleration Act, the Bank of England, and the Septennial Act, and
although the first of these might (but need not) be defended in the name of the
ancient constitution, the others were in increasing degree defiantly modern and
needed to be defended against "country," "Commonwealth," and "patriot" at-
tacks whose appeal was to the symbols of Roman and Gothic antiquity. If con-
servatism is the defense of the existing order, the conservatism of the eighteenth
century was the defense of a revolution. If this revolution had (like not a few
^rom verses by Hester Thrale, quoted by Douglas N. Archibald, "Edmund Burke arid the Con-
servative Imagination: Part II," Colby Library Quarterly XIII, 1 (1977), pp. 19-41, p. 19-
2
Namier's dislike of Burke was vehement and transmitted to his pupils.
3
See in particular, "General Considerations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West," History
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. Ill (1781), chap. 38.
4
Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, 3 vols. (London, 1958), vol. 1, p . xiii.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 159

others) ended in oligarchy and the restriction of politics, this was not enough to
make its defense a simple exercise in traditionalism. There was much to be de-
fended that was not traditional at all, but must be defended on the grounds of
its modernity. We already know how the apologists of Walpole developed a
strategy in which modernism itself becomes a conservative argument, 5 and we
are told that we must defend what is because it is all that we have achieved - all,
indeed, that we have. To reconcile such an argument with piety toward the "little
platoon" (by which Burke meant the French and English aristocracies) is difficult,
but not impossible. Once we see it, however, as a central strand in Whig con-
servatism, a dilemma must necessarily arise within the accepted interpretation of
Burke as traditionalist. If such elements are present in his thought, how do they
coexist with those we have learned to recognize? If they are not present, why are
they absent?

II

This essay is designed to explore these problems by confronting Burke with one
of the most extraordinary and pungent personalities of his times: an intellect as
conservative as his own, yet both like and unlike it in a challenging combination
of ways. Josiah Tucker (1711—99), who became dean of Gloucester in 1758, is
remembered as the author of economic tracts that rank him as a lesser pioneer of
the free-trade school, but he was a good deal more than that. 6 The Seven Years'
War gave him a passionate hatred of wars for the sake of trade, 7 and of the
political alliance between Pitt and the London aldermen and liverymen that seemed
to others (including Hume) to combine the worst elements of chauvinism and
democracy. At least from 1766 Tucker believed that the problem of relations
with America could be solved only by a total separation:8 a declaration of Britain's
independence from her colonies rather than the other way around. He came to
believe that American resistance to parliamentary authority, English clamors for
parliamentary reform, and Dissenting pressures for relief from the Test and Cor-
poration Acts were aspects of a single conspiracy against the constitution by what
he called "new-light men" — those ultraliberal descendants of the Puritans whom
Burke had named "the very dissidence of dissent." Tucker also believed that the
5
Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge,
Mass., 1968), pp. 127—37. Kramnick considers Walpole to be the author of the ideas published
in his defense - a doubtful ascription.
6
See George Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-Century Economic and Political Thought (New York,
1981), which reached me after all but the last part of this essay was completed.
7
See the letter of February 11, 1758, in which Tucker tells Kames that his Bristol parish "is become
a hell on earth," since the wealthier inhabitants are investing in privateers to plunder French trade
and in brothels to provide them with seamen. Quoted in Shelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 166-7.
8
A Letter from a Merchant in London to His Nephew in America (London, 1766), esp. pp. 4 4 - 9 . Re-
printed in Four Tracts together with Two Sermons on Political and Commercial Subjects (Gloucester,
1774), pp. 128—30. (The sermons are separately paginated.)
160 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

ideological foundation of their knavish politics was Locke's theory of the forma-
tion of civil society, against which he wrote a Treatise Concerning Civil Government,
published in 1781. This seems to be the first major refutation of Lockean politics
since that of Charles Leslie, the nonjuror, nearly eighty years before,9 and it is
certainly the first to find in Locke the radical populist and democrat who has
begun to reemerge in recent research.10 Tucker's primary bete noire came to be
the tradition of individualist natural right, which he insisted had been inherited
from Locke by Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, Jean Jacques
Rousseau, and other "republicans," "patriots," and "democrats" of the 1770s.
He respected Priestley and had an ironic admiration for Rousseau.11 Price he
disliked personally as well as ideologically,12 and the Treatise Concerning Civil
Government is a blast against Price in his pro-American vein, just as Burke's Re-
flections on the Revolution in France, a decade later, is a blast against Price's pro-
French utterances. Yet Tucker had an equal and associated antipathy to Burke;
he thought Dissenting propaganda had contributed to Burke's election for Bris-
tol, 13 and in 1775-6 Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America and Price's Obser-
vations on Civil Liberty seemed to him to reveal the two men in hypocritical alli-
ance. There is a strange triangle of repulsions here, which furnishes this essay
with its title; yet it takes us only to the brink of the differences between Tucker's
defense of civil authority and Burke's.
Tucker was an original, independent to the point of eccentricity. His works
were nearly all printed in Gloucester to be sold in London, an indication that he
wrote unsupported by any party connection, and when accused by Burke of being
a court flatterer intriguing for promotion, Tucker declared in print that he would
accept no preferment offered him, "SO HELP ME GOD." 1 4 He was, perhaps, in

9
J . P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689-1720 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 6 3 -
4; Gordon J . Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford, 1975), pp. 2 2 0 - 2 . Hume's
essay "Of the Social Contract" may be considered another refutation.
10
John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge, 1969); Julian H. Franklin, John Locke
and the Problem of Sovereignty (Cambridge, 1978); Richard Ashcraft, "The Two Treatises and the
Exclusion Crisis: The Problem of Lockean Political Theory as Bourgeois Ideology," in Pocock and
Ashcmft, John Locke: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar (Los Angeles, 1980), and "Revolutionary
Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government: Radicalism and Lockean Political Theory," Political
Theory VIII, 4 (1980), pp. 4 2 9 - 8 6 .
11
A Treatise Concerning Civil Government (London, 1781), p . 22: "Dr. PRIESTLY, the fairest, the
most open, and ingenuous of all Mr. LOCKE's Disciples, excepting honest, undissembling ROUS-
SEAU . . . " Cf. p . 236: " . . . except honest ROUSSEAU, who is generally consistent, whether in
Truth, or Error, and perhaps also Dr. PRIESTLY." For the full title of Tucker's Treatise see n. 52,
this chapter.
12
A Series of Answers to Certain Popular Objections against Separating from the Rebellious Colonies (Gloucester,
1116), pp. xii-xiii, xiv, 87: "And you too, my ingenious Doctor, you, a Writer on moral Obli-
gation, could condescend to lend your assisting Hand in this good Work"; pp. 88—93.
13
A Series of Answers, p . 70.
14
Burke's innuendo is in the speech on American taxation {The Works of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke,
Rivington edition, London, 1826, vol. II, p . 413); Tucker's oath in A Series of Answers, p . 97. See
Shelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 1 9 4 - 5 , 197, 2 4 3 - 5 .
 Josiab Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 161
no great danger of a bishopric. His belief that it was as foolish to make war for
the subjugation of the colonies as it was wicked to support their claims to im-
munity was too much even for Samuel Johnson,15 who had no aversion to inde-
pendence of mind. But Tucker had no aversion to seeing himself as the one sane
man in a wilderness of fools and scoundrels; he liked to recall how the great
Bishop Butler, during an evening stroll in his garden at Bristol, had suggested to
him that a whole nation might go mad just as an individual might.16 Tucker was
a florid, abusive, and egocentric writer, in addition to being an extremely funny
one; we must remind ourselves that he is to be taken seriously. His reputation
has further suffered from the inadequate growth of the history of ideology as a
serious scholarly discipline. Robert Livingston Schuyler once edited a selection of
Tucker's writings from which the whole third book of the Treatise, which deals
with the history of medieval government, was omitted on the grounds that,
being neither economics nor political theory, it could be of no possible interest
to anybody.17 Now that we know a little more about how to write the history of
political thought, there is much to be found in Tucker that is worth studying
both as history and as theory.
The key to Tucker's mind must be found in the unity he effected between the
need for economic freedom and that for submission to civil authority. The first
of these principles convinced him (with David Hume)18 that those who made war
for commercial empire were wicked madmen, and (with Adam Smith)19 that to
maintain empire in order to regulate colonial economies was costly futility. The
second persuaded him (with both Hume and Smith)20 that if the Americans
would not submit to the authority of Parliament they should become separate
and independent states - not indeed because they possessed any of the rights they
were claiming, which would soon lead them to declare their independence, but
because they were a set of dangerous anarchs with whom Britain, for both com-
mercial and civil reasons, should have as little as possible to do. Neither Hume
nor Smith was far from sharing the belief that independence was desirable, not
as an American right but as a British convenience, and Hume agreed with Tucker
that it would spike the guns of the potentially revolutionary agitators in London
and Middlesex; but the dean of Gloucester proclaimed at the top of his voice
what Smith knew was not politically practical to say before public opinion was
15
Johnson, Taxation no Tyranny (1775) in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald
J. Greene (New Haven, Conn., 1977), vol. X, Political Writings, p. 451.
16
An Humble Address and Earnest Appeal . . . (Gloucester, 1775), p. 20n.
17
Robert L. Schuyler, ed.,Josiah Tucker: A Selection from his Economic and Political Writings (New York,
1931).
18
". . . that wicked madman Pitt . . ." (Hume to Strahan, October 26, 1775); J. Y. T. Greig, ed.,
The Letters of David Hume 2 vols. (Oxford, 1932), vol. II, p. 301; see also pp. 3 0 3 - 5 . Four Tracts
and Two Sermons, pp. 7 5 - 8 8 .
19
An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, especially the concluding paragraphs.
20
Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 133-4, 190n.; Donald Winch,
Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiography Revision (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 1 4 6 - 6 3 .
162 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

ready for it. In this respect, Tucker's personality was more eccentric than his
intellect, but it must be added that he believed in the need to cast off the Amer-
icans for a formidable and fascinating collection of reasons. He took seriously, for
example - and why should he have been the only Englishman to do so? - Frank-
lin's vision of a future in which the population of America would so far exceed
that of Britain that the seat of empire would be transferred across the Atlantic.
Tucker returned again and again to this theme;21 it meant, he insisted, that the
contest with the colonies was a contest for empire,22 not liberty, and that all
proposals for conciliation were part of an American strategy of remaining within
the empire, without acknowledging its authority or contributing to its defense,
until the time should come when they could take it over.23 For his part, he added
for good measure, he would rather see Britain a French province than an Ameri-
can one.24 Tucker never commented directly on the Declaration of Independence,
but it would have been perfectly consistent (given the military situation of July
1776) had he regarded it as a triumph for British arms; Yorktown he certainly
considered a fortunate defeat.25 Before dismissing Tucker as an overintelligent
crank with one idea, it might be well to ask ourselves what effect Franklin ex-
pected his geopolitical prophecies to produce on the minds of Englishmen.
Tucker's reasons for wanting the Americans cast out of the British community
and obliged to assume the rank of independent states — enemies in war, in
peace friends26 - begin at a level of envenomed antipathy but become deeper
and more interesting as we study them. In 1766, he gave a series of indignant
accounts of the American propensity for smuggling, for trading with the enemy
in time of war, for trying to force British investors to accept colonial paper cur-
rency in payment of debts;27 and these, as we have seen, were already linked with
a vigorous response to Franklin's talk about a transfer of the seat of empire. All
these grievances recur to the end of Tucker's writing career, and in his later works
the specter of Franklin is merged with warnings against the colonies' encourage-
ment of massive immigration from Britain and Ireland.28 But the tones deepen
21
A Letter from a Merchant, p p . 1 4 , 4 2 - 3 , Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p p . x i i , 1 2 8 - 3 0 ; Humble
Address and Earnest Appeal. . . , p . 4 0 ; A Series of Answers, p p . xi—xii, 5 8 - 9 -
22
A Letter from a Merchant, p . 4 2 {Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p p . 1 2 8 - 9 ) : " . . . y o u w a n t t o b e
Independent: You wish to be an Empire by itself, and no longer the Province of another." Humble
Address and Earnest Appeal, p . 4 1 : "His Majesty is graciously disposed to join with Great Britain
against America in this Contest for Empire, (for in Fact, that is the real Dispute, whatever may be
the Pretence)."
23
A Series of Answers, pp. xi-xii, 5 8 - 9 ; Humble Address and Earnest Appeal; The Respective Pleas and
Arguments of the Mother Country and the Colonies . . . (Gloucester, 1775), p . vi.
24
Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p . 194.
25
Cui Bono? . . . Being a Series of Letters Addressed to Monsieur Necker (Gloucester, 1782), p . 140.
26
Humble Address and Earnest Appeal, p . 5: "Offering at the same Time, to enter into Alliances of
Friendship, and Treaties of Commerce with them, as with any other sovereign, independent States."
27
A Letter from a Merchant (see also Four Tracts and Two Sermons); A Series of Answers, pp. 8 8 - 9 3 -
28
E . g . , Cui Bono? p . 26.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 163

with A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq. of 1775. Here Tucker carries out a devastat-
ing autopsy upon the great Speech on Conciliation, in which every one of Burke's
explanations of the Americans' "fierce spirit of liberty" becomes a reason for hav-
ing nothing more to do with them. He lingers with peculiar affection on that
admittedly very odd passage in which Burke envisages the trans-Allegheny set-
tlers' becoming a race of "English Tartars," a wild nomad cavalry raiding the
outposts of settled government. 29 Even had British explorers yet encountered the
Comanche and Kiowa, the landscape of Ohio and Kentucky 30 would hardly have
justified this application of the "shepherd-stage" theory then becoming estab-
lished in French and Scottish historical sociology,31 and Tucker has some merci-
less fun with Burke's premature invocation of the cowboy West. 32 More serious
disagreements, however, are soon to come. Burke's use of the argument from
population growth plays right into Tucker's hands, and his suggestion that the
spirit of liberty in the southern colonies may be directly connected with the
institution of slavery enables Tucker to open up an argument that will soon
become a favorite: that if slaveholders are generally republicans, history shows
that republicans are generally slaveholders.33 We should note the following:

As to the Institution of Slavery in any of our Colonies; let them be Advocates for it, who
approve of it. For my part, I am thoroughly convinced, that the Laws of Commerce, when
rightly understood, do perfectly coincide with the Laws of Morality; both originating from
the same good Being, whose Mercies are over all his Works. Nay, I think it is demonstra-
ble, that domestic or predial Slavery would be found, on a fair Calculation, to be the most
onerous and expensive Mode of cultivating Land, and of raising Produce, that could be
devised. And I defy you, with all your Learning and Acuteness, to produce a single In-
stance from History either antient or modern, of a Country being well cultivated, and at
the same Time abounding in Manufactures, where this Species of Slavery (I mean the

29
"They would wander w i t h o u t a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners w i t h t h e
habits of their life; would soon forget a g o v e r n m e n t by which they were disowned; would become
H o r d e s of English Tartars; and p o u r i n g down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce a n d irresistible
cavalry, become masters of your Governors and your Counsellors, your collectors, and comptrollers,
and of all the Slaves that adhered to them." Works (Rivington edition), vol. Ill, pp. 63-4.
30
I b i d . : " Y o u cannot station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you drive t h e people from one
place, they will carry on their annual Tillage, a n d remove w i t h their flocks a n d herds t o another
. . . they behold before t h e m an i m m e n s e plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five
h u n d r e d m i l e s . " Burke m a y mean that this regression to t h e shepherd stage is less t h e consequence
of t h e terrain than of t h e abdication of a civil g o v e r n m e n t that m i g h t otherwise p r o m o t e agricul-
ture.
31
See R. L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1975); J. G. A. Pocock, "Gibbon
and the Shepherds; The Stages of Society in the Decline and Fall," in History of European Ideas II, 3
(1981), pp. 193-202.
32
A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq., Member of Parliament for the City of Bristol. . . in Answer to his Printed
Speech . . . (Gloucester, 1775), p . 4 3 ; A Series of Answers, p p . 2 4 , 7 9 - 8 0 ; Humble Address and Earnest
Appeal, p . 2 8 .
^Letter to Burke, p p . 2 2 - 3 ; A Series of Answers, p p . 2 2 , 1 0 3 - 6 .
164 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

domestic or predial) is preferred to the Method of hiring free Persons, and paying them
Wages. 34

Tucker detested slavery, but this is no isolated explosion of his abhorrence. He

would soon be developing a highly specific theory in which the rise of a wage
economy goes with that of proper ideas concerning submission to civil authority,
and the prevalence of slave or serf labor is linked with an erroneous theory of
political liberty. Burke had enabled Tucker to accuse him of being on the latter
side; the same strategy could be employed, in a remarkable fashion, when he
dealt with Burke's suggestion that the northern colonists valued liberty because
their Puritan forebears had emigrated in search of liberty both religious and civil.35
Tucker's language shows how he was able to identify political radicalism with
degenerate Puritanism and to accuse Burke (of all people) of complicity with
both.

Our first Emigrants to North-America were mostly Enthusiasts of a particular Stamp. They
were of that Set of Republicans, who believed, or pretended to believe, that Dominion was
founded in Grace. Hence they conceived, that they had the best Right in the World, both
to tax, and to persecute the Ungodly. And they did both, as soon as they got Power into
their Hands, in the most open and atrocious Manner.
In process of Time, the Notion, that Dominion was founded in Grace, grew out of
Fashion. But the Colonists continued to be Republicans still, only Republicans of another
Complection. They are now Mr. LOCKE s Disciples; who has laid down such Maxims in
his Treatise on government, that if they were to be executed according to the Letter, and
in the Manner the Americans pretend to understand them, they would necessarily unhinge,
and destroy every government upon Earth . . .
When the Emigrants fled from England, they were universally Calvinists of the most
inflexible Sort. But they were very far from being of that Species of Protestants, whom
you describe; and of which spreading Sect, there are but too many Proselites both in Great
Britain, Ireland, and America; I mean the modern new-light Men, who protest against every
thing, and who would dissent even from themselves, and from their own Opinions, if no
other Means of Dissention could be found out. Such Protestants as these are very literally
PROTESTERS; but it is hard to say, what they are besides . . .
The present Dissenters in North America retain very little of the peculiar Tenets of
their Forefathers, excepting their Antipathy to our established Religion, and their Zeal to
pull down all Orders in Church and State, if found to be superior to their own. And if it
be this you mean, by saying, that the dissenting Interests [in America} have sprung up in
direct Opposition to all the ordinary Powers of the World; — and that the Religion most
prevalent in the Northern Colonies is a Refinement on the Principles of Resistance; the Dis-
sidence of Dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant Religion:36 - In short, if you ascribe
the fierce Spirit now raging in the Northern Colonies to these Causes, I make no Objection

34
Utter to Burke. 35 Works, vol. Ill, p . 53.
36
Tucker is of course quoting a famous passage in Burke's speech.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 165

to your Account of the Matter; provided you will allow, that the Religion of the Gospel
is a very different Thing from theirs.37
This is not the last we shall hear of Tucker's belief that Locke's errors, or
heresies, as a political theorist sprang from a confusion between the principles of
civil and religious liberty. For the moment we are concerned with his onslaught
upon Burke, and here the first point to notice is that he would have had no
difficulty in accepting the contention of John Dunn and Quentin Skinner that
Locke's Treatises form "the classical text of radical Calvinist politics," 38 provided
the word "radical" was interpreted so as to fall in line with Alan Heimert's
contention that the American Revolution sprang from the soil of the Great Awak-
ening. 39 By "the modern new-light Men," Tucker meant those Dissenters, En-
glish as well as American, for whom religion was now a kind of enthusiastic free
inquiry; who held, as he had put it in an Apology for the Present Church written
three years before, "that every Person, who was to teach, or preside in that As-
sembly, should engage, to teach nothing but what appeared to him to be true, and
agreeable to right Reason, (which Words you know are a parody on a favorite Expression
of yours relative to the Scriptures)," 40 and that religion was a perpetual search
after truth no more to be finally concluded than Sir Hudibras's reformation. By
inserting the words "in America" in square brackets in the last paragraph just
quoted, Tucker probably meant to convey that English Dissent had gone over
less completely to new-light rationalism than had the American congregations. 41
We may still hold that he exaggerated the case; but in the Letter to Burke he
carefully excerpted the whole passage from the Speech on Conciliation in which
Burke had described "the Dissidence of Dissent" as justifiable "only on a strong
claim to natural liberty" and (with Tucker's emphasis added) as "agreeing in noth-
ing but in the Communication of the Spirit ofLiberty."42 Here Tucker would see the
religious origins of Locke's political theory; he would also see, in Burke's account
37
Letter to Burke, p p . 1 8 - 2 0 . Tucker's printer generally used square brackets, and these are repeated
in this essay.
38
Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke; Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols.
( C a m b r i d g e , 1978), vol. I I , The Age of Reformation, p . 2 3 9 .
39
Alan E. H e i m e r t , Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the American Revolution
( C a m b r i d g e , Mass., 1966).
40
An Apology for the Present Church of England as by Law Established, occasioned by a Petition . . . for
Abolishing Subscriptions, in a Letter to one of the Petitioners (Gloucester, 1772), p p . 1 5 - 1 6 . T h e " y o u "
addressed is not Burke this time.
41
A Series of Answers, p. 69n.: "It is remarkable, that the younger Dissenters of all Denominations,
both Clergy and Laity, are [I do not say Universally but] too generally tainted with levelling repub-
lican principles respecting the State, and with various wild Heterodoxies in Point of Religion. The
Elder, the more experienced, and those, who are in every respect the wiser, and better Part of them
greatly lament this general Defection in their Brethren." Tucker goes on to say that this does not
apply to the Scots, against whom the patriots display violent prejudice. This passage might be
compared with Burke's estimates of the extent of pro-French feeling among Dissenters after 1789.
42
Letter to Burke, p. 17.
166 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

of the state of American Puritanism in 1775, a diagnosis identical with his own.
As he tells Burke, not only at the end of the passage quoted, but throughout the
dissection of the Speech on Conciliation, they do not differ on the facts, only on the
conclusions to be drawn from them. All that Burke finds to make the Americans
formidable, Tucker finds to make them abominable; every one of Burke's argu-
ments for conciliation Tucker finds to be an argument for separation.
But if Burke, recognizing the true character of American society, still wants
to retain it in organic association with the established order in church and state,
what is the explanation? Here Tucker's eye falls on the leading English apologists
for American civil and religious liberty, and for colonial claims against the au-
thority of parliament: Joseph Priestley and Richard Price. These "Republican
Doctors" 43 have reduced religion to a species of enthusiastic speculation; they
profess what Tucker considers a "Lockian" political philosophy that denies the
legitimacy of all civil government by making consent its necessary precondition;
they are the allies of those London radicals who, after joining with Pitt to pro-
mote the great war for empire, are now using the crisis in imperial government
to demand far-reaching political change and even new forms of political associa-
tion. It is clear that Tucker in the 1770s found Dissenting claims for reform on
grounds of natural right and liberty deeply disturbing, exactly as Burke was to
do a decade later; the words and actions of Richard Price helped spark Tucker's
Treatise Concerning Civil Government in 1781, just as they did Burke's Reflections on
the Revolution in France in 1790. But in 1775—6 Tucker found Burke expounding
Price's brand of religion as a constituent of the American character, and Price
praising Burke as a friend to liberty. Not even Tucker at his most explosive could
call Burke a "Lockian"; but if the member for Bristol was not a republican, it
seemed pretty clear to the dean of Gloucester that he was a "patriot," a self-
serving politician who had joined with the republicans for reasons of his own.
These reasons might be profoundly ambivalent and hypocritical. If in the Letter
to Burke Tucker told him that "both the American and the English Republicans
expect great things from you," 44 in a tract of the following year he held Burke
responsible for all plans involving a number of independent parliaments under
the same crown, which he said would inevitably lead to the despotism of either
43
". . . your celebrated American Fellow Labourer . . ."; Letter to Burke, p. 12. The phrase "Republican
Doctors" is in Four Letters on Important National Subjects Addressed to the Right Honourable the Earl of
Shelburne (Gloucester, 1783), p . 23-
44
Letter to Burke, pp. 14—15: "On the other hand, it is equally certain, that you are endeavouring to
make Use of these factious Republicans, as the Tools and Instruments of your own Advancement."
In A Series of Answers, p p . xii-xiii, Tucker says that Burke was personally responsible for the
Declaratory Act and that Price lacks "the Ingenuity to acknowledge it." In A Treatise Concerning
Civil Government, p . 254, appears the figure of a false patriot who, rather than advocate a separation
from the colonies, "would warmly recommend a Reform in the K—g's Kitchen, in his Cellar, in
his Household Servants, and his Household Furniture; - nay, I had almost said, in his Dog-
Kennel." The allusion to Burke is obvious.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 167

ministerial influence or royal prerogative, and probably to the triumph of Frank-

lin's plan for the subjugation of Britain by America.43 These charges were not as
contradictory as may appear. When an eighteenth-century writer expresses fear
of republicanism or democracy, he is usually expressing fear of a conspiracy by
degenerate aristocratic politicians, "desperate Catilinarian Men." 46 By 1783 Tucker
saw the role of patrician demagogue being played by Lord Shelburne, that patron
of subversive intellectuals (like Shaftesbury before him), 47 who was supposed to
have said that monarchy might prove unnecessary. This fear was to be shared by
Burke; we know that the Reflections were in part intended to expose the evil
designs of Shelburne and his creatures, Price and Priestley. 48
Tucker's charges against Burke might not be acceptable, but they would not
be unintelligible to a contemporary mind; yet we can see the doctrinaire element
in them well enough. It seemed so clear that Britain should separate from the
colonies, and the case for doing so had been so cogently stated in Burke's own
oratory, that only sinister motives could account for his persistence in trying to
keep them within the empire; Common Sense, which Tucker attributed to Franklin
and Adams (he does not say which Adams), was a refreshingly honest work by
comparison. 49 What is striking and important for our purposes, however, is that,
ten to fifteen years before the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Tucker could
make so "Burkean" a case against ideologies with which he held Burke to be in
complicity. We return to the comparison between the two men's extended state-
ments of the "conservative" position.

Ill
The name of John Locke does not occur in Burke's Reflections and, even where he
is considering the proper interpretation of the events of 1688, it taxes the inge-
nuity of modern scholars to contend that a rebuttal of the Treatises on Government
was what Burke had principally in mind. Tucker's Treatise Concerning Civil Gov-
ernment is another matter. Since at least 1775, the dean of Gloucester had been
announcing his intention of publishing a systematic refutation of Locke's theory
of politics at the earliest possible opportunity, 50 and had given several foretastes
^Humble Address and Earnest Appeal, p p . 1 0 - 1 1 , 3 3 - 4 0 .
46 4l
Treatise Concerning Civil Government, p . 2 3 8 . Four Letters on Important National Subjects.
48
Frederick Dreyer, " T h e Genesis of Burke's Reflections," Journal of Modem History L, 3 (1978), p p .
464-6.
49
A Series of Answers, p . 50: "In this single Assertion, tho' in very few others, I entirely agree with
the Authors . . . I T IS T I M E T O P A R T . " See also p . 5 9 .
50
Pleas and Arguments, p . 13n. This is also described as "Tract V , " in succession to Four Tracts and
Two Sermons, and the treatise against Locke was evidently intended to be a sixth. See Pleas and
Arguments, p p . 25ff., 3 8 - 9 - In the "Advertisement" prefixed to the Letter to Burke (pp. 1 1 - 1 3 ) ,
Tucker says: " T h e present critical Juncture obliges the Author to postpone his Animadversions on
Mr. LOCKE's Theory of Government for some Time longer." See A Series of Answers, sig. A 2 .
168 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

of his arguments. Significantly, the anti-Lockean treatise was originally to have

taken the form of an "address to the Protestant Dissenting ministers of North
America," but any intention of addressing American audiences had disappeared
with the increasing virulence of Tucker's feelings on the subject; and to judge
from the four hundred pages it finally occupied, he had found composition a
bigger task than he had anticipated. A draft was privately printed for circulation
among the author's friends and predictably fell into hostile hands,51 but the text
that appeared in 1781 represented Tucker's final recension of his views.52
Tucker makes a somewhat simplistic statement of the position he desires to
rebut. Locke is taken to have said that the individual cannot be deprived of his
freedom without his own consent; that he inherits no obligation to obey civil
authority from the fact of his father's obedience; that he cannot acquire member-
ship in civil society from any period of living under its laws, without "actually
entering into it by positive engagement"; and that he cannot be taxed or deprived
of his property without his consent.53 Tucker repeatedly cites the Second Treatise
in support of this reading of Locke's intentions,54 but he is less concerned with
the structure of Locke's argument than with conclusions derived from and (in his
opinion) compatible with it, which he claims to find in Priestley's Essay on Civil
Government,55 Price's Observations on Civil Liberty,56 and other works. 5 7 These con-
clusions are (a) that there may be conceived an ideal form of government, founded
on the individual's right to consent to the creation of authority and to acts of
legislation and taxation, in which he is as far as possible his own legislator in
matters concerning himself; (b) that governments obtaining in the actual world
are legitimate only insofar as they conform to this model, which most of them

51
Tucker included responses to criticisms already published by John Cartwright (The People's Barrier
against Undue Influence and Corruption { L o n d o n , 1780}) a n d J a m e s D u n b a r {Essays on the History of
Mankind {"London, 1 7 8 1 ] ) . See Treatise, p p . 3 8 5 - 6 .
52
T h e full t i t l e r u n s A Treatise Concerning Civil Government in three parts. Part I. The Notions of Mr.
Locke and his Followers concerning the Origin, Extent, and End of Civil Government, Examined and Con-
futed. Part II. The True Basis of Civil Government Set Forth and Ascertained; also Objections Answered;
Different Forms Compared; and Improvements Suggested. Part III. England's Former Gothic Constitution
Censured and Exposed; Cavils Refuted; and Authorities Produced; also the Scripture Doctrine Concerning the
Obedience Due to Governors Vindicated and Illustrated. By J o s i a h T u c k e r , D . D . , D e a n of G l o u c e s t e r
(London, 1781).
^Letter to Burke, pp. 11—12, 12-13; A Series of Answers, pp. [ix}-x; Treatise, pp. 1-2, 3 - 5 .
54
Treatise, pp. 5-10. The citations are from Locke's Second Treatise, chap. VIII, sees. 95, 98, 116,
119-22; chap. IX, sees. 123, 127; chap. X, sees. 138, 140; chap. XVII, sec. 198.
55
Treatise, pp. 13-17, citing "2nd ed., 1771," pp. 6, 11, 40. For citations see Pleas and Arguments,
pp. 38-9; Letter to Burke, pp. 12-13; A Series of Answers, pp. 60-4.
56
Treatise, pp. 18—21, citing "the 5th edition," pp. 1, 3, 4, 7, 15. For earlier citations see A Series
of Answers, pp. xii-xiv and (allusively) 60-74; also 88-93-
57
Chiefly William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland's Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England (1698).
See Pleas and Arguments, pp. 25ff.; Treatise, pp. i-ii, 11-13, 96-101. Tucker attached much
importance to proving Locke's complicity with Molyneux's writings, and argued incessantly for a
parliamentary union with Ireland.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 169

arc far from doing; and (c) that when a government is such that it defrauds or
deprives a people of its rights, they, or any individual acting in their name, are
free to take action designed to recover these rights and establish a government
that will actualize them. Tucker firmly asserts that Locke was the author and
originator of these doctrines, but he is more concerned with the continuity and
development of "Lockian" thought than with the exegesis and analysis of the
Treatises of Government themselves. The problem he raises for us is less that of
Locke's own intentions than that of the role he played in the history of thought
in the eighteenth century: Had it or had it not been radical in the way that
Tucker supposes?
Tucker's central criticism of the "Lockian" position is one we have long been
accustomed to consider essentially Burkean: namely, that a systematic application
of a theory of natural right centering in the individual must end by delegitimat-
ing all existing governments and all existing systems of institutionalized social
relationships.58 Burke was to put it thus: "They have the rights of men. Against
these there can be no prescription; against these no agreement is binding; these
admit no temperament and no compromise; any thing withheld from their full
demand is so much of fraud and injustice."59 As far back as 1775, Tucker had
found a passage in Priestley that suggested that lawyers were not to be consulted
when the requirements of nature were antecedent to any mere precedent of fact;60
and in 1781 he quoted Price as saying: "In general, to he free is to be guided by
one's own Will, and to be guided by the Will of another is the Characteristic of
Servitude. This is particularly applicable to Political Liberty."61 The question
was, he wrote, whether any government was to be accounted usurpation that
could not meet such criteria of natural right and freedom. Burke would have
concurred (at least in 1790); the pages of the Reflections are thick with denuncia-
tions of the "metaphysician," whose wickedness knows no bounds because he will
subject any human relation or affection to abstract criteria such as natural right,
and as often as not this "metaphysician" is a figure constructed from that of
Richard Price himself. A decade and more earlier, Tucker had found Price guilty
of the same errors, but his imagination was coarser and less apocalyptic than
Burke's, and the "metaphysician," instead of being an embodiment of Luciferian
58
Letter to Burke, p. 12: Priestley teaches that "as all Governments whatever have been in some
Measure compulsory, tyrannical and oppressive in their Origin, THEREFORE they ought to be
changed"; Rousseau suggests doing this annually. A Series of Answers, p. 64. Treatise, p. 4: "The
Question, therefore, the sole Question now to be decided, is simply this, 'Whether THAT Govern-
ment is to be justly deemed an USURPATION, which is not founded on the express mutual Com-
pact of all the Parties interested in, or belonging thereunto?' "; p. 17 (summarizing Priestley):
"And in Circumstances, where regular Commissions from this abused Public cannot be had, EVERY
MAN, who has Power, and who is actuated with the Sentiments of the Public, may assume a public
Character, and bravely redress public Wrong."
59
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: Works, vol. II, p . 60.
60 61
Pleas and Arguments, pp. 3 8 - 3 9 and note. Treatise, p. 20.
170 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

pride and hypocrisy, is simply a figure of the contemporary scene - the heir of
Locke, the expositor of a socially dangerous error which Tucker proceeds to ex-
plain.
The error is that of making the individual, his rights, and his personality,
anterior to the formation of civil society. Tucker presents this error as arising in
two ways. In the first place, it is predicated on a fundamentally antisocial view
of human nature. The naturally free individual is by nature free, and very little
more; he desires to be free and to rule himself, he asserts a series of rights to the
satisfaction of these desires, but he and those like him are by nature no more than
so many "independent and unconnected" beings (the words are Priestley's), who
do not spontaneously, and, as it were, imperceptibly slide into a Distinction of Orders, and
a Difference of Ranks by living and conversing together, as Neighbours and social Beings:
— But on the contrary . . . naturally shew an Aversion, and a Repugnance to every kind
of Subordination, 'till dire Necessity compells them to enter into a solemn Compact, and
to join their Forces together for the Sake of Self-Preservation.62

It may be worth remarking at this point that Tucker shows no particular

interest in Hobbes and does not find it necessary to invoke his specter as part of
an indictment of natural-rights social theory. He is asserting that men are natu-
rally sociable, that they naturally learn to accept differences of rank and authority
as part of the experience of social life, and that government and submission to
authority arise naturally out of the network of relationships and subordinations
thus formed. By comparison, such an author as Priestley
supposes Government, to be so entirely the work of Art, that Nature had no Share at all
in forming it; or rather in predisposing and inclining Man to form it. The Instincts of Nature,
it seems, had nothing to do in such a complicated Business of Chicane and Artifice, where
every Man was for driving the best Bargain he could; and where all in general, both the
future governors and governed, were to be on the catch as much as possible . . . In short,
they did not feel any Instincts within themselves kindly leading them towards associating,
or incorporating with each other. 63

Here are Burke's "sophisters, oeconomists and calculators";64 but they do not
occur where Burke seems to place them, at the moment of transition from a
feudal and chivalric to a commercial and philosophical society, but rather at the
moment of Lockean compact, where we are to imagine society as being formed
by a multitude of "independent and unconnected" beings. Tucker hammers away
at the unhistorical character of such a compact, because he wants to emphasize
that we cannot imagine it without imagining the individual out of history, and
consequently out of nature. The state of nature is profoundly unnatural. It is clear
to him how this error has arisen.

62
Treatise, p. 22. ^Treatise, pp. 2 3 - 4 . "Reflections; Works, vol. II, p. 89-
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 171

But if Mr. LOCKE and his Followers have not granted much to human Nature in one
Respect, they have resolved to make abundant Amends for their Deficiency in another.
For tho' they have not allowed human Nature to have any innate Propensities towards the
first Formation of civil Society; - yet they do most strenuously insist, that every Man,
every individual of the human Species hath an unalienable Right to chuse, or refuse,
whether he will be a member of this, or that particular Government, or of none at all.65

As unequivocally as could be desired by any modern follower of Leo Strauss or

Russell Kirk, Tucker identifies the "Lockian" error as the divorce of the individual
from society brought about by the substitution of natural right for natural law.
It is not by accident that the penultimate chapter of his Treatise is designed to
rescue "the judicious Hooker" from the republican and individualist company he
has too long been obliged to keep, 66 and restore him to his proper place in the
succession from Aristotle and Cicero to Grotius, as "a Constitutional (though not
a Republican) Whigg."61 Here we may be tempted to assign Tucker, as he assigns
Hooker, to the grand "classical tradition of natural law," to which Burke too is
held to have addressed himself when he protested against the "sophisters, oec-
onomists and calculators." But Tucker's role as a pioneer of free-trade economics
may perplex us here, since we have been for so long encouraged to see the decom-
position of classical politics in the eighteenth century as brought about by the
rise of classical economics — as an affair of the revolt of economy against polity, 68
of the rise of possessive individualism 69 and market ideology.70 Tucker is so far
from fitting into this scenario that he presents a problem worth exploring. We
should begin by noting the second explanation he offers of the rise of natural-
right theory, one that entails a rather different account of its history. In a rela-
tively benign account of Locke's historical role, he writes:
Mr. LOCKE in his early Days was a Witness to grievous Persecutions inflicted on the
Score of Religion. He saw the Right to private judgment exposed to continual Vexations;
and he saw likewise, that the Interests of the State were not at all concerned in maintaining
that rigid universal Conformity in Religion, for which the Bigots of those Times so fiercely
contended; - nay, that the Principles of Humanity, justice, and Truth, as well as the
Suggestions of sound Policy, plainly required a more extended Plan of religious Liberty:
All this he clearly saw: And hence he inferred, and very justly, that every Man had a Right
not only to think, but even to act for himself, in all such religious Matters as did not
oppose, or clash with the Interests of civil Society. And had he stopt there, and gone no
further, all would have been right; nay, he would truly have deserved the Thanks of
Mankind for pleading their Cause so well.
6l
^Treatise, p. 25. ^Treatise, Part II, p. Hi. Treatise, p. 409.
68
Joseph E. Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (The Hague,
1957).
69
C . B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962).
70
Joyce O. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.,
1978).
172 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

But alas! he extended those ideas, which were true only in what concerns Religion, to
Matters of a mere civil Nature, and even to the Origin of civil Government itself, — as if
there had been the same Plea for Liberty of Conscience in disobeying the civil Laws of
one's Country, as for not conforming to a Church Establishment, or an Ecclesiastical
Institution; — and that the Rights of private judgment [I mean the open and public
Exercise of those Rights} are equally unalienable and indefeasible in both Respects.71
Tucker was what he had called Hooker, a constitutional Whig: a resolute
defender of toleration, a resolute opponent of the Dissenting claim that civil
rights should be accessible to all on grounds unconnected with church member-
ship. What seemed to be a separation of church and state, he held, was in feet a
confusion between the two, namely, the error of holding that civil liberty could
be claimed on the same grounds as religious liberty; and this was an error to
which Dissent, for theological reasons as well as in consequence of its civil posi-
tion, was especially prone. We have noted Tucker's suggestion that New Eng-
landers had passed from believing that dominion was founded in grace to believ-
ing that religious liberty was a civil and natural right. There is something to the
same effect in a highly entertaining passage of the Treatise where he imagines his
opponents objecting that though natural society may grow imperceptibly through
the processes of human interaction, civil or political society is different in kind
and cannot come into being without specific acts of consent and engagement by
individuals. Tucker imagines his reply:
When Mr LOCKE was a very young Man, it was the Custom of the Pastors of his Time
to make the junior Part of their Congregations to undergo the following strange Exami-
nation, "At what Day or Hour did you feel the Influxes of Saving Grace, and receive the
Seal of your Election and Justification?" Something like the same Question is couched
under this Objection, founded under Mr LOCKE's System.72
The acts of divine grace — however much the Puritans distorted their opera-
tions - may well occur and take effect outside the normal processes of social
experience and education; but to suppose that the political acts of free individuals
can only be thought of as acts of consent rooted immediately in nature is an error
that may very well arise from a confusion between grace and dominion. The result
is not only that we separate the political institution from
that progressive Course of Civil Society, which like the infant State of Man {moral and
intellectual as well as natural) grows up gradually from small beginnings to Maturity . . .
As well may you pretend to define, where the Night ends, and the Day begins, as to
assign the exact Period when that Society which is natural puts on the Dress and assumes
the Form of the Political.73

It is also that we confound the actions of the moral being with those of the
political. By this Tucker does not of course mean that political actions are inde-
ll 12
Treastise, pp. 3 0 - 1 . Treatise, p. 153. ^ Treatise, p. 158.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 173

pendent of moral constraints; he means that moral personality is not by itself a

sufficient foundation for political capacity and membership. It is the fundamental
"Lockian" error to suppose that it is; for not only does this mean that an equal
political role must be accorded to every moral agent - every sentient human
creature, rich and poor, male and female, young and old74 - but in the last
analysis it makes political action and capacity impossible. The reason is that
moral action is not alienable, whereas political action is:
In the Affairs of Conscience no Man can act, or be supposed to act as Proxy for another;
no Man can be a Deputy, Substitute or Representative in such a Case; but every Man must
think, and act personally for himself. This is the Fact; and in this Sense it is very true,
that the Rights of private Judgement are absolutely unalienable . . . because they are
untransferable.15

But all systems of political action, all distributions of civil authority among
human beings, depend upon my capacity to recognize that another has the right
to act for me and the authority to commit me by his actions. To say that all my
actions must be performed by me as a moral agent not only denies another the
authority to command me; it also denies me the authority to commission another
to act in my name; for if my rights are unalienable I am not free to alienate them.
To identify political capacity with moral agency therefore destroys both authority
and representation at a single blow.
Honest, undissembling ROUSSEAU clearly saw, where the Lockian Hypothesis must
necessarily end. And as he was a Man who never boggled at Consequences, however ex-
travagant or absurd, he declared with his usual Frankness, that the People could not
transfer their indefeasible Rights of voting for themselves to any others: and that the very
Notion of their choosing Persons to represent them in these Respects, was a species of
Contradiction. According to him, a Transmutation of Persons could not be a greater
impossibility than a Translation of those Rights, which are absolutely incommunicable.76

Rousseau is the Priestley of Geneva, the dissidence of dissent in its alpine

form. Both theorists leave the individual "independent and unconnected," claim-
ing to choose a government for himself but in fact incapable of doing so without
"chicane" and "contradiction." Tucker does not examine Rousseau's solution of
74
Treatise, pp. 26—7: "Now, according to the Principles of Mr. LOCKE and his Followers . . . the
Right of voting is not annexed to Land, or Franchises, to Condition, Age, or Sex; but to human
Nature itself, and to moral Agency: Therefore, wherever human Nature, and moral Agency do exist
together, be the Subject rich or poor, old or young, male or female, it must follow from these
Principles, that the Right of voting must exist with it: For whosoever is a moral Agent is a Person;
and Personality is the only Foundation of the Right of voting." Tucker frequently hints that women
would have the right to vote on these principles. He does not seem to think that they should,
though he notes {Treatise, p. 249n.) that women shareholders vote in elections of East India Com-
pany directors; his point is not that women are not moral persons, but that moral personality confers
no right to vote. See his debate with Cartwright on the subject; Treatise, pp. 358-65.
75 76
Treatise, pp. 32-33; cf. p. 2In. Treatise, p . 39.
174 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

the problem, but if he had we may imagine him commenting acidly on the
radical separation between the general will and any scheme of social relations on
which human beings could be supposed to enter as the result of their own activ-
ities. He now returns to these relations as he claims they really are, and considers
them as naturally engendering authority and political capacity, subordination
and right.

IV
There is no distinction between natural and political authority, because the latter
arises as humans, in the ordinary course of social interaction, recognize that ine-
qualities of capacity exist among them and acknowledge the authority for specific
purposes of those possessing superiority in the capacity for which each purpose
calls.77 Natural society is therefore deferential, and the state is the consolidation
of those groups of authoritative persons to whom deference is paid. This does not
mean that it is a simple aristocracy; Tucker is a good enough Aristotelian to be
aware that authority comes in many forms and is lodged in many groups of
persons, who need not cohere in a single governing class or institution. Consis-
tently throughout his writings he affirms the superiority of a mixed constitution
or state;78 but this does not exist chiefly to ensure the internal restraints which
its component parts exert upon each other, and Tucker has no objection to saying
that "we must stop somewhere"79 and attribute to some governing organ a final
authority from which there is no appeal — the ne plus ultra that every parliamen-
tarian found he must sooner or later assert and defend against American claims.
The value of a mixed-constitution doctrine is that it appropriately expresses the
idea that political authority is the coalescence of various forms of natural author-
ity and is thus natural itself. There is nothing particularly architectonic about
the political art; deference and authority are products of the natural sociability of
human creatures pursuing their diverse activities and associations. Tucker would
not satisfy any believer in the primacy of political philosophy as a ruling art, but
then he was a Christian priest and not a pagan Platonist.
This natural society, in which people conduct their own activities and find
their own heads of association, might remind Socrates of the ''city of pigs," and
it may if we are not careful remind us of Locke's state of nature. It is of course
the antithesis of the latter, because it contains everything necessary to the consti-
tution of civil government, without recourse to compact, contract, or consent.
Tucker lays great emphasis on the civil-law notion of a "quasi-contract,"80 in
^Treatise, pp. 130—5; p. 134: ". . . there is found to exist in human Nature a certain ascendancy
in some, and a kind of submissive Acquiescence in others."
79
™ Treatise, pp. 207, 242; Four Letters to Shelburne, pp. 1 0 0 - 1 . Pleas and Arguments, p. 12.
80
Treatise, pp. 1 3 9 - 4 3 .
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 175
which contractual relations and rights may be presumed to exist though no for-
mal agreement to enter upon them has ever been signed; they exist because social
relationships are found to have progressed to that degree of complexity and so-
phistication, and there is no need to posit the individual and his natural freedom
as anterior to their formation. But we might still suppose that the "natural soci-
ety" entails no more than a "natural economy": that relatively simple state of
appropriation of the earth and cultivation of its fruits, which in Locke's system
precedes the growth of monetarized exchange and the consequent need of more
complex forms of government. Noting that Tucker has nothing whatever to say
about this aspect of Locke's theory, an exponent of the view that Locke is the
theorist of commercial society might wish to argue that Tucker misunderstood
the nature of his doctrine, exaggerated the distinction between contract and quasi-
contract, and allowed the apparently unhistorical character of Locke's individu-
alism to mislead him — as perhaps it misled Priestley, Price, and Paine — as to
the width of the gap separating Locke's thought from his own. Such an exponent
might question whether Locke was the radical egalitarian and natural-rights in-
dividualist Tucker took him to have been.
Nothing, however, could be more inaccurate than to take Tucker to have been
content with a simple "natural economy," and we cannot understand the char-
acter of his polemic against Locke until we understand the character of the debate
over political economy in England and Scotland since Locke's time. During the
last years of the latter's career, and with some assistance from him,81 there had
come into being a new system of public finance, based on the Bank of England
and the national debt, which involved the growth of a new class of public credi-
tors and the ability of the state to maintain its political and military enterprises
by anticipating its revenues. This system had proved so stimulating to economic
as well as political growth that the phrase "a commercial society" had come to
denote not merely one engaged in trade and commerce, but one maintained by
the system of public credit and capital flow that was now seen as essential to
commerce in the ordinary sense. But the Whig political regime that credit sup-
ported had been created fairly rapidly and to the exclusion of many previously
entrenched political groups, and the publicists of the eighteenth century engaged
in a perpetual and bitter debate over the merits of its existence.82 Its opponents,

81
Locke was active in the Great Recoinage and one of the first shareholders in the Bank of England.
82
There is now a sizable literature on this debate. See Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Com-
monwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle; J. G. A. Pocock,
Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1971); and The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N . J . ,
1975); John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought from Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977);
H . T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in ISth-Century Britain (London, 1977);
Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N . Y . , 1978); Drew
McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeff ersonian America (Chapel Hill, N . C . , 1980);
Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue (Cambridge, 1983).
176 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

variously known by such epithets as "country," "Commonwealth," and "patriot"

ideologues, included dissatisfied elements of both rural gentry with Tory ante-
cedents and urban merchants and artisans with Dissenting connections and radi-
cal leanings; and this accounts for the widespread belief (which Tucker vigorously
shared) that Tory and patriot, Jacobite and republican, were closely allied and at
times virtually interchangeable.83
The ideology of opposition was moral and neoclassicist in its arguments and
assumptions, and had little if anything to do with the debate between Locke and
Filmer. To the image of the individual as client, dependent and corrupt, it op-
posed that of the individual as citizen, independent and virtuous. It located this
image first, in classical antiquity, when the oikos had served to support the polls
and the ager the quirts, and second, in a simplified and idealized version of me-
dieval society, when the "Gothic" freeholder had been at one and the same time
his own warrior, judge, and legislator. This was less an idealization of feudalism
than a defeudalization of medieval reality,84 and it is important to bear in mind
that the economy invoked to assail the growth of public credit represented, in
Marxist terms, the ancient rather than the feudal stage of production. But the
defenders of the new order85 saw from an early time that what they were required
to vindicate was a rentier society in which the individual found it worth his while
to pay others, and to invest his money in the system by which they were paid, to
conduct a professionalized system of government that left him free to pursue his
profit, leisure, and cultivation. If the Goths, Spartans, and early Romans had
been free and virtuous, they had been neither enlightened nor polite; and it came
to be argued that neither material freedom nor intellectual development had been
possible in ancient economies, where the warrior-citizen had been obliged to
discharge all functions in his own person, instead of paying others to discharge
some of them for him. 86 In such an economy, moreover, the dearth of monetar-
ized exchange relationships meant that the performance of personal services in-
evitably became a principal means of receiving a benefit or paying a debt. 87 The
ancient city rested on a foundation of slavery, the Gothic polity on one of serf
83
A Series of Answers, p . 9 3 : " B u t t h e patriotic Dean S W I F T had almost raised a Rebellion in Ireland
u n d e r t h e like shameful Pretence, w i t h that which is now maintained by t h e patriotic D r . P R I C E ,
viz. T h a t Copper Money a n d Paper Money will drain us of our Gold and Silver . . . A n d thus it
appears b u t too plainly, that Mock-Patriots in every Country, in every A g e , and of every D e n o m i -
nation, are m u c h t h e same"; p p . 9 4 n . - 9 5 : " A n d I have had t h e Mortification t o find, that not a
few of those, w h o formerly wore all t h e Insignia, and drank all t h e Healths of Jacobitism, now give
as evident Proofs of their being R e p u b l i c a n s . " See also T h o m a s R . Cleary, " H e n r y Fielding and t h e
Great Jacobite Paper W a r of 1 7 4 7 - 4 9 , " Eighteenth-Century Life 5 , 1 (1978), p p . 1 - 1 1 .
84
D . W . L. Earl, "Procrustean Feudalism: A n Interpretative Dialogue in English Historical Narra-
tion, 1700-1725," Historical Journal XIX, 1 (1976), pp. 33-52.
85
O f w h o m t h e leader was Daniel Defoe; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p p . 4 3 2 - 6 , 4 5 2 - 8 .
86
M e l v i n R i c h t e r , The Political Theory of Montesquieu ( C a m b r i d g e , 1977), presents M o n t e s q u i e u ' s
treatment of this question.
81
'Treatise, p. 5 1 .
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 111

labor. It was, then, as a means of defending rentier and "commercial" society

against criticism in the name of the classical citizen ideal that the idea came to
be generally put forward that personal liberty and intellectual progress depended
on the increase and development of exchange relationships, and these in turn on
the progressive increase of specialization of function and division of labor.88
In the growth of this debate, and the very important role it played in the
history of political economy, Locke took no direct part. He appears to have been
totally indifferent to the clash of ideas about ancient virtue and modern com-
merce, and though it is possible to imagine how his accounts of the origins of
government might have been fitted into the defense of modernity, there is re-
markably little sign of its being used in its construction. Lockean ideas about the
role of labor in the appropriation of property, and more important, his ideas
about the role of epistemology in the formation of personality, may have been
extensively drawn upon by the Scottish philosophers as they formulated a theory
of human progress in which labor became increasingly specialized and the human
capacities for passion, production, and the organization of ideas increasingly com-
plex and sophisticated.89 But in the present state of research it is not at all clear
whether or how this happened; we have for so long taken it for granted that the
intellectual history of the eighteenth century is to be organized around the figure
of Locke that we do not in fact know how to do so. Josiah Tucker, who was a
keen student of the growth of the Scottish school,90 a vigorous exponent of polit-
ical and economic modernism, and a man of strong opinions about the history of
political thought over the preceding hundred years,91 was able to assume that
Locke had played a wholly reactionary role and could be denounced as an expo-
nent of archaic politics.
Tucker's refutation of "Lockian" politics contains many arguments directed at
an ideal of classical citizenship that Locke himself had never affirmed. He con-
tends that republican Rome was not a virtuous but an economically primitive
polity, in which the constant demands of military service forced the citizen to
neglect his smallholding and go into debt, thus preparing the way for his subse-
quent corruption.92 It would have been better had he employed his industry in
88
The classics here are John Millar, The Origin of Ranks (1771, 1787), and Adam Smith, The Wealth
of Nations (1776). For Tucker, see Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p. 25; Treatise, pp. 130—1.
89
For recent studies of the growth of this interpretation, see David Kettler, The Social and Political
Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus, Ohio, 1965); Duncan Forbes, ed., Adam Ferguson's Essay on
the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1966); Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics; Meek, Social Science
and the Ignoble Savage; Winch, Adam Smith's Politics; Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests;
Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue; and chap. 6, this volume.
90
Tucker corresponded with Kames, debated with Hume, and read Robertson. Cf. Treatise, p. 376.
91
Tucker held that Filmer and Locke had fallen into the same error of making a right to rule anterior
to the being of government, and differed only as to its location. Treatise, pp. 8 1 - 8 , 4 2 7 - 8 ; Four
Letters to Shelburne, pp. 9 7 - 8 .
92
Four Tracts and Two Sermons, pp. 6 0 - 5 ; Treatise, pp. 226ff.
178 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

increasing the yield of his farm; but Tucker quotes Cicero on the ignobility of all
mechanical and useful arts. 93 The ancient republics all possessed governments
profoundly unsuited to the encouragement of commercial society,94 and the Gothic
polities after them can only be compared to the slave-worked Jamaican and Vir-
ginian estates owned by such patriots as Beckford and Washington. 95 Tucker
gleefully declares that Locke was the author of the Fundamental Constitutions of
Carolina and as such - like Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun and other modern repub-
licans - an apologist for slavery; he knows the answer to Dr. Johnson's question,
"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of ne-
groes?" 96 From his point of view it does not matter that the rhetoric of Roman
virtue and independence is singularly absent from Locke's writings. In the rhet-
oric of Americans, Dissenters, and Londoners Tucker finds the two converging;
there is a union between the classical ideal of the citizen (merged with the Gothic
ideal of the freeholder) who commands his own lands and arms, so that he can be
involved in government only in his own person, and the "Lockian" ideal of the
individual whose rights to personality and property are anterior to the being of
civil society, so that he can be brought under government only by his own con-
sent. Tucker does not bother to distinguish between the two, rooted though the
distinction may be in that between virtue and right, because he sees both as
equally archaic. Such a precivil command of property is possible only in a pre-
commercial world of slaveholding latifundists or serf-commanding barons. In the
last of his published works, a group of open letters to Shelburne, Tucker links
Locke with Algernon Sidney as nostalgic for "Polish liberty"; both were ideo-
logues for a group of desperate aristocratic radicals, the Catilines of their age. 97
The dreadful truth that Russell and Sidney had taken French money was long
since out, 98 and Tucker did not scruple to hint that the patriots of the American
war had done the same. 99
He would clearly have had difficulty in recognizing Locke as a "bourgeois
ideologist," whatever that terminological inexactitude may imply. Tucker em-
ploys a basically Scottish theory of the progress of commercial society as a means
of destroying the positions he attributed to Locke, Price, and Priestley, by affirm-
ing the priority of natural law over natural right. He was able to do this because
he believed that natural society was commercial society, and that commerce was
a natural human activity. It seems to have been said of him by Bishop Warburton
93 94
Treatise, pp. 2 2 6 - 3 0 . Treatise, p. 202 (chapter heading).
95
Series of Answers, p. 106; Treatise, pp. 168, 2 1 8 - 2 2 4 . Comparisons between Gothic barons and
modern planters are found in Treatise, pp. 167, 210, 302.
96
A Series of Answers, pp. 1 0 3 - 6 ; Treatise, pp. 1 6 7 - 8 ; Four Letters to Shelburne, pp. 9 2 - 4 . For John-
son, see Taxation No Tyranny, in Works, ed. Greene, p. 454.
97
Four Letters to Shelburne, letter IV.
98
Sir John Dalrymple's Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland had been published in 1771.
"Cut Bono? p . 12.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 179

that "he made religion a trade, and trade a religion;" 100 and though he displayed
indignation at this piece of rather brutal perspicuity, 101 he did not conceal his
belief that exchange relations between men were part of the providential plan for
government of the universe, They came into being as humans discovered the
diversity of their situations and capacities,

a great Difference of Talents; and, if I may be allowed the Expression, a wonderful Variety
of Strata in the human Mind,102

and set up relations among themselves by exchanging the goods and services each
was best fitted to provide. Though commercial progress tended to the dissolution
of hereditary authority, it was in the practice of exchange that men learned to
identify and respect their betters, and Tucker saw nothing in commerce incom-
patible with deference;103 on the contrary, it was only through the cementing of
these natural relations between men that government could come into being,
without the "chicanery" and "contradiction" inherent in the idea of a compact
between "independent and unconnected" individuals. Exchange among humans
was a natural, providential, and divine necessity.

And how are the Ends both of Religion and Government to be answered, but by the
System of universal Commerce? - Commerce, I mean, in the large and extensive Signifi-
cation of that Word; Commerce, as it implies a general System for the useful Employment
of our Time; as it exercises the particular Genius and Abilities of Mankind in some Way
or other, either of Body or Mind, in mental or corporeal Labour, and so as to make Self-
interest and Social coincide. And in pursuing this Plan, it answers all the great Ends both
of Religion and Government; it creates Social Relations, it enables Men to discharge their
Duty in those Relations, and it serves as a Cement to connect together the Religious and
Civil Interests of Mankind.104

But what is natural is also historical; Tucker's economy moves through a series
of stages of development and attains greater fulfillment as it becomes more mod-
ern. There is consequently no such thing as a state of nature, conceived as a norm
of departure; Tucker devotes no less than thirty pages of the Treatise Concerning
Civil Government10"* to repudiating the thesis that the American Indians display
society in its natural condition. Here he bases himself wholly on William Rob-
ertson's History of America, a classic of Scottish four-stages theory in which it is
100 wl
Shelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 164-5. Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p. xiv.
™2 Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p. 67. l0i
Treatise, pp. 41, 124, 126, 130-1, 159-60.
104
Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p. 11.
105
Pp. 170-201. Robertson's America had been published in 1777. See The Works of William Robert-
son, D.D. (London, 1824), vols. VI and VII.
180 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

said of the Indians (as Gibbon had written of the primitive Germans) 106 that
because they do not labor, they neither appropriate nor produce and consequently
have never developed their passions past a level of gloomy frigidity, to the point
where the exchange of commodities makes possible the beginnings of sympathy
and sociability. When Tucker wrote that commerce "creates social relations," he
meant to be taken literally. He was no less clear that the beginnings of appro-
priation marked the beginnings of dispute over property and of the need for civil
government; he quoted, ironically but by no means dismissively, the famous
passage from the Discours sur lorigine de I'inegalite in which Rousseau prophesies
the fatal consequences flowing from the first man's erection of a fence around land
he calls his own. 107 That Rousseau thought this the true fall of man does not
trouble Tucker unduly; it is an event occurring naturally in the process of prim-
itive economics, and is not preceded by the construction of a fictitious scheme of
rights.
If there is no state of nature, there is no "Machiavellian moment." We have
already considered Tucker's refutation of the theory that early Rome or Sparta
could be considered an era of civic virtue, with citizen-warriors commanding
their own land and participating in their own government. Exchange relations
had not yet developed to the point where the yeoman could be kept from sinking
into debt, or the wealthy from commanding the labors of countless slaves; the
ancient patrician, like the feudal baron, belonged to an era when the performance
of personal service to a patron had not yet been replaced by the receipt of wages
for one's industry or a price for one's produce, out of which a tax could be paid
for the support of civil government. If no Machiavellian moment, then no "an-
cient constitution." Most of the third book of the Treatise Concerning Civil Govern-
ment is spent in demolishing the myth of Gothic liberty, on which the patriots of
1781 still heavily relied. Locke had written nothing on this subject, and we do
not even know if he meant to communicate his indifference to others; but it was
prominent in that convergence of "patriot" with "Lockian" rhetoric with which
Tucker supposed himself to be dealing.
What Tucker has to say here is in part a replay of a debate fifty years old, and
of another fifty years older still. He was a keen admirer of Sir Robert Walpole,
whom he saw as the first minister in history to have understood the principles of
taxation and the proper government of a commercial society;108 and in the paper
war against Bolingbroke and the Craftsman about 1730, Walpole's journalists
had helped defeat the country appeal to the "original principles" of the consti-
tution by arguing that liberty in England was modern, not ancient, and that
106
Decline andFall, chap. 9; see J. G. A. Pocock, "Between Machiavelli and Hume; Gibbon as Civic
Humanist and Philosophic Historian," in Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, ed. G. W . Bowersock and John Clive (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
101 108
'Treatise, pp. 4 6 - 7 . Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p . 7 I n . ; Treatise, pp. 78, 222n., 2 4 2 - 3 .
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 181

constitutional government had emerged out of feudal disorder. 109 To make this
case they had drawn upon the arguments of Robert Brady and the Tory historians
of 1680 and after, who had been involved in the defense of one part of Filmer's
writings when Locke was attacking the other. 110 This adoption of Restoration
Tory arguments by Hanoverian Whigs to defend themselves against Common-
wealth Whigs and their country Tory allies is, of course, a crucial and confusing
move in the development of eighteenth-century polemics. 111 A hundred years
after Brady, fifty years after Walpole, and twenty years after Hume (whose History
he does not seem to cite), Tucker carries on the strategy; but he does so in a
context transformed by the growth of Scottish historical sociology and a growing
debate over the role of boroughs in the historical structure of English parliamen-
tary government.
Before the growth of commerce, society could at most be feudal, and in an
England of lords and serfs — vassals, copyholders, and villeins — Parliament in
its modern sense could have no place. To understand the history of that institu-
tion, it was necessary to understand the history of the House of Commons, and
since this assembly brought together the representatives of shires and boroughs,
it was necessary to decide whether its history was to be written in terms of the
increasing role of country gentry or of urban burgesses. The Scottish historians,
Robertson among them, were advancing the generalization that "the progress of
society in Europe" was due to the increasing commercial activity of the trading
inhabitants of corporate towns 112 — the bourgeoisie in the institutional sense of the
term, for which, significantly, no equivalent exists in English. 113 Tucker has no
objection to this proposition in general, but as part of the patriot radicalism he
had devoted himself to confuting, he was confronted by a demand for parliamen-
tary reform which reiterated the allegation that the representation of boroughs
was ancient and immemorial and could be traced to a time when they were
independent and free before falling under royal and aristocratic influence. Tucker
saw this argument not as expressing the claims of a rising class of burgesses, but
as serving the interests of a miscellaneous political class of patriots, dissenters,
and demagogues populating the great wen of London, Westminster, and South-
wark, 114 whose influence had increased, was increasing, and ought to be dimin-
109
See n. 6, this chapter; also Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, pp. 233-49, 482-3. A good text
is Lord Hervey's Ancient and Modern Liberty Stated and Compared (London, 1734).
110
J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957).
m
Kenyon, Revolution Principles, pp. 200-8.
112
Robertson, Works, vol. Ill, pp. 9-316, "The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V,
with a View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the
Beginning of the Sixteenth Century."
113
Bourg; bourgeois; bourgeois (adj.); bourgeoisie. Burg, Burger; burgerlich; Burgertum. Borough; burgess;
no adjective; no collective or abstract noun. This exercise in historical semantics suggests further
reflections.
n4
Treatise, pp. 258-60, 274, 291-2.
182 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

ished. Their rhetoric could at every point be confuted by advancing the thesis
that commerce was the natural human state and that society progressed naturally
from relations of personal service, dependence, and servitude to relations of in-
dependent association, voluntary deference, and monetarized exchange; but it
was a central feature of this argument that trading towns had come late on the
scene of history and could claim neither ancient nor natural right. As generally
happened in the eighteenth century, the commercial interpretation of history was
an argument in defense of the established Whig order, and to argue whether
Tucker or his opponent (who in this case might be Cartwright) is the "bourgeois
ideologist" is merely to play games with a double-headed penny.
Tucker accordingly depicts a process (based largely on the works of Brady and
Madox in earlier generations)115 in which the medieval boroughs, grudgingly
founded by feudal lords in minimal recognition of the need for some division of
labor, grew in importance during the period of "epidemical Madness" that seized
on the unemployed warriors of Europe during the Crusades and were summoned
to send representatives to the king's councils. 116 But far from eagerly pressing
the demand for annual parliaments beloved of eighteenth-century radicals, they
attended with the utmost reluctance and departed as soon as they could. For this
Tucker assigns an interesting reason, in which the political behavior of barons
and burgesses appears the reverse of what is sometimes portrayed.
The Fact was, to speak the Truth at once, the landed Interest, as it was then erroneously
understood, was supposed to be directly opposite to the trading Interest of the Kingdom.
For the personal and immediate Interest of the Barons, great and small, was to preserve
their own Importance in the State, and their Authority and Jurisdiction over their Vassals
and Dependents, in Contradistinction to the regal Power. Whereas Shopkeepers, Traders,
and Mechanics, could have no such Views. Therefore the former were always desirous of
having frequent Meetings of Parliaments, in order to consult and associate together against
the Crown, whom they regarded as their common Enemy: [Magna Charta itself was owing
to this very Principle.} Whereas the latter, the Corporate-Towns and Boroughs, which
had Reason to esteem the Crown more their Protector than their Oppressor, had no such
Motives, either offensive or defensive, for associating together. In one Word, the Crown,
and the Law-Courts of the Crown, were then the only Security and Defence which trading
Corporations could have had against the Power and Insults of the feudal Baronage.117

In this English version of the these royale, the trading classes are seen as tending
to unpolitical passivity; Tucker had elsewhere observed that the proper conduct
for a commercial nation was "to study to be quiet, and to mind our own busi-
115
Robert Brady, An Historical Treatise of Cities and Burghs or Borroughs (London, 1690); Thomas
Madox, Firma Burgi, or An Historical Essay Concerning the Cities, Towns and Boroughs of England
(London, 1726). Tucker also cites Samuel Squire, Enquiry into the Foundations of the English Consti-
tution (London, 1753); see Reed Browning, "Samuel Squire: Pamphleteering Churchman," Eigh-
teenth-Century Life 5, 1 (1978), pp. 12-20; and Daines Barrington, Observations on the More Ancient
Statutes (London, 1769).
116 117
Treatise, pp. 262-5, 292-6, 309-16. Treatise, pp. 318-19.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 183
118
ness." An excess of political activity was the characteristic of the lazy, the
ambitious and unemployed — of patrons and their clients, barons and their re-
tainers. Tucker certainly did not consider the patriots of his own time a feudal
class — there was none known to him nearer than Poland — but he did consider
them a set of unproductive nuisances whose ideology was a great deal more feudal
than they recognized; and the London mobs who followed them in politics seemed
not unlike the faeces Romuli or the gangs of medieval retainers.
Unfortunately, he did not carry his account of English history past the unedi-
fying picture of medieval politics necessary for the destruction of the Gothic
myth, so that we do not know by what stages he thought England had achieved
a form of government possible for a commercial society. We may imagine a
somewhat Humean account of the process, with Tudor legislation against retain-
ers at one end 119 and Tucker's insistence that the principles of taxation were not
understood until the reign of George I 120 at the other. It is highly unlikely that
the independent activities of the borough corporations would have played much
part in it, since we know from the previously quoted passage that civil govern-
ment itself — "the Crown, and the Law-Courts of the Crown" — was to be a
crucial agency and that an important objective was the dispelling of the illusion
that landed interest and trading interest were in opposition. Tucker had written
one of his appeals for separation from America on commercial grounds in the
form of the Address to the Landed Interest,121 and it was one of his adversaries —
Samuel Estwick, an agent for Barbados — who had argued that American taxation
was a job of the landed interest, designed to reduce the land tax and the national
debt. 122 In the long-term historical picture, the function of the rise of commerce
was to civilize the landowning class and lead them in the paths of industry and
exchange, and this need not entail any increase in the political role of the cor-
porations; indeed, Tucker could have argued that it was perfectly compatible
with the dominance of the borough representation by members of the landed
gentry. There is certainly no sign that he found this phenomenon objectionable,
and we should recall that he found the merit of commercial society to be that it
promoted deference no less than industry. 123

118 Xl9 X2
Treatise, p. 52. Treatise, p. 3l4n. ° Treatise, pp. 67, 78.
121
This is the page heading used in printing the work cited here as An Humble Address and Earnest
Appeal. The full title was: An Humble Address and Earnest Appeal to those Respectable Personages in
Great-Britain and Ireland, who, by their Great and Permanent Interest in Landed Property, their Liberal
Education, Elevated Rank, and Enlarged Views, are the Ablest to Judge, and the Fittest to Decide, whether
a Connection with, or a Separation from the Continental Colonies of America, be most for the National
Advantage, and the Lasting Benefit of These Kingdoms. The tone seems to be defiant rather than
sycophantic; the implication is that the landed aristocracy and gentry are the fittest to judge of the
nation's commercial interests. Cf. Treatise, p. 212.
122
S a m u e l E s t w i c k , A Letter to the Reverend Josiah Tucker . . . ( L o n d o n , 1 7 7 6 ) .
123
There is no shortage of evidence that Tucker's admiration for commerce did not make him (any
more than Adam Smith) an admirer of tradesmen. Treatise, pp. 78, 212 and note, 232, 323-5,
327; Cui Bono? pp. 5 0 - 1 , 53-4.
184 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

When Tucker meditated a reform of parliamentary representation, which was

much under discussion in 1781, 1 2 4 he proposed a qualification of resident land-
ownership for both county and borough members, 125 aimed at discouraging both
the familiar demons of country ideology — "neither the Plunderers of the East, nor
the Slave-Drivers of the West, nor the Privateering, trading Buccaneers of the
American Continent, nor our English Newmarket Jockeys, nor Change-Alley Bulls
and Bears" 126 - and the domination of Parliament by residents of London, West-
minster, and Southwark, that fertile nursery of patriots. 127 For voters he proposed
a qualification of forty shillings freehold in the counties, or payment of scot and
lot in the boroughs. 128 "Any common Day-Labourer, or common Mechanic"
might attain the franchise by industry before his old age. On the other hand,
It is indeed a melancholy Reflection, that in most Cities, and Borough-Towns, and per-
haps in Counties, the far greater Number of Voters are such, whose Circumstances lead
them to wish for a new Division of Property, because they have little, or nothing to lose,
but may have much to get in Times of Confusion, and by a general Scramble. Therefore,
every Rule of sound Policy, not to say Religion and Morality, suggests the Necessity of
raising the Qualification of voting to such a Mediocrity of Condition, as would make it
the Interest of the Majority of Electors, to assist in the Support and Preservation of Order
and good Government, and not to wish their Overthrow.129

Tucker is not haunted by the specter of communism so much as by those of

Gaius Gracchus, Catiline, and Julius Caesar. Nevertheless, it is hard not to hear
the hoofbeats of the Manchester yeomanry when reading his proposals. Either the
hopes of economic self-betterment must be such as to make the injunction enrichissez-
vous, et vous deviendrez des electeurs convincing in the ears of every common day
laborer or mechanic, or the scot-and-lot franchise must be a means of uniting
greater and lesser proprietors in a class domination of those with little or nothing
to lose. However, we should read the following in conjunction with the passage
just quoted:
Though it would be highly absurd, to admit indiscriminately every individual Moral-
Agent to be a Voter, yet true Policy requires that the Voters should be so numerous, and
their Qualifications respecting Property be so Circumstanced, that the actual Voters could
not combine against the Non-Voters, without combining against themselves, against their
nearest Friends, Acquaintances and Relatives.130
The socializing and civilizing effects of commerce provide the razor's edge that
civil government is to walk. Tucker is a progressive conservative, the defender of
124 125
John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640-1832 (Cambridge, 1972). Treatise, pp. 2 7 8 - 8 3 .
126 l21
Treatise, p. 286. Treatise, pp. 2 9 1 - 2 .
l28
Treatise, pp. 2 7 6 - 8 , 2 8 4 - 5 . Shelton (Dean Tucker, pp. 53ff.) shows that Tucker had argued for
the use of a restricted franchise to encourage self-advancement in the poor as early as his Essay on
Trade of 1749.
l29 l3
Treatise, pp. 2 9 0 - 1 . ° Treatise, p. 275.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 185

a commercial order perhaps not much older than himself, which has certainly not
finished evolving. 131 But because he sees no contradiction between nature and
history — and thinks that Locke and Rousseau were wrong to impose it — he
holds that the principles of economic progress are those of natural law. He sees
no contradiction — nor, given the structure of English society, is there much
reason why he should see it — between upholding the Whig commercial order
and maintaining the primacy of the landed interest, or between proposing to
reduce the electoral importance of London in favor of the agricultural shires132
and writing:

Our exclusive Corporations, and Companies of Trades in Towns and Cities, have at present
very little Power of doing Mischief, compared with what they formerly had. For Men's
Eyes begin to be opened every where: And the flourishing State of those great Manufac-
turing Places in England (the greatest perhaps in the known World, certainly the greatest
in Europe) where every Man enjoys PERFECT FREEDOM to follow that Course of Trade
to which his Genius or Circumstances are best suited; I say, thisflourishingState has made
the dullest of us feel, that Industry and Ingenuity are best excited by constant Emulation,
and that no Man ought to be armed with the Power of a Law, or with an exclusive
Privilege, to crush his Rival.133

The age of the boroughs was drawing to a close, and one of the irritating things
about the word "bourgeoisie" is that we are expected to use it precisely of the
time when its semantic justification was beginning to collapse (if, in English, it
ever had any). Its employment will not help us to understand why this shrewd
and historically sophisticated mind saw no reason why the spread of manufactur-
ing and wage relationships outside the older structures should present any threat
to the principle of natural authority that it was his purpose to inculcate. He
closed the Treatise Concerning Civil Government with the injunction the Revolution
regime had maintained since 1688: that it was the duty of a people to obey
constituted authority until, as a matter of utmost necessity, it became no longer
possible to do so. 134 But the false principle, that there existed a body of rights
that defined the legitimacy of any authority whatever, stemmed to his mind from
premodern sources. The Americans and Dissenters were the heirs of the Puritans;
Locke and the patriots were the heirs of the barons; and the Londoners inhabited
no manufacturing city, but a great wen like ancient Rome. Commerce and man-
ufacture upheld constituted authority, and it was natural that they should do so.

131
In debate with Hume, Tucker had argued for a future of indefinite progress, which he thought
Hume had denied. Four Tracts and Two Sermons, pp. 23, 4 1 .
li2 lii
Treatise, pp. 2 9 7 - 8 . Cui Bono? pp. 5 3 - 4 .
lH
Treatise, pp. 3 - 4 , 4 1 0 - 2 8 . Kenyon, Revolution Principles, pp. 2 1 - 3 4 . Reference may be made to
what Burke has to say about 1688 in both the Reflections and An Appeal from the New to the Old
Whigs.
186 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

VI
Old Dean Tucker was a fine old man; we study him both for the sake of his
invigoratingly cantankerous intellect and for the light it is capable of throwing
on the defense of the established order in late eighteenth-century Britain. Since
when we think of conservatism we have to think of Burke, it is his intellectual
as well as personal attitude toward the latter that renders Tucker an intriguing
figure. Ten to fifteen years before Price addressed the Revolution Society, the
dean of Gloucester had perceived that the Dissenting emphasis on natural rights
was capable of challenging the legitimacy of all existing governments and the
theoretical possibility of government itself. Perhaps he did not know that by
1781 or soon after, Burke was coming to see such arguments as "a preposterous
way of reasoning and a perfect confusion of ideas"135 in a prescriptive (or in
Tucker's terms a quasi-contractual) system of government, or that he was begin-
ning to regard Shelburne and his stable of intellectuals at Bowood with a mistrust
as vehement as Tucker's own. It might have made very little difference if Tucker
had known this; there was that about Burke he would never have liked, and in
any case he ceased writing after 1785. Though Tucker lived until 1799, his
energies seem to have failed him,136 and we know nothing of his octogenarian
responses to the French Revolution or to Burke's writings on that event; this
limits our capacity to set the two conservatives in a common frame of comparison.
Born in the same year as Hume, Tucker is like him a conservative of the 1760s
and 1770s, when patriots, republicans, Dissenters, and Americans seemed the
enemies against whom the Whig order had to be defended. Richard Price, his
doctrine of natural right, and his interpretation of the Revolution of 1688, had
to be counterattacked in the course of this campaign, and there is a sense in
which the sermon to the Revolution Society represents the response (almost the
survival) of an older "Commonwealth" radicalism in the new world the French
were creating. What Tucker had to say about Price in 1781 differed little from
what Burke said of him in 1790, but the accidents of political alignment in 1776
and after enabled Tucker to stigmatize Burke as almost Price's ally. No doubt
this was unfair, and one wonders whether Burke, whose allusions to Tucker are
few, remembered it in 1790. Of far greater interest, however, is Tucker's deci-
sion to mount a full-scale assault on Locke. If he was right in perceiving that
Locke had been a radical actor in 1683—8 and could be used in authorizing a
radical interpretation of the meaning of 1688, we must ask why Burke, elaborat-
ing in both the Reflections on the Revolution in France and the Appeal from the New to

135
Works, vol. X , p . 99.
136
For the last phase of his life, see Shelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 2 5 5 - 7 . He seems to have left no
disciples, though a case might be made with regard to William Mitford, the historian of Greece;
see Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn., 1981), pp. 194—
204.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 187

the Old Whigs (an almost Tory account of the English Revolution), made no al-
lusion to Locke one way or the other. Had Tucker's Treatise rendered Locke con-
troversial? Was he a figure too sacred or too little conspicuous in the Whig canon
to be brought back into debate? Our understanding of his reputation as a political
writer in eighteenth-century England is still too confused to let us say for certain.
Macaulay in the next century has likewise nothing to say about Locke's Treatises
of Government in the course of his generally Burkean interpretation of 1688, but
is insistent on clearing him of complicity in Monmouth's rebellion137 (Tucker
insists on his guilt). 138 We may regard Macaulay as carrying on the Holland
House enterprise of reconciling the shades of Fox and Burke and reharmonizing
the shattered chords of Whig ideology; perhaps this necessitated a myth of Locke's
political respectability. 139 But to observe silence regarding the Treatises is not to
present them as a classic of moderate constitutionalism, and the stages by which
they acquired this reputation are still not well understood. Tucker saw them as
they have begun to reappear in the light of recent research, that is, as an essen-
tially radical manifesto that appeared when their author and his cause were ceas-
ing to be as radical as they had been. 140 There was not yet much contemporary
debate about their meaning, and Burke took no part in it.
Tucker's Whiggism is of a different stripe from Burke's, and this must be
taken into account when we compare them as conservatives. When Tucker char-
acterized himself as "a constitutional but not a republican Whig," he declared
himself as belonging to the generation of Hume, for whom the Whig order
required defense against patriots and Commonwealthmen, Tories and Jacobites,
all employing much the same ideology. He therefore situated himself in the
tradition of Brady, among those for whom the principles of constitutional liberty
were modern rather than ancient and for whom there could be no return either
to the customs and prescriptions of an ancient constitution or to the principles
into which these could (Burke said "preposterously") be resolved. Hume in his
History of England did the same, 141 but he also took a leading part in formulating
the Scottish perception of history as the progressive elaboration, through the
multiplication of commercial relations between human beings, of that growing
envelope of civilized and deferential manners that rendered ancient virtue no
longer necessary. Tucker, who believed himself to have surpassed Hume in show-
ing that commercial progress knew no theoretical limits on its future, 142 joined

137
Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James II, ed. C. H. Firth (London, 1913), vol. II,
chap. V, pp. 5 3 8 - 9 n .
ns
Four Letters to Shelburne, pp. 9 4 - 6 .
139
For this see Ashcraft's articles cited in n. 10, this chapter.
140
See John Dunn, "The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century," in
John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, ed. John W . Yolton (Cambridge, 1969).
141
Victor L. Wexler, David Hume and the History of England (Philadelphia, 1979).
142
See Istvan Hont, "The Rich-Country—Poor-Country Debate in Scottish Classical Political Econ-
omy," in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Hont and Ignatieff.
188 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

with the Scots in making this the means of rejecting the politics of nostalgia for
republican antiquity; it is his peculiar originality to have seen that though Locke
had been indifferent to the republican vision of history, his state of nature and
theory of the origin of right to property could be made liable to criticisms iden-
tical with those brought against it. To this he added an even shrewder insight
into the religious origins of Lockean thought and the leanings toward both re-
publican and natural-rights theory displayed by the radical Dissenters and Amer-
icans of his time. Burke came in the path of Tucker's broadsides. Though we can
say with confidence that he shared none of the views Tucker was concerned to
attack, we cannot point to much that he had done by 1781 to associate himself
with the polemic against them conducted by the "scientific Whigs," of whom
Tucker was one.
It is arguable that he never did. The lucidity of Tucker's commercialism, and
perhaps even his proposals for restricting the franchise so as to giwe the poor a
motive for accepting a tighter work discipline, attracted the ironic approval of
Karl Marx, who described him as "a Tory and a parson, but for the rest an
honourable man," whereas he could see nothing in Burke except venality and
hypocrisy.143 Marx was wrong about Burke, who meant what he said, and the
word "Tory" can be used of neither Burke nor Tucker until we understand how
the Whig tradition fell apart and was reconstituted in the years of counterrevo-
lution. But we cannot understand this either until we understand the far-reaching
change in the Scottish perceptions of history that Burke helped to bring about at
a time when Tucker had ceased to write. To Hume, Smith, Millar, or Tucker,
commerce was the motor force behind the growth of manners and the progress of
society. As it created increasingly complex social relations, the passions were
refined, the sympathies developed, and human beings became increasingly capa-
ble of supporting the edifice of culture and the necessity of government. Com-
merce was the precondition of "the progress of the arts" and the elaboration of
manners, in which the natural relations and subordinations of society were pro-
gressively discovered and actualized. But when Burke beheld the proceedings of
the French revolutionaries, he very early saw in them a program for the systematic
destruction of manners and the substitution of an altogether new and antinatural
code of social behavior.144 This had begun with an assault on the church, the
nobility, and the royal family, but Burke was so far steeped in the belief that a
modern commercial society was the ultimate efflorescence of manners that he
accepted the corollary that the destruction of manners could not be accomplished
without the destruction of commerce itself. He therefore took up certain hints
dropped by Robertson and other historians, who had depicted the growth of
chivalry and canon law as early movements toward refined manners and a better

143 144
See Shelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 264-5. For a fuller treatment, see chap. 10, this volume.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 189

circulation of goods, and used them in order to argue that church and nobility
were necessary to the growth of manners and that manners formed a precondition
of the growth of commerce itself. Burke was explicit in his revision of the Scottish
sequence of history.
Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilisation, and all the good things
which are connected with manners and with civilisation, have in this European world of
ours depended for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the result of both combined;
I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy,
the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the
midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than
formed . . .
If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to own to antient
manners, so do other interests which we value full as much as they are worth. Even
commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our oeconomical politicians, are them-
selves perhaps but creatures; are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we choose
to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished. They
too may decay with their natural protecting principles.145
It is tempting to imagine an aged clergyman in Gloucester reading this pas-
sage, as he may well have done. "The gods of our oeconomical politicians," though
intended probably to refer to the Scottish theorists as a group, might well strike
him as meant for those who "made religion a trade and trade a religion." But
what would Tucker make of the proposition that manners, learning, and above
all commerce could survive only under the protection of the clergy and aristoc-
racy? A Whig clergyman in the marrow of his bones — not least so in his refusal
to pursue patronage too far - he had begun his career in controversy with the
fathers of Methodism 146 and knew high fliers and High Churchmen when he saw
them. What would he make of the proposition that the church was independent
of commerce, and therefore of government, and was indeed their historical pre-
condition along with an equally independent aristocracy? Here, he might have
said with a flash of his old disgust, was the patriot up to his usual games, playing
a baronial and papist card when the republican would not turn the trick. The
University of Oxford declined to offer an honorary degree to Burke at the height
of his counterrevolutionary fame because they were not sure of his churchman-
ship, 147 and his desire to relieve Irish Catholics was not unconnected with his
desire for an ultimately civil religion. 148 Yet Burke could assign a historical role
to the church; had Tucker done so?
145 l46
Burke, Works, vol. V, pp. 1 5 4 - 5 . Shelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 17-36.
147
Thomas W . Copeland, ed., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols. (Cambridge and Chicago,
1967); Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith, eds., vol. VI, pp. 1 9 3 - 5 .
148
So at least I read the relevant passages in the Reflections (Works, vol. V, pp. 1 7 3 - 8 , 187-98), and
see his avowal that his attachment to Christianity arose "much from conviction, more from affec-
tion" {Correspondence, vol. VI, p. 215). Cf. Frederick Dreyer, "Burke's Religion," Studies in Burke
and His Time XVII, 3 (1976), pp. 199-212.
190 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

Tucker's misgivings may be imagined to increase as he read on and found in

the Reflections an outburst — not the only one in Burke — against the brutality of
Henry VIII's proceedings in the dissolution of the monasteries. 149 Very deep in
the Anglican tradition lay the roots of the belief that the monastic lands should
have been preserved and used to endow learning under clerical control; yet we
can say with certainty that Tucker would have preferred even Warburton to Laud,
although, to borrow a phrase of his own, "that is saying a great deal." 150 No
Whig could support the idea of a church as independent as that, and Tucker saw
the prosperity of learning as bound up with the progress of commerce and the
arts; yet here was Burke saying that these forces could not maintain learning, or
even themselves, unless protected by a wealth of land held in entail and mort-
main. We might cite text after text showing Burke as aware as Tucker that the
mainsprings of society were now in commerce, 151 and yet, by reversing the his-
torical order in which Tucker's generation had ranked commerce and manners,
Burke (whatever he thought he was doing) had opened the way to Coleridge's
Idea of a Constitution in Church and State, to Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and in
our own time to Raymond Williams's Culture and Society. To the Enlightenment
theorists commerce had appeared to be the force that refined the manners and
extended the sympathies; now it could be argued that it was philistine and util-
itarian, made use of a cold mechanical philosophy derived from Bacon and Locke,
and did not protect culture and manners at all. Not even a leisured aristocracy
was equal to the task, unless reinforced by Coleridge's "national church" and
"clerisy," founded upon a "nationalty" of land reserved to maintain learning,
which in an ideal history every nation would have established from its begin-
nings. Ergo tua rura manebunt.152
Could Tucker have lived to hear of notions of this kind - they were hardly
formulated when he died in 1799 - he would have smitten the "nationalty" for
the historical poppycock it was; and he might have noticed that Coleridge's "cler-
isy" is by no means the same thing as a Christian ministry. Even Burke (to
continue the fantasy) may be imagined joining him here. He saw the French
Revolution as a conspiracy of gens de lettres and monied speculators to get their
hands on the lands of the church; to find the former setting themselves up as a
new sort of landed clergy might not have seemed incompatible with this inter-
pretation, or with Coleridge's Jacobin youth. But in this diagnosis, and later
149
Works, vol. V, pp. 215-18; and A Letter to a Noble Lord, Works, vol. VIII, pp. 38-45.
150
The Spartans treated the Helots "much worse, and with more wanton Cruelty, than the Planters
do the Negroes in the West-Indies; - And that is saying a great deal"; Treatise, p. 219.
151
SeeC. B. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford, 1981).
152
These words from Virgil's Georgics form the motto of both the University and the Province of
Canterbury, at whose foundation in 1850 a grant of lands was set aside for the maintenance of
higher education.
 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 191
when he defined Jacobinism as the rebellion of "talent" against "property,"153
Burke raised a question unknown to Tucker and the generation of the Scottish
Enlightenment. They had seen the cultivated intellect emerging as society was
refined by the increasing complexity of property relations; but if, as Burke now
desperately proclaimed, the intellect was turning to the destruction of property
and social relations themselves, where was the property structure by which intel-
lect might be disciplined? Burke was not the leader of a "revolt against the
eighteenth century,"154 but he announced that one had broken out and asked
whether enlightened philosophy of history was capable of explaining or remedy-
ing it. From now on, there might be stern unbending Tories proclaiming the
alliance of church and state as the only answer, and there might be Tory radicals
castigating the existing church and state as quite incapable of providing it. Both
brands of "Tory" were in fact Whigs, heirs of the latitudinarians and the neo-
Harringtonians, respectively, but the Whiggism of Josiah Tucker had relatively
little to say to the problem of culture and anarchy. Burke had discerned the
advent of the politics of romanticism and alienated sensibility, which has preoc-
cupied conservatives ever since; it is in Marxism, paradoxically enough, that we
find continued the conservative assurance that intellect can again be disciplined
by the processes of production. But Burke would have known what to say about
the Great Cultural Revolution and the evacuation of Phnom Penh.
™ Works, vol. VIII, p. 70.
154
Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1929; revised,
1960).
 10

The political economy of Burke's

analysis of the French Revolution

There are, perhaps, in the end only two ways in which a historian may undertake
the study of a document in the history of political thought. One may consider it
as a text, supposed to have been intended by its author and understood by its
reader with the maximum coherence and unity possible; the historian's aim now
becomes the reconstitution of the fullest possible interpretation available to in-
telligent readers at the relevant time. Alternatively, one may consider it as a
tissue of statements, organized by its writer into a single document, but accessi-
ble and intelligible whether or not they have been harmonized into a single
structure of meaning. The historian's aim is now the recovery of these statements,
the establishment of the patterns of speech and thought forming the various
contexts in which they become intelligible, and the pursuit of any changes in the
normal employment of these patterns which may have occurred in consequence
of the statements being made.
Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. It is the second
which will be attempted, in this essay,1 to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in
France and subsequently to his Letters on a Regicide Peace. In I960 the present
writer published in The HistoricalJournal an essay entitled 'Burke and the Ancient
Constitution: a problem in the history of ideas', 2 in which it was argued that
important passages in the Reflections, together with passages from other speeches
and writings by Burke, should be understood in the context of a tradition of
common-law thought established in the age of Sir Edward Coke, and that they

From The Historical Journal, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 331-49. © 1982 Cambridge University Press;
reprinted by permission of the editors.
Earlier versions have been presented to seminars at Johns Hopkins, Cornell and Cambridge, and to
the Midwest American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I am indebted to all these audiences
for their comments and suggestions.
2
The Historical Journal, in, 2, 125-43; reprinted in Politics, language and time (New York, 1971).

193
194 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

contained explicit and conscious allusions to this tradition and to their own place
in it. The present essay will argue that comparably important passages in the
Reflections and the Letters can similarly be situated in a quite distinct tradition of
thought, which will be termed 'political economy'; but it will not be much
concerned to inquire into the relations between the two traditions, or the possible
consistencies and inconsistencies in Burke's text or thought occasioned by the fact
that they are both present there. It seems more important to establish that Burke
can be read in both of these contexts than to inquire whether he can be read in
both of them simultaneously; the premises from which he argued and the mes-
sages which he may have transmitted can be given a thick description if we apply
the first only of the procedures distinguished in this sentence. There is more to
the method of interpretation followed both now and in I960, however, than the
singling out of one thread and then another in the texture of Burke's writings. A
better analogy is the selection of one and then another facet from, and through,
which a multi-surfaced and translucent artefact may be viewed. Burke's response
to revolution looks different when considered as that of a common-law constitu-
tionalist, and as that of an exponent of political economy; the prime need is to
establish that it can be looked at in both ways.
The term 'political economy', as is well known,3 can be used with reference to
the late eighteenth century in varying degrees of specificity. We may use it, as it
was then used, to denote either the emerging science of'the wealth of nations' or
the policy of administering the public revenue. Burke admired the work of Adam
Smith, and the Reflections and the Letters contain lengthy passages devoted to
analysing the state of the revenue both in revolutionary France (1790) and in
belligerent Britain (1796). But it is and was also possible to use the term to
denote a more complex, and more ideological, enterprise aimed at establishing
the moral, political, cultural, and economic conditions of life in advancing com-
mercial societies: a commercial humanism, it might not unjustly be called, which
met the challenge posed by civic humanism or classical republicanism to the
quality of life in such societies.4 It will be argued that Burke was a defender of
Whig aristocratic government; that Whig government was identified with the
growth of commercial society; that Burke saw the Revolution as a challenge to
the Whig order, arising within the conditions that order made possible; and that
he employed the language and categories of political economy in order to analyse
3
Here I am particularly indebted to members of the King's College Research Centre's project on the
history of political economy, and to the conference which they held in May 1979- See Istvan Hont
and Michael Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and virtue (Cambridge, 1983).
4
Cf. Albert Hirschman, The passions and the interests, arguments for capitalism before its triumph (Prince-
ton, 1975); Duncan Forbes, Hume's philosophical politics (Cambridge, 1975); Donald Winch, Adam
Smith's politics, an essay in historiographic revision (Cambridge, 1978); Drew R. McCoy, The elusive
republic: political economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill and Williamsburg, 1980) and other
works.
 Burke's analysis of the French Revolution 195
the revolutionary threat and respond to it. He did not do so, however, without
using language which revealed tensions within Whig society and its ideology and
furthered changes in the ways in which that language was normally used.
Political economy in eighteenth-century Britain was at one and the same time
a nascent social science of a remarkably new order, part of an enduring though
increasingly historicized science of natural morality, and an ideological defence
of the Whig ruling order which took shape during the first quarter of the century.
Burke's political and emotional loyalties were very strongly focused upon that
order, and it was in its capacity as an ideological defence and moral vindication
that he most keenly appreciated the new science of political economy and natural
sociability. Far from being one in which the aristocratic and bourgeois principles
were deeply at variance,5 the Whig regime was founded on an assumed identity
of interests between a managerial landed aristocracy and a system of public credit,
in which rentier investment in government stock stimulated commercial pros-
perity, political stability, and national and imperial power. The defence of a
commercial order in politics, society and morality, wherever it occurs down to
Burke's time and after, is invariably a defence of the Whig regime and generally
of natural aristocracy; and attacks upon the Whig regime are nearly as often
conducted in the name of real or landed property against mobile or personal. The
focus of these attacks, however, is not upon trade or the investment of capital in
commerce, but upon its investment in government, patronage, and warlike ex-
pansion; from this, it was argued, arose the corruption which destroyed the com-
mercial empires of Athens and Rome.
Because these attacks were based on an ideal of the ancient citizen, whose
independence in arms and land assured his political virtue, it was necessary for
the defenders of the Whig commercial order to find an alternative ideal.6 They
did so by characterizing the ancient citizen as an economically underdeveloped
being. Because he lacked the ready credit and cash to pay wage-labourers, he was
obliged to exploit the unremunerative labour of slaves and serfs. Because he was
not involved in the multifarious social relationships which only an advancing
system of commerce could bring, he could employ his leisure only in active
statecraft and war, or in contemplative metaphysics or superstition. His per-
sonality lacked the multifaceted refinements and polishings which arose from
encounters with other human beings in a multiplicity of exchange relationships
and consumer activities; commerce, it was argued, was the sole agency capable
5
See Isaac F. Kramnick, The rage of Edmund Burke: the conscience of an ambivalent conservative (New
York, 1979).
6
For other presentations of this argument see my The Machiavellian moment (Princeton, 1975) chs.
13 and 14; 'Between Machiavelli and Hume; Gibbon as civic humanist and philosophical historian',
in G. W. Bowersock and John Clive (eds.), Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); 'The Machiavellian moment revisited: a study in history and ide-
ology' , Journal of Modern History, LIII, 1 (1981), 4 9 - 7 2 .
196 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

of refining the passions and polishing the manners. The central place — it is not
too much to say — in Whig ideology between the English and French Revolutions
was occupied by the concept variously expressed as manners, politeness or taste;
this offered not only defence against criticism in the name of patriot virtue, but
defence against that partially buried Titan haunting the imagination of the age,
the explosive power of enthusiasm. The leading British and European exponents
of the ideology of manners were the moral philosophers, conjectural historians
and political economists of Scotland.7 When Burke visited Glasgow as Lord Rec-
tor of its University in 1785 and dined with John Millar, and with Adam Smith
in Edinburgh, 8 he was among celebrants of a historical view of the progress of
society, in which the diversification of labour conducted the human race through
four stages of production towards the refinement and enrichment of its manners.
The feature of the Whig regime which its ideologists found hardest to defend
was the multiplication of the national debt. Queen Anne Tories, of the school of
Swift and Bolingbroke, had thundered against Whig rule as that of a monied
interest, made up of men who owned no property or rather had substituted prop-
erty of an altogether new kind: the paper tokens of a fluctuating public confi-
dence, in which the determinants of the rate at which money could be had, and
the value of all property created, had themselves become a species of commodity.
Richard Price, whose sermon to the Revolution Society spurred Burke to write
the Reflections, had argued that the attempt to tax America was a product of the
indebtedness and accompanying corruption which the elder Pitt's wars had brought
upon England; and far-left Unitarian as he was, Price had been able to quote
copiously from Hume, that most sceptical and therefore most resourceful of Whigs,
as holding an almost indistinguishable position. 9 Neither David Hume, Adam
Smith, nor as we shall see Edmund Burke, 10 was free of the nightmare that
multiplying paper credit might end by destroying the value and even the mean-
ing of property, the foundation alike of virtue, manners and the natural relations
of society.
7
N . T. Phillipson, 'Towards a definition of the Scottish Enlightenment', in P. Fritz and D. Wil-
liams (eds.), City and society in the eighteenth century (Toronto, 1973); 'Culture and society in the
eighteenth-century province; the case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment,' in Lawrence
Stone (ed.), The university in society (Princeton, 1974); 'Hume as moralist; a social historian's per-
spective', in S. C. Brown (ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Hassocks, 1979); 'Manners, morals,
civic virtue and the science of man', presented to the Fifth International Congress on the Enlight-
enment (Pisa, 1979); 'Adam Smith as civic moralist', in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and virtue. Also
George Davie, The Scottish Enlightenment (Historical Association Pamphlets, General Series 99, 1981).
8
The best account of this incident is in The diary of the Rt. Hon William Windham (London, 1866),
pp. 6 0 - 1 , 63—4. I am indebted to Mr. E. E. Steiner (Yale Law School) for this reference.
9
Richard Price, Two tracts on civil liberty, the war with America, and the debts and finances of the kingdom
(London, 1778), 'Additional Observations', pp. xiii-xiv, 25, 38-39, 47, 5 1 - 2 , 153n.
10
An exception must be entered to Macaulay's observation (History of England, ch. xix) that only
Burke was 'free of the general delusion' that the debt would destroy society. He did not fear it in
England, but did in France.
 Burke's analysis of the French Revolution 197

The revolution of 1688 had been secured by the foundation of the Bank of
England and a system of public finance which encouraged investment in the
future of the new regime and stimulated the growth of its prosperity and power.
A century later, the French Revolution was perceived as having seized upon the
lands of the French Church and made them its security for the issue of a national
loan whose paper assignats were to be made legal tender everywhere. Now it is
not possible to read Burke's Reflections with both eyes open and doubt that it
presents this action — and not assaulting the bedchamber of Marie Antoinette —
as the central, the absolute and the unforgivable crime of the Revolutionaries.
The charge which appears as soon as Burke has completed his denunciation of the
Revolution Society and Price's sermon is that in France we see

everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bank-
ruptcy the consequence; and to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering
power, the discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud and beggared rapine, held
out as a currency for the support of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized species
that represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared and hid
themselves in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of property, whose
creatures and representatives they are, was systematically subverted.11

Even the nocturnal attack upon Marie Antoinette — long notorious as the
central firework display of Burke's rhetoric — if read carefully, will be seen as
fitting into this context. His account of this partly imaginary atrocity leads on,
as all readers know, to the even purpler prose of the lament for the decline of the
age of chivalry and the triumph of the 'sophisters, oeconomists and calculators',
which has driven so many commentators to Freudian and Marxist extremes in the
attempt to discover what Burke was going on about. But an acquaintance with
the Scottish historians would have solved the problem for them. Read on to the
end of the paragraph, and we shall find 'the unbought grace of life', the 'chastity
of honour which felt a stain like a wound', and all the rest of it, summarized in
what follows by these perfectly sober remarks:

This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the antient chivalry; and
the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, sub-
sisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live
in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which
has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which distinguished it under all its
forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and
possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique
world . . . Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it
obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority
11
The works of the Rt. Hon Edmund Burke (London, 1826; the Rivington edition), v. 88.

mas que princípio? Que princípio, único, varia, ao variarem as condições das relações entre os homens?
na sequência, Burke se refere a dois princípios: spirit of gentleman and spirit of religion
198 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

to submit to elegance, and gave a domination, vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by

manners.12

This passage is one which might have come from any of the great historians of
contemporary Scotland. In Robertson's View of the progress of society in Europe (1769), 13
or in Millar's Origin of ranks (1771), 14 Burke might have read — and he probably
had — that the peculiar nature of feudalism differentiated the history of Europe
from that of other societies, and that the rise of chivalry, with all its extrava-
gances, was a revolution in manners occurring within the feudal world, by which
barbarian warriors had begun to civilize themselves, to acquire more polished and
humane modes of conduct towards the weak, the female and one another, and to
promote the increased circulation of material goods and the skills entailed in
producing them. It had been a major step in the direction of a commercial and
polite society and the cultural characteristics that went with them. In the same
way, wrote Robertson, the canon law, while doubtless promoted by the clergy to
defend the riches brought to them by superstition, had promoted justice and
respect for property and, by converting the struggle for ownership into the inter-
pretation of a code by lettered men, had rendered manners more gentle and
society more rational.
And Burke continues:

Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilisation, and all the good things
which are connected with manners and with civilisation, have in this European world of
ours depended for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the result of both combined;
I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy,
the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the
midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than
formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood; and paid it
with usury, by enlarging their ideas and by furnishing their minds. Happy if they had all
continued to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy if learning,
not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired
to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast
into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.15

The last phrase of course was to do Burke no good with his artisan readers; but
observe that it is the revolutionary intelligentsia who are to play the role of Circe
to the swine, and let loose a herd which only a fully organic society has the
manners to educate. He goes on:

12
Works, v, 151.
13
The works of William Robertson (London, 1824), Hi, 28-33, 55-7 (chivalry and feudal law), 65-71
(canon law), 72-4 (chivalry). Note the association of both phenomena with commerce and towns.
14
Text in W. C. Lehmann,>£» Millar of Glasgow (Cambridge, I960), pp. 210, 212-18 (chivalry);
Millar, Historical view of the English constitution (London, 4th edn, 1818), I, 109-26; II, 135-7.
15
"Works, v, 154.
 Burke's analysis of the French Revolution 199

If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to own to antient
manners, so do other interests which we value full as much as they are worth. Even
commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our oeconomical politicians, are them-
selves perhaps but creatures; are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we choose
to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished. They
too may decay with their natural protecting principles. With you, for the present at least,
they all threaten to disappear together. Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a
people, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always
ill supplies their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to
try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a
thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordid
barbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pnuc, possessing nothing at present,
and hoping for nothing hereafter? 16

Burke is asserting that commerce is dependent upon manners, and not the
other way round; a civilized society is the prerequisite of exchange relations, and
the latter alone cannot create the former. The political economists (or 'oeconom-
ical politicians'), the historians of the Scottish school, 17 had as we have seen rec-
ognized clerical learning and feudal chivalry as preconditions of the growth of
commerce; but Hume, Robertson, Smith, Millar — we may add Gibbon — had all
isolated the growth of exchange, production and diversified labour as the motor
force which created the growth of manners, culture and enlightenment. Burke
characteristically regards this as preposterous, as mistaking the effect for the cause.
He insists that commerce can flourish only under the protection of manners, and
that manners require the pre-eminence of religion and nobility, the natural pro-
tectors of society. To overthrow religion and nobility, therefore, is to destroy the
possibility of commerce itself. The assault upon Marie Antoinette betokens the
destruction of chivalric manners, which is part of the destruction of the second
estate; and this in turn leads, as Burke explains in more detail, to the destruction
of the first, to the seizure of the lands of the church and their use to establish a
despotism of paper currency, itself fatal to property, commerce, trade and man-
ufacture. The ancien regime is a microcosm of the history of Europe: feudal con-
quest, clerical and political organization, commercial and cultural growth; all is
organized around a historical edifice of manners, and it is the structure of Euro-
pean civility which the Revolution is in process of destroying.
We have next to inquire by what agencies this destruction is being carried out,
and the possibility may arise that it is by something in the nature of a Marxist
bourgeoisie. But if men of commerce are doing all this, Burke is insistent that
l6
Works, v, 155.
17
So it seems proper to read the phrase; but 'the gods of our oeconomical politicians' may be a gibe
at Josiah Tucker, who had attacked Burke bitterly in 1776 and was said to 'make religion a trade
and trade a religion.' See George Shelton, Dean Tucker and eighteenth-century economic and political
thought (New York, 1981), pp. 164-5.
200 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

they are destroying the possibility of commerce itself; and since we know that
the vocabulary of eighteenth-century England distinguished sharply between
commerce and speculation in the public debt - stockjobbing was to trade, Bol-
ingbroke once wrote, as faction was to liberty18 - it seems arguable that Burke
is presenting religion, chivalry and commerce as trodden down together by the
hoofs of a paper-money despotism. Following the next section of the Reflections,
concerned largely with the English determination to maintain an established and
landed church, Burke proceeds:
By the vast debt of France, a great monied interest had insensibly grown up, and with it
a great power. By the ancient usages which prevailed in that kingdom, the general circu-
lation of property, and in particular the mutual convertibility of land into money, and of
money into land, had always been a matter of difficulty. Family settlements, rather more
general and more strict than they are in England, the jus retractus, the great mass of landed
property held by the crown, and by a maxim of the French law held unalienably, the vast
estates of the ecclesiastick corporations - all these had kept the landed and monied inter-
ests more separated in France, less miscible, and the owners of the two distinct species of
property not so well disposed to each other as they are in this country . . .
In the mean time, the pride of the wealthy men, not noble or newly noble, increased
with its cause . . . There was no measure to which they were not willing to lend them-
selves, in order to be revenged of the outrages of this rival pride, and to exalt their wealth
to what they considered as its natural rank and estimation. They struck at the nobility
through the crown and the church. They attacked them particularly on the side on which
they thought them most vulnerable, that is, the possessions of the church, which, through
the patronage of the crown, generally devolved upon the nobility.19

There is no indication here that the revolutionary men of wealth are a class
seeking to maximize the profits of capital invested in commerce and manufacture.
They are described, in language drawn straight from the vocabulary of Queen
Anne Toryism, as a 'monied interest . . . grown up . . . by the vast debt' which
the government had contracted in order to wage its wars. Burke is employing,
here as throughout his diagnosis of the French Revolution as a conspiracy to
create a paper-money despotism, a language first created to attack the foundations
of the Whig order he is concerned to defend. He has told us, of course, that this
order is more stable than the ancten regime because it encourages the investment
of money in land and the conversion of land into money; it is this fluidity of
capital, compared with the rigid barriers between estates, which makes the po-
litical edifice of English manners more harmonious than the French, and on this
point Burke is as '©economical' a 'politician' as any professor in Scotland. But his
'monied interest' is still situated between a landowning class on the one hand and
a debt-contracting government on the other, and it is this which differentiates it
18
Remarks on the history of England, letter xiv (2nd edn, London, 1747), p. 169.
19
Works, v, 204-6.
 Burke's analysis of the French Revolution 201

from a commercial or industrial bourgeoisie in the conventional sense of the

word. In France, Burke's revolutionary monied interest grasps at power in order
to carry out a vast expansion of public credit.
It does so by seizing on the lands of the church; and Burke must be aware that
this can hardly be the main strategy for revolutionaries in England. The expro-
priation of the church there had been an episode of the sixteenth century, and the
Puritan attempt to complete the process had fallen short of complete success.
Deeply as Burke came to fear the revolutionary potential of English Dissent, he
must have known that there were limits to what it could achieve by further
disestablishment in the economic field. The vindication of a landed clergy, how-
ever, was an act to be performed, and it is of great interest to find Burke denounc-
ing the 'tyranny' of Henry VIII's proceedings against the monasteries and quoting
at length on this subject from Sir John Denham's Cooper's Hill.20 The deepest
discord in the Anglican tradition was the nostalgia for lands which might have
been retained to endow a clergy and make them patrons of learning and the poor;
and if Burke used the language of Swiftian Toryism to denounce the monied
interest, here he used the language of the Laudians and stands on the brink of a
high-churchmanship he could never have adopted 21 — one, moreover, capable of
being put to radical use. No doubt Burke could have assured the Whig aristocrats
whom he delighted to serve that their ancestors' seizure of church lands was
justified by the merger of landed and monied interests which it had made possi-
ble, though this is rather far from what he told Bedford in A letter to a noble lord
when that magnate permitted himself a sneer at Burke's pension. 22 It was in the
logic of Burke's argument that from now on, landed aristocracy must either be
praised for guaranteeing commerce and culture or condemned for failing to do
so, and the voice of Denham was enough to make it clear that this would be no
easy matter. Forty years later, William Cobbett was to denounce the English
Reformation and all its fruits, precisely because it had facilitated the growth of
capitalist landownership and the monied interest. 23 The Whig Burke had placed
himself at a point from which Tory and Radical argument could take off.
Let us revert to Burke's account of France. His anatomy of the revolutionary
movement does not stop with the affronted men of wealth; he writes:

Along with the monied interest, a new description of men had grown up, with whom
that interest soon formed a close and marked union; I mean the political Men of Letters.

20
Works, v , 215—18. For Denham and his poem, see Brendan O Hehir, Harmony from discords: a life
of Sir John Denham (Berkeley, 1968) and Expans'd hieroglyphics: a study of Sir John Denham's "Cooper's
Hill" (Berkeley, 1969).
21
Frederick Dreyer, 'Burke's religion,' Studies in Burke and his time, XVII, 3 (1976), 1 9 9 - 2 1 2 .
22
Works, v i n , esp. p p . 3 8 - 4 5 , where Henry VIII's tyranny recurs.
23
William Cobbett, A history of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (two vols., London,
1824).
202 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation. Since
the decline of the life and greatness of Lewis the XlVth, they were not so much cultivated
either by him, or by the regent, or the successors to the crown; nor were they engaged to
the court by favours and emoluments so systematically as during the splendid period of
that ostentatious and not impolitic reign. What they lost in the old court protection, they
endeavoured to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation of their own; to which the
two academies of France, and afterwards the vast undertaking of the Encyclopaedia, carried
on by a society of these gentlemen, did not a little contribute.24

The circumstance that the gens de lettres were organized without being adequately
patronized had been commented on by d'Alembert and has interested modern
scholars.25 Burke, who earlier observes that the English deists 'never acted in
corps, or were known as a faction in the state', 26 explains that the philosophes
constitute an anti-religious faction, and indeed an interest, distinct from the
monied interest but intrinsically allied with it. Being organized for the destruc-
tion of the Christian religion, they supply an ideological justification for the
speculators in the public credit, who seize on the church lands in order to increase
the sphere of their operations. And there is reason to suppose that Burke sees this
alliance between the two interests as more than an accidental convergence. Else-
where in the Reflections occurs the following:

Nations are wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt. Public debts,
which at first were a security to governments, by interesting many in the public tranquil-
lity, are likely in their excess to become the means of their subversion. If governments
provide for these debts by heavy impositions, they perish by becoming odious to the
people. If they do not provide for them, they will be undone by the efforts of the most
dangerous of all parties; I mean an extensive discontented monied interest, injured and
not destroyed. The men who compose this interest look for their security, in the first
instance, to the fidelity of government; in the second, to its power. If they find the old
governments effete, worn out, and with their springs relaxed, so as not to be of sufficient
vigour for their purposes, they may seek new ones that shall be possessed of more energy;
and this energy will be derived, not from an acquisition of resources, but from a contempt
of justice. Revolutions are favourable to confiscation; and it is impossible to know under
what obnoxious names the next confiscations will be authorised . . . Many parts of Europe
are in open disorder. In many others there is a hollow murmuring under ground; a con-
fused movement is felt, that threatens a general earthquake in the political world. Already
confederacies and correspondences of the most extraordinary nature are forming, in several

24
Works, v , 2 0 7 .
25
D ' A l e m b e r t , Essai sur la Societe des Gens de Lettres ( 1 7 5 4 , 1771); Orest R a n u m , Artisans of glory:
Writers and historical thought in seventeenth-century France (Chapel H i l l , 1980). Burke's analysis begins
here t o anticipate t h e views of A u g u s t i n C o c h i n , Les societes de pensee et la democratic (Paris, 1921),
interest in which has recently been revived (n. 5 0 , below).
26 21
Works, v , 1 7 2 . Works, v , 2 8 2 .
 Burke's analysis of the French Revolution 203

And here there is a footnote:

See two books entitled, Einige Originalschriften des llluminatenordens — System und Folgen des
llluminatenordens, Miinchen, 1787.

Burke is not known to have read German, and it is not clear from what source
these references to the Illuminati reached him. 28 To know this is perhaps of less
importance than to know whether continental European publicists perceived them
as he did - namely, as typifying the alliance of organized but unpatronized in-
telligentsias with the machinations of discontented public creditors; for such is
Burke's general perception of revolutionary movements about 1790. It would be
valuable to know this for two reasons: first, it would help us to reconstruct Burke's
understanding of ancien regime France in crisis, and the information on which he
drew. Secondly, we need to know whether an extraordinary dread of the power
of public credit to subvert the natural relations of society is peculiar to the English-
speaking lands of the period or is dispersed through European society. In the
passage just quoted, this fear is the occasion for the emergence of a key term in
Burke's analysis of revolution: the term 'energy'.
There were two social forces which David Hume, pioneer philosophical de-
fender of the aristocratic monied order, had identified as destructive of natural
society. One was enthusiasm, which - he had written in the History of England -
suspended all the normal relations between effects and their causes which ac-
counted for social behaviour. 29 Though this usually appeared in the form of reli-
gious fanaticism, it was to be understood as occurring when the mind was left
alone with its own creations and mistook these for real causes operating on it
from without. 30 Burke's 'metaphysics' and 'preposterous way of reasoning' may
be considered as descriptions of enthusiasm occurring in a non-religious form.
The second destructive force recognized by Hume was public credit, which - he
had written in an essay bearing that title 31 — was capable of substituting itself
for all forms of property and for all the natural relations between men in society,
of which he had named 'nobility, gentry and family . . . a kind of independent
magistracy in a state, instituted by the hand of nature' 32 as constituting the three
most vulnerable to the subversions of paper. Hume had seen this destructive force
as issuing from the sovereign executive, and as reducing proprietors to 'a stupid
and pampered luxury' and 'lethargy'; 33 he had not discerned a connection between

28
A possible candidate is August Ludwig Meyer, formerly a librarian at Gottingen, who visited
England and was in touch with Burke during 1788-90. See The correspondence of Edmund Burke, VI
(ed. Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith, Cambridge and Chicago, 1967), 256-7.
29
David Hume, History of England (new edn, London, 1762), V, 55-6.
30
Ibid., pp. 56-7.
31
T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (eds.), The philosophical works of David Hume (London, 1875), in,
360-74 ('Of public credit').
32 33
Ibid., p. 368. Ibid., p. 367.
204 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

public credit and enthusiasm. Yet it was precisely when property and natural
subordination, the sources from which manners arose in society, had been sub-
verted by paper that the mind was left alone with its own fantasies; what had the
madness of the South Sea Bubble been but the enthusiasm of public credit? In
the account Burke gives of the gens de lettres, philosophes and illuminati, the expan-
sive power of the monied interest is being most expressly brought together with
the uncontrollable energy of enthusiasm, the intellect divorced from all natural
relations — from manners and subordinations, from the laws of nature and na-
ture's God - feeding on its own fantasies and substituting itself for every other
form of power.
At a later point in the Reflections Burke declares:
The whole of the power obtained by this revolution will settle in the towns among the
burghers, and the monied directors who lead them. The landed gentleman, the yeoman,
and the peasant have none of them habits, or inclinations, or experience, which can lead
them to any share in this the sole source of power and influence now left in France. The
very nature of a country life, the very nature of landed property, in all the occupations and
all the pleasures they afford, render combination and arrangement (the sole way of procur-
ing and exerting influence) in a manner impossible amongst country-people. Combine
them by all the art you can, and all the industry, they are always dissolving into individ-
uality. Anything in the nature of incorporation is almost impracticable amongst them.34
Now here it is hard to believe that Burke is describing English society. As a
seasoned if unsuccessful Whig politician, he knew perfectly well that country
gentlemen were entirely capable of combination, arrangement and influence, and
in insisting on the 'miscibility' of landed and monied interests which differen-
tiated England from France, he had given one very good reason for this. (He
might indeed have asked himself whether French landowners would not be glad
of the opportunity to invest in a public debt.) As for the striking word 'burghers',
it had been adopted from the Dutch about 160035 to describe townsfolk, surely
because the English 'burgesses' had been too far absorbed into its parliamentary
context to do so, and because English contained no such category noun as the
French bourgeoisie and felt little need for one. If we argue that Burke had complex
and ambivalent feelings about the bourgeoisie, we must face the fact that he had
no word for them, and as far as we know no concept. Is he struggling here to
formulate one? He continues:
It is obvious that, in the towns, all the things which conspire against the country gentle-
man combine in favour of the money manager and director. In towns combination is
natural. The habits of burghers, their occupations, their diversion, their business, their
idleness, continually bring them into mutual contact. Their virtues and their vices are
sociable; they are always in garrison; and they come embodied and half disciplined into
the hands of those who mean to form them for civil or for military action.
34 35
Works, v, 347-8. O.E.D., sub voce.
 Burke's analysis of the French Revolution 205

We do not usually think of the bourgeoisie as a standing army, or London and

Bristol as garrison towns; no more did Burke. The burghers he describes here
might exist in France or the Netherlands, 36 but never in England as he knew it;
and as for their social composition -
All these considerations leave no doubt on my mind that, if this monster of a constitution
can continue, France will be wholly governed by the agitators in corporations, by societies
in the towns formed of directors of assignats and trustees for the sale of church lands,
attornies, agents, money-jobbers, speculators and adventurers, composing an ignoble oli-
garchy founded on the destruction of the crown, the church, the nobility and the people.
Here end all deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men.37

The 'burghers' here revert to being a Swiftian monied interest, rendered for-
midable by their alliance with an independently organized intelligentsia; it is not
their desire to invest capital in commerce or industry that makes them a revolu-
tionary class. But the word 'combination' must catch our eye. We may recall that
it is when 'bad men combine' that 'good men must associate'.38 If country people
are incapable of 'combination', is there something in the conditions of town life
favourable to a 'combination' of energies which is antisocial because not led by
Hume's 'nobility, gentry and family . . . a kind of independent magistracy . . .
instituted by the hand of nature'? If so, Burke would be lamenting the lack of an
effective natural aristocracy in France, and intimating that one could only exist
under conditions of Whig 'miscibility.'
The problem of energy and combination recurs, but is stated in rather different
terms, in the Letters on a regicide peace of 1796—7 — that wild jeremiad of a mind
at the end of its tether, in which Burke declares that what is going forward in
Europe is not a war between nations but a civil war waged by a 'sect', 'conspiracy'
or 'armed doctrine' of revolutionary fanatics, who aim at nothing less than the
destruction of natural society itself. Before this — he had already written in A
letter to a noble lord — men of property

were found in such a situation as the Mexicans were, when they were attacked by the dogs,
the cavalry, the iron and the gunpowder, of a handful of bearded men, whom they did
not know to exist in nature.39
And in the second of the Regicide letters is found a similar comparison with
the power by which Mahomet and his tribes laid hold at once on the two most powerful
empires of the world . . . and, in not much longer space of time than I have lived,
overturned governments, laws, manners, religion, and extended an empire from the Indus
to the Pyrenees.40

36
For armed 'burghers' in the Austrian Netherlands, see Correspondence, VI, 267.
37
Works, v, 3 4 9 - 5 0 . ^Thoughts on the present discontents; Works, n, 330.
59 4o
Works, v m , 53. Works, v m , 254.
mas o que é exatamente natureza, se não o arranjo natural,
histórica, das relações sociais? Natureza tem o sentido, assim,
de curso natural, a partir de princípios estabelecidos, derivados
do curso mesmo dos eventos.

206 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

Burke uses these historical instances of the utterly unexpected because he de-
sires to say that something has happened unknown to previous history: something
unknown to history because it did not previously exist in nature, unknown in
nature because it is aimed at the destruction of nature itself; something which
seeks to carry out an entire revolution in manners, he informs us, and so to 'strike
at the root of our social nature'. 41 But this entirely demonic conspiracy has itself
a social origin, and the difference between the Reflections and the Letters may be
found in the way in which Burke's ideas on this subject have developed. The gens
de lettres are still there, to represent the power of the decivilized intellect; but the
role of the monied interest has diminished in visibility, and the 'burghers' have
vanished altogether from the page. In the Reflections Burke had spoken of the
confiscatory monied interest's search for governments possessed of greater 'en-
ergy', and his predominant concern in the Letters is to develop the idea of an
'energy' unchained from all the restraints of society. In place of the alliance
between monied interest and gens de lettres, we are now told that the Revolution
was made by 'two sorts of men . . . the philosophers and the politicians'. If we
ask who these 'politicians' were, we learn that they comprised

the active and energetick part of the French nation, itself the most active and energetick
of all nations . . . I am convinced that the foreign speculators in France, under the old
government, were twenty to one of the same description then or now in England; and few
of that description there were, who did not emulously set forward the Revolution. The
whole official system, particularly in the diplomatick part, the regulars, the irregulars,
down to the clerks in office (a corps, without all comparison, more numerous than the
same among us) co-operated in it. All the intriguers in foreign politicks, all the spies, all
the intelligencers, actually or late in function, all the candidates for that sort of employ-
ment, acted solely upon that principle.42
The monied interest has not disappeared, but it is now the bureaucrats and
technicians of national power who pursue confiscation as the means of national
aggrandizement. They have become revolutionaries by a route the ideological
opposite of that the monied interest might be expected to follow.
From quarrelling with the court, they began to complain of monarchy itself, as a system
of government too variable for any regular plan of national aggrandizement . . . They had
continually in their hands the observations of Machiavel upon Livy. They had Montesquieu's
Grandeur et Decadence des Romains as a manual; and they compared, with mortification, the
systematick proceedings of a Roman senate with thefluctuationsof a monarchy.43
. . . What cure for the radical weakness of the French monarchy, to which all the means
which wit could devise, or nature and fortune could bestow, towards universal empire,
was not of force to give life, or vigour, or consistency - but in a Republick? Out the word
came; and it never went back.44

41 42 4i 44
Works, viii, 172-3. Works, vm, 240-1. Works, viii, 244. Works, vm, 246-7.
 Burke's analysis of the French Revolution 207

Republics, as Machiavelli well knew, were for expansion; but in eighteenth-

century England the admirers of Livy's citizen warriors usually saw themselves at
the opposite pole of social being from the speculators and stockjobbers of the
monied interest. Burke, defender of the Whig order with its commerce and ci-
vility, can imagine the two coming into alliance. The republic expands through
conquest, the monied interest through confiscation. Such a republic destroys man
as social being, to reconstitute him as armed citizen; its nature is what we should
call totalitarian.
In that country entirely to cut off a branch of commerce, to extinguish a manufacture, to
destroy the circulation of money, to violate credit, to suspend the course of agriculture,
even to burn a city, or to lay waste a province of their own, does not cost them a moment's
anxiety. To them the will, the wish, the want, the liberty, the toil, the blood of individ-
uals, is as nothing. Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The state is
all in all . . ,45

The assignats are now only one among the instruments of a despotism wielded
by an alliance of literati, who aim not at the maximization of their investment in
the public debts, but at naked power for its own sake. The Revolution is a
trahison des clercs:

Never can they, who, from the miserable servitude of the desk, have been raised to empire,
again submit to the bondage of a starving bureau, or the profit of copying musick, or
writing plaidoyers by the sheet. 46

B u t the power of such persons may still have an origin in wider social change:

A silent revolution in the moral world preceded the political, and prepared it . . . It was
no longer the great and the populace. Other interests were formed, other dependencies,
other connexions, other communications. The middle classes had swelled far beyond their
former proportion. Like whatever is the most effectively rich and great in society, these
classes became the seat of all the active politicks; and the preponderating weight to decide
on them. There were all the energies by which fortune is acquired; there the consequence
of their success. There were all the talents which assert their pretensions, and are impatient
of the place which settled society prescribed to them . . . The correspondence of the
monied and the mercantile world, the literary intercourse of academies, but, above all,
the press, of which they had in a manner entire possession, made a kind of electrick
communication every where. 47

The 'electrick communication' is probably Mesmer's rather than Franklin's; 48

but is it in the term 'middle classes', purely English though it is, that Burke comes
closest to formulating a 'bourgeois' theory of revolution? Thirty-five years later,
at the time of the Reform Bill debates, the case for the measure was that there
45 A6 47
Works, vin, 253. Works, vm, 256. Works, vm, 259-60.
48
Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the end of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968) for
an 'electric communication' as sympathy passing immediately from person to person.
208 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

had come to exist a 'public opinion', the political attribute of the 'middle class'
or 'classes', which required only to be represented in parliament and neither
should nor could be subjected to the restraints of'interest', 'dependency' or 'con-
nexion'. To this the Anti-Reformers replied that to permit such a 'public opinion'
free and unconnected operation would be as revolutionary a measure as any un-
dertaken in France. In the 1830s an ideologue or two can be found49 who equates
the rise of 'public opinion' with the 'history of civilization', with 'the middle
class', with personal as opposed to real property and with command over the
labour of others: the formula for a bourgeoisie in the Marxist sense of the term.
Burke does not make any such equations, but he is visibly helping to lay the
foundations for both sides of the 1832 debate. What interests him about 'public
opinion' - a term which does not appear in the passage from which I have been
quoting — is the occurrence of a revolution in communications: the growth of a
society where, he says, 'there was no longer any means of arresting a principle in
its course', 50 and enthusiasm, fanaticism and metaphysical politics could have
free play. For the reformers of 1832, 'public opinion' was committed to a new
system of property relations and therefore need not be feared; but in Burke's eyes
it had nothing to do with manufacture and commerce at all, its agents were
literati, bureaucrats and technocrats, and the form it took was 'energy', 'talent',
'a new, a pernicious, a desolating activity'. 51

Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property.52
We have not considered as we ought the dreadful energy of a state, in which the
property has nothing to do with the government. Reflect, my dear sir, reflect again and
again, on a government, in which the property is in complete subjection, and where
nothing rules but the mind of desperate men. The conditions of a commonwealth not
governed by its property was a combination of things, which the learned and ingenious
speculator Harrington, who has tossed about society into all forms, never could imagine
to be possible. We have seen it; the world has felt it; and if the world still shut their eyes
to this state of things, they will feel it more.53

'Dreadful energy' is the phrase whose meaning we have to penetrate. If, in some
dialogue of the dead, Karl Marx be imagined explaining to Edmund Burke 54 that
49
E . g . W . M . Mackinnon, On the rise, progress and present state of public opinion in Great Britain and
other parts of the world (London, 1828); History of civilisation (two vols., London, 1846). For t h e
aspect of t h e Reform Bill debate mentioned above, I a m indebted t o Professor Barton L. Boyer
(College of Idaho), a m e m b e r of m y 1980 N E H Summer Seminar.
50
Here again we are reminded of Cochin; n . 2 5 , above. See Keith Michael Baker, 'Enlightenment
and Revolution in France: old problems, renewed approaches', Journal of Modern History, LIII, 2
(1981), 281—303, for a study of Francois Furet's revival of Cochin's views.
51 52
Works, v m , 2 1 4 . ( Works, v m , 170. "Works, vm, 255-6.
54
It is not easy to imagine, since most of Marx's surviving references to Burke are merely philistine;
he impugned his motives without considering his argument. Capital (Moscow 1959), I, 170, quoted
in Shelton, Dean Tucker, p. 264.
 Burke's analysis of the French Revolution 209

he had simply failed to recognize that one system of property relationships was
replacing another, and that the 'dreadful energy' was that of the revolutionary
and triumphant bourgeoisie, Burke must be imagined retorting that Marx was
another 'learned and ingenious speculator' who had simply failed to recognize the
spectacle of human energy disengaged from any system of property relationships
whatever. Should Marx reply that this was impossible, since all human energy
was by its nature involved in productive activity and the generation of new prop-
erty relationships, Burke would declare that this comparatively liberal and rela-
tively optimistic dogma failed to bring him any comfort, since he had seen a
vision of human energy turned wholly and systematically destructive. It is a
vision which many have had since his time, and sometimes with good reason.
And Burke saw the antithesis against which this energy was aimed as a liberal
commercial society, the Whig order as ruled by Sir Robert Walpole and ex-
pounded by Adam Smith. The states of the civilized world, he declared, flour-
ished by multiplying and by satisfying the needs of men, and the more effectively
they did this, the greater the resistance they must overcome in mobilizing their
resources to meet the challenge of revolutionary systems to which 'the state was
all in all'. Britain could effectively meet such a challenge only because of the
enormous taxable surplus which her affluence produced, and Burke silently pointed
to the underlying problem of Pitt's strategy: was the expansion of British com-
merce an adequate substitute for the application of military power?55 The Letters
end with a review of the national resources, and we recall a passage towards the
end of the Reflections in which 'virtue' is defined as most highly displayed in the
management of the public revenue. Burke to the last was a man of his modern
age, with little nostalgia in his make-up. 56
This inquiry points to certain provisional conclusions, and to certain agenda
for further research. Burke was a Whig, the defender of an aristocratic and com-
mercial order which could be represented as at once natural and progressive and
defended by reference to a system of civilized manners. 'Manners', he wrote, 'are
of more importance than laws. . . . According to their quality, they aid morals,
they supply them, or they totally destroy them. Of this the new French legisla-
tors were aware', 57 and had set out to inculcate a new system of manners alto-
gether contrary to nature. The Revolution was the crime against society rather
than against God; Burke's Christian feelings were real but not spiritual — they
arose, he once declared, 'much from conviction, more from affection'58 — and he
tended to see religion mainly as the sacralization of man's social nature. Manners,

"Works, vm, 251-3.

56
This interpretation is reinforced by that of C. B. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford, 1981; in the Past
Masters Series). Since the present writer has often differed from Professor Macpherson, it is a
pleasure to record the closeness of their views on this subject.
^ Works, vm, 172. ™ Correspondence,\\, 215.
210 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

then, offer us a key to his argument; but a strictly progressive theory of manners,
such as Burke might have derived from his Scottish acquaintances, presented
them as arising, and fulfilling the natural sociability of man, only in the course
of the commercialization, refinement and diversification of society. In outlining
his differences with 'our oeconomical politicians', Burke declared that manners
must precede commerce, rather than the other way round, and that modern Eu-
ropean society needed and must not sever its roots in a chivalric and ecclesiastical
past. This move — to borrow a term now much employed — was historicist and
traditionalist, but it was not reactionary. It anchored commerce in history, rather
than presenting it as the triumph over history, and here we may cautiously link
Burke's argument as studied in this essay with the appeal to prescription and
immemorial usage studied in 'Burke and the Ancient Constitution'. If'manners'
were mceurs, refined and enriched by the progress of society, they were also consu-
etudines, disciplined and reinforced by the memory of society; and presumption,
prescription and prejudice were signs and means of society's determination to
keep its memory alive. Burke proposed to keep the past actual, but he did not
propose to return to it; there is no neo-medievalist programme for reactivating
an age of chivalry or an age of faith, only a declaration that to destroy the histor-
ical structure built up by older social forms must lead to the destruction of society
in its modern character. It is 'manners', that key term in the defence of commer-
cial humanism, which the demonic revolutionaries have set out to subvert, and
it is the strength of a commercial Britain by which they must be defeated.
Nevertheless, Burke's 'view of the progress of society in Europe' constitutes a
significant revision of the Scottish perception of history, and it would be inter-
esting to know what the heirs of Robertson thought of his insistence that com-
merce had been and remained dependent upon aristocracy and established reli-
gion. To most eighteenth-century defenders of Whig civilization, the rise of
commerce and the rise of polite culture went together, under the name of 'the
progress of the arts', and required to be defended together, against those who
hankered after the austere republicanism of Spartan or Roman antiquity. When
Burke proposed to reverse the Scottish thesis that commerce had been the motor
force behind the growth of manners, he went some way towards encouraging the
view — soon to become widely held — that commerce might generate a 'mechan-
ical philosophy' and a 'dismal science', hostile to the point of philistinism to 'the
progress of the arts'. We have not therefore lost sight of the perspective in which
Burke may appear to some degree involved in a 'revolt against the eighteenth
century'.59 If he held that aristocratic patronage and established religion were
necessary links in the connexion between civilized manners and expanding com-
merce, he had, by calling attention - as he overtly did - to the problematic

59
Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the revolt against the eighteenth century (London, 1929, I960).
 Burke's analysis of the French Revolution 211

relation in English history between Whig aristocracy and Anglican church, raised
the question whether this alliance in fact held together. Both Tory and Radical
neo-medievalists were now in a position to argue that it did not, though we
ought probably to add that both were in their way mutants — 'romantic' mutants
if the term is safe to use — of an essentially Whig stock.
The presence in Burke's argument of this problem — not to call it a contradic-
tion - reopens one of the most difficult questions in Burkean studies: how far his
writings on the Revolution form a commentary on English and how far on French
affairs. On the one hand, the Whig 'miscibility' of landed and monetary property
is said not to have been duplicated in France, so that weaknesses arising from
their separation ought not to be feared in England. On the other, there are im-
plicit weaknesses in the Whig order — the Church is not wholly out of danger —
and Burke did end by falling into an acute dread of revolutionary activity in
England. These fears, however, are not explained by his analysis of French affairs.
His conviction that nine-tenths of Dissenters were Jacobins at heart 60 cannot be
accounted for by supposing that he saw them as public creditors, incorporated
philosophes or armed burghers. It may be, of course, that he feared the English
radicals and anti-war Whigs less as revolutionaries in their own right than as
fellow-travellers with someone else's revolution, anti-patriots judging by a dou-
ble standard, which is exactly what some of them were. But the problem of
relating Burke's analysis of French to his analysis of English affairs remains, and
is heightened in proportion as we uncover the intense and idiosyncratic character
of both. How far — again — is his account of that 'middle class' society, in which
aristocratic patronage and segmentation have failed and 'electrick communica-
tion' ensures the instant explosion of opinion into enthusiasm, a diagnosis of the
ancien regime in disintegration, how far a warning of what England may become?
To answer such questions, it would be valuable to know more about two things.
The first is the reception of Burke's anti-revolutionary writings by his English
readers, rather especially those sympathetic to them. Because we believe their
impact to have been great, we have tended to take it for granted, and have not
studied in detail exactly what messages they transmitted. An author is not nec-
essarily read as he intended; but if we knew how responsive Burke's readers were
to his doctrines about 'monied interest', 'armed doctrine' and 'dreadful energy',
we might know how far he was writing in language shared with his contempor-
aries, and what the sources of that language were. The second area calling for
investigation is Burke's understanding of the last phase of ancien regime society.
There is clearly more here than sentimentalizing about the French royal family,
or the complacent assumption that France could easily have been remodelled
along Whig lines; more than he could have picked up from emigre nobles like

^Correspondence, VI, 4 1 9 - 2 0 . Cf. Works, v m , 141-2.

212 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

Lally Tollendal. What he has to say about the 'monied interest', the 'men of
letters', the 'burghers' and the 'politicians' (or technicians of national power) may
or may not be nonsense; but it is the product of information carefully arranged
along systematic lines, and by no means all of it results from the application of
English bugaboos to French affairs. He seems to have thought of the disintegrat-
ing ancien regime as one in which powerful combinations could be formed in the
absence of royal and aristocratic techniques of control through patronage, and it
would be desirable to know where he got his information regarding 'monied
interest', 'philosophers' and 'politicians' as forming such combinations. He seems
to have thought — at any rate while writing the Reflections — of the public debt as
a powerful agent in bringing about this state of things, and it would be desirable
to know how far this belief was an extension of the Anglo-Scottish obsession with
debt as subversive of natural social relations and how far it was shared by French
and European observers. Here Burke's dealings with the exiled finance minister
Calonne might be explored; they corresponded (though not very intimately), and
Burke made use of Calonne's Etat de la France.61 His understanding of both French
and English affairs, like his philosophy of society in general, is seen to have arisen
from sources even deeper and more complex than has been suspected: more deeply
and widely rooted in the language and thought of his time.
61
For references to Calonne in the Reflections, see Works, v, 243, 245, 246, 334-5, 374, 413, 421
and n. For Necker's report on the finances, v, 219-21, 236-40, 244, 402, 410, 425.
PART III
 11

The varieties of Whiggism from

Exclusion to Reform:
A history of ideology and discourse

I. From the First Whigs to the True Whigs

"But she is a Whig," an academic woman of high distinction once said to me of

Caroline Robbins, whom this essay was first written to honor.1 The description
may have been culturally rather than historiographically apt; a case can be made
for regarding Professor Robbins not indeed as a gravedigger, but certainly as a
deconstructor of the Whig monolith — if, that is, it should not be thought
"Whiggish" to maintain that there ever was one. Her major work, The Eighteenth-
Century Commonwealthman,2 appeared in 1959, and its function was to reveal to
us the existence of a persistent tradition of Whig dissent, in which a succession
of Old Whigs, True Whigs, and Honest Whigs - collectively known to us as
"Commonwealthmen" — kept up a criticism of the principles and practices of the
regime known to us as "the Whig supremacy," originating before its foundations
in the Revolution of 1688 and audible well after the revolutions of 1776 and
1789. There was in fact a profound schism in Whig political culture, and we
have been working out its implications ever since. Let us review the historio-
graphical chronology.
Almost thirty years earlier, Herbert Butterfield had taught us to view with
suspicion what he called "the Whig interpretation of history," and by 1959 we
had begun studying its origin as itself a historical phenomenon. In the process
its character had undergone a change, from the selective progressivism criticized
in The Whig Interpretation of History to the antiquarian fundamentalism identified
in The Englishman and His History1" and further explored in The Ancient Constitution
1
An earlier version was presented to a panel on Professor Robbins's work at the 1981 annual meeting
of the North American Conference on British Studies.
2
Caroline A. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: 1959).
3
Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931); The Englishman and His
History (Cambridge, 1944).

215
216 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

and the Feudal Law,,4 The problem of Whig historiography has since 1959 become
increasingly an aspect of the problematic history of Whiggism, and two major
caesuras may be detected in the development of the latter. In 1967 J. H. Plumb 5
established the paradigm of the "Whig oligarchy": after a period of broadly
based and turbulent politics lasting through 1714, the Whig party hardened into
a regime, and the Septennial Act and other measures of the early Hanoverian
years formed agoverno stretto of aristocratic patronage wielders not seriously shaken
until after 1760. The fairly continuous and consistent ideology6 of Caroline Rob-
bins's Commonwealthman now appeared as the language of protest against this
regime, employed alike by its Tory opponents in church and country and by its
Old Whig critics in the boroughs now excluded from power, although the sim-
plicities of this classification are now undergoing serious challenge. Between 1965
and 1970, Bernard Bailyn7 established the paradigm of the "republican synthe-
sis," in which the American Revolution was revealed as the repudiation not only
of parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies, but of parliamentary sovereignty
as an acceptable form of government - a repudiation that had made powerful and
effective use of the language of Commonwealth and country denunciation of the
corruptions of Whig parliamentary oligarchy.
To Caroline Robbins, the Commonwealthmen had appeared a succession of
interesting but on the whole ineffective ideologues, and this interpretation has
been independently but automatically followed by those historians for whom all
politics are oligarchic and all ideologies ineffective. As early as 1949, however,
Butterfield had drawn attention to the role of a radical brand of ancient consti-
tutionalism among the Middlesex and Yorkshire petitioners of 1780, when the
last of the old country movements had signaled a crisis with some drastic impli-
cations;8 and after Bailyn's contribution, the republican synthesis vastly enlarged
the possible significance of the Commonwealth ideology. Its criticism of execu-
tive patronage, public credit, and standing armies was seen as stemming from
4
J. G, A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957; New York, 1967).
5
J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1660-1730 (London, 1967).
6
The word "ideology" is here used loosely and perhaps casually, since it seems at least very difficult
to employ consistently or rigorously. I use it in three senses that often overlap: (1) thought con-
sidered as rhetoric or speech in action; (2) thought determined and constrained by, and at times in
tension with, the forms of speech available for its expression; and (3) a view of the world determined
by the various factors that may be held to have determined it (there being no single preconceived
theory as to what these may have been).
7
Bernard Bailyn, Political Pamphlets of the American Revolution, vol. 1; no more published (Cambridge,
Mass., 1965); The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); The Origins
of American Politics (New York, 1970). There is now an extensive literature on this time; for con-
venient bibliographies see two essays by Robert S. Shalhope in The William and Mary Quarterly:
"Towards a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in Amer-
ican Historiography," 3d ser., XXIX (1972), pp. 49-80; "Republicanism and Early American
Historiography," 3d ser., XXXIX (1982), pp. 334-56.
8
Herbert Butterfield, George 111, Lord North and the People, 1779-80 (London, 1949).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 217

the republicans of the interregnum and even the Renaissance, and as capable of
growing into a fully fledged republicanism. If this growth was stunted in Britain,
it provided Americans with the language of genuine republican revolution; if
Gordon Wood 9 and others demonstrated that it had to be drastically remodeled
to become the language of Federalism, Lance Banning 10 and others demonstrated
the profoundly country and Commonwealth character of Jeffersonian opposition
to the programs of Alexander Hamilton, denounced as the heir of Walpole. At
this point it became necessary to turn back to Britain and inquire how far the old
radicalism (and, by implication, an opposed conservatism) was continued, or
alternatively transformed, in the decades following 1784 and 1793. Among both
American and British historians, then, debates continue that can be intimately
related to the publication in 1959 of The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman and
to historiographical events occurring since.
In that specialized domain inhabited by historians of political discourse, two
developments may be noted as relevant. In I960 Peter Laslett established that
Locke's Treatises of Government must have been composed in the early 1680s. 11
From this it followed, first, that when written the Treatises must have expressed
intentions far more revolutionary than could have been read into them when
published at the end of 1689; second, that the Revolution was, as had long before
been pointed out, justified in language more conservative, and involving far more
reliance on historical continuity, than anything to be found in the Treatises; third,
as we shall see further, that the Old Whig or Commonwealth criticism of the
Revolution Settlement expressed itself in a distinct set of terms, whose radicalism
was not necessarily derived from Locke. Caught in cross fire from three directions,
the old view that Locke had provided the orthodox justification of the English
Revolution, and by the same series of arguments had inspired the American
Revolution, 12 necessarily dissolved, and it became apparent that his role, which
was obviously great, in the thought of the eighteenth century would have to be
reconstituted by means of a new description. How this is to be done remains a
matter of much debate.
Lastly, the present writer, who ventures here to name himself among his bet-
ters, had by 1977 completed an elaborate synthesis, begun as early as 1964, 13
that offered to trace the history of the republican synthesis from its classical and
9
G o r d o n S . Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-87 (Chapel Hill, N . C . , 1969).
10
Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N . Y . , 1978).
11
Peter Laslett, ed.,John Locke: Two Treatises on Government (Cambridge, I960, 1963).
12
It is always difficult to document one's straw men succinctly. A good example is Carl L. Becker,
The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York, 1922; several
subsequent editions).
13
J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays in Political Thought and History (New York,
1971); The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N . J . , 1975); The Political Works ofJames Harrington
(Cambridge, 1977). See further "The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and
Ideology," Journal of Modern History LIU, 1(1980), pp. 4 9 - 7 2 .
218 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

humanist beginnings. It was a cardinal thesis with him that a persistent emphasis
on the armed citizen, enshrined in perpetuity in the Second Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States, had entailed as an ideological consequence the
ideal superiority of real over personal property, and that this had imparted an
agrarian and classical character to eighteenth-century republicanism, infecting it
with ineradicable doubts and ambivalences regarding the growth of a world com-
merce that it otherwise ardently welcomed. Since the Whig oligarchy, now es-
tablished as the dominant reality of Anglo-American history in the eighteenth
century, was based on the management of a system of publicfinanceby a class of
great landed proprietors, this duality of mind among its critics and opponents
had interesting implications and could be related to those other dualities of Tory
and Old Whig, country and Commonwealth, Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ele-
ments that the opposition to Whig oligarchy so manifestly contained. This inter-
pretation, however, has proved too dialectical for those liberal and Marxist his-
torians - in this respect curiously difficult to tell apart - who are wedded past
separation to an ultimately "Whig" interpretation in which nothing counts ex-
cept the rise of liberal individualism and the triumph of the bourgeoisie. These
have incessantly accused the republican synthesis of doing less than justice to
possessive individualism and of not assigning it the central role in the history of
ideology in the eighteenth century. In a variety of essays the present writer has
sought to explain how a system of commercial values, historicist rather than
individualist in character, was formulated during the Enlightenment in the course
of a complex dialogue with the classical republican criticism. This controversy is
a further consequence of the fragmentation of our concept of "Whiggism" that
occurred when the "oligarchy" and the "Commonwealth" were seen in opposition
to one another. The essay to which this is the preface is devoted to accepting this
fragmentation as a fact and to pursuing the history of "Whiggism" as a word
denoting a diversity of realities. It will necessarily follow that a reevaluation of
the changing meanings of "Toryism" must be undertaken as part of the enter-
prise.

The history pursued will be presented in terms of ideology and discourse rather
than behavior, on the presumption that what people claim to be doing and how
they justify it is just as revealing as what they finally do. This approach of course
in no way precludes asking who and what they were. Such a history of Whiggism
would necessarily begin with J. R. Jones's "First Whigs,"14 the men of Shaftes-
bury - unless there should be uncovered any significant links with the epony-

14
J. R. Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678-83 (Oxford, 1961).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 219
mous "Whiggamoies" of the Scottish hills, a possibility to which the Anglo-
centrism usual with historians tends to close our eyes. Who the First Whigs were
and what they were attempting is a question notoriously hard to resolve; inter-
pretation is currently turning back toward the view that the central facts of Res-
toration politics were the reestablishment of the church and the institutionaliza-
tion of dissent, and that the First Whigs were a faction of former Presbyterians
seeking to put together an alliance of Anglicans and Dissenters aimed at preempt-
ing the policy of indulgence, whereby the crown sought to make itself the patron
of dissent and lessen its dependence on the church and church party.15 If the
religious rather than the constitutional establishment is to be made the central
issue, we must downgrade (though we cannot ignore) the tradition of seeing the
Whigs as primarily concerned with safeguarding whatever gains Parliament could
be supposed to have inherited from the years of civil war and interregnum; reli-
gion was the issue on which Parliament was dragged back into self-assertion, and
the Test Act was to stand beside the Toleration Act as pillars of the central pier
of the Whig edifice — a perception quite generally held in the first half of the
nineteenth century. However this may be, the experiment of making religion the
central issue enables us to coordinate recent research in ways interesting to the
historian of ideology.
We must now place at the center of the picture a phenomenon that in the years
following the Restoration certainly could not have been called Whig, though it
was later to form part of what we call an "Augustan" ethos and think of as an
ideological buttress of the "Whig supremacy." This is the emergence of a lati-
tudinarian churchmanship, a rational religion aimed at repressing, moderating,
or replacing the "enthusiasm" now thought of as the essential characteristic of
Puritanism: the claim to personal inspiration by an indwelling spirit, with all its
chiliastic and antinomian capacity to turn the social as well as the metaphysical
world upside down. Doctoral candidates - those straws who know which way the
wind is blowing - are working with increasing concentration on what they term
a Restoration "politics of culture," the redefinition of religious man as a polite
rather than a prophetic being, whose communion with God is exercised from the
midst of human society and culture, reinforced by and reinforcing their author-
ity.16 Important developments in philosophy occur as we pursue the growth of
this world view through the Cambridge Platonists to Locke, with a detour by
way of Bishop Cumberland and the revival of natural law; at the end of the path
may be glimpsed the figures of Addison and the third earl of Shaftesbury, the
Whig Erasmus and the Whig Montaigne. We are indeed dealing here with a
15
1 am indebted on this point to correspondence with Dr. Mark Goldie.
16
See, e.g., W. Craig Diamond, "Public Identity in Restoration England: From Prophetic to Eco-
nomic," Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1982; Lawrence E. Klein, "The Rise of Politeness
in England, 1660-1770," Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1983.
220 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

strand of that Erasmian tradition of which the present master of Peterhouse has
written so eloquently. 17 Research of this kind travels in convoy with the work of
Margaret Jacob 18 and James Jacob, 19 both of whom have emphasized the emer-
gence of a rational world order that ultimately reinforced the Whig political
order, while it underwent persistent challenge from a more radical and illuminist
rationalism of hermetic and spiritual origins. Though this radical illuminism is
chiefly to be met with among excluded groups of republicans, it may also be
found keeping Hobbesian and absolutist company; the revolutionary temper does
not choose its allies in attacking the liberal. But if we are to acknowledge the
existence of a Radical Enlightenment, and allow for a revival of enthusiasm in
the age of the democratic revolutions, we must also admit that, in both British
kingdoms, the Magisterial Enlightenment was a surprisingly clerical affair, ow-
ing quite as much to prelates as to philosophes: to English latitudinarians and
Scottish Moderates in their unending warfare against antinomianism and enthu-
siasm.
In identifying (though hardly exploring) this surely most important of all ide-
ological developments of the Restoration, we have traveled far enough from the
company of the First Whigs, who had yet to cement an alliance with latitudinar-
ian churchmanship. Their temper was neither irenic nor oligarchic and their
radicalism owed a good deal to their alliances with London malcontents, though
there are radical interpretations of Locke that may make a shade too much of the
green-ribbon survivals of whom John Wildman was so questionable a represen-
tative. All attempts to synthesize the political arguments of the First Whigs have
had to wrestle with the unstable blend of conservative and radical elements they
seem to present, but yet another attempt may be offered here. The relevant chap-
ters of The Ancient Constitution andthe Feudal Law, published in 1957, emphasized
the Whig appeal to the antiquity of the House of Commons but did not do much
toward establishing the theoretical context in which it occurred; this has now,
after nearly a quarter century, received its first restatement in Subjects and Sover-
eigns, the work of Corinne C. Weston and Janelle R. Greenberg. 20 Professor
17
H. R. Trevor-Roper, "Religion, the Reformation and Social Change," and "The Religious Origins
of the Enlightenment," both in his The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
and Other Essays (New York, 1969).
18
Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Ithaca, N . Y . , 1976);
The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981).
19
James R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York, 1977), and Henry Stubbe: Radical
Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983); James R. Jacob and Margaret C. Jacob,
"The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitu-
tion," Isis LXXXI 257 (1980), pp. 2 5 1 - 6 7 ; and Jacob and Jacob, eds., The Origins of Anglo-
American Radicalism (London, 1983).
20
Corinne Comstock Weston and Janelle Renfrow Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Con-
troversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England (Cambridge, 1981).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 221

Weston's earlier book, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords (1965), 21
remains the reigning study of Charles I's Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of
Parliament, which Weston has elevated to the rank of a major document in the
history of English political thought. In this memorable if ill-fated manifesto,
the king was made to describe the constitution as a coordinated but not self-
perpetuating balance of three powers, his own being but one. Research and inter-
pretation since 1965 have shown that there were several directions in which ar-
gument could move from this point. The doctrine latent in the Answer could be
used in dealing with the question of what was to happen when there was war
between the three powers, which ultimately brought it into the context of the
controversy over de facto authority. It could be used by radical republicans, of
whom James Harrington was the most striking theorist, in contending that the
historic constitution had failed to provide the equilibrium which it offered and
that a new and perhaps socially based separation and balance of powers - a genu-
ine republic - must be sought instead. 22 Lastly, and this is Professor Weston's
contribution, it could be used to argue, necessarily in a parliamentarian interest,
that King, Lords, and Commons found and affirmed their balance in a coordinate
exercise of legislative sovereignty.
The authors of Subjects and Sovereigns contend that the last is the correct context
in which to understand the so-called Brady controversy, the debate over the an-
tiquity of the Commons in 1680-2. 2 3 In arguing that the Commons were im-
memorial, the Whigs Petyt and Atwood were not arguing for some Mcllwainian
doctrine of fundamental law or anticipating Burke's appeal to prescription — no
doubt The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law can be read in one or both of
these senses - but were trying to include them as coordinate in the exercise of
legislative sovereignty; in denying their antiquity, Robert Brady was trying to
exclude them from it. The debate concerned the location of sovereignty, a con-
cept to which exclusionist First Whigs were as responsive as their opponents. The
interpretation is an attractive one, especially if a Whig concern with parliamen-
tary sovereignty can be made to coexist with a Whig adoption, occurring about
the same time (1675), of arguments concerning the excessive influence of the
executive ministry in parliamentary proceedings, their use of patronage and cor-
ruption, their designs to bring in standing armies, and the need for frequent,
triennial, if not annual, parliaments as the only means of forestalling the minis-
ters and their designs. 24 For it is in this coexistence that the conceptual origins
of the later Whig schism may be found. Whigs who desired to rule employed
21
Corinne Comstock Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords (New York, 1965).
22
Pocock, Political Works of James Harrington, pp. 15-42.
23
Pocock, Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, chap. VIII; Subjects and Sovereigns, chap. VII.
24
Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, chap. IV; The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 4 0 6 - 1 6 .
222 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

arguments leading to the sovereignty of Parliament; Whigs who desired to op-

pose employed arguments about the independence of representative from execu-
tive and of property from patronage, which led ultimately to the separation of
powers and looked beyond it to republicanism. These arguments were not a Whig
monopoly; they were country in character and it still seems worth calling them
neo-Harringtonian; 25 but when Old Whigs, True Whigs, and Commonwealth-
men desired to criticize Whig rule, the arguments were available to them. The
debate among Whigs of the next century may be summarized in the form: Was
parliamentary sovereignty possible without parliamentary corruption? Was par-
liamentary virtue possible this side of the republic? It was summarized in this
form by David Hume.
Petyt and Atwood affirmed the antiquity of the House of Commons; Henry
Neville carried out the move from Harringtonian to neo-Harringtonian positions
by professing that Petyt and Atwood had partially converted him to this doctrine,
which Harrington himself had only cautiously adopted. By locating the com-
monwealth of armed freeholders in a modified feudal past, however, Neville left
room for a doctrine of historical change, which in more simplistic hands could
become one of corruption or degeneration from original principles. This duality
is only one of several in the complex pattern of argument in the early 1680s.
Petyt's Antient Right of the Commons of England Asserted (1680), Atwood'sJ^j An-
glorum ab Antiquo (1681), and Neville's Plato Redivivus (1682) are, like James
Tyrell's Patriarcha Non Monarcha (1681) and more remotely, Locke's Treatises of
Government (not published until 1689) and Algernon Sidney's Discourses of Govern-
ment (not published until 1698 and needing reaffirmation of its authenticity),
outgrowths of the debate that followed the republication of Filmer in 1679—80.
We may never have a complete study of this controversy in all its none-too-
coherent ramifications, for though it has been shown that Filmer was a serious
and intelligible thinker, 26 and that his arguments retained significance for the
first generation that debated the Revolution of 1688, he has not been made to
appear a key figure in any party's tradition or to have articulated positions central
or enduring in English thought. The transformations of Toryism have been too
many for that. In this survey of the variations of Whiggism, a crucial point is
that if Locke's Treatises were composed as early as we now believe, they envisaged
an "appeal to heaven" and a "dissolution of government" that had not yet taken

23
For criticisms of this term, see J. R. Goodale, "J. G. A. Pocock's Neo-Harringtonians: A Recon-
sideration," History of Political Thought I, 2 (1980), pp. 2 3 7 - 6 0 ; J. C. Davis, "Pocock's Harrington:
Grace, Nature and Art in the Classical Republicanism of James Harrington," Historical Journal
XXIV, 3 (1981), pp. 683—98; Enrico Nuzzo, "La riflessione sulla storia antica nella cultura repub-
licana inglese del' 600," Atti dell' Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche XCI (1980), pp. 9 1 - 1 8 3 .
26
Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford, 1975); J. W . Daly, Sir Robert Filmer
and English Political Thought (Toronto, 1979). Both are based on Peter Laslett's edition of Patriarcha
and Other Political Works by Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford, 1949).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 223

place, and therefore compassed and imagined rebellion to a degree not ap-
proached by any of the tracts published during the Filmerian controversy. It is
this that has upheld attempts to read them as an appeal to London radicalism of
an almost green-ribbon flavor,27 and no doubt it explains why they long remained
unpublished and why Locke was careful not to have them on his person when he
went abroad in 1683; he could have shared the fate of Sidney if caught with such
material in his cabinet. They were published, however, and it is now a difficulty
about the Treatises that we have to read them as they were read — that is, as
published after the miraculously bloodless appeal to heaven of 1688 - knowing
that we are not reading them as they were written. This is not merely a problem
in the interpretation of Locke's writings and career; it is a point of significance in
understanding the transition from the First Whigs to the Revolution Whigs.

(Hi)
Locke returned to an England (with the doings of Scottish Whigs we are not yet
concerned) in which an appeal to heaven had been made but had not resulted in
a dissolution of government, or in the civil war with which such an appeal was
assumed to be coterminous. The appeal to heaven, however - the drawing but
not the stroke of the sword - had rendered sharply problematic the legitimation
not simply of the events preceding and following the flight of James II, but of
the governing institutions, whether ancient or still to be established, that he had
left behind him. From this perspective, which was not only a Tory one, the
Revolution might seem to present first and foremost a problem in the legitima-
tion of de facto authority, such as had engrossed debate after 1649, and this must
explain the republication after forty years of so many works relating to the En-
gagement Controversy. 28 In John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty, Julian H.
Franklin has proposed to connect the Treatises of Government with George Lawson's
Politica Sacra et Civilis,29 a work of the late interregnum, and has traced the way
in which a doctrine of original sovereignty, coined to show how a people might
restore government after it had been dissolved, grew into a means of justifying
their action in precipitating its dissolution. Resistance theory was not far re-
27
Richard L. Ashcraft, "The Two Treatises and the Exclusion Crisis: The Problem of Lockean Political
Theory as Bourgeois Ideology," in J. G. A. Pocock and Richard L. Ashcraft, John Locke: Papers Read
at a Clark Library Seminar (Los Angeles, 1980); "Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of
Government: Radicalism and Lockean Political Theory," Political Theory VIII, 4 (1980), pp. 429—
86.
28
See Q u e n t i n S k i n n e r , " H i s t o r y a n d I d e o l o g y in t h e E n g l i s h R e v o l u t i o n , " Historical Journal VIII, 2
(1965), pp. 151-78.
29
J u l i a n H . F r a n k l i n , John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty: Mixed Monarchy and the Right of Resistance
in the Political Thought of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1978). For comment see Conal Condren,
"Resistance and Sovereignty in Lawson's Politica: An Examination of a Part of Professor Franklin
His Chimera," Historical Journal XXIV, 3 (1981), pp. 6 7 3 - 8 1 .
224 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

moved from a profound acceptance of authority.30 To read the Treatises in this

way, however convincing as reconstruction, is not the same as weighing their
contribution to the debate in which they were published; most recent scholarship
on the Revolution controversy has dwelt on their relative inconspicuousness in
that context.31 The central point, of course, is that apologists preferred to argue
that the government was not dissolved, that traditional institutions retained their
authority, and that the actions taken and being taken were to be justified by
reference to known law. The extent to which this argument was offered to
sweeten the bitter pill of necessity and obligation de facto on Tory palates pre-
vents our echoing the praise Macaulay lavished on the Revolution fathers for their
anticipation of Burkean prudence and prescription; even Burke's interpretation
of the Revolution is not as Burkean as that; but William Atwood, who is classi-
fied as a "radical Whig," 32 emphasized in one of the few contemporary notices of
the Treatises that their doctrine was admirable but unnecessary, since the govern-
ment had not been dissolved.33 Whigs were beginning to opt for leaving the
English people under the authority of their own history. This had not been At-
wood's point in upholding the ancient constitution against Brady, but by the
end of his career he was beginning to maintain the authority of ancient English
institutions over the other kingdoms of Britain.34 The uses of history were many,
and the authority of nature dangerous.
There were, however, substantial groups of Whigs who wished that the gov-
ernment had been dissolved and that the Convention had proclaimed itself some-
thing more than a parliament: a constituent assembly looking toward a radical
remodeling of the constitution. Locke himself seems to have been in sympathy
with this position and may well have printed the Second Treatise in an attempt to
further it.35 It is difficult, however, to discover much unity of ideology or pro-
gram among these discontented Whigs, whose existence is of such importance to
the story we have to trace. A few pamphlets issued from the vicinity of John
30
Skinner, "History and Ideology in the English Revolution"; Martyn P. Thompson, "The Idea of
Conquest in Controversies over the 1688 Revolution," Journal of the History of Ideas XXVIII, 1
(1977), pp. 33-46; Mark Goldie, "Edmund Bohun and Jus Gentium in the Revolution Debate,
1689-93," HistoricalJournalXX, 3 (1977), pp. 569-86.
31
J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1688-1720 (Cambridge, 1977); Martyn P.
Thompson, "The Reception of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, 1690-1705," Political
Studies XXIV, 2 (1976), pp. 184-91; Mark Goldie, "The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of
Political Argument," Bulletin of Research in the Humanities LXXXIII 4 (1980), pp. 473-564.
32
Goldie, "The Revolution of 1689," so classifies him.
33
W i l l i a m A t w o o d , The Fundamental Constitution of the English Government (London, 1 6 9 0 ) , p . 1 0 1 ;
Fmnklin, John Locke, pp. 105-98.
34
A t w o o d , The History and Reasons of the Dependency of Ireland upon the Imperial Crown of the Kingdom of
England ( L o n d o n , 1 6 9 8 ; a reply t o M o l y n e u x ) ; The Superiority and Direct Dominion of the Imperial
Crown of England over the Crown and Kingdom of Scotland (London, 1 7 0 4 , 1705).
35
Ashcraft argues this case at length and convincingly; see n.27, this chapter.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 225

Wildman and Richard Hampden; 36 Lois G. Schwoerer has identified a group of

hard-core First Whigs who wanted to use the Declaration of Rights to effect a
sharp reduction in the powers of the crown. 37 These were neither London radicals
nor republican doctrinaires, but seasoned Exclusionists whose reliability had once
been carefully noted by Shaftesbury himself with such marks as "worthy" or
"honest." This is not enough to identify them with a further group of sometime
Exclusionist pamphleteers — Robert Ferguson, Samuel Johnson, and others (iden-
tified by Mark Goldie in a crucially important article entitled "The Roots of True
Whiggism") 38 - whose means of limiting the powers of the crown was to insist
on the necessity of frequent parliaments, triennial if not annual, and who came
within a few years to lament that the revolution of 1688-9 had failed to effect
this restoration of what they claimed was an ancient constitutional liberty. Some
of them, including Ferguson, even reverted to Jacobite plotting in the hope of
achieving the radical program by means of a Stuart restoration - much as their
Leveller predecessors had plotted with Royalist exiles in the 1650s. Goldie's group,
as his choice of a title indicates, were the immediate predecessors of Robbins's
Commonwealthmen and belonged to that world of London radicalism with which
Shaftesbury and Locke had maintained close contacts; some of them had been in
Holland with Locke in the years of exile and conspiracy after 1683, 39 and had
promoted Monmouth's expedition with its radical and popular manifestos. Yet
in laying the foundations of the Commonwealth tradition, they were at the same
time laying those of the tradition we denominate "country." The independent
gentry of the shires were to show themselves not unresponsive to the argument
that frequent parliaments were necessary if the patronage of the crown was not to
bring members into dependence on the executive, and the passage from republi-
canism to Jacobitism was to be a recurrent phenomenon in opposition conduct
from 1689 to 1745. With the coexistence and interchangeability between urban
and agrarian opposition of which it is an indicator we shall be much concerned.
Goldie's True Whigs did not borrow significantly from Locke's Treatises of
Government. The one outstandingly radical doctrine these contain is that of the
dissolution of government, and there may well have been those in the radical
groups who wanted to bring it about as a means to the institution of frequent
parliaments. Yet not only is the case for these best stated in language not to be
found in the Treatises, but Locke himself explicitly rejects both the case and its
language. There is a crucial difference here that needs underlining at this point.
36
Franklin,y0/&» Locke, p. 103, n. 38 and p. 108, refers to these as "Lawsonian"; others see them as
more authentically radical.
37
Lois G . Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689 ( B a l t i m o r e , 1981).
38
Mark Goldie, "The Roots of True Whiggism," History of Political Thought I, 2 (1980), pp. 195-
236.
39
Ashcraft, articles cited in n. 27, this chapter.
226 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

As early as 1675, Shaftesbury and perhaps Locke - if we believe that he had any
hand in writing the Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country, a
tract central to Shaftesbury's campaign to bring about a dissolution of Parliament
when Danby seemed to be bringing its militant Anglicanism into alliance with
the king - had been denouncing prolonged parliaments as tending to corruption;
after their defeats in 1679 and 1680, they had equally denounced the arbitrary
dissolution of parliaments by the prerogative. The logical remedy lay in the elec-
tion and reelection of parliaments at frequent but regulated intervals, which Har-
rington had endeavored to provide by the devices of rotation and which the man-
ifestos of the Good Old Cause, put out by discontented officers before and after
the publication of Oceana, had presented as the principal objective of the politi-
cally militant soldiers of 1647—9.40 Here we have the reason for the appearance
of Harringtonian language in the Shaftesburean rhetoric of 1675-6, which -
restated in the "neo-Harringtonian" form made necessary by the persistence of
the historic constitution — was to make so great an appeal to urban and country
oppositions in the eighteenth century. But we also have a link with something
older and more urban than Harrington: a London-based radicalism looking back
through the lens of the Good Old Cause to the Agitators and Levellers of 1647,
of whom John Wildman was a living if battered reminder. With the small mas-
ters and old soldiers of London Shaftesbury and Locke kept up their association;
if Locke was involved in plotting insurrection in 1683 or 1685, it was with
representatives of this radical underground.
This had its own political language, as old as the Levellers, in which natural
rights and historic birthrights merged in coexistence if not in consistency; there
can be no greater error than to suppose that the argument from natural rights by
its nature tended toward radicalism, the appeal to history toward conservatism.
There arose a claim to the effect that frequent or annual parliaments were rooted
in medieval or Anglo-Saxon antiquity, so that to deny them by prorogation or
dissolution was to deny Englishmen their inheritance or birthright in the consti-
tution. Here was an ancient constitutionalism more radical than Petyt's or At-
wood's, closer to the concerns of the more violent Shaftesbureans and serving to
link them with their Commonwealth antecedents. It was among men of these
antecedents, and professing such language, that Locke moved when, in London
or Amsterdam, he moved in conspiratorial circles. The Second Treatise, we must
suppose, was written at some time during the years when Locke was keeping such
company and associating himself with conspiracy and insurrection, as he perhaps
did with the Rye House plot, and very probably with Monmouth's rebellion.41
40
See "James Harrington and the Good Old Cause: A Study of the Ideological Context of his Ant-
ing?" Journal of British Studies X, 1 (1970), pp. 30-48.
4l
Ashcraft, "Revolutionary Politics," reopens the question of Locke's involvement. See n. 27, this
chapter.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 227

Yet the thirteenth chapter of the Second Treatise explicitly rejects the position
that the intervals between parliaments can be provided for as part of the original
constitution of government. Though it leads toward Locke's concluding argu-
ment that failure to call a parliament at the proper time is one of the missteps by
which a prince may put himself in a state of war with his people, it explicitly
declares that the calling and dissolving of parliaments is a power that may be and
has been reserved to the prerogative. 42 The chapter proceeds to declare that it is
for the prerogative and executive power to reform the representation of the people
in Parliament by erecting new corporations where old ones have become depo-
pulated, 43 and is followed by the chapter headed "Of Prerogative," in which the
existence of a power capable of setting laws aside is justified on the grounds that
salus populi suprema lex esto. All that makes Locke's argument a revolutionary one
at this rmportant point is the further series of claims that the prerogative must
be exercised for the public good; that it is entrusted to the prince in order that it
be so exercised; that if it is exercised to the public harm, for example in the
calling and dissolving of parliaments, the trust is dissolved and with it the gov-
ernment; and that the judges of whether this has happened are necessarily the
people, who may by appealing to heaven - that is, by drawing the sword -
proclaim that the prince has put himself in a state of war with them.

42
". . . for it n o t b e i n g possible t h a t t h e first framers of t h e g o v e r n m e n t should, by any foresight, be
so m u c h masters of future events, as t o be able t o prefix so just periods of r e t u r n a n d d u r a t i o n t o
the assemblies of the legislative in all times to come, that m i g h t exactly answer all the exigencies
of the commonwealth; the best remedy that could be found for this defect was to trust this to the
prudence of one who was always to be present, and whose business it was to watch over the public
good. . . . Thus supposing the regulation of times for the assembling and sitting of the legislative
not settled by the original constitution, it naturally fell into the hands of the executive, not as an
arbitrary power depending on his good pleasure, but with this trust always to have it exercised only
for the public weal, as the occurrences of times and change of affairs might require. W h e t h e r settled
periods of their convening, or a liberty left to the prince for convoking the legislative, or perhaps a
mixture of both, hath the least inconvenience attending it, it is not my business here to inquire,
but only to show that though the executive power may have the prerogative of convoking and
dissolving such convention of the legislative, yet it is not thereby superior to i t . " Two Treatises of
Government, chap. 13, sec. 156.
43
"Salus populi suprema lex is certainly so just and fundamental a rule, that he who sincerely follows
it, cannot dangerously err. If therefore the executive, who has the power of convoking the legisla-
tive, observing rather the true proportion than fashion of representation, regulates, not by old
custom, b u t true reason, the number of members in all places that have a right to be distinctly
represented . . . it cannot be judged to have set u p a new legislative, but to have restored the old
and true one, and to have rectified the disorders which succession of time had insensibly, as well as
inevitably introduced . . . prerogative being nothing but a power in the hands of the prince to
provide for the public goou, in such cases which, depending upon unforeseen and uncertain occur-
rences, certain and unalterable laws could not safely direct; whatsoever shall be done manifestly for
the good of the people, and the establishing the government upon its true foundations, is and
always will be just prerogative. T h e power of erecting new corporations, and therewith new repre-
sentatives, carries with it a supposition that in time the measures of representation m i g h t vary . . .
and whenever the people shall chuse their representatives upon just and undeniably equal measures,
228 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

This is certainly a revolutionary doctrine, as well as a theory of revolution, but

there is room for debate in which of several senses it is a radical one. Certainly it
expresses neither a conservative nor a radical constitutionalism; at this point it is
not a constitutionalist doctrine at all, but is advocating a prerogative exercised
pro salute populi and tempered only by the threat of dissolution of the government
and consequent civil war. It reads very like the language of desperate men in the
early 1680s, turning to thoughts of civil war or the threat to use it - a threat
easily countered by a government that called out its troops and appealed to the
political nation with the perfectly justified cry "Forty-one is come again." But
the conjunction of prerogative and revolution is a long way from the radical
constitutionalism of the Levellers and the Good Old Cause; what kind of popular
absolutist, one is entitled to ask, might King Monmouth have turned out to be?
The problem is to explain why Locke rejected the language of his own radical
associates, who continued to argue for frequent parliaments as a constitutional
right on radical-historical grounds.
The Revolution of 1688-9 was accepted by Tories on the grounds that the
ancient constitution had been set aside as an act of necessity rather than of right,
and (or so they struggled to add) a de facto government erected until time should
remedy the situation. It was justified by those whom we shall be calling the
ruling Whigs as an act carried out within the structure of the ancient constitu-
tion, designed to preserve it and legitimated by it. Though these were the argu-
ments of those whom the Revolution enabled to continue as rulers in England,
neither was very complete or satisfactory;44 and as we shall see, Burke and even
Macaulay were still struggling to reconcile them with each other. John Locke,
satisfied by neither argument and none too happy with the revolution taking
shape in 1689, published (but did not admit having written) his Treatises of Gov-
ernment as a service to those who argued that there had been a dissolution of the
government, a reversion of power to the people, and an opportunity for radical
reconstitution. This act gave him a certain place in the continuum of English
radical thinking. There were always those who held — sometimes on Lockean
grounds — that what occurred in 1688—9 had been a dissolution of the regime if
not the government, an election of a monarch by the people, and an affirmation
of a right to do the same again should need arise.45 The Treatises of Government
suitable to the original frame of the government, it cannot be doubted to be the will and act of the
society, whoever permitted or caused them so to do." Ibid., sec. 158.
44
This is the argument of Kenyon, Revolution Principles. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, argues
that perceptible changes in the prerogative were made in consequence of pressure from the more
radical faction she has identified.
45
See Richard Ashcraft and M. M. Goldsmith, "Locke, Revolution Principles and the Formation of
Whig Ideology," HistoricalJournal XXVI, 4 (1983), pp. 773-800. This traces a continuation from
Locke through Defoe of the view that James II had been deposed and replaced by his people.
Occasionally expressed throughout the eighteenth century, it may be identified with that pro-
claimed by Price and attacked by Burke, but needs to be distinguished from the argument about
frequent parliaments and executive corruption emphasized here.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 229

exercised a special appeal in dissenting and nonconformist circles, and a hundred

years later we will find this interpretation of the Revolution passionately debated
between Richard Price on one hand, and on the other Josiah Tucker (who con-
siders Locke the apostle of the radical cause) and Edmund Burke (who does not
mention him at all). What the Second Treatise cannot do is to find Locke a place
in the mainstream of English radicalism: the claim to "frequent parliaments reg-
ularly chosen by the people," which had been made on grounds of both natural
and historical right in the manifestos of the army, the Levellers, and the Good
Old Cause. It was this that had begun to reassert itself about 1675 and was now
being restated by those Goldie has identified in "The Roots of True Whiggism"
- all of them Shaftesbureans, Londoners, and former associates of Locke's - in
language modified by the further claim that Parliament was threatened with
corruption by the executive. At the roots of True Whiggism we find the link
between the Good Old Cause and the eighteenth-century Commonwealthman;
but just as Harrington himself can be connected with the Good Old Cause, so
we shall find the Commonwealth critique of ruling Revolution Whig-
gism taken up and linked with the neo-Harringtonianism of the country Tories.
Radical opposition could be Tory as well as Whig, rural as well as urban; it
would be hard to say as much for the thinking of the Treatises of Government.
Locke, therefore, must be counted a First Whig who never became a True
Whig or a significant contributor to their vocabulary; nor was he an original
member of that "Whig canon" of seventeenth-century writers whom Caroline
Robbins identified as the pantheon of the Commonwealthmen. This will become
evident as we study the next phase of the formation of True or Old Whiggism;
before we do so, however, an attempt must be made to fix his ideological role.
Locke's career as a theorist and literary activist in the 1680s, it is evident, was
very different from what it was in the 1690s, and the anonymous publication of
the Treatises looks like an end rather than a beginning. Within a very short time
he published the Letter Concerning Toleration and the Essay on Human Understanding
(he even admitted authorship of the latter), and it is here, as well as in his
writings on religion and his Reasonableness of Christianity, that his contribution to
Whig culture - to say nothing of his true greatness as a mind - may best be
found. If we adopt the perspective, mentioned earlier, that presents the Revolu-
tion as a move to stop James II from preempting Whig positions, and toleration
as the Whig riposte to indulgence, the two most solid achievements of the Rev-
olution Whigs must seem, first, that they retained Dissenter support and never
lost it to the Jacobites, and second, that following the departure of the nonjurors
they were able to create a latitudinarian episcopate that induced a sufficient num-
ber of the recalcitrant clergy to underwrite them. As the philosopher of tolera-
tion, Locke really was a pillar of the Whig order, which came to pair his name
with that of Hoadly, while the epistemology of the Essay was clearly of incalcu-
lable if ambivalent importance in establishing that religiosity of the sociable man
230 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

that we have seen to be the central theme of the latitudinarian counterrevolu-

tion.46 Here, it may some day be agreed, were Locke's true accomplishments as
an ideologue as well as a philosopher; the Treatises of Government, when recognized
as his, were swept along in the wake of this mighty work in a manner that has
made their radicalism (which was not the radicalism of the next seventy years)
hard to recognize. It was Locke's pupil the third earl of Shaftesbury who thought
his work as a moralist subversive unless carried further in the direction of socia-
bility.

II. From the Financial Revolution to the Scottish

Enlightenment

The next phase in the formation of an opposition ideology may be examined in

the light of several events occurring about 1698: a moment, like 1675 or 1680-
2, when a number of distinguishable threads came together to create a new pat-
tern. As prelude it must be stated that William III, little as he may have reflected
on what he was doing, is a revolutionary actor in the history of British monarchy.
He obliged his new kingdoms to reorganize their military, financial, and political
structures in order to achieve effective participation in continental and imperial
warfare, and this is an important precondition of the formation of Whig oligarchy
at the end of the reign succeeding his own. To Goldie's True Whigs in the
aftermath of the Revolution we need impute no more than disappointment that
features of the Exclusionist program were not being adopted; but the radicals of
1698 confronted the regime of the Junto Whigs and the powerful institutions
that had been built up to conduct the Nine Years' War. The establishment of
the Bank of England in 1694 had laid the foundations of that edifice of public
credit which was to be incessantly debated until well after the French Revolution,
but the most prominent theme of the 1698 polemic was the reduction of Wil-
liam's army. A Scot, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, and two Anglo-Irishmen, John
Toland and John Trenchard, held forth on the vices of a standing army and the
virtues of a militia, and this was to be of significance in the ideological history of
all three kingdoms. Trenchard is a key figure in the history of neo-Harringtonian
thinking; it is becoming usual to present the Scottish Enlightenment as a series
of replies to positions taken by Fletcher; and though Toland did not here write
in an Anglo-Irish context, Viscount Molesworth in Dublin had published his
Account of Denmark and William Molyneux was about to publish his Case of Ire-
land's Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England^1 — a work filled with Lockean
46
A M a r x i s t analysis o f t h e Essay m a y b e found i n N e a l W o o d , The Politics of Locke's Philosophy: A
Social Study of "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (Berkeley, 1 9 8 3 ) .
47
For b o t h these see R o b b i n s , Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, p p . 8 8 — 1 0 8 , 1 3 4 - 4 3 - T h e char-
acter of Irish Whiggism might repay study at even greater length.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 231
doctrine that Locke was obliged to disown and At wood to castigate. The paper
war of 1698 enlarges our subject into a British context and establishes themes
that were to preoccupy the American mind.
The neo-Harringtonian reading of history was given its definitive form in
Fletcher's Discourse of Government in Relation to Militias; the reading with which
the Whig regime was to counter it obtained its first formulation in the reply
Daniel Defoe directed against both Fletcher and Trenchard.48 Fletcher located
the Harringtonian ideal of armed civic virtue in a Gothic and medieval past
whose feudal character he played down; he presented the rise of commerce and
enlightenment at the end of the Middle Ages as phenomena admirable in them-
selves but entailing specialization and the loss of liberty as the freeholders per-
mitted themselves to be defended and governed by professionals, who necessarily
exploited and corrupted them. Defoe asserted that a society built on military
service and tenure was not only feudal but baronial, uncultivated, violent, and
repressive; true freedom was modern and could cnly be found in commercial
society, where the individual might profit by wealth and enlightenment and did
not risk his liberty in paying others to defend and govern himr so long as he
retained parliamentary control of the purse strings. The defense of the Whig
regime was beginning to find the once Tory feudal interpretation of medieval
history usable for its purposes. In this debate neither side made any allusion to
Locke — it is difficult to see why they should have — nor does it appear that Locke
(who was still living) expressed any interest in it. The confrontation of Fletcher
with Defoe supplies an antithesis between virtue and commerce, republicanism
and liberalism, classicism and progressivism. The Old Whigs identified freedom
with virtue and located it in a past; the Modern Whigs identified it with wealth,
enlightenment, and progress toward a future. Around this antithesis, it is not
too much to say, nearly all eighteenth-century philosophy of history can be or-
ganized, though it is obvious that in cultures other than the British, something
other than Whig parliamentarism must be located as the precipitating cause; in
France, perhaps, one could point to the growth of an enlightened court culture,
with philosophic academies and gens de lettres in dialogue with absolute mon-
archy.49 Nor must it ever be forgotten that, as the debate progressed during the
next century, virtually every participant showed himself deeply aware of the val-
ues propounded by the opposing party. There can be no greater mistake than to
turn this debate into a straw man by presenting it as a simple eristic, and nothing
more like a "Whig interpretation" than to render the eighteenth century the
progressive triumph of the Modern Whigs over their opponents.
The terms "Old Whig" and "Modern Whig" appear about this time in the
satirical dialogues of Charles Davenant,50 who was among the first to link the
48
The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 427—36.
49
Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton, N . J . , 1980).
50
The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 4 3 7 - 4 6 .
232 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

growth of standing armies with that of a "monied interest" of investors in the

public funds. Yet Davenant's own claims to be called any kind of Whig are
uncertain, and we are at the point where the debate can no longer be adequately
described as one between ruling Whig politicians and their doctrinaire Old Whig
critics. The drive to disband the army came, after all, from a "country party" led
by that complex and ambivalent figure Robert Harley, and both it and he were
on their way from being something that could be called Whig to being some-
thing that could be called Tory. As the discontent of the "country" (a term that
could bear urban as well as rural meanings) acquired in its growth a plethora of
Jacobite and High Church resentments against everything that had happened
since 1688, we enter that territory in which the opposition of court and country
has to be interwoven with that of Whig and Tory, and to which the historio-
graphical catchphrase "the rage of party" is peculiarly applicable. It is also that
in which the categories Old Whig and Tory begin to penetrate one another. John
Toland claimed in after years that the edition of Harrington he prepared between
1698 and 1700 had been undertaken as a service to Harley. He also dedicated
this idealization of a gentry republic to the mayor, aldermen, and common coun-
cil of the city, praising London as a Venice where Harrington had imagined
England as a Rome.51 Harrington, though he never said so, may have seen trade
as bringing about the emancipation of the freeholders from their lords, but Lon-
don was by now the center of the "monied interest," of which he had never heard.
The field of debate was not simple, and we should not hasten to resolve it.
Toland's role in the militia debate is of less significance than other activities
in which we find him engaged.52 During the years to which his edition of Har-
rington belongs, he wrote a Life of Milton, he partly rewrote and then published
the memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, and he was instrumental in producing the
definitive edition of Sidney's Discourses, to which — as has been pointed out by
Blair Worden, who has reestablished part of Ludlow's authentic text — we had
better pay close critical attention.53 Toland was in short the main actor in creat-
ing what Caroline Robbins has called "the Whig canon" of seventeenth-century
writers venerated by the eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen; to the names
just listed those of Vane, Marvell, Neville, and Nedham were soon to be added.54
But this Whig canon was in fact a republican canon; every name upon it was that
of a Commonwealthman in the sense of a defender of the regicide government, if
not of the regicide itself. To understand its significance we must place its creation
5x
The Political Works of James Harrington, pp. 141-142.
52
Robbins, pp. 125-8; Margaret C. Jacob, "John Toland and the Newtonian Ideology," Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, XXXII (1969), pp. 307-31, and works cited in nn. 18 and
19, this chapter. Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations
(Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
53
Blair W o r d e n , e d . , Edmund Ludlow: A Voycefrom the Watchtower (London, 1978).
54
R o b b i n s , Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, c h a p . I I .
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 233

alongside that of the "Whig interpretation of history," which may be seen taking
shape in the years around 1700. J. P. Kenyon has emphasized how incessantly
Whigs of every stripe from the Exclusionists on were saddled with responsibility
for the judicial murder of Charles I. The only way to escape it was to separate the
parliamentary leaders from the army regicides and construct a vindication of the
men of 1628 and 1641 on the grounds they themselves had alleged: that there
was an ancient constitution and that the actions of Charles I had tended to break
it. James Tyrrell, the friend of Locke, who had joined him in attacking Filmer's
Patriarcha and had encouraged William Petyt to defend the ancient constitution
against The Freeholder's Grand Inquest published with it, seems to have been one
of the first to see the necessity of this strategy. 55 Even the publication in 1702 of
Clarendon's History of the Rebellion did not inhibit its growth; Clarendon himself,
after all, had behaved conformably to the Whig interpretation until the Grand
Remonstrance. From Tyrrell to Rapin de Thoyras, Whig historiography was built
up from the twin foundations of the ancient constitution and a judicious defense
of Eliot, Hampden, and Pym; we all know that the myth proved very potent
indeed. 56 But the "republican canon," built up by Toland and other Common-
weal thmen to the time of Thomas Hollis, by implication both adopted the Whig
interpretation and challenged it. It endorsed the ancient constitution and said
little about the "Norman yoke," but it moved beyond Parliament to Common-
wealth, beyond the antiquity of Parliament to neo-Harringtonian ideas of Gothic
liberty; it also implicitly endorsed the regicide of 1649, from which Whig his-
toriography was a sustained attempt to deflect attention. 57 Toland was the archi-
vist and to some extent the myth maker of English republican theory.
He appears also as a leading activist of radical deism, the promoter in England
and abroad of various secret societies that look like gathered congregations of
illuminist rationalism. One of the dedicatees of his Harrington, the city magnate
Sir Robert Clayton, was a leader of the established structure of English freema-
sonry at a time when Toland was seeking to organize hermetic groups within it.
The ideological implications of this have been worked out by Margaret Jacob. 58
Religious unorthodoxy of any kind had obvious anticlerical connotations, and
these were the years in which the church was most alarmed by the spread of what
it called deism. But there was a profound if elusive difference between a "rational
religion," however undogmatic, that supported the Whig latitudinarian ideal of
55
A full-length study of Tyrrell would be worth having; there is J. W. Gough, "James Tyrrell, Whig
Historian and Friend of John Locke," Historical Journal XIX, 3 (1976), pp. 581-610. His General
History of Englandbegan appearing in 1696.
56
There may well have been more "Tory" than "Whig" historians of seventeenth-century events
during these years; we are dealing with three dominant interpretations.
57
There is overlap here; many Whigs maintained "Calves' Head" attitudes and displayed copies of
Charles I's death warrant, but such endorsements were more private than public.
58
See works cited in nn. 18 and 52, this chapter.
234 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

a rational piety practiced within society and amenable to its authority, and a
"religion of reason," or worse still "of nature," that offered to make the bold
spirit master of its thinking in this world and denied the separateness of the next.
The latter smacked of republicanism - though Toland and his friends were in
retreat from the forum into the lodge — and of enthusiasm, albeit one of prisca
theologia rather than biblical prophecy. There is a skepticism that tolerantly ac-
cepts the clergy and another that angrily proposes to disestablish them. What
this distinction means is made very clear in the histories written by such
thoroughgoing philosophes as Hume and Gibbon, not that even they are unequiv-
ocal about it.

Between the Treaties of Rijswijk (1697) and Utrecht (1713), opposition polemic
in England was directed against the regime that conducted the War of the Span-
ish Succession: a regime presented as a system of public credit and national debt,
maintaining an ever-expanding professional army and parliamentary patronage,
which waged and won great wars abroad but was held to pay for itself by impos-
ing a land tax on the freeholders and gentry. However exact or inexact this de-
scription, the regime bears witness to the profound transformation in British
politics brought about by involvement in the wars against France; the expansion
of imperial power was made possible by devices that tended to the stabilization
of parliamentary rule, and before the political crisis of 1710—15 we see the alli-
ance of Godolphin and Marlborough with the Junto Whigs as anticipating the
Whig oligarchy and the imperial parliamentarism of the Hanoverian reigns. The
polemic against the wartime regime therefore presents itself as continuous with
the polemic against parliamentary oligarchy, and we have looked back to the
beginnings of the Commonwealth tradition to substantiate the Robbins thesis
that this polemic was continuously conducted by Old, True, and Independent
Whig critics of the Whig regime, revealing a sharp schism in Whig political
culture. We shall see that this thesis can be, and indeed must be, maintained;
yet we must now confront the problem that during the reign of Anne the polemic
against the Whig monied interest - the alliance of urban dissent with great
financial and military interests — was conducted by Tories, that is, by adherents
of a country party that claimed to speak for the rural gentry and was moved by
their discontents into High Churchmanship and the borderlands of Jacobitism.
This was territory into which radical deists and republicans of the Toland stripe
could not follow, and old Commonwealthmen and supporters of frequent parlia-
ments are to be found in due course reluctantly endorsing the Septennial Act of
1716 as the only means of rendering the Jacobites harmless.59 We might con-
59
Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 109-10; Sullivan, John Toland, pp. 37, 142,
153—57, doubts Toland's reluctance.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 235

elude from this that the heirs of Shaftesbury and Neville had lost control of their
neo-Harringtonian ideology to its natural proprietors, the self-appointed mouth-
pieces of the country gentry; yet so long as the lineage established in The
Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman stands, this cannot be uncritically accepted.
The relationships between urban and rural, and also (but not interchangeably)
Commonwealth and Tory, elements in opposition polemic and ideology require
a good deal more investigation.
The polemic of Anne's reign was directed against the monied interest: against
a speculative society typified less by merchants - always figures of relative benig-
nity — than by the stockjobbers, political adventurers, and investors in the public
funds whose tense, grubby, avid faces begin to appear in caricature. The gener-
alization has been ventured 60 that since by now property was acknowledged as
the social basis of personality, the emergence of classes whose property consisted
not of land or goods or even bullion, but of paper promises to repay in an unde-
fined future, was seen as entailing the emergence of new types of personality,
unprecedentedly dangerous and unstable. Hence the imagery of Credit as a female
and hysterical figure, and (shared by Addison and Montesquieu) of the bags of
gold that prove to be only bags of wind. 61 To all this the Roman mythology
favored by a number of traditions, including the Harringtonian, offered a gallery
of countertypes: self-mastered, stoic, public, and agrarian, whether called from
the plow like Cincinnatus or retiring like Cicero to Tusculan philosophic leisure;
Cato in all his manifestations the arch figure. The Whigs of the regime, at whom
so much of this was aimed, strove to annex the Roman ideal to their own cause,
and there was plenty in the Ciceronian ethos of negotium and officium that favored
their doing so; Reed Browning has written a remarkable study of "Court Whig"
thought as fundamentally Ciceronian. 62 But what was above all needed was a
defense of urban life and politics as neither an ancient polis nor a faeces Romuli —
a financial and military regime based, as both Fletcher and Defoe had realized,
on a decisive abandonment of the classical (and at the same time Gothic) ideal of
the citizen as armed proprietor, and his replacement by a leisured, cultivated,
and acquisitive man who paid for others to defend and govern him. This could
not be defended in Greco-Roman terms. Rather, it called for an understanding
of commercial modernity, and the vindication of the regime entailed an opposi-
tion between ancient and modern, resembling if not identical with that currently
going on in the "battle of the books." Whig ideology now took a decisive turn
toward social, cultural, and commercial values, one we associate especially with
the name of Addison, among a group of great contending literary figures who
were at the same time party journalists and cultivated essayists, catering in both
capacities to a new urban public of the readers of periodicals. In reply to the Old

60 61
See chap. VI of the present volume. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 4 5 2 - 7 , 475.
62
Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge, La., 1982).
236 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

Whigs and their Tory inheritors there appears a new category, which we may
term that of the "polite Whigs."
The ideal of politeness had first appeared in the Restoration, where it formed
part of the latitudinarian campaign to replace prophetic by sociable religiosity.
This campaign is carried on by Addison, a sound churchman by the new Whig
standards, whose supreme achievement we see as the advancement of a polite
style, and so of a politics of style accompanied by a morality of politeness.63 The
polemic against enthusiasm was to continue for another hundred years - so deep
were the scars of the Puritan interregnum on the governing-class mind — and the
concepts of politeness, manners, and taste were to remain integral parts of its
strategy. It is important to notice, however, that they could be directed at other
targets. Satire against curmudgeonly old dons out of Anthony Wood could easily
become polemic against Oxford clerical Toryism, while across the Channel the
deist philosophes were seeking to substitute manners for religion as the key to the
history of mankind. In Whig England, moreover, Addisonian politeness had a
further set of adversaries. It could be used against the uncouth virtue of the
Spartans and Romans — of Cato the Elder, with his distrust of all philosophers —
being exalted by the neo-Harringtonian critics of the regime, and against the
radical deists with whom some of them still associated. Politeness and enlighten-
ment were irenic, established, and oligarchic ideals, capable of being employed
against Puritan, Tory, and republican alike and of making them look curiously
similar.
Placed in a counter-Harringtonian context, the ethos of politeness is seen to
make an appeal to that historical movement discussed by both Fletcher and De-
foe, in which the rise of commerce and culture had led to the replacement of the
armed citizen by the leisured taxpayer under parliamentary government. But the
exaltation of politeness is not just a way of saying that the acquisition of culture
is worth the price; in the Spectator essays, politeness becomes an active civilizing
agent. By observation, conversation, and cultivation, men and women are brought
to an awareness of the needs and responses of others and of how they appear in
the eyes of others; this is not only the point at which politeness becomes a highly
serious practical morality, reinforced by an obviously Lockean epistemology, al-
though just at this point Shaftesbury thought Lockean doctrine needed to be
enlarged by a doctrine of sympathy. It is also the point at which Addison begins
to comment on the structure of English society and the reconciliation of its diverse
"interests." In the Spectator circle, Sir Roger the country gentleman and Sir
Andrew the urban merchant meet and polish one another, and Mr. Spectator
comments on the merits and shortcomings of each. His observation is his prac-
63
Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal: In the Market Place, on the
Hustings, in the Pulpit (Providence, R.I., 1971) remains a convenient summary of Addisonian ide-
ology. See also James Leheny's introduction to his edition of The Freeholder (Oxford, 1979).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 237

tice; by observing his friends he heightens their awareness of self and other, and
this sociable role is more important, both morally and socially, than any he could
play as a politically engaged activist.
The Spectator circle also stands for what was coming to be called "the Town,"
the leisured urban environment spreading west from the old centers of West-
minster and London as the result of the growth of the parliamentary aristocracy
and the rentier classes; it was not the ferociously expanding London (also some-
times called "the Town") of Defoe, Hogarth, and Fielding. It is the setting in
which gentleman and merchant meet to learn politeness, and at the end of the
later Freeholder essays the loutish Tory squire, the Foxhunter, is brought to Town
and taught the blessings of trade and the Protestant succession - which had
intervened in emblematic form in the Vision of Credit at the outset of the Spec-
tator series, and had caused the bags of wind to be filled with gold again. The
Town was replacing the court as the meeting point of country and city; Macau-
lay's famous chapter on the bumpkin backwardness of the rural gentry and clergy
is simply an extension of the Addisonian doctrine that an urbane and suburban
Whiggism was necessary to teach church and country the culture without which
they would be unable to exercise their liberty. Whiggism of the polite kind had
no need of the Puritan, Tory, or republican virtues; the ideological importance
of secular culture was a Whig, and paradoxically also an Anglican, creation.
There was as we shall see a Scottish component in Macaulay's thinking. Polite
Whiggism gains meaning when read in the context of Defoe's reply to Fletcher
of Saltoun, and Nicholas Phillipson, George Davie, and others have developed
an interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment that locates its beginnings in the
need to find alternatives to the values expressed in Fletcher's speeches opposing
the form taken by the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707.64 There are two respects in
which the union is crucial to the formation of the Whig regime of the eighteenth
century. It originated in an urgent Scottish desire to take part in the economic
growth fostered by the new financial and military power of the southern king-
dom, and because it took the form of an incorporation of the two parliaments, it
ensured that the managers of patronage both controlled the politics of Scotland
and enlarged the ministerial interest at Westminster. This accounts for the bitter
dislike of Scotsmen in British affairs expressed by such critics of the coming
oligarchy as Jonathan Swift, Charles Churchill, and Thomas Jefferson. Andrew
Fletcher, however, based his opposition to the incorporating union on values
more simply civic-humanist and neo-Harringtonian. He ardently desired mod-
^Nicholas Phillipson^ "Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment," in City and Society in
the Eighteenth Century, ed. P. Fritz and D. Williams (Toronto, 1973); "Culture and Society in the
Eighteenth-Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment," in The
University in Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (Princeton, N.J., 1974); "The Scottish Enlightenment,"
in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge, 1981). G.
E. Davie, The Scottish Enlightenment (London, 1981).
238 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

ernization of the Scottish economy — he had after all been a promoter of the
Darien Scheme, the equivalent of the English South Sea Bubble - but he no less
ardently desired that the moral consequences of commerce and culture should be
controlled by the disciplined virtue that only the maintenance of autonomous
political and military institutions could preserve for Scotland. He therefore de-
sired a federative union, with a regional parliament and militia. The program
was politically foredoomed, but it is the contention of Phillipson and Davie that
the values it expressed enjoyed such resonance that some alternative to them must
be found. Scottish lay and clerical thinkers therefore set about denning a morality
in which virtue might be shown arising from sources in society, culture, and
commerce, and existing independently of the practice of autonomous politics.
The provincial elites of postunion Edinburgh, it is contended - juristic, land-
owning, mercantile, academic, clerical - can be seen founding a series of evi-
dently Addisonian societies, dedicated to the furtherance of sociability, conver-
sation, and moral and economic improvement. Though the combination is un-
mistakably Whig, it is the emphasis on the last that is distinctively Scottish;
because in Scotland there was no Tory landed interest, but only Jacobites, High-
landers, Borderers, and a past remembered as more barbarous than it probably
had been,65 the Whig belief that conversation and commerce go together merged
with a perception of economic improvement as immediately superimposed upon
feudal, agnatic, and hunter-warrior states of society. This perception sensibly
quickened after the Highland rebellion of 1745; but long before that, Addiso-
nian, latitudinarian, Arminian, and Lockean theories of morality, religion, and
sociability found themselves in a more direct confrontation than could possibly
occur in England with the heavily armored Calvinism of the late Covenanting
period. Here too the collision between modernity and tradition was more acute
than anything known in the southern kingdom, though the rise of the Moderate
faction among the Edinburgh clergy did much to cushion it; and finally, the
rather rapid advent of an enlightened morality merged with a Scottish tradition
of study in the Roman civil law, itself turning, under Arminian influences in the
Dutch universities, which Scotsmen attended in numbers, toward the analysis of
jurisprudence in terms of manners, morals, and sociability. So distinctively Scot-
tish is this last that Duncan Forbes and Peter Stein have found it possible to
describe the Scottish Enlightenment in terms of the modernization of juris-
prudence and ethics, with minimal reference to the need to overcome a neo-
Harringtonian critique of the Whig commercial order.66 Indeed, the relative
absence in Scotland of anything like the conjunction of Tory and Commonwealth-
65
Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 14'/70-1625 (Toronto, 1981).
66
Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1976); Peter Stein, Legal Evolution: The
Story of an Idea (Cambridge, 1980). See the present writer's "Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch
Philosophers," in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge, 1983).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 239

man in England may raise the question whether one Fletcher of Saltoun is enough
to make a republican antitradition. It can be affirmed that the Moderate clergy
and Whig lay elites of Edinburgh and elsewhere developed a powerful series of
theses regarding the history of society, the psychological foundations of morals
and aesthetics, and in due course political economy. These formed an ideological
vindication of the Union of 1707, and when they moved south with David Hume,
they took the form that Forbes has called "scientific Whiggism" 67 and that in
England encountered a diversity of antagonists.

From the Hanoverian succession of 1714 we are accustomed to date the rather
rapid establishment of the "Whig oligarchy" or "supremacy," which may have
been the outcome of long-term social processes but on the evenementiel level ap-
pears to us — as it did to the next generation — associated with such highly
specific legislative measures as the Septennial Act of 1716 and the ultimately
abandoned yet significant Peerage Bill of 1719. The lengthening of the duration
of parliaments made possible a series oipactes de famille that were rapidly to make
contested elections a good deal less common in counties and even in boroughs;
we tend to see this as the effective disfranchisement of the borough electorates
which for so much of the preceding century it had been the inclination of the
gentry to strengthen, involve, and enlarge. The shrinkage of local influence could
only weaken those families excluded from government patronage, and even zpacte
de famille that might preserve a seat in Tory hands paid a price for it in the loss
of ability to challenge a government by forcing a contest. Stamped with the
suspicion of Jacobitism and demoralized by the loss of their leaders, the Tory
gentry so conspicuous in 1709—14 rapidly dwindled into an authentically Jaco-
bite rump of uncertain size, or were forced to make their peace with a series of
Whig patronage masters if they desired to exhibit anything more than the passive
virtue of independent country gentlemen. This perception of politics 68 has been
challenged by twentieth-century research, which queries the extent to which pa-
tronage was centralized in a few identifiable hands, and by more recent works
that maintain the active role of the Tories until 1745 or 1756; but it was quite
widely shared by observers and critics of the Hanoverian regime in all three
kingdoms. There was believed to exist a Whig "oligarchy" or "supremacy," the

67
F o r b e s , Hume's Philosophical Politics; for t h e s h a d e d differences b e t w e e n " s c e p t i c a l " a n d "scientific
W h i g g i s m , " see discussion later in this section.
68
T h e representative works on this subject are P l u m b , Growth of Political Stability; W . A . Speck,
Stability and Strife: England 1714-1760 ( C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1977); H . T . D i c k i n s o n , Liberty and
Property: Political Ideologies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977). T h e t w o latter a u t h o r s
advocate the view that a court-country replaced a Tory-Whig polarity about 1714.
240 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

effective dictatorship of a single if minimally organized party using as its instru-

ment a parliament so far sovereign that it had prolonged its own duration without
reference to the electorate.
The alliance of forces that established the Whig regime was that which had
conducted the War of the Spanish Succession and had been attacked with all the
resources of the polemic against a monied interest said to use war as a means of
expanding its credit, its patronage, and its parliamentary and military power.
Much of this polemic could be carried on even when the new oligarchy had
adopted a policy of peace and French alliance; even though the South Seas Com-
pany was a Tory foundation with many Tory directors, the polemic against the
monied interest could be directed against the Whig ministers who intervened to
save the public credit. This polemic could be Old Whig as easily as it could be
Tory, and there now appeared to give it an effective voice that founding father
among Commonwealthmen John Trenchard, who until his death in 1724 con-
ducted Cato's Letters and The Independent Whig, with Thomas Gordon as his coad-
jutor and his successor.69 The former journal took parliamentary corruption as its
chief target; the latter was directed against the alliance of Whig politicians with
the established church and was anticlerical enough to be widely read and imitated
in America, especially when one colony or another was active in opposing the
threat of a crown-supported episcopacy.70 It was also translated into French and
published by Holbach; deists and Old Whigs continued to figure in the European
Enlightenment.
The greatest of all polemics, however, against the regime consolidated and
typified by Sir Robert Walpole was Tory to the extent that it was orchestrated
by Bolingbroke, and High Church and even Catholic to the extent that it in-
volved Swift, Atterbury, and Pope. There are many problems here crucial to the
understanding of eighteenth-century ideological history. What so outspoken a
deist as Bolingbroke had been doing at the head of an Anglican party in Anne's
reign is a question that seems to transcend any answer (however justified) in terms
of political duplicity. The grandfather of Edward Gibbon was a city Tory and
South Seas Company director, and his family at Putney seems to have included
two men of intellect: William Law, the nonjuring mystic, and David Mallet, the
deist and Bolingbroke's literary executor.71 This sharp dualism — oligarchy makes
69
For them see Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 115-24; Pocock, The Machiavel-
lian Moment, pp. 467—77; Isaac F. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in
the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p p . 2 4 3 - 5 1 .
70
See Milton M. Klein, ed., The Independent Reflector . . . by William Livingston and others (Cambridge,
Mass., 1963). The Holbach translation is entitled L'Esprit du Clerge and is dated 1765; see Frank
Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).
71
Michel Baridon, Gibbon et le My the de Rome: Histoire et Ideologie au Siecle des Lumieres (these presentee
devant l'Universite de Paris VII; Lille, Service de Reproduction des Theses, 1975), vol. I, pp. 2 3 -
6, 39-42; Patricia Craddock, Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters (Baltimore, 1982), pp. 8 -
9, 24, 36, 51, 87, 126.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 241

strange bedfellows — may be associated with another, inherent in the character of

the Craftsman, conducted by Bolingbroke and Pulteney, and in the Dissertation
upon Parties and Remarks on the History of England, works by Bolingbroke that
grew out of it. These were recognized by contemporaries as constituting a country
campaign, a polemic designed to drive Walpole from power by mobilizing a
"public opinion" that should include the independent country gentlemen still
supposed to be an essential component of the political order. As such, they mar-
shalled all the neo-Harringtonian arguments familiar to us since at least 1675:
the danger of an executive ascendancy employing patronage andfinanceas means
of corruption; the need for Parliament to be independent of the executive, and to
this end composed of independent proprietors; the importance of landed even
more than mercantile property in ensuring personal and parliamentary indepen-
dence; and the need to return to the principles of an ancient constitution in which
all these truisms had been institutionalized. Bolingbroke also, in The Idea of a
Patriot King, engaged in the "Leicester House" maneuver becoming frequent with
politicians out of power: He imagined a successor to the throne who should
himself take the lead in rendering Parliament independent of ministe-
rial and oligarchic control. However unimportant this "idea" may have been in
shaping the conduct of George III before or after 1760, it played a real part in
shaping others' perceptions of his conduct.
But the public opinion to which this printed polemic was addressed was nec-
essarily made up of those in a position to read books and journals printed in
London, and though an increasingly effective circulation industry might convey
these views to a country public for whom they were intended, we must suppose
that they had an urban public as well. This in turn might consist largely of recent
arrivals, seasonal visitors, and suburban residents drawn to the Town by politics,
business, and pleasure, while retaining much of the country outlook they had
brought with them; but under the conditions presupposed by the thesis of Whig
oligarchy, we must also take account of a longer-established city population,
whose participation in politics and satisfaction by it were no longer what they
had been in the days before the Septennial Act. To the real or fancied exclusion
of country gentry by parliamentary oligarchs and the monied interest, we have
to add that of borough electorates effectively disfranchised after 1714, and the
crucial problem we now face is that of the relative significance of the ideologies
generated by these two groups or offered to them.
Marxist and marxisant historians retain an apparently ineradicable allegiance to
the idea of the rising bourgeoisie or middle class, without which, it seems -
though one may want to ask why - not only their classical system but their entire
way of thinking would disintegrate. They feel obliged to explain all social op-
position or radical thought in preindustrial eighteenth-century Britain — unless
it can be dismissed as "traditional" or outright "reactionary" — as the ideology of
242 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

a bourgeoisie, to be contrasted with that of an aristocracy that must be shown to

have been feudal, paternalist, or hierarchical; this bourgeois radicalism must fur-
ther be integrated with a "liberal" possessive individualism associated as closely
as possible with the name of Locke, who has become a necessary actor in their
scheme of things. Historians of this persuasion have been offended by the sug-
gestion that radicalism in the eighteenth century consisted largely of a polemic
against a system of public credit dominated by a landed aristocracy, that it was
conducted largely in the name of classical-republican and agrarian-military val-
ues, and that it was in the defense of the Whig aristocracy that an ethos of
commercial individualism was first elaborated. Although none of these proposi-
tions would have disturbed Marx and Engels as much as they do their succes-
sors, 72 the latter have cast about for ways of depriving them of their force. Isaac
F. Kramnick, 73 for whom every diminution of the role of Locke is an implicit
attack on Marx and every criticism of the concept of bourgeois ideology an attack
on that of ideology itself, has hit upon the strategy of representing all radicalism
of the foregoing kind as reflecting the consciousness of an excluded country gen-
try, and all claims for republican virtue and independence as reflecting this gen-
try's "nostalgia" for an ordered, hierarchical, and paternalist society in which
others were dependent on them. The republican critique thus shifted unthreaten-
ingly into the reactionary column, the way is clear for the emergence in the late
eighteenth century of an essentially Lockean "bourgeois radicalism," a term
Kramnick reiterates with all the fervor and unction of one testifying to the old-
time religion. A more sophisticated version of the same thesis may be that put
forward by E. P. Thompson, who accepts the view that the governing classes
become deeply divided during a period with 1714 as one of its turning points;
Thompson seems to contend, however, that the excluded fragment offered an
ideology of paternal protection in opposition to the governing fragment's tech-
niques of patronage and direct control. 74 Both these contentions operate by rep-
resenting country and Commonwealth criticisms of the Whig order as the ideo-
logical tools of a Tory gentry, and by minimizing that duality of Tory and Old

72
As is m a d e clear at various points in R . S. Neale, Class in English History (Oxford, 1981).
73
K r a m n i c k , Bolingbroke and His Circle; "Religion and Radicalism: English Political Theory in t h e
Age of R e v o l u t i o n , " Political Theory V , 4 (1977), p p . 5 0 3 - 3 4 , and "Republican Revisionism R e -
visited," American Historical Review LXXXV'II, 3 (1982), p p . 629—64. Despite some kind words in
the first footnote of t h e latter article, I consider t h e alliterative incantation that forms its title a
clear indication that an orthodoxy is about t o be reestablished; t h e word "revisionism" is synony-
m o u s w i t h heresy. Joyce O . Appleby likewise tends t o regard any diversion of emphasis from liberal
capitalism as deconstructive of both English and American history; see her " W h a t is still American
in t h e Political Philosophy of T h o m a s Jefferson?" William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., X X X I X , 2
(1982), pp. 287-309- It was not and is not my intention to furnish or to demolish answers to that
question.
74
E. P. Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" Social His-
tory III, 2 (1978), pp. 133-65.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 243
Whig versions of the same argument around which this essay is being built.
Meanwhile a heavy blow at the nostalgia thesis, and to some extent at the
oligarchy thesis on which it rests, has been struck in the recent work of Eveline
Cruickshanks, Linda Colley, and J. C. D. Clark.75 These authors contend that
the Tory party did not decline and disappear by rapid stages after 1714, but
remained a stubborn, active, and surprisingly radical political alternative until
some time after 1745. Though they are not uniformly in agreement, they take
seriously in varying degrees the contention that the Tories of these decades were
actually, or in a high state of potentiality, Jacobite, or alternatively that the
condition of politics was such that no statesman could afford to act as if Jacobi-
tism were anything but a serious threat. Dr. Clark, the most methodologically
polemical of these three scholars, further offers to carry on a version of the Namier
thesis — he is critical of Namier, but for not being Namierite enough — that
insists, first, that eighteenth-century politics were oligarchic, at least in the sense
that the game of high politics is played according to rules intelligible only to
those playing it; and second, that in the politics of oligarchy - indeed in all
politics insofar as they are high politics - ideology and the rhetoric of issue,
principle, and abuse have little or no place. A consequence for his argument is
that though he indicates some scorn for the concept of Whig oligarchy, this scorn
is reserved for those - as they might be G. O. Trevelyan or E. P. Thompson -
who employ the term as one of condemnation and identify oligarchy with corrup-
tion.76 He insists a Voutrance on the oligarchic character of politics and merely
defers the advent of oligarchy without party from the years after 1714 to those
after 1745, a move of greater narrative than interpretative importance (Clark
usefully insists on the superiority of narrative over interpretation).77 The return
of Tories and Jacobites to center stage, supposedly the principal modification of
the accounts of history given by Namier and Plumb, thus tends paradoxically to
reinforce these historians' accounts of what eighteenth-century politics were like
as a structure.
Clark lays great emphasis on the point that the players in the game of high
politics are seldom much activated by their perceptions of the general issues
implicit in the game's existence, least of all by the issues apparent to those who
are critical of the existence of high politics or of high politics in their existing
form. To the extent to which the players constitute an effective oligarchy, they
can afford to ignore ideological issues, especially those used to question whether
oligarchy should exist at all; if the issues, having been articulated, are admitted
to a role in the game, they are admitted only by the action of one or more of the
75
Eveline Cruickshanks, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the '45 (London, 1979); Linda Colley,
In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714-60 (Cambridge, 1982); J. C. D. Clark, The Dynamics
of Change: The Crisis of the 1750s and English Party (Cambridge, 1982).
76 77
Clark, Dynamics of Change, p. 458, n. 1. Ibid., pp. 1 8 - 1 9 .
244 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

players, themselves motivated by their playing of the game. When issues and
ideology appear in eighteenth-century politics, they tend to acquire a local, tac-
tical, and oligarchic significance; some oligarch allows them to be heard, for
purposes of his own. We should study this kind of perlocutionary force, rather
than the ideological implications of the generalized utterances we hear.
To the extent to which this is true - and it must be true to a high degree if
the term "oligarchy" is to be appropriate - two consequences follow. We must
beware of supposing that the actors in high politics were motivated by the things
they said, and we must beware of supposing that the categories of ideological
rhetoric necessarily furnish either reliable description or reliable evaluation of the
way the institution of high politics worked. The historian of ideology, however,
is not necessarily making either of these suppositions, though there is a conven-
tion of taking it for granted that he is. Clark stresses that the game was extraor-
dinarily hard for the players to describe, even to one another — in the words of
John Nance Garner, "politics is funny" — and that therefore the language of the
spectators was bound to be inadequate as a description of the game. He quotes
Dodington78 on the difference between bystanders, who can see only the backs of
the cards, and players, who can see the markings. But those excluded from a
game in which they are being governed are talking not merely about how the
game is being played, but also about the fact that they are being excluded from
it;79 the fact that their awareness of the former is false does not mean that they
have not something to say about the latter, or that what they have to say (even if
false) is not an effective way of acting on their exclusion. Clark is not absolutist,
any more than were the politicians he studies (though it seems only a matter of
time before some genius informs us that absolute monarchy reached its height
in England during the reign of George II). He does not think that the language
world of high politics was altogether hermetic and unaccountable; it was a shib-
boleth with the men of letters they read that the ultimate foundation of govern-
ment was in opinion. He very rightly emphasizes that outside the closed circle of
high politics, there were social areas in which people were intensely aware of
what might be going on within the circle and employed, in the attempt to
characterize it, language and terminology in many ways drawn from the game
itself; nor does Clark altogether preclude the possibility that this language might
in turn counterpenetrate the circle and be employed within it. He quotes from
78
Ibid., p. 11.
79
"The minds of leading Whigs," says Clark (ibid., p. 4), "were dominated not by a canon of Whig
doctrine drawn from the great seventeenth-century tradition - Harrington, Tyrrell, Moyle, Tren-
chard, Toland, Sidney and the rest - but by the practical details and daily techniques of their
trades." The whole point of post-Robbins writing has been that this is true. The "canon of doctrine"
was used by discontented Whigs to indict leading Whigs and the practice of their "trades" — and
occasionally by leading Whigs to embarrass one another. Dr. Clark denies what has not been
significantly affirmed.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 245
governing-class sources well aware that there was such a thing as popular opinion
and another such thing as press agitation, and although he shows that the rulers
looked on both as irrelevant and offensive — imprudent and unnecessary corporate
venalities — except insofar as they could be created and managed (as they often
were) by high politicians, he displays his sources' awareness that they might not
always be able to manage them.80 This is why eighteenth-century fears of revo-
lution regularly took a Catilinarian form; some member of the inner circle might
betray his class. In the end, as we shall see, Catiline was a paper tiger; something
else happened. But the criticism of oligarchy is not to be studied as a description
of oligarchy but rather as one of its products, one furthermore that oligarchy does
not always succeed in absorbing and that may in the long run have something to
do with how oligarchy is modified. At this point narrative recedes and interpre-
tation must step forward.
There is a rhetoric by whose means Outs - who are insiders - become Ins;
there is a rhetoric that outsiders use to comment on insiders and on how the latter
keep them out. In Hanoverian England these rhetorics not infrequently coin-
cided, but even when it is necessary to distinguish between them - as Clark
wishes to emphasize — the rhetoric of outsiders is worth studying as part of their
political culture, whether or not it is the speech of men in power. In that society
we note a rhetoric used by Tory oppositions, highly coincident as regards content
with a rhetoric, often Old Whig in derivation and audience, that may have given
voice to the discontent of urban populations diminished in importance by the
Septennial Act. We encounter yet again the problem that Tory language, which
ought to have been and often was High Church and Jacobite, ought not to have
been but often was radical and republican, Commonwealth as well as country.
There are Jacobite manifestos of 1745 that sound not unlike Monmouth's mani-
festos of 1685.81 Indeed, Linda Colley, in a lecture published independently
of her book, has contended that the story of "English radicalism before Wilkes"
is to be found in the continuity of Toryism between 1714 and 1760.82 But it is
an essential part of the argument that this Toryism was if anything more urban
than rural, that without ceasing to ascribe discontent to elements of the country
gentry it gave a voice to those city and borough populations who found that the
great financiers and the parliamentary oligarchs were depriving them of power.

80
Clark, ibid., pp. 3-4, 12-15. See in particular p. 12, where a pamphleteer writes, "It is the
controversy itself which is the SIN."
81
F. J. McLynn, "Issues and Motives in the Jacobite Rising of 1745," The Eighteenth Century: Theory
and Interpretation XXIII, 2 (1982), pp. 97-133. Mr. McLynn's facts may be studied to advantage
by those who do not accept his conclusions.
82
Linda Colley, "Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes," Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, 5th ser., 31 (1981), pp. 1-20. See also Robert M. Zaller, "The Continuity of
British Radicalism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Eighteenth-Century Life VI, 2-3
(1981), pp. 17-38.
246 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

Marie Peters has reminded us how much of the basis of William Pitt's London
popularity was Tory and how many of these Tories joined in opposition with such
West Indian plantation owners as the Beckford brothers and Sir John Phillips;83
anything less nostalgic, hierarchic, or paternalist than a West India London ald-
erman of the 1750s would be hard indeed to imagine. Marxists of the simpler
kind will at this point toss their usual double-headed penny and proclaim that
insofar as Tory rhetoric spoke for the country opposition it was nostalgic (so they
were right after all), and insofar as it spoke for the urban opposition it was
bourgeois (so they were right after all). The difficulty about this move is that it
does not tell us why the same rhetoric served to articulate opposite systems of
values, and this cannot be done by appealing to the common sophism that it does
not matter what people say because the Marxist knows what they mean. Those of
us who believe not only that people's language articulates their experience, but
also that it has something to tell us about what that experience was, will have to
resume our researches. Meanwhile it is clear that if a country-Commonwealth
language could articulate urban discontents, there was less need to wait for a
Lockean individualist language in which to do it; what role a Lockean language
might play remains to be seen. It is also clear that if discontented groups in
country and borough society chose to employ republican, classical, and nostalgic
(meaning past-oriented) language in attacking an oligarchy of great landowners
and great investors, a modernist, commercial, and polite language might be
employed (as we have begun to see it was) in defense of the Whig aristocratic
order. The perception goes with another, well known to Marx himself: that great
landowners were often highly effective capitalist investors. We can see therefore
that if there was "bourgeois" criticism of the Whig aristocracy, it might well
include criticism of their capitalist behavior; but we cannot add that defense of
the aristocracy was equally "bourgeois" without emptying the word of all useful
meaning (if it has any). Our investigation must at this point turn once more to
the relations of "ancient" to "modern" in mid-century polemic, and in particular
to the character of Whig modernism.

Bolingbroke and the Craftsman had argued in defense of an ancient constitution,

which had ensured the independence of legislative from executive and to which a
return must be made to protect the legislative and those whom it represented
from reduction to a corrupting dependence. The argument could be made to
support a demand for return to more frequent parliaments, and it looked back to
a neo-Harringtonian past of proprietors armed and assembling to assert their
83
Marie C. Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years'
War (Oxford, 1980).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 247

liberty. In reply, Walpole's defenders had argued that liberty was not ancient
but modern, and that the past was feudal, not free. It followed that the consti-
tution contained no principles to which return could be made and that its spirit
was either pragmatic and empirical, or modern and progressive.84 The latter
argument had been anticipated by Defoe with his contention that liberty ap-
peared only as proprietors emerged from feudal subordination and acquired through
trade control over the movement of their own goods; at this point Defoe could
have appealed to Locke, though there seems to be little evidence that he did. But
as the oligarchy acquired control of the executive and the power to exercise a
parliamentary sovereignty of which the Septennial Act was a signal expression, it
appropriated the interpretation of history that the Charles II Tory Brady had once
used to affirm royal sovereignty in the face of Parliament, and employed it to
nullify the arguments with which the Queen Anne Tory Bolingbroke was chal-
lenging parliamentary politics in the name of the independent proprietorship -
in city, one wants to add, as well as country. The defense of oligarchy and sov-
ereignty went hand in hand with that of commercial society.
A problem that assumed prominence as part of the Walpolean polemic and
counterpolemic was that of the relation between political regimes and the arts.
Walpole was "Bob, the poets' foe"; nearly all the great writers of the age were
his enemies, 85 and part of their extraordinarily obsessive presentation of him as a
medley of clown and tyrant, Sejanus and Tiberius, was the contention that as
virtue became corrupt under his control of politics, the arts lost integrity and
language itself lost meaning. There is complexity and paradox here. On the one
hand the qualities that the arts were thought in danger of losing were the "mod-
ern" virtues of clarity, order, and good taste; on the other, the danger stemmed
from an alleged loss of the "ancient" and Roman virtues of political indepen-
dence, liberty, and self-mastery. We find reason to suppose that the apocalyptic
triumph of nonsense over language at the end of Pope's Dunciad has something
to do with a society dominated by speculators in paper promises to repay which
will never be made good before the end of time; if property is the foundation of
personality, unreal property (in which nothing is owned except meaningless words)
makes personalities unreal and their words meaningless. Pape Satan, pape Satan
aleppe! Against this the image presented is that of Roman order, although the
imagery stresses retirement from the corrupt city more than activity in a city
whose virtue is to be restored.
84
This point has been adequately dealt with by Kramnick, Dickinson, Zaller, and other writers cited.
85
Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature 1722-1742 (Lincoln,
Nebr., 1976); Maynard P. Mack's, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry
of Pope (Toronto, 1969) is the established interpretation of Pope's perception of literature as oppo-
sition. The possibility that Pope's political writing had a positively Jacobite character is advanced
by Howard Erskine-Hill, "Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in his Time," Eighteenth-Century
Studies XV, 2 (1981-2), pp. 123-48.
248 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

Yet the corruption of virtue was a concept carrying strong agrarian, anticom-
mercial, and republican implications, and if we return, as recent Pope scholarship
has been doing, to the hypothesis of a strong crypto-Jacobite component in the
polemic against Walpole, the dualities of eighteenth-century opposition are once
more made manifest. Furthermore, the proposition that the arts were being cor-
rupted and destroyed in a speculative Whig society was hard to reconcile with
the thesis, put forward by Fletcher and adopted by Defoe in 1698, that the
growth of the arts was part of the growth of commercial society, and partook of
both its benignant and its malignant characteristics. To say, as David Hume did
in an early essay, that under Walpole "trade had flourished, liberty declined, and
learning gone to ruin"86 was to beg the question, posed by Hume and other Scots
in later writings, whether trade and learning did not flourish together, thus
rendering the nature of liberty problematic. We have so far considered politeness,
and consequently the arts, as features of an Addisonian Whig ideology; it was a
paradox characteristically Humean that "the first polite prose we have was written
by a man who is still alive (N.: Dr. Swift)."87 The paradox for which Swift stood,
however, was that in attacking Walpole polite letters might be attacking the
forces that had cultivated them.
There was a classical republican and humanist reply to the polite contention:
that the arts, being of the nature of rhetoric, couldflourishonly under conditions
of public liberty and must decline under tyranny or corruption. Tacitus had
always been an authoritative source for this argument, and Thomas Gordon's
translation of Tacitus, which won him some European reputation, seems to have
been employed by d'Alembert in his examination of the condition of letters in
the ancien regime.88 It is here that we encounter the problem of Augustanism.
Voltaire in the Siecle de Louis XIV had argued what would certainly be a "modern"
thesis if read in Whig conditions, namely, that the great periods in the history
of the arts had all occurred under strong manipulative rulers - Pericles, Augus-
tus, the Medici, Louis himself — because they required peace, prosperity, and
patronage and must be bought at the price of authority. In calling Hanoverian
England "Augustan" we implicitly accept Voltaire's thesis, acquainted though
he was with Bolingbroke and Pope; we imply that the artsflourishedunder Whig
oligarchy and ignore the passionate asseverations of the wits that Walpole brought

86
Hume, "The Character of Sir Robert Walpole," Philosophical Works, ed. T. H. Green and T. H.
Grose (London, 1882), vol. IV, p. 396. This essay was subsequently withdrawn.
87
Hume, "Of Civil Liberty," Philosophical Works, ed. Green and Grose (1875 edition), vol. Ill, p.
159.
88
Orest A. Ranum, "D'Alembert, Tacitus and the Political Sociology of Despotism," Transactions of
the Fifth International Congress on the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1980), sec. V, pp. 5 4 7 - 5 8 . For an
enlightened nobleman who ranked Gordon with Algernon Sidney, see Franco Venturi, "Le Adven-
ture del Generale Henry Lloyd," Rivista Storica Italiana XCI, 2-3 (1979), pp. 369-433, esp. p.
429.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 249

them to the point of death. Howard Weinbrot has found that in the England we
call "Augustan" the image formed of Augustus himself is preponderantly nega-
tive and Tacitean; he is less the friend of Maecenas than the predecessor of Tiber-
ius (and by implication of Walpole). Virgil himself does not escape blame, or the
imputation of decadence.89
Nevertheless, Tacitus and Voltaire between them posed an awkward problem
in the politics of culture under a commercial oligarchy. If the arts did not decline,
did it follow that they could only flourish, in conditions restrictive of liberty and
virtue? Rousseau's answer we know; it lies at the end of nearly every avenue
opened by this question. More immediately, the first step in seeking a way out
of the dilemma must be to find means of asserting that commerce and culture,
prosperity, politeness, and the progress of the arts, themselves constituted modes
of liberty and virtue that remained valid even under a governo stretto. Even repub-
lican theory might be enlisted in this enterprise; since the wars of the Maritime
Powers with France, Englishmen had been acquainted with the idea, which Dutch
writers had expressed before them, that the first republics had been trading cities
asserting the freedom of the seas against Cretan thalassocracies and Persian em-
pires. 90 Rhodes and Corinth might be set up instead of Sparta and Rome, and if
the end result had been Athenian empire or Venetian oligarchy, Athens and
Venice presented their own images of liberty. In mid-century Britain, however,
the leading role in the identification of liberty with commercial culture was taken
by Scots engaged, as we have seen, in the search for modes of freedom and virtue
that could grow in the space left by a forsaken political autonomy. We encounter
here forms of Whiggism not exclusively shaped by confrontation with the Tory-
republican mixture that constituted opposition ideology in England.
Walpole was pulled down by forces combining country discontents and urban
bellicosity, but the years succeeding his fall witnessed no revival of patriot virtue,
merely the unencouraging rise of the Pelhams. The great age of literary satire
seemed to have ended, and if there is a period of English history without signif-
icant ideological dispute it may have been the late 1740s and early 1750s. 91 In
Scotland, however, the decade was punctuated by a mainly Highland Jacobite
rebellion and a renewed effort to impose economic modernization on the moun-
89
Howard K. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in Augustan England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Prince-
ton, N.J., 1978).
90
Charles Davenant was an English expositor of this view; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp.
4 3 7 - 8 . For the Dutch, see E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican
Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Assen, 1980). It is tenable — to say no more — that the British
nations were idiosyncratic in owning a rhetoric both republican and agrarian. See Pocock, "The
Problem of Political Thought in the Eighteenth Century: Patriotism and Politeness," with com-
ment by E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier and E. H. Kossman, Theoretische Geschiedenis IX, 1 (1982), pp.
3-36.
91
See, however, Maurice Goldsmith, "Faction Detected: Ideological Consequences of Robert Wal-
pole's Decline and Fall," History LXIV, 1 (1979), pp. 1-19.
250 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

tains: an episode that served to intensify awareness of the historically contingent

character of the Scottish union with England and of commercial society in gen-
eral. Southward-facing Scots, like David Hume and Tobias Smollett, were well
able to see the connection with the debates that had gone on in England since
1698, and the striking growth in Scottish literature occurring between the Ja-
cobite rising in 1745 and the American Revolution in 1776 includes a reevalua-
tion of English history and the formation of a distinctively Scottish way of view-
ing the history of society in general.
In the essays he began to write following the failure of his first philosophical
treatise, Hume revised his earlier censures of Walpole and began to argue that a
polite liberty — the freedom of a man to enjoy his property and his intellect —
might flourish under commercial conditions, not merely in a Whig parliamentary
oligarchy but even in a Bourbon absolute monarchy.92 Liberty in this sense was
intimately connected with the authority whose protection it required, but, for
reasons that may be extended into the philosophical, Hume did not suppose the
relation to be a simple one. In his essays on the English, which was now the
British, constitution he stressed its ultimate instability. The balance of indepen-
dent powers, of which it had been supposed to consist since the Answer to the
Nineteen Propositions, might end in a republic or even an anarchy, and the parlia-
mentary "influence of the crown," by which the edifice was supposedly held
together, might end in an absolute monarchy or even in a despotism.93 It is
significant that Hume, in general so unmistakably a defender of the Whig com-
mercial aristocracy, expressed unmistakably Tory fears of the power of public
credit, which by rendering both real and mobile property valueless might destroy
the natural aristocracy of land-inheriting families.94 In his writings on the social
character of religion, he showed superstition and enthusiasm, mythopoeic
polytheism and philosophic monotheism, as both supporting and subverting the
severed principles of authority and liberty.95 The long polemic against enthusi-
asm was not at an end, and Hume represents the conservative character of en-
lightenment in Protestant countries; he reminds us at the same time that the
inner dynamics of Protestantism were not yet worked out.
Hume held that commerce and enlightenment were producing a society pref-
erable to anything in antiquity; he also held that the Whig regime in Britain was
unstable for reasons partly historical and partly rooted in the constitution of
society itself. His modernism therefore possessed a double face. He believed that
the reigning order was progressive but at the same time that it was fragile. His
92
Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics; a n d J a m e s Moore, " H u m e ' s Political Science a n d t h e Classical
Republican T r a d i t i o n , " Canadian Journal of Political Science X , 4 (1977), p p . 8 0 9 - 3 9 .
93
H u m e , Essays, " W h e t h e r t h e British G o v e r n m e n t inclines more t o Absolute Monarchy or t o a
Republic."
94
H u m e , " O f Public Credit."
95
H u m e , " O f Superstition and Enthusiasm," "The Natural History of Religion."
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 251

History of England, which began to appear in 1754, is the greatest of a series of

writings that express impatience with any complacent synthesis that imputes to
the Whig order a comprehensiveness it does not possess. He included Locke with
Rapin, Hoadly and Sidney, among those authors whose compositions he de-
scribed as "most despicable,"96 though some strange simplifications here have
suggested that it was a Scottish rather than an English Lockeanism he had in
mind. But he held in equal contempt the writings of Whig historians such as
Rapin de Thoyras,97 and there is a sense in which the History of England carries
on the contention of Walpole's defenders that liberty in England is little older
than 1688.
Hume goes back to Harrington and even more to Brady in arguing that the
government of England was feudal under the Normans, Angevins, and Plantag-
enets;98 the doctrine of an ancient constitution is therefore untenable — or rather,
he says in a footnote he must have enjoyed writing, at least three ancient consti-
tutions can be made out in the English past.99 Subsequently, what he calls "a
revolution in manners," and describes, as do Fletcher and Defoe, in terms of the
growth of enlightenment and trade,100 brought about the Protestant Reforma-
tion, a period of almost Turkish despotism under the later Tudors, an interlude
of confusion about the true distribution of authority and power, a decade of
enthusiasm and hypocrisy in the 1650s, and finally the establishment of a rela-
tively ordered liberty in 1688. Beyond that point Hume declined to go; the
history of England since the Revolution was left to Tobias Smollett, whose Tory
and radical ideas acquired in London led him to a greater neo-Harringtonian
stress on corruption and the monied interest than Hume would have thought
right to endorse.
Such is what we have learned from Duncan Forbes to call Hume's "sceptical
Whiggism" (the phrase is ultimately Hume's own) and oppose to the "vulgar
Whiggism" that confused Bourbon absolutism with despotism and upheld belief
in an ancient constitution. But there are two kinds of "vulgar Whiggism." There
is the ancient constitutionalism of the neo-Harringtonians — Old Whig with the
Commonwealthmen and their republican canon, Queen Anne Tory with Boling-
broke and the Craftsman — who located in the past those principles from which
ministers, standing armies, and the monied interest had brought the constitution
to degeneration. The modernism of Walpole's defenders had been designed against
this thesis, and Hume without doubt shared many of their intentions. On the
96
H u m e , History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (new e d i t i o n in
6 vols.; London, 1762), vol. VI, p. 443. A footnote identifying Locke and other authors aimed at
was deleted from this edition.
97
J . Y . T . G r e i g , e d . , The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1 9 3 2 ) , vol. I, p . 2 5 8 .
98
V i c t o r C . W e x l e r , David Hume and the History of England ( P h i l a d e l p h i a , 1 9 8 0 ) .
" H u m e , History of England, vol. I V , p . 3 l 4 n .
100
History of England, vol. I V , p . 3 3 6 ; also I I I , p p . 6 3 - 7 , 1 2 1 - 2 ; V , p . 6 8 .
252 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

other hand, and far more central to the concerns of regime Whiggism, there is
the ancient constitutionalism of the "Whig interpretation of history," which de-
fended the parliamentary leaders of 1604—42 by endorsing their case for the
antiquity of law and Parliament. Hume's bad reputation in English historiogra-
phy for the next hundred years, until and including the time of Macaulay, arose
from his attack on this way of interpreting the seventeenth century. Following a
lead originally given by Harrington, he saw the reign of Charles I as a period in
which historical change had rendered the dualisms of medieval government —
Harrington's "wrestling ground between king and nobility," Hume's "absolute
monarchy under which the people had many privileges"101 — finally and deci-
sively unworkable, so that its problems could no longer be solved by the tradi-
tional remedies. The more Hume reflected on this situation, the more he became
persuaded that the king enjoyed just as good a case as the parliamentary leader-
ship — given that neither had a very good case in that age of confusion — and his
offense in Whig eyes was that he argued for king against Parliament and slighted
the ancient constitution in so doing. Times had changed since the Craftsman
controversy and the fall of Walpole. In the 1730s and even the 1740s oligarchy
and ministerial rule could be defended by asserting the modernity of parliamen-
tary freedom against the Tory and republican appeal to the ancient constitution.
In the 1760s, when the reaction to Hume's History was at its height, something
had happened to make defenders of a system no older than 1714 fall back on the
appeal to antiquity and the "Whig interpretation of history." We shall have to
consider what that was, as well as the curious transformation of terminology that
was to lead to Hume's being branded a Tory. Meanwhile, we have to observe
that the argument of modernity was far from being exhausted or given up.
From "sceptical" we turn with Forbes to "scientific Whiggism." During the
two following decades Hume's friends and associates in Edinburgh and Glasgow,
William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and John Millar — the pre-
sent writer would add Edward Gibbon, as a star revolving in an intersecting orbit
— produced the extraordinary series of works that together constitute their au-
thors as "the Scottish historical school." These present a theory of history that
ranges across the disciplines from moral philosophy to political economy, and
arise from concerns transcending the ideological conflict between the regime Whigs
and their critics; yet, as Forbes's nomenclature reminds us, they never cease to be
illuminated by that conflict. Paying little regard to the ancient constitution, with
which as Scotsmen they felt no great concern, they situated the transition from
barbaric and feudal to commercial and polite society in the context of the four-
stage scheme of history, in which a progressive division and specialization of labor
had refined the passions, polished the manners, and multiplied the interactions

101
Harrington, Political Works, p. 196; Hume, History of England, vol. V, pp. 110n.-112.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 253
of human beings of both sexes, and in so doing had rendered them capable of the
production and distribution of wealth. From the perspective adopted in this es-
say, their argument may be seen as an immense elaboration of the insight first
reached in 1698: that the individual might (with Defoe) or might not (with
Fletcher) be justified in abandoning the search for liberty in self-sufficiency in
favor of one for liberty in increasing sociability and exchange; the weight of
Scottish argument is, of course, almost wholly on the side taken by Defoe. Yet
the claims of the individual self and its military and civic autonomy continued
to be heard; there were controversies over the militia and the authenticity of
Ossian; and perhaps the most alienated Scottish voice of the mid-century comes
from London, where Smollett's radical Tory concern with corruption led him to
equate civilization with corruption but freedom with savagery. Dumbarton he
proposed as the point where Britons fleeing from Roman despotism had wisely
but precariously stopped short of Gaelic barbarism.102 In Edinburgh and Glas-
gow they proposed to keep moving along the lines of civilization, yet were never
unaware of the dangers of doing so. Ferguson, Smith, and Millar all knew there
could be such a thing as overspecialization. The mobilization of commerce and
politeness in support of Whiggism and the union had nevertheless reached a state
of imaginative completeness.

III. From the Seven Years' War to the Constitution of

the United States

We now return to the politics of Westminster, London, and England as they

took shape in and from the late 1750s. The ensuing period, however one dates
it, was one of dislocation and fragmentation, which has been subjected to a frag-
menting historical analysis; to say anything suggestive of a pattern of develop-
ment is dangerous. Nevertheless, it is possible to construct a scenario in which
the polemic against the oligarchic regime remained in many ways the same, while
displaying some major regroupings of opinion and beginning to undergo some
deep-seated change. The elder Pitt's wartime ministry involved association be-
tween, on the one hand, the Pelham and Grenville-Temple connections among
the great Whig families and, on the other, a faction of London aldermen, with
support among the liverymen and in the streets among the "mobile," headed by
William Beckford and others identifiable as urban Tories. In his role as opposi-
tion orator, Pitt had employed the usual patriot rhetoric aimed at independent

102
The notion of Dumbarton as marking the frontier between Belgic or Cymric agriculture and
Pictish or Gaelic pasturage may also be found in Thomas Carte, A General History of England, 3
vols. (London, 1747), vol. I, pp. 130, 175.
254 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

country gentlemen, supposed to waver in matters of foreign policy between blue-

water strategies and outright avoidance of conflict, in either case inspired by
distaste for continental wars that intensified the national debt and the Hanoverian
connection. Since Pitt's London supporters had West and East Indian associa-
tions, they could be ardent supporters of war outside Europe, in America and
India as well as at sea; the word "patriot" thus took on its mid-century (or post-
Jacobite) meaning, combining the notion of a noisy blue-water bellicosity with
the image of a quasi-republican supporter of his country against his king, or at
least his king's ministers. It is not to assert that a republican revolution was ever
likely in England to say that "patriots" often employed revolutionary and even
republican language. The Beckfords began their public career as urban Tories,
but it is in their journal the Monitor that hints have been found, as early as the
fifties, of the notion of appealing to the nation, the people, and even a national
convention against a corrupt and minister-dominated parliament.103 By the time
he died as Lord Mayor in 1771, William Beckford was using Commonwealth
language and threatening the king with a radical evocation of 1688, if not 1641
or 1649, while the language of the Sawbridges was as startling in its way as the
actions of the Wilkites. Tory and republican appear in this projection as remain-
ing brothers under the skin; nevertheless, it is from the time of Pitt the Elder
that the word "Tory" begins losing the meanings it had borne since the time of
Bolingbroke and taking on new significances.
Perceptions, no doubt exaggerated or distorted, of the intervention in politics
of the new king George III and his adviser Lord Bute had much to do with
initiating these changes. It has many times been shown that the king was acting
within the normal conventions of politics and had no thought of acting other-
wise, but the fact remains that he was denounced, and that language was avail-
able to denounce him, for acting outside Whig rules.104 That Bute was a Stuart
made it possible to impute to him designs of restoring Stuart ideals of kingship,
while the circumstance that George III was apparently using the authority and
influence of the crown to break up constraints that Whigs imposed on him made
it possible to see him, and believe that he saw himself, as a "patriot king" in the
sense in which Bolingbroke had adumbrated that deeply paradoxical term. Here
we have a first move toward the reunion of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century connotations of "Tory." Once the "independence of the crown," a Bo-
lingbrokean term, could be linked with the "prerogatives of the crown" fought for
by the pre-1688 Stuarts, Charles II Tories and George II Tories could be seen as
103
Marie C. Peters, "The Monitor on the English Constitution, 1755-65; New Light on the Ideolog-
ical origins of English Radicalism," English Historical Review LXXXVI, 341 (1971), pp. 7 0 6 - 2 7 .
See also Nicholas Rogers, "Resistance to Oligarchy: The City Opposition to Walpole and his
Successors, 1724—47," in London in the Age of Reform, ed. John Stevenson (Oxford: 1977).
104
For the first half of this sentence see Richard Pares, George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1953);
for the second, Herbert Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London, 1957).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 255

one and the same, and aristocratic politicians resentful of George Ill's policies
could make believe they were fighting for the good old cause for which Hampden
had died on the field and Sidney on the scaffold.105 A new chapter, with new
heroes and villains, could now be written in the Whig interpretation of history,
but Walpolean modernism would have to be abandoned and Humean skepticism
denounced. Scientific Whigs were liable to find themselves, without much re-
pugnance, supporters of George Ill's ministries. It is testimony both to the in-
tellectual power of Hume's History, and to the changing ideological climate in
which it appeared, that almost a century later it still seemed to Macaulay his
principal adversary and competitor.
There were deeper ambivalences still. The regime that had prevailed since the
Septennial Act was above all a regime of influence and patronage. The extent to
which patronage was concentrated in a few hands, and the efficacy of patronage
whoever exercised it, may easily be exaggerated;106 yet the regime was widely
perceived as one in which "the influence of the crown" was exercised concurrently
with the not dissimilar "influence" exercised by Whig magnates, with the result
that those currently occupying the king's councils could be denounced as selfish
"ministers," and those currently out of place denounced as a selfish "faction,"
each seeking to add the crown's influence to their own. This was the small change
of political rhetoric, even when it was not far from the truth; but when George
III displaced powerful groups of Whig politicians, they not only denounced him
or his advisers for using his influence against them but contrived, sometimes by
affecting to regard him as a patriot king in the making, to accuse him of design-
ing a real change in the structure of politics. They said that the influence of the
crown was being used to destroy the independent capacity of the aristocracy to
form associations — by the use of patronage, party association, popularity, or any
combination of them — that could then recommend themselves to the royal coun-
cils. For many years this complaint was regularly urged in Whig rhetoric and
literature. Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770) is a famous example,
and leading Whigs now formed and long retained the belief that the use being
made of royal influence was "Tory." 107 They had something Bolingbrokean in
mind. The influence of the crown, which Bolingbroke had imagined capable of
restoring the independence of Parliament, was in their vision being employed to

103
This finds a late echo in Macaulay's description of the Rockingham Whigs as "worthy to have
charged at the side of Hampden at Chalgrove, or to have exchanged the last embrace with Russell
on the scaffold in Lincoln's Inn Fields." Macaulay, "The Earl of Chatham," Critical and Historical
Essays, 3 vols. (Boston, 1901), vol. Ill, p. 654.
106
J. B. Owen, "Political Patronage in Eighteenth-Century England," in The Triumph of Culture, ed.
P. Fritz and D. Williams (Toronto, 1972); Clark, Dynamics of Change, p. 15.
107
F. O'Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London and New York, 1967) has some
useful quotations from Portland, Fitzwilliam, and Lady Rockingham in the years 1793—4 (pp.
198-9, 211).
256 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

break up the independent associations of the aristocracy and their followings and
subject Parliament to royal control. Burke shared this belief in an aristocracy
natural because independent, and if there is anything new about the theory of
party expressed in Thoughts on the Present Discontents, it is Burke's belief that aris-
tocratic associations are more than combinations of patrons and clients. 108 Nat-
ural aristocracy may prefer governo largo to governo stretto; to this extent the Septen-
nial oligarchy was showing signs of loosening up.
The Whig aristocracy, against whose oligarchy all patriot rhetoric had been
directed, were now in a position to put themselves forward — or a faction among
them identifying themselves with the whole could put them forward - as the
true patriots or natural leaders of a free society, while stigmatizing the patronage
of the state as a design to restore the excessive powers of the seventeenth-century
crown. This enabled them to identify new (if fictitious) "Tories" with old, and
to go (sometimes consciously) in search of the rhetoric of the First Whigs, with
which Shaftesbury in 1675 had tried to turn the House of Lords against the
ministerial corruption he attributed to Danby. The language of Whig opposition
turned back toward the ancient constitution and republican virtue — those linked
if disparate vocabularies — and there could appear noblemen expressing radical,
republican, and even democratic ideals, the counterparts in fact of Milord Stan-
hope in Mably 109 and Milord Bomston in Rousseau. Some of these called for
reforms in the system of representation, and even for manhood suffrage; as we
shall see, there were followings to be gained by doing so. But no Whig aristocrat
out of office would find it easy to break with the methods of rule by patronage
and high politics exercised since the Septennial Act, or with the system of public
credit that was twenty years older. They might deplore, and even propose to
reform, the probably mythical enlargement of royal patronage under George III
or the much more real enlargement of the national debt by the Seven Years' War,
but they must go on administering these systems whenever they might come
back into office. We may say, then, that the game of politics had not changed
very much, but we must also say that the rhetoric employed in the game envis-
aged increasingly significant alterations in its rules.

(.it)
Like the language employed in parliamentary opposition, from which it cannot
altogether be separated, the language of radical criticism of the regime began to

108
See John Brewer, "Rockingham, Burke and Whig Political Argument," The Historical Journal
XVIII, 1(1975), pp. 1 8 8 - 2 0 1 .
109
"Stanhope" appears in Mably's Des Droits et des Devoirs du Citoyen, dated 1758 but published 1789.
See Keith Michael Baker, "A Script for a French Revolution: The Political Consciousness of the
Abbe Mably," Eighteenth-Century Studies XIV, 3 (1981), pp. 2 3 5 - 6 3 .
 The varieties ofWhiggism from Exclusion to Reform 257
change after 1760. The term "Tory," perhaps because it could now be applied to
the policies of the crown, ceases being applied to the recurrent turbulence of
London aldermen and their following, about the time when their perception of
Pitt as a lost leader who had gone over to the oligarchy was producing a more
vehement hostility to Whig aristocracy and even to aristocracy as such. Their
rhetoric remained "patriot" in many ways, and it by no means shed all its Tory
characteristics. The rabid anti-Scotticism of the North Briton had more to do with
hatred of Hanoverians, especially when Scots and Hanoverians were both sol-
diers, than with hatred of Jacobites. But patriot radicalism was no less urban
than Toryism had been before it, and as we pursue the explorations of popular
politics conducted by John Brewer and others,110 from the streets and clubs of
London to those of provincial towns, we seem to be following the growth of a
"public opinion," increasingly given to new forms of "association," which it is
hard not to consider as the self-assertive voice of those borough populations whose
political weight had been reduced since the not very distant time when the oli-
garchy had been established. Not only urban Toryism, but the "True," "Old,"
"Independent" Whiggisms of the Commonwealth tradition have by now been
identified as semi-interchangeable modes of protest, dating from the late seven-
teenth century, against the increasing consolidation of an oligarchic Whig re-
gime. It comes as no surprise, then, that the Exclusionist, country, and Com-
monwealth program of "more frequent," annual, or triennial parliaments began
again (if it had ever ceased) to be the theme of polemic against the regime, and
remained a staple of radical demand until the days of the Chartists; or that the
interregnum heroes of the canon put together by John Toland began yet again to
be cited by such radical sages as Thomas Hollis, James Burgh, Catherine Saw-
bridge Macaulay, and at a later period, the young William Wordsworth, some
of whom even display an awareness that there had once been such people as
Agitators and Levellers.111 The independent and often Dissenting borough pop-
ulations were, it might seem, once again finding their Old Whig and Common-
wealth voices. We are tempted to conclude that the Tory interlude in their his-
tory was over, but to make such an assertion brings us once more face to face
with the problem of telling Tory and Commonwealth apart.
110
John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976);
"English Radicalism in the Age of George III," in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776,
ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton, N.J., 1980). For further bibliography, see Albert Goodwin, The
Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge,
Mass., 1979), p. 533-4, and Zaller, "Continuity of British Radicalism," cited n. 82. For every
discovery that a crowd was "manipulated," there is a corresponding need to know what was in its
members' minds that made them willing to be "manipulated"; it may and may not have been
what the manipulators sought to put there.
1l1
A study of the extent in this century of historical knowledge concerning the interregnum radicals
would be worth having; ours is largely dependent on the Thomason and other collections, which
became available only with the opening of the British Museum.
258 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

The radical voice of the 1770s further complicates matters by uttering propo-
sitions not usually to be found in the rhetoric of early Georgian opposition. It is
at times militantly hostile to aristocratic control of politics and does not differ-
entiate very much between Whig aristocrats in opposition to George III and
Whig aristocrats in office under him. That monarch's actions preclude any lasting
attempt to appeal to him as a "patriot king" and he is seen less as a counterweight
to the aristocracy than as their partner in operating a repressive and corrupt
parliamentary regime. The attack is directed against the aristocracy, not so much
a class of landholding seigneurs as one of borough owners, borough patrons, and
boroughmongers; there are complaints, however, that men of landed wealth should
use the borough system to dominate the parliamentary representation of the men
of movable wealth - or, when the appeal is being made to artisans, the men
whose wealth is in their labor — inhabiting the towns. In conjunction, perhaps,
with this tendency to regard the borough as a repressive device, there is rejection
of any "idea" of a patriot king or patriot minister and an insistence that the only
true patriots are the "people" themselves. A radical Lockeanism makes its ap-
pearance, and the authority of the Second Treatise is often, though not necessarily,
cited in support of the view that since the "people" are originators of their own
government, they may resume the power to alter that government, not merely
(as Locke had emphasized) when it becomes repressive, but when it becomes
corrupt, when it fails to give effect to their natural freedom, or more simply still
whenever they find good reasons for doing so. This ultra-Lockean radicalism,
entailing a democratic doctrine of permanent reform if not revolution, is to be
found, occasionally but not uncharacteristically, at the leading edge of the repub-
licanism that now took shape; it helps shift republican doctrine (in what measure
remains to be determined) away from the polity of independent powers and to-
ward the sovereignty of popular will.
At this point the voice of liberal-Marxist historians is heard loud and jubilant.
Their principal concern is to affirm the autonomy in history of a kind of practice
(in this case its ideology) called "bourgeois," and to present history whiggishly
(in the Butterfieldian sense) as the unidirectional movement toward, and later
past and away from, the ascendancy of this practice. To do so has become so
dominant an enterprise that Marxist historians may be recognized by their inces-
sant use of the term "bourgeois," non-Marxist (or "bourgeois") historians by their
care to avoid it. The function of the word in question is to denote the presence
and action of those whose wealth is movable and employed in controlling the
labor of others; we may agree that it is very important indeed to have means of
denoting their presence and describing their action, without agreeing that the
word "bourgeois" necessarily denotes and describes them satisfactorily. The word
has, however, acquired a mystical value and become a test of orthodoxy. In the
present case, the assumptions used by the liberal-Marxist historians are that an
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 259
opposition to something called "aristocracy," an emphasis on the individual's
possession of rights and property that government exists to protect, and the adop-
tion of a Lockean brand of populism justify them — when these phenomena occur
in conjunction — in using the magic word "bourgeois." The latent assumptions
are (1) that all the foregoing phenomena entail an acceptance of movable rather
than real property as the basis of social and political reality, and (2) that the
historical complex so constituted is and should be described as bourgeois, on
grounds that seem to be more than merely conventional. How the word entered
the Marxist lexicon and came to be used as it now is offers a problem of which
little seems to be known and which will not be discussed here, though the present
writer's sense that it has become a mystical term is strong enough to make him
wish to avoid it. How far the English radicalism that took shape in the 1770s
ought to be described as bourgeois in the conventional sense, and how this inter-
pretation ought to be operated if at all, are problems that do need to be examined
if a history of the "Whig" cluster of ideologies is to be adequately constructed.
The latest to write on these matters in the liberal-Marxist perspective is, pre-
dictably, Isaac Kramnick. In "Republican Revisionism Revisited" he sets out to
aver that the radicalism of the 1770s was "bourgeois" in the previously men-
tioned senses, and therefore sharply distinct from the country, Tory, and Old
Whig criticism of the Whig regime that had preceded it.112 He pursues this aim
(as we have seen) by the adoption of two strategies. One is the dismissal of all
brands of neo-Harringtonian criticism as Tory, agrarian, ancient constitutional-
ist, "nostalgic," and reactionary; the other is the repetition, more incantatory
and liturgical than anything else, with which he introduces the terms "bour-
geois" and "middle class" into every sentence in which he characterizes the radi-
cals of George Ill's reign. Concerning the first strategy, enough has surely been
said to establish that it simply will not do. Early Georgian opposition was both
Tory and Old Whig; Toryism itself was both rural and urban; Kramnick's at-
tempt to reduce republican rhetoric to fox-hunting nostalgia is doomed from the
start. What remains not fully explained is how an ideology stressing Roman
warrior - civic values and the independence that came best from real property
possessed the appeal it visibly had for town dwellers; but if we have not fully
explained the fact, Kramnick does not help by denying its existence. The present
writer has preferred the argument that since the target of criticism was the ma-
nipulation of credit and the forms of dependence and corruption it could bring,
the tradesman operating on his own stock could seem to share in the indepen-
dence of the yeoman landholder; John Brewer in a significant article has shown
the ways in which such a tradesman might feel his independence threatened by
the private or public behavior of the aristocratic managers of debt.113 It did not

li2 113
See sources cited in n. 73, this chapter. "English Radicalism in the Age of George III."
260 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

follow that the tradesman must necessarily characterize himself as creditor in the
"public" sense, or abandon a view of the world in which debtors and creditors
appeared almost equally dangerous. So long as professional men, tradesmen, and
artisans believed themselves to be inhabitants of a domestic economy, a universe
of masters and servants in which independence was to be pursued and dependence
avoided, a plebeian version of the Roman republican ideal would make some
sense to them and the argument that it was predicated on an obsolete agrarian
economy would benefit only their rulers. This does not mean that a democratic
radicalism furnishing the individual with the politics of life in a world of ex-
change relationships would not ultimately appear. Possibly it did appear in middle-
Georgian London, and certainly we should be on the alert for its appearance; but
we will not be well equipped to detect it if we fetishize the term "bourgeois" and
construct a naive and crude antithesis between republican and Lockean forms of
radicalism.
This mistake was not often made by critics and theorists in the later eighteenth
century. James Burgh, a writer of the 1770s studied by Robbins, Kramnick, and
others, 114 was indeed one of the early English authors known to have used the
term "bourgeoisie," 115 but he used it of the lesser citizenry of Holland, and why
he used a French word in denoting Dutch social categories is as puzzling as why
Burke used the Dutch word "burghers" to denote the inhabitants of French towns
- or who first used the word with reference to England. It was Burgh who com-
plained that borough patronage subjected townsmen to great landed proprietors,
but in order to increase the representation of great cities, he envisaged, like many
after him, a reduction of borough and an increase of county representation. 116
There began at this time a lively historical debate (which has still to be studied)
regarding the role of boroughs in English history. 117 Were they originally inde-
pendent communes or instruments of royal and aristocratic patronage? If we are
to see in electoral reforms such as Burgh proposed the emergence of the "bour-
geoisie" as a nationally acting "class," we must observe that they were destroying
the boroughs to do so. Dialectical rhetoric will doubtless inform us that they
114
Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 364-8; Carla Hay, James Burgh: Spokesman for
Reform in Hanoverian England (Washington, D.C., 1979); Martha K. Zebrowski," One Cato Is
Not Enough; or, How James Burgh Found Nature's Duty and Real Authority, and Secured the
Dignity of Human Nature against All Manner of Public Abuse, Iniquitous Practice, Vice and
Irreligion," doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1984. Burgh quoted as freely from the
Tories Brady, Carte, and Bolingbroke as from interregnum sources, Locke, and the Common-
weal thmen.
115
James Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 3 vols., (London, 1771), vol. I, p. 71.
ll6
Burgh, Political Disquisitions, vol. I, pp. 51-4, 75-7. See generally John Cannon, Parliamentary
Reform, 1640-1832 (Cambridge, 1972).
117
T. H. B. Oldfield's History of the Boroughs (published between 1792 and 1816 and then entitled
The Representative History of Great Britain and Ireland), in time the encyclopedia of the reforming
movement. It is noteworthy how Tucker relied upon Robert Brady's Boroughs (1690) and Thomas
Madox's Firma Burgi (1726).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 261
were emancipating themselves from the corporations in which their class had
taken shape, but this rather easy move does not inform us how far mid-Georgian
radicals claimed to be speaking for a historical class of "burgesses," a word that
should have been developed in the formation of any English "bourgeois" con-
sciousness. The operative historical myth remained ancient constitutionalist and
neo-Harringtonian; it spoke of Anglo-Saxon tythingmen and hundredmen as rus-
tic warriors governing themselves in village assemblies, among whom the free-
men of ancient boroughs took their place almost as a detail. Burgh's generation
indeed hesitated between this and a counterimage of the slow emergence of urban
freedoms from feudal darkness; but the latter thesis did not explain why boroughs
had rights or how they had lost them, and so entailed what did not occur, the
abandonment of historic right and historic constitutionalism as radical argu-
ments. It was not really possible (though it was sometimes tried) to attack the
managers of public credit and the standing army as a feudal aristocracy, and
rights were better ancient than modern if one aimed to overthrow the regime of
the Modern Whigs (especially when they too claimed the authority of the ancient
constitution).
Ancient rights, furthermore, could be as well enjoyed by a Roman republic as
by a Gothic yeomanry, and Burgh took the next step this could imply. Alongside
the Lockean image of the "people" retaining the right to form or reform govern-
ments, he set the unmistakably republican notion that their greatest need, as
they recovered the rights that had been taken from them, was to form themselves
into rhetorical and hortatory associations for the renewal of their moral and polit-
ical virtue.118 Where Burke feared that a camarilla of courtiers was plotting to
deprive the aristocracy of their capacity to form associations — "where bad men
combine, the good must associate"119 - Burgh thought that borough and country
populations bypassed by the Septennial Act must associate in the realm of moral
virtue before advancing (as they would later do in the guise of public opinion) to
a reform of the parliamentary representation. The logically separate notions of
right and virtue could up to a point be unified by making each the precondition
of the other; and if this could be done, Locke could be made into an Old Whig
after all. As an acquisitive and commercial Modern Whig, however, he must
continue to serve the Whig regime. The naivete of Kramnick's feudal-bourgeois
antithesis prevents his realizing that a democratic individualism which presup-
posed the individual's commitment to a society based on acquisition and ex-
change could come about only when democrats fully accepted that the commerce
associated with Whig rule had transformed the social world, and they would not
118
See the second and third volumes of Political Disquisitions, and Eugene C. Black, The Association:
British Extra-Parliamentary Political Organisation, 1763—93 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
119
Burke, "Thoughts on the Present Discontents"; see Paul Langford, ed., The Writings and Speeches
of Edmund Burke, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1981), vol. II, p. 315.
262 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

do that as long as they continued to employ neo-Harringtonian and Old Whig

doctrine to indict the Whig aristocracy. Since the problems of mid-Georgian
England remained so largely the problems of an agrarian society, it is not to be
wondered at that rhetoric of this kind remained active until well after the Na-
poleonic wars. The emergence of a democratic ideology for mobile individuals,
of whom some were proprietors of capital and others of labor, ought indeed to be
looked for and can be found, but the imposition of the category "bourgeois," as
if it were descriptive of the social tensions of English society, merely leads us to
misunderstand the context in which this ideology emerged. To use "bourgeois"
as a technical term for such proprietors is not to characterize any estate, order, or
class in Georgian social or historical reality.
Josiah Tucker, whose arguments were studied in Chapter 9, assailed Locke's
political theory in conjunction with the Commonwealth or classical republican
position as if the two were interchangeable. He did so on the grounds that both
were economically and historically archaic, and for the same reasons; no theory of
political society that held individual rights and moral personality to be fully
formed at the beginning, or even in the early stages, of the growth of productive
and commercial relationships between human beings could lead to anything but
a stunted and impoverished image of individual social personality. The classical
citizen could not be other than a master of slaves, and this was why Roman
republicanism appealed to Virginia and Jamaica planters; Locke had designed his
individual for the slaveholding and feudal tenures of the Fundamental Constitutions
of Carolina, and the only difference between his scheme and Filmer's was that the
latter had made the rights of one individual, the former those of any individual,
anterior to the relations natural to men in society, which were formed in the
historical processes of commercial growth. Like his contemporary David Hume,
whom he thought not quite modern and optimistic enough,120 Tucker was an
heir of the defenders of Walpole; he was a defiant modernist who held that sound
political theory had been impossible before that great minister had discovered
the true principles of government through taxation, and in nothing was he more
truly a Whig than in his conviction that it was commercial society that taught
men deference to a natural aristocracy and civilized the "landed interest" to the
point where it could assume that role.
Kramnick characteristically supposes that Tucker attacked the "bourgeois"
radicals because they taught disrespect to the "traditional" aristocracy,121 but the
whole point of Tucker's case for the Whig aristocracy and the landed interest,
who in his mind are one, is that they are not traditional, feudal, or classical, but
modern and progressive, and that deference increases with diversification. As for
120
See his Four Tracts together with Two Sermons on Political and Commercial Subjects (Gloucester, 1774),
pp. 4 1 , 47—8, where he opposes his progressive to Hume's cyclical view of history.
121
"Republican Revisionism Revisited," p. 653.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 263
the contractarian and republican intellectuals, from Locke and Sidney to Price
and Priestley, Tucker saw them as the reverse of what is meant by "bourgeois."
They were the archaic and reactionary apologists of "desperate Catilinarian men,"
declasse patricians who, from Shaftesbury to Shelburne, had employed an indi-
vidualist rhetoric in leading mobs of underemployed Londoners not subject to
the civilizing disciplines of the labor market. The malcontent "patriots" of 1776
- Whig oppositionists, London aldermen, American colonists - were inhabitants
of an anachronistic equivalent of ancient Rome, with its faeces Romuli on the
Thames and its latifundia in the Caribbean and the Chesapeake, where street
crowds followed aristocratic demagogues and slaves were in bondage to their
masters because free wage labor had not yet developed to the point where men
knew their station and its duties, their interests, and the necessity of submission
to recognized authority. Tucker saw such a political economy developing in the
new manufacturing towns as the medieval selfishness of corporate boroughs dis-
appeared, and he had no objection to seeing them enfranchised. To do so would
not entail any false theory of pseudonatural (because precommercial) rights.
Tucker's function is to remind us that the aristocratic Whig order was de-
fended as modern by men born before it was established, and as a commercial
order against men who could be characterized as archaic and reactionary. The
Scottish science of political economy, essentially a celebration of the progressive
role played in history by the diversification of labor, was perfectly compatible
with a theory of the natural aristocracy of a hereditary landed class,122 and Hume's
historicist skepticism regarding natural rights was easily turned against the in-
dividualist radicals who continued to find Whig rule repressive. Tucker saw the
regime of the progressive aristocracy as threatened by a coalition of reactionary
"patriots," among whom he included Whig patricians who were traitors to their
class, London guild bosses untouched by the free market, American colonists
whose wealth rested on smuggling and slavery, and a faction of religious radicals
whose ideology turned out under his analysis as archaic as that of the rest. These
were the English Unitarians like Price and Priestley, who employed Lockean
theses to argue for a complete separation of civil rights from religious identity
and the reduction of all worship to free speculation and inquiry, and with them
the New England enlightened Puritans whom Burke had identified as "the dis-
sidence of dissent, agreeing in nothing except the principles of liberty." Tucker
despised Burke for furthering the coalition of transatlantic radicals, but found
nothing wrong with his diagnosis. He himself held radical libertarianism to be a
Puritan survival, a secularized form of the radical autonomy of the free spirit;
there is a sense in which he was carrying on the Anglican polemic against enthu-
siasm, the insistence that private inspiration must be subject to the disciplines of

122
See Hume's "Of Public Credit," in Essays.
264 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

polite, commercial, and deferential society. Scottish social thought contained

nothing, except Hume's religious skepticism, which was unfriendly to the aims
of the latitudinarian and Moderate clergies in either kingdom. In Price and Priestley
Tucker (like others) detected the enthusiasts who of old had claimed that all
authority must give way before the freedom of the spirit and were now insisting
that all governments were illegitimate except insofar as they furthered the free-
dom of the mind and the rights of the individual. Ten years before Burke heard
of the sermon to the Revolution Society, Tucker saw Price as prepared to chal-
lenge the legitimacy of any government that did not satisfy his ideals of liberty.
The formation of a political culture based on moral dissent is arguably as signif-
icant in the long run as that of one based on the mobility of property; it may
outlast it.

Tucker wrote during the efflorescence of Scottish scientific Whiggism and during
the rapid and revolutionary development of radical patriot Whiggism in Amer-
ica. The early phases of the latter's history are still curiously little known; we
know a good deal about the doctrinal content and social function of American
patriot culture as a fully fledged entity, but not much about the processes whereby
it reached the colonies and subsequently took root there. What we can say about
it is that it was Old Whig and does not raise for us the problems of seeing how
a republican ethos could enter a High Church or Jacobite Tory mind; if there
were no Tories in Scotland, there were none in America either, and it may have
been there that the word "Tory" first took on its paradoxical later meaning of an
authoritarian defender of the Whig order. Attempts have been made to derive
American republicanism from Scottish origins, stressing the concepts of sympa-
thy and sentiment to be found there,123 but it is a difficulty that Scottish scien-
tific Whiggism evolved in a commercial and unionist direction highly supportive
of the Whig order, and we should be obliged to set the Enlightenment of Francis
Hutcheson in opposition to that of Hume, Robertson, or even Adam Ferguson,
and perhaps look behind Hutcheson to the radically Whig Irish environment, of
Molyneux, Molesworth, and possibly Toland, in which his career began.
If we evaluate American political culture as an English transplant, it will seem
to present the spectacle of a country Whiggism, desperately mistrustful of any
kind of court but not immediately involved in confrontation or interaction with
any such. Colonial gentries, clerisies, and artisanates adopted patriot rhetoric
with alacrity, but were not at grips with the concrete reality of the regime it had
been formed to oppose. The patriot gentry of Virginia praised civic virtue as the

123
Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 265
ethos of their class and spoke much of the horrors of corruption, but were not a
landed interest fearing displacement by a monied, or still less a parliamentary,
gentry of "independent country members" constantly faced by the ministerial
authority their English equivalents rather half-heartedly denounced. In still Pu-
ritan Massachusetts, in religiously heterogeneous Pennsylvania, and even in Vir-
ginia where reigned that perfect gentry solution to the problem of ecclesiastical
authority — an episcopal church without a bishop — patriot clergies and laities
exploited the equation of religious with civic freedom, of congregation with re-
public,124 and moved toward those deist and Unitarian solutions that equated
faith with freedom to believe as one chose. None of them, however, was subject
to the toleration of an established church that ranked among the governing insti-
tutions of a realm. Radical groups of merchants and artisans took shape in Boston
and Philadelphia and corresponded with Londoners who spoke, as they them-
selves did, a language going back to the First Whigs and the Commonwealth;
but those cities were not parliamentary boroughs subject to the Septennial Act
and obliged to reexplore the history of parliamentary representation and parlia-
mentary corruption as boroughs felt it in their intimate structure. An American
political society was one that spoke the language of parliamentary opposition
without being a parliamentary realm; its political culture was the criticism of a
regime it experienced only at a distance.
Bernard Bailyn at the end of the 1960s found himself under considerable attack
for having suggested that radical Whig ideology had operated to render the
American Revolution inevitable because, given certain critical conjunctions, it
made it impossible for Americans to regard British policy as anything but a
design to destroy virtue and liberty and establish a despotism. To some scholars
this carried the unwelcome suggestion that the Revolution was no more than an
early instance of "the paranoid style in American politics";125 to others it seemed
to neglect other contributory causes and competing ideologies; to still others it
appeared to disregard the functioning role of ideology within the structure of
colonial society - and often they thought they already knew what that was.
However, the proposition that an ideology may operate by itself and work both
with and against realities instead of merely reflecting them is reinforced if we
take up the suggestion made in the preceding paragraph: that Old Whig ideology
in eighteenth-century America was in the nature of a Hartzian fragment,126 di-
vorced from a context it still presupposed and, if at all controlled by the context
124
A l a n G . H e i m e r t , Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution ( C a m -
b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1966); N a t h a n O . H a t c h , The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the
Millennium in Revolutionary New England(New H a v e n , C o n n . , 1977).
125
See, most recently, Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit
in the Eighteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. XXXIX, 3 (1982), pp. 4 0 1 -
41.
126
Louis B . H a r t z , e d . , The Foundation of New Societies ( N e w Y o r k , 1964).
266 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

to which it had been transplanted, controlled by it in unpredicted and paradoxi-

cal ways. There are many serious problems with Hartz's model, and the debate
in which Bailyn became involved is not being continued here. But if we take up
the suggestion that Americans were conducting their political culture with the
aid of a rhetoric formed to criticize a Whig parliamentary order in which they
were involved only at a distance and in which they did not participate, it may
help us understand why the rhetoric of Old Whig parliamentary opposition be-
came a means of republican revolution in America, at the same time as it was
becoming a language of franchise reform in England and of parliamentary auton-
omy in Ireland.
If we examine the roles of the various components of Whig doctrine in the
Revolution, we shall be obliged to separate contractarian and resistance theory
from republican theory, according to the purposes for which each was used. The
argument that parliament was not entitled to levy taxes in the colonies was orig-
inally constitutionalist, but expanded to the point where it was expressed in
terms of natural rights and the powers and obligations of the state to maintain
them. Locke took his place here with Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel, and the
end of the process was reached in the Declaration of Independence, when it had
to be maintained that what had been colonies were now states, fully empowered
to protect the peoples inhabiting them and their property; for this end they had
been established and it made them states. However, it had until very recently
been accepted that this function was rightfully discharged by another state, that
of Great Britain, and a decent respect for the opinions of mankind impelled
Congress to endorse a quasi-Lockean rhetoric that enumerated the wrongful acts
by which the government of that state had lost its lawful authority over the
American people (usually numbered in the singular, though organized into thir-
teen states). The result, however, was less the dissolution of all government over
that people127 than the exaltation of their existing governments into states; rather,
it was contended — by arguments that made use of Locke's doctrine of a right to
emigrate — that these governments already existed in history and by right of their
historic origins enjoyed a contractual autonomy.128 The chain of arguments to
this point was juristic; it deployed the concept of right rather than the republican
concept of virtue.
By the time of the Declaration of Independence the colonial governments were
being reorganized as those of states, a process in which many have discerned the
crucial step into revolution. These constitutions rejected the authority of the
crown, and in consequence it became a question whether they should acknowl-
127
Only in some western districts, and for local reasons, was it much maintained that a dissolution
of government had occurred and a state of nature obtained. See Wood, Creation of the American
Republic, pp. 282-91.
128
Jefferson's Rights of British America a n d A d a m s ' s Letters ofNovanglus advance versions of these theses.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 267
edge the monarchical principle, and "if so in what form. Here we switch from the
argument tending to independence into the argument tending to republicanism,
but this is not the first point at which the effect of republican language and
doctrine is to be felt. Prior to the Declaration - while, that is, he was still the
commander of troops who had taken up arms in a civil war — George Washington
was in the habit of referring to the forces opposing him as "the ministerial army."
In Old Whig and Commonwealth rhetoric of eighteenth-century opposition gen-
erally, the sovereign's ministers were conventionally presented as menacing fig-
ures; it was they who disturbed the balance of the constitution, employed the
influence of the crown to reduce Parliament to dependence, promoted standing
armies, and sought to corrupt virtue and establish a general despotism. This is
the rhetoric that, in Bailyn's presentation, could expand until it filled men's
minds and could permit only a totally Manichaean interpretation of every event.
In an age when it seemed that executive authority could maintain itself only by
patronage, and that all patronage entailed the reduction of independence to de-
pendence — when even David Hume held liberty and authority to exist in an
irresolvable conflict — it was hard not to see virtue as perpetually threatened by a
total subversion. In Britain, where the realms were anciently possessed of sover-
eignty, it could be said that the dualisms were necessary. Sovereignty might
threaten liberty and virtue, yet sovereignty had to be maintained; the relations
between the two were those of constant adjustment, not the warfare of light with
darkness. In the American colonies, new states were grasping at sovereignty but,
since they had not previously possessed it, were doing so with the aid of an
ideology that stressed far more nakedly than in Britain the power of sovereignty
to subvert. The logical outcome could only be republican. King and Parliament
must be represented as totally corrupt and aiming at total corruption; the new
states must establish sovereignty in the only form that aimed at the systematic
institutionalization of virtue. For the reason that they must become states, they
must become republics. The rhetoric of right as the precondition of independence
merged with the rhetoric of liberty and virtue as the preconditions of one another.
From a time at least as distant as that of the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions,
it had been possible to represent the King, Lords, and Commons of England as a
balance of equal and independent powers; yet this concept is formally republican,
and theoretical republicans such as Harrington had been moved to try to replace
King, Lords, and Commons by agencies better suited to the roles it enjoined. A
central problem, though by no means the only one, had been that of sovereignty.
Three independent powers might seem better qualified to check than to reinforce
one another's majesty, but, as Weston and Greenberg have shown us, the Answer
to the Nineteen Propositions could be used to promote the doctrine of a conjoint
exercise of sovereignty, in which it was debated whether the Lords and Commons
took part in legislation as initiatory wills or merely through their functions of
268 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

counseling the crown and giving or witholding consent to its actions. The prob-
lem was further complicated as language slid from describing King, Lords, and
Commons as estates to vesting them with the executive, judicial, and legislative
powers; for once the king was characterized as an executive, it became apparent
that he also legislated and did so as King-in-Parliament, and any attempt to
separate executive and legislative and place them in equilibrium as independent
agencies must encounter the shock of reality. A rhetoric directed against minis-
ters, placemen, and courtiers could for a long time obscure this contradiction;
they could be represented as the minions and intermediaries of power, unknown
to the constitution and liable by misusing the influence of the crown to destroy
the balance of the constitution by bringing powers that should be independent
into dependence on one another. From the circumstance that it was not known
how the executive could subsist except by patronage, ministers (and public credit)
acquired that supposed capacity for infinite malignity and subversion with which
the age invested them. Once attention was paid, however, to the facts of legis-
lation or fiscality, it became apparent that executive and legislative were not
separate and could not be; the king was present in Parliament in the mediatory
persons of his ministers, and acted there to pass laws and to execute policies.
There was even a body of post-Harringtonian doctrine that contended that he
needed influence and patronage, as his ancestors had needed the ties of tenure and
vassalage, to attach members of the legislature to his interest and so get these
things done.129
Once again we see why regime Whiggism took up pre-Whig constitutional
doctrine, and why it was that Old Whig, Tory, and country oppositions were to
a certain extent in bad faith; their rhetoric implied such criticism of parliamen-
tary monarchy that it could be imagined that a republic might replace it, yet
none of these oppositions had any program whatever for doing so. No bill for a
general expulsion of placemen from Parliament ever got off the ground, and it
becomes increasingly hard to believe that any was seriously intended; yet such
bills went on being moved, and the rhetoric and doctrine that went with them
continued being voiced. There was at least this to be said for Hume's belief that
the balance of the constitution, though the best that could be hoped for, was
inherently unstable: there was a persistent disjunction between language and
reality, and practice contained disjunctions that theory could not explain away.
The regime of oligarchy incessantly criticized itself, just as the commercial ar-
istocracy criticized itself in the name of agrarian and republican values. Much of
what we term ideology was in fact Utopia (though we must not confuse Utopia
with nostalgia).
But Americans were not skeptical Whigs in the Humean sense; the very con-

l29
See Reed Browning's study of Samuel Squire, chap. V; n. 62, this chapter.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 269
siderable skepticism of the Founding Fathers did not go beyond Franklin's fa-
mous apophthegm, "a republic, madam, if you can keep it." They took the left
fork from the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions and having convinced themselves,
for reasons that may have been partly Hartzian, of the thoroughgoing corruption
of ministerial parliamentarism, they took the separation of powers seriously, ex-
cluded the executive secretaries from seats in Congress, and so rejected parlia-
mentary monarchy forever and committed themselves to a republican experi-
ment. Josiah Tucker, with his usual acumen, perceived both the American war
and American independence as means to preserve the sovereignty of Parliament
against enemies who were as much Tory as republican; if the colonies could not
be subjected to a necessary sovereignty, then sovereignty itself must cast them
out. The disruption of Whig empire was a disruption of the varying intimations
of Whig political culture; if America could never again be a parliamentary mon-
archy, then Commonwealth radicalism in parliamentary Britain could never again
be the same. It had been a pusillanimous idea, thought Jefferson, that America
had friends in Britain worth keeping in with. 13°
The republican component in the Whig inheritance did not, however, control,
though it did modify, the formation of governments in the United States. Gor-
don Wood131 has examined the process by which several states set up bicameral
legislatures in the apparent expectation of duplicating the ideal relationship of
few to many that characterized the classical republican model, but discovered
that even in Virginia a naturally leading elite and naturally deferential vulgar
were no longer to be found.132 Wood argues that republican theory presupposed
a society of estates, but in some of its versions the aristocratic component need
only be one of talent, whereas in others the few were defined by their political
function rather than by their inherent virtue. What can be clearly seen is that
post-Revolutionary thinking early showed itself acutely suspicious of the idea of
natural aristocracy and unwilling to distinguish it from hereditary or otherwise
entrenched aristocracy. John Adams, the most systematic thinker in the older
republican style, who wished to warn that a natural aristocracy of some kind
would always emerge, and that it must be anticipated and rendered harmless by
being provided with a useful function, found himself accused of designs to restore
a hereditary nobility.133 Natural republics, as they may be termed, self-differen-
tiated into patricians and plebeians, gentlemen and yeomen, signally failed to
make their appearance in the constitution-making period; to many it seemed that
a mobile and acquisitive bonanza was taking shape instead, and this was lamented
l30
Julian P. Boyd, Lyman H. Butterfield, and Mina R. Bryan, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
(Princeton, N.J., 1950-), vol. I, p. 314.
Ul
Creation of the American Republic, p p . 3 9 1 - 4 2 5 .
132
For the processes occurring there, see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Wil-
liamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982).
133
Wood, Creation of the American Republic, chap. XIV, pp. 565-92.
270 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

on all sides as a failure of virtue, the principle universally known to be cardinal

to republics. Very cautiously, publicists began to examine what forms of govern-
ment there might be that did not depend on virtue.134
What was taking shape would have to be a republic, in the sense that there
was no other acceptable alternative to parliamentary monarchy. That constitu-
tion, from which the United States had just broken away, relied heavily on the
concept that the nation, or the people, were represented both by the king as a
public person and in his councils by persons elected to "represent" shires and
boroughs. In Britain at this period, as the pendulum swung against the regime
of the Septennial Act, it was being argued among the radicals both that the
remedy for corruption lay in a better representation of the people - meaning one
in which more members of the communities represented took part in electing
their representatives — and that the ultimate authority to form and reform gov-
ernments resided in this same people as an entity. If these two arguments were
allowed to interact, there could emerge the idea of a people who constantly renew
virtuous government, and their own virtue, by regularly choosing their represen-
tatives to constitute a government. Though Rousseau, far away in Europe, had
already damned this concept for separating virtue from personality, it retained
much of the republican's characteristic concern for virtue. The form of govern-
ment that emerged from representation, however, was a sovereign to whom the
people in the act of election transferred rights and powers they might otherwise
have exercised for themselves, and there can be nothing further from the repub-
lican principle than the idea that a select body of persons can represent, imper-
sonate, or stand for a body of autonomous citizens and claim that when it governs
them, they are governing themselves. To the classical republican or the modern
communitarian,135 representation is little better than alienation, and there are
still those who claim that in constructing a representative democracy, the Amer-
ican founders were saddling the people with a Hobbesian Leviathan.136 The prep-
ositions contained in the great phrase "government of the people, by the people,
and for the people" can be made to form a trinity of consubstantial ambiguities.
As the Whig tradition separated into its dual constituents, the theory and
practice of representative democracy were developed in the United States far faster
than in Britain; but because they were developed in the context of a republican
experimental structure, they encountered problems that did not confront the
British a century later, when they set about the democratization of parliamentary
monarchy. It was as a second best to the republican ideal that the people were

134
J . R . P o l e , Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic ( N e w Y o r k ,
1966), pp. 531-2.
135
B e n j a m i n R . B a r b e r , The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton
(Princeton, N.J., 1974).
136
F r a n k M . C o l e m a n , Hobbes and America: Exploring the Constitutional Foundations ( T o r o n t o , 1 9 7 8 ) .
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 271

proclaimed capable of representation in all branches of government; James Mad-

ison paid more than lip service to this truth when he calmly reversed accepted
terminology and proclaimed that a polity in which the people governed them-
selves was a democracy, and one in which they were governed by their own
representatives a republic. 137 There was a sense in which Madison was maintain-
ing the republican paradigm by giving the representatives the role of a few and
the electors that of a many; the former constituted a natural aristocracy (qualified
by the fact of election) who made the decisions, the latter a natural democracy
who evaluated the decisions after they had been made and the qualifications of
those who had made them. Even the idea that representatives should be in-
structed by their constituents need not annul this relationship. But the few and
the many are in a relationship of deliberation rather than of power, which does
not define the capacity of representation to produce sovereignty. Madison had
further to maintain that the people retained sovereignty in the act of choosing
representatives to exercise it, and this had to be done in two ways: first, by
elaborating devices to make the elected accountable to their electors — the idea
of frequent elections was deeply embedded in the Commonwealth tradition; and
second, by a separation of powers that ensured that the representatives could not
corruptly consolidate themselves to monopolize the government. We have seen
how separation of powers emerged together with conjoint sovereignty to give
parliamentary monarchy its republican shadow; in this way too the oppositions
of eighteenth-century Britain left their legacy to the American republic.
None of the states constituting that republic, however, presented by the end
of the century the image of a classical or Harringtonian republic of interacting
gentry and freemen, and if they had it was a recognized impossibility to draw
several such republics together in any union more perfect than that of an Achaean
league. The fact that government in each state was better constituted along rep-
resentative than classical republican lines made it more possible to extend the
principle of representative sovereignty to the point where it could define the
relations of states to union; we reach the point where Whiggism is transformed
into Federalism, and what was originally English becomes that which can only
be American. The separation of powers, however — that oddly ambiguous legacy
— left unsolved the relation of executive to legislature; to this day a parliamentary
observer sees the United States government as consisting of an executive who
persistently tries to legislate and a legislature that as persistently frustrates him,
and the observer wonders how far this accounts for the growth of court and palace
politics in the city where (as it happens) these words are being written. 138 An

157
The Federalist, no. 10, The Federalist Papers, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown; Conn., 1961), pp.
60-1.
138
As a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in the Smithsonian Institute
in Washington.
272 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

attempt to solve the problem along regime Whig lines was made under the first
presidency by Alexander Hamilton, who sought to establish in Congress some-
thing in the nature of a "presidential interest" made up of men who would find
it in their interest to support measures proposed by the administration.139 That
Hamilton's project included use of executive patronage, a strong, federally con-
trolled professional army, a funded national debt, and a Bank of the United States
ensured a passionate polemic in which he was accused of a design to install all
the techniques of government by corruption supposedly perfected by Walpole. 14°
Americans once more showed how deeply they could fear a type of regime of
which they had little direct experience.
It is interesting that the accusation of contriving to establish an office-holding
and fund-holding aristocracy merged instantly with that of seeking to restore a
hereditary titled nobility and king. Americans brought up to dread and detest
the Whig oligarchy saw it as both ancient and modern, both feudal and fiscal,
and feared both its despotism in the past and its corruption in the future. There
could be no better illustration of how the republican mind located itself, and the
modes of property on which it thought it rested, in a scheme of history still
cyclical and degenerative; American optimism, of which there was plenty, con-
sisted in the hope of escape from history into Utopia, wilderness, or millennium.
This is the moment at which to take up the problem of how far the political
economy of republicanism persisted in America; how far, that is, the republic
was held to presuppose an agrarian, unspecialized economy and to fear the cor-
ruptions of industry and commerce. We may pass over much of what has been
urged to the effect that the Jeffersonian farmer was less a self-sufficient yeoman
than a commercial producer for a market,141 since it has never been alleged that
republican virtue was incompatible with trade and industry. Jefferson could not
be more anxious for economic modernization than Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun
had been, and both considered slavery from the angle of its possible contribution
to mercantile growth. The antipathy to what was called "commerce" in the eigh-
teenth century arose, it must always be remembered, along two main lines of
development. It was feared that men might become in various ways dependent
through overspecialization, as they had been tempted to entrust their indepen-
dent virtue to professional soldiers, governors, patrons, or — it was increasingly
perceived — employers. The yeoman living off the produce of his farm was arche-
typally immune from this corruption, but that did not preclude the possibility
of independence through exchange relations; the yeoman took his goods to mar-
ket, the serf delivered them to his lord as payment in kind. The independence of
139
G e r a l d S t o u r z h , Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, Calif., 1970).
140
Lance B a n n i n g , The Jeffersonian Persuasion.
141
Appleby, cited in n. 73, this chapter. The best recent work on this question is Drew R. McCoy,
The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, N . C . , 1980).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 273

the small entrepreneur appeared in American values as an outgrowth of the in-

dependence of the small farmer, 142 and even the growth of water-powered mill
industry in New England was idealized in terms of rustic independence and vir-
tue. The pieceworker and his capitalist employer presented a graver problem in
mutual corruption and interdependence — especially when they created a new
type of urban environment - and Jefferson was concerned with the problem of
how far his society should advance beyond domestic to factory manufactures. At
all levels, independence and specialization remain the theme, and the workman
sees himself as independent artisan rather than as proletarian struggling to tran-
scend his overspecialization.
The second line of thought, which must never be lost to sight, is that "com-
merce" in the eighteenth century was held to entail the presence of an aristocracy:
the Whig aristocracy Hamilton was accused of wishing to reintroduce to Amer-
ica. As late as 1813—14, John Taylor of Caroline unhesitatingly characterized as
"capitalists" the privileged rulers of an aristocratic mode of government, per-
fected in Britain during the previous century and still threatening the virtuous
agriculture (at once scientific and slaveholding, improving and Catonian) of which
he was the advocate. 143 The ghost of the monied interest still walked, and it was
a question of historical circumstance whether the improving landowner felt im-
pelled to embrace the Whig aristocracy in Scotland or reject it in Virginia. The
values of market society, which could reinforce yeoman independence in one set
of circumstances, could be employed (as Tucker demonstrates) to reinforce the
Whig order in another, and it does not seem to be a coincidence that Madison
and Hamilton have been identified as students of Hume, 1 4 4 whereas it was Jef-
ferson who wanted to exorcise him from the American mind. Hamilton, who
wanted strong government and commercial empire, would be attracted by Hume's
thoughts on the relation between liberty and authority and on how men were to
live freely under government in a world where commerce counted for more than
virtue. But though the American future might belong to Hamiltonian practice,
it belonged to Jeffersonian ideology.145 There is not to be found anything like
the ideology of regime Whiggism, in which a modernizing aristocracy is rein-

142
Rowland T. Berthoff, "Independence and Attachment, Virtue and Interest: From Republican
Citizen to Free Enterpriser, 1787—1837," in Uprooted Americans, Essays to Honor Oscar Handlin, ed.
Richard L. Bushman (Boston, 1979).
143
J o h n Taylor, Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political ( P e t e r s b u r g , V a . ,
1818; reprinted, Indianapolis, 1977), pp. 74, 7 9 - 8 1 , 85, 98-110. In an Inquiry into the Principles
and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814), Taylor distinguished between "capital created
by industry" and "capital created by paper." "Capitalists" were those who robbed the former to
create the latter and found a new species of aristocracy.
144
Douglass Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers, ed. Trevor Colbourn (New York; 1974).
145
John M. Murrin, "The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution
Settlements in England (1688-1721) and America (1776-1816)," in Pocock, ed., Three British
Revolutions.
274 V I R T U E , COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

forced in possession of a strong executive government by the twin forces of com-

merce and politeness. This is one reason why Scottish social thought has been so
long misunderstood and Adam Smith set down as a rugged individualist. The
tremendous historical power of commerce was recognized and described in the
eighteenth century as a soft, civilizing, and feminizing force, and in the nine-
teenth as hard, heroic, and philistine: the gentle and the stern paideia.l46 The
advent of industry has much to do with this, but so has the role of a commercial
aristocracy, present in Britain but absent in America.

IV. From the response to the American Revolution to

the reaction to the French Revolution

Radical or patriot Whiggism in Britain and America confronted a Whig oligar-

chy that both cultures characterized in the same terms, but Americans had to do
with it at a distance and feared it as a specter, whereas Britons encountered it
head on as part of their own world of experience and were obliged to hear and
respond to what was regularly said on its behalf. Once the "ministerial" armies
had been discouraged from attempting to reduce the colonies to obedience, there
existed a space, if not a vacuum, that must be filled by extending — and, as it
turned out, transforming — the republican intimations latent in Whig discourse.
We have already begun to observe the reasons why this could never happen in
Britain. There existed no vacuum; political space was already filled with the
historic institutions of royal government and common law. The republican inti-
mations of Whiggism called for a republic of separated powers, but where the
crown in Parliament already exercised a conjoint sovereignty, there could be no
real case for a classical republic, just as a few years later there was no point in
raising the Jacobin cry for a republic one and indivisible. England (if not Britain)
was one and indivisible already, aristocratic and corporate power notwithstand-
ing, and the only serious Jacobins in the British Isles (to use that term) made
their appearance in Ireland, where a republic one and indivisible had much to
commend it before and even after the rise of Orangeism. The sovereignty of
Parliament being an effective fact, it might seem as if Commonwealth quasi-
republicanism stood revealed as a historical blind alley, and indeed it may never
have been the same after the American war. The Declaration of Independence
was a brutal slap in the face of those London radicals who had supposed that the
American cause was their own,147 and Richard Price and those like him were
reduced to declaring that American independence was a punishment for British
146
This phrase was coined by Marvin C. Becker, Florence in Transition, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1967-8).
147
Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 275

guilt. The relations between the component powers in Parliament could not be
remodeled along republican lines once the spectacle existed of the experiment
being carried out in American reality — not that the American constitutional
experiments of the 1780s seem to have attracted much British attention — and
the attempt to do so had always been largely a Tory affair. But, as we have already
seen, royal influence and aristocratic corruption had always been exposed to Old
Whig and patriot denunciations, and since the days of the First Whigs it had
been held that the remedy for such things lay in more frequent parliaments and
a reform of the representation. Before the American crisis became an American
war, these habitual slogans were being developed into serious proposals for fran-
chise reform, abolition of boroughs, and even manhood suffrage, and the elector-
ate was being presented as not only a repository of republican virtue and Lockean
power, but as a necessary and essential component in a political and social bal-
ance. If British radicalism could not significantly take a republican route, it could
take a democratic one. The democratization of politics could occur on both sides
of the Atlantic, but in the American republic the representation of the people
became a mode of sovereign democracy, whereas in Britain the representation of
the realm, with which the sovereign monarchy consulted to render its sovereignty
effective, became a representation of the people. Even this took a long time.
Because British republican and democratic radicalism encountered an aristo-
cratic oligarchy entrenched in control of a parliamentary system to which no
alternative was possible, there could never be a republican revolution but must
be a reform of Parliament. To say this, however, is not to say, as some have
supposed, that British radicalism was a tame and reformist affair compared with
the revolutionary daring of the Americans. 148 Nothing like the creative consti-
tutional experimenting of the Founding Fathers is indeed to be found, but the
experience of the next fifty years in exacting parliamentary reform from the oli-
garchy was tougher and more embittering than any undergone by the Americans,
and it is possible to imagine that it might have led to more revolutionary conclu-
sions. To smash and replace crown and Parliament, shire and borough, would
have been as totally transforming a revolution as the smashing and replacement
of the ancien regime, and there have always been British revolutionary dreamers
who wonder what it would have been like.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia's wrath, and our wrath be the worst.149

But this seems to be dreaming against the facts. The strength of Whig and
conservative interpretations of British history continues to lie in the general truth
148
A view attributed to the present writer by Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy, p. 174, and
"Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes, " p. 2.
149
G. K. Chesterton (scarcely a man of the left), in "The Secret People."
276 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

that no revolutionary alternative to the democratization of Parliament has ever

been taken seriously, and it has remained plausible that the Whig regime, even
at its most oligarchic, possessed a liberal flexibility that the ancien regime lacked.
It can further be maintained that because the oligarchic regime disposed of pow-
erful and articulate ideologies in which both its ancient and its modern character
could be asserted and defended — rhetorics that ranged from the ancient consti-
tution to the Wealth of Nations — the ideological debate in counterrevolutionary
Britain was of a depth and texture unknown in revolutionary America. Thomas
Paine, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Wil-
liam Blake, Thomas Malthus, William Cobbett, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and
James Mill form a gallery of radicals, conservatives, and revolutionaries hard to
imagine in a simpler and more spacious world. America might produce prophets,
but few dialecticians appeared until Tocqueville arrived to tell the republic what
it was becoming. This is not being said to score points in a World Cup for
political thinkers, but rather to establish the premise that a history of "the vari-
eties of Whiggism" still has a long way to go.
Two authentic revolutionaries took part in the Anglo-American debate of the
mid-1770s: Jean Paul Marat, a Frenchman resident in London, and Thomas Paine,
an Englishman just arrived in Philadelphia. The former wrote a rather conven-
tional radical Whig tract that he had to revise considerably to make into a French
Revolution manifesto years later. 150 The latter remains difficult to fit into any
kind of category. Common Sense breathes an extraordinary hatred of English gov-
erning institutions, but it does not consistently echo any established radical vo-
cabulary; Paine had no real place in the club of Honest Whigs to which Franklin
had introduced him in London, and his use of anti-Normanism to insist that
Britain did not have a constitution but rather a tyranny does not permit us to
think of him (as contemporaries might have) as a New Model soldier risen from
the grave. Moreover, when the Revolutionary War was over Paine returned to
live under "the royal brute of Great Britain" as if nothing much had happened,
nor was he pursued by the authorities until the very different circumstances of
1791- One of the few practicing revolutionaries in English history, he performed
no independent revolutionary action in England; his appearance on the scene,
however, does indicate that things were beginning to happen for which neither
branch of the Whig mainstream could properly account. In 1776, the year of
Common Sense, there appeared Jeremy Bentham's Fragment on Government, the first
shot in a long guerre de course against the ancient constitution, the balanced gov-
ernment, the common law, and all the icons of regime Whiggism as voiced by
the latest of its expositors, Sir William Blackstone. In the same year, however,
150
Luciano Guerci, "Marat prima della Rivoluzione: Le Catene della Schiavitu, " Rivista Storka Italiana
XCI, 2 - 3 (1979), pp. 4 3 4 - 6 9 . The Chains of Slavery was Marat's title in 1774, Les Cha'tnes de
I'Esdavage in 1793-
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 277
Bentham seems to have taken a hand in writing a government-sponsored rebuttal
of the Declaration of Independence.151 There was nothing venal about him and
it is far too early to be speaking of Philosophic Radicalism or of Bentham as a
radical of any kind; but no man and no tradition was his master. Some program
for scientific legislation was already in the young man's mind, but his indifference
to constitutional debate was all but absolute. We may do best to think of Ben-
tham as a kind of conservative Jacobin, a bureaucratic reformer indifferent to
history, but altogether without revolutionary aspirations or opportunities; yet we
should not try to document, what this might otherwise suggest, an affinity with
Walpolean or Scottish modernism — the rhetoric of modernism was Whig and
his was not. The parameters within which occurred the mutation of discourse
that produced him and his mind are hard to establish and seem not to belong to
the history of English public debate. Like Paine, but like him only in this,
Bentham concealed his origins if he had any.
The established patterns of radical speech and action outlasted the Declaration
of Independence, and Herbert Butterfield in 1949 found it possible to character-
ize 1780 as the year of "the revolution that did not happen."152 He came under
considerable fire for doing so: Whig historians believe that revolution is pre-
cluded by the structure of English institutions, and Namierite historians find it
difficult to believe that political beings ever think or act in a revolutionary man-
ner. To say that no one intended revolution in 1780 is in a sense to beg the
question, since revolutions are commonly conducted by those who had no inten-
tion of doing so; but without climbing into the cumulonimbus of the counterfac-
tual, we can say that in 1780 there were those who knew that revolution might
occur. The attempt made in that year to combine the petitioning activities of
London and Middlesex radicals with those of Yorkshire gentlemen and freehold-
ers suggests the classic formula for a country movement combining urban with
rural discontent; in the highly traditional Old Whig and ancient-constitutional-
ist rhetoric which the movement employed may be discerned elements of
the notion that the uncorrupt people may assemble, associate, and petition —
petitioning was often a tumultuous activity — in order to bring about reform of
a corrupt parliament. This was also the year of the Convention at Dungannon,
when a virtuous militia assembled in arms to bring about — peaceably, it is true
— a renewal of Irish parliamentary life (a revolution in the ancient sense of the
term). It never became clear how far, supposing Parliament to be corrupt, a
national convention could proceed through parliamentary channels or must sub-
stitute itself for them, and in the world as it looked after 1789, the charge of
promoting a national convention was to become that of promoting revolution in
151
Douglas Long, Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham's Idea of Liberty in Relation to his Utilitarianism
(Toronto, 1977), pp. 51-4.
152
H e r b e r t Butterfield, George III, Lord North and the People, 1779-80.
278 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

the French or most modern sense of the word. Long before that, however, British
and Irish patriot radicalism appeared to have shot its bolt. The Yorkshire move-
ment failed; the Patriot Parliament ran itself into futility; the Gordon riots stirred
up all the governing class's latent fears of religious enthusiasm. "Forty thousand
Puritans as they might have been in the time of Cromwell," wrote Gibbon, "have
started out of their graves."153 The election of 1784, however it came about, in
retrospect appeared to mean that the monarchy, the oligarchy, and the gentry
had closed ranks and were prepared to distinguish ever more stringently between
the reforms they were ready to concede and those they were not.
If we date the British counterrevolution from 1784, without waiting for the
massive reaction against the news from France, we may take into account certain
ideological indications of a hardening of attitude. Blackstone's successor in the
Vinerian professorship had come out unequivocally for "a high doctrine of sover-
eign authority, in framing which Samuel Johnson may have taken a hand.154 In
the domain of philosophy, the reality of divine will and the autonomy of moral
values were being asserted in terms calculated to reinforce the authority of soci-
ety; the advent of Scottish commonsense philosophy and the rapid adoption of
William Paley's writings into the Cambridge curriculum are instances of this.
There is an audible sternness and an unwillingness to accept opposition as legit-
imate, which suggests that the oligarchy was losing its tolerance for quasi-repub-
lican alternative programs; leaders of the aristocracy who found themselves in
opposition might have to decide quickly whether to endorse or reject radical
plans. This may have been a crucial moment in the reflective as well as the active
career of Edmund Burke. Between 1781 and 1784 it became clear that he would
have no part in proposals to enlarge the franchise. Thomas Reid and William
Paley, nevertheless, were liberal as well as conservative philosophers, and Burke
did not base his theoretical opposition to enlargement of the franchise on any
intransigently modernist claim that the constitution had assumed its final form
in 1688 or 1714 and could not thereafter be reformed. Rather, he affirmed that
the constitution was prescriptive and immemorial, and that therefore it was con-
ceptually impossible to speak either of natural rights it disregarded or of original
rights from which it had fallen away.155 The bedrock of ancient constitutionalism
was being laid at the foundations of the prescriptive conservatism to which Burke
would give classic expression a few years later and which, at a first and even a
second reading, seems very remote from the Scottish scientific Whiggism hith-
erto an intellectual pillar of the post-Walpolean order. One would give much for

153
J. E. Norton, ed., The Letters of Edward Gibbon, 3 vols. (London, 1956), vol. II, p . 243.
154
1 refer here to Sir Robert Chambers, whose subsequent career lay in India; for his association with
Johnson see W . Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York, 1975), pp. 4 1 7 - 2 6 . Johnson certainly
helped with the writing and may have advised on the argument.
155
Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1971), pp. 2 2 6 - 8 .
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 279

a report of the conversations that took place when Burke dined with Millar in
Glasgow and with Smith in Edinburgh; the young William Windham, however,
found his faculties not clear next morning. 156

(«•)

The impact of the French Revolution between 1789 and 1793 brought about a
disintegration and regrouping among the Whigs: one, to speak more precisely,
in which a relatively organized entity known as the Whig party lost contact with
several great Whig connections but contrived to retain its name. Whether the
Grenville and Portland connections ceased being Whigs, and if so what they were
said to have become, is a question we may consider. Whatever the high politics
of these occurrences, 157 their history in the fields of ideology and discourse may
conveniently be recounted from the obvious point: the publication of Burke's
Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. Burke was spurred to write this by
hearing of Richard Price's sermon to the Revolution Society, which presented the
march to Versailles in October 1789 and the conducting of the French royal
family to Paris as glorious events in keeping with the spirit of the English Rev-
olution of 1688. If we ask what Price was doing when he delivered this address,
part of the answer must be that his rhetoric may well have been 'Vulgar Whig"
but was not Old Whig in the Commonwealthman sense. It was aimed at a king,
not a king's ministers, and proclaimed that kings — in England, France, or nature
— might be cashiered for misconduct: a doctrine of conditional rule and popular
sovereignty, which paradoxically formed no part of the language that affirmed
the separation and balance of the component parts of the constitution. Price may
well have believed that he was preaching a Lockean sermon, and Josiah Tucker
would caustically have agreed; there is a problem ex silentio in the circumstance
that Burke at no time saw fit to mention Locke's name in this connection. He set
himself, however, to repudiate what was certainly a radical Whig interpretation
of the events of 1688—9, and there is evidence that, much like Tucker some years
earlier, he saw Price as an agent of the earl of Shelburne. 158 There was a conspir-
acy afoot, both conservatives agreed, to damage the monarchy by using 1688 to
assert natural rights of limitation and deposition, and Tucker had seen this as the
work of aristocratic desperadoes conducting an ideological fronde. After Burke's
conduct in the regency crisis, he was ill placed to defend himself had any such

156
The Diary of the Rt. Hon. William Windham (London, 1866), pp. 6 0 - 1 , 63-4: "Felt very strongly
the impressions of a company entirely Scotch. Faculties not clear."
157
For w h i c h see O ' G o r m a n , Whig Party and the French Revolution, w h o never neglects t h e factor of
belief.
158
Thomas W. Copeland, ed., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1967); vol.
VI, pp. 9 1 - 2 .
280 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

charge been made; but his attitude toward aristocratic Whiggism was more com-
plex than Tucker's.
Tucker and Burke both had recourse to an interpretation of 1688 so character-
istic of regime Whiggism as to savor paradoxically of the arguments used by
Revolution Tories. That is, they argued that the Revolution had been an act of
necessity and had not established any general right to repeat the actions of which
it had consisted. To avoid the extremes of arguing either that it established a
right of deposition or that it set up a merely de facto regime, it must be argued
that the act of necessity was performed within a framework of historic constitu-
tionality that had not been dissolved. Here, however, the arguments pressed by
Tucker and Burke, in each case against Price, must be said to have diverged.
Tucker was a modernist of much the same school as Hume; he saw the principles
of constitutional liberty as recent in their formation, and the acts of 1688 and
1689 as important contributions to giving them shape. He saw the reliance on
abstract natural right, of which he suspected Price, as implying a violent repu-
diation of the processes of history, by which commerce was bringing a free and
ordered society into existence. Burke on the other hand had already subscribed
to the view that the constitution was immemorial and prescriptive; he could join
hands with Coke and Blackstone in presenting the men of 1688 as acting within
the framework of the ancient constitution and the confirmatio cartarum,159 and the
history to which natural right did violence was a process of gradual adaptation
and piety toward precedents, far more natural and prudential and less dynamic
than those isolated by the theorists of scientific Whiggism, of whom Tucker was
one. Those who had acted out of necessity were seen to have acted out of reverence
toward precedent and custom.
Burke established a rhetoric of prescriptive conservatism with such intellectual
power and religious conviction, and found so large a public willing to endorse it
- even Gibbon, to his slight dismay, found himself a true believer160 - that he
bade fair to displace Scottish social theory from its role as the chief ideological
support of the Whig order. This does not mean, however, that he was either
indifferent or hostile to it. As his understanding of the European civility threat-
ened by the French Revolution developed and intensified, he saw that civility
increasingly as an edifice of manners and morality resting on a foundation in
commerce: precisely the theory advanced by Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon,
looking back to the age of Addison, Shaftesbury, and the philosophers of polite-
ness. That the Whig order, as part of this civility, was based on a union of land
and commerce Burke had no doubt whatever, and he held that the virtue of the
state was displayed in the management of its revenue. But the management of
159
Not much had in fact been said about Magna Carta in 1689. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights,
pp. 195-6.
160
Norton, ed., Letters of Edward Gibbon, vol. Ill, p. 216.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 281

Whig commerce must be in aristocratic hands, and Burke found increasing rea-
son to fear the emergence of a "middle class" no longer responsive to their pa-
tronage and leadership. It was not, however, the entrepreneurial activity of this
class that he feared or saw as directing their behavior, but rather their energy,
their enthusiasm, and their unbridled capacity to form associations; the category
"bourgeoisie" may be imposed on his thought but cannot be directly elicited
from it. For these reasons, although he continued to accept and proclaim the
civilizing power of commerce, he declared as early as the Reflections that commerce
stood in need of its own history. It did not negate the feudal honor or the eccle-
siastical piety and learning that had preceded it, and to destroy these — as a
revolutionary monied interest and intelligentsia were doing in France — was to
destroy commerce and civilization themselves. Burke's intellectual solution to
the challenge presented by revolution was to enlarge scientific Whiggism in the
direction of a deeper historicism; his common-law concern for custom and prec-
edent and his Whig commitment to aristocratic manners and politeness have
somehow to be fitted into this context.
As has been indicated in the preceding chapter, the point at which his thought
comes closest to breaking with the Whig tradition to which he deeply belonged
was that at which he articulated his concern for clerisy. Burke's religiosity — his
awareness of the sacred, of the need for transcendent moral sanctions — was real
although its roots do not seem to lie in direct religious experience; but to the
need for a clergy to preach the discipline of transcendence he added the need of
one to further that of manners through the maintenance of learning. Here he
struck a chord which was Tory and Laudian rather than Whig and latitudinarian;
Whigs knew that there must be polite manners and that the clergy had a role to
play in furthering them, but they emphatically did not think — in the tradition
of Anglican critics of Henry VIII — that there could be no manners without the
learning of an established, beneficed, and landed church. Burke was to persuade
many of them that there was such a necessity, but it may have been these among
his disciples who found that they had become Tories in a real sense of the word.
By denying that culture was dependent on commerce, and affirming the possi-
bility of the converse relationship, he radically modified an important premise of
scientific Whiggism, and in suggesting that a class brought into being by com-
merce might destroy itself by attacking the clerical foundations of culture he gave
expression to a new problem in social theory. The barbarian was known; he ex-
isted before the growth of commerce had made culture possible. But what was to
be said of the philistine, who existed after the relation between culture and com-
merce had become possible but who denied that it was a necessary one? Burke's
demonic men of energy, destroying the framework of manners in the pursuit of
power, are examples of what is meant; they appear within the process of history
but almost as its negation. Later, however, it was increasingly felt that the growth
282 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

of commerce might produce a class without manners or culture, and this was to
form part of the conventional meaning of the term "bourgeoisie." The process of
history itself must be reexamined in this light, and at the point where Burke's
revision of perspectives forces scientific Whiggism to redefine itself as Tory stands
Coleridge's Constitution of the Church and State,161 a study of how a static landed
and a dynamic commercial class must discipline themselves by endowing a clerisy
charged with the perpetuation of culture. Coleridge's American disciples, how-
ever — such as there were of them — called themselves Whigs. 1 6 2
Burke's immediate intention was to demolish the claim that the English Rev-
olution of 1688 might be read in such a way as to provide justification for the
French Revolution of 1789, and thus to assimilate the former event to the
latter. Because he was an imaginative and neurotic genius, Burke saw, both
rightly and wrongly, very much further than that; he recognized the Revolution
in France as an event of vast ideological importance and endeavored to diagnose
and resist it by far-reaching ideological statements. As regards actions his coun-
trymen might or might not perform, however, he does not seem to have looked
much further, initially at least, than the attempt to assimilate the two revolutions
and justify the latter one; yet this issue was to prove sufficient to fragment the
Whig political groupings along ideological lines that are by no means identical
with those denning the fissure between regime and Commonwealth Whiggism
that has concerned us so far. A number of problems meet us here. The myth of
the French Revolution is of course no myth; it was instantly recognized as an
event that transformed — in some minds it came to constitute — world history,
and people in many political cultures found themselves living in terms of their
responses to it. Yet the Revolution did not instantly assimilate all other political
cultures into its categories, and English political culture was singularly idiosyn-
cratic, tough, and resistant. English radicalism, no less than the defense of the
ruling system, was as we have seen possessed of many idioms for expressing its
values and demands, and these did not instantly disappear with the news from
the Bastille and Versailles. We should therefore ask the question — and seek to
answer it in terms of a serious theory of speech and discourse — exactly why
radicals in England found it necessary to interpret French events as expressing
their demands, and state their values in terms congruent with French discourse
as they understood it. This program is probably too ambitious to be undertaken
here. As regards Price, the Burkean diagnosis (i.e., that Price was abstracting
concepts from one tradition of discourse and imposing them as criteria on all
political societies whatever) is plausible as far as it goes, but carries more than

161
On the Constitution of the Church and State according to the Idea of Each (London, 1830).
162
The most recent studies are Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs
(Chicago, 1979), and Jean V. Matthews, Rufus Choate: The Law and Civic Virtue (Philadelphia,
1980).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 283

one meaning. Burke condemned Price as a political rationalist, or as he called it

a "metaphysician": one who would construct a theory and then use it to judge,
sentence, and transform all practice. Burke had already brought this charge against
English reformers, and Tucker earlier still had leveled it against Price himself. It
would be useful to determine whether Price was guilty as charged, after which
we would be free to determine that it was not necessarily a crime. Historically
speaking, had a habit of arguing in the way described established itself in the
discourse of English radical intellectuals, whether inclined to Platonism like Price
or to associationism like Priestley? 163
The notion of abstraction can be applied in another way. If we think of English
radical sympathizers with the French Revolution as engaged in a species of com-
parative politics — as asserting that the speech and actions of the French had bases
in common with their own speech and action — it is evident that this would
entail an exercise in translation, and translating concepts from one mode of speech
into another cannot be done without abstracting them, when it is easy to assert
that they possess multicontextual if not universal significances. It was Mackin-
tosh's complaint that Burke's language was so English as to leave no terms in
which it was possible to understand scientifically what the French had been doing.164
If we employ the concept of translation, however, we are once again affirming
that the English had a discourse of their own, after which we must ask why they
found it necessary to assimilate it to French discourse; exactly what was per-
formed when English radicals addressed each other as "Citizen"? And if we affirm
that English radical discourse possessed a continuing validity not identical with
that possessed by the French, 165 we must sooner or later ask the question: Exactly
how Jacobin were the English Jacobins? When it was suggested in the preceding
essay that Burke feared the English radicals and dissenters less as revolutionaries
than as fellow travelers, 166 the intention was to raise the problem of translation;
for the fellow traveler is preeminently one who asserts that the parameters of a
neighboring politics are relevant to, and more significant than, those of his own,
yet does not leave his politics to inhabit those to which he refers himself. Trans-
lation entails the problem of the double standard; every one of those who replied
to Burke's Reflections declared that the French must not be judged harshly for
actions performed in the overthrow of despotism, but if this meant that they
must be judged by standards intelligible to themselves, the mere fact that En-
glishmen did not fully comprehend them meant that they must judge the French
163
For this dimension of the difference between the two men see Jack G. Fruchtman, The Apocalyptic
Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley (Philadelphia, 1982).
164
See pp. 297-8.
165
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964), and a plentiful
literature of articles and monographs.
166
See also R o b e r t L. Dozier, For King, Constitution and Country: The English Loyalists and the French
Revolution (Lexington, Ky., 1983), p. 69-
284 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

either less or more severely than they could ever judge themselves. This per-
plexity now entered political discourse as a constant and has never left it.
We are circling around the problem and have returned to the point of recog-
nizing that Englishmen for all their idiosyncrasy of culture did evaluate their
actions with reference to the pretensions of the French. This, which had moved
Price to speak and Burke to write, is highly relevant to the fragmentation that
now overtook the Whigs. Between 1789 and 1793 the followers of Charles James
Fox moved away from Burke's condemnation of the French Revolution and into
opposition to Pitt's policy of making war against it. Because they possessed a
political organization167 and a newspaper that were in the habit of using the
phrase "the Whig party," they were able to arrogate the label "Whig" to them-
selves, and it was possible for the Morning Chronicle to announce that "the great
body of the Whigs of England" had sat in judgment on the disputes between
Burke and Fox and pronounced in the latter's favor; "the consequence is that Mr.
Burke retires from parliament." Burke, who found this kind of party discipline
as uncongenial as many still do, retorted with An Appeal from the New to the Old
Whigs. The title is at variance with the terminology we have been using: Burke's
"Old Whigs" are in fact the great families constituting the "Old Corps" of Whigs,
and in particular their Revolution ancestors, whereas his "New" are still in many
ways the heirs of the Old (True, Real, Independent, Honest) Whigs of the Com-
monwealth tradition.168 The Appeal essays once more to demonstrate that the
Revolution of 1688 was the antithesis of that of 1789, and the foundations it
discovers for the dethroning of James II and the impeachment of Henry Sachev-
erell are, if anything, more consonant with the thinking of Revolution Tories
than are those laid down in the Reflections. Regime Whiggism had long since
absorbed Revolution Toryism and made it its own, but perhaps we have here one
clue to the curious change that at some point overcame the term "Tory" and
made it applicable to the great Whig families who took Pitt's path and also
Burke's. The motives that led Fox to stand out in opposition to the war with
France cannot be too simply stated;169 among them may have been the feeling
that the radical associations offered a power base still necessary to him, but we
know also that he continued to see the policies of the crown and its ministers as
"Tory," in the Bolingbrokean sense that they aimed to use royal influence to
break up aristocratic associations. This would be the normal way of using the
term; there is an evident sense of paradox in the remark made a few years later
167
0'Gorman, Whig Party and the French Revolution, pp. 12-31.
168
O'Gorman shows clearly that Burke's terminology was not idiosyncratic; the equation Old Whigs/Old
Corps was perhaps more current than the use of "Old Whig" in a "Commonwealth" sense. He
also shows that Burke's publication was by no means welcomed by the Old Whigs to whom he
appealed; as usual, he seemed to them too strident.
169
O'Gorman, Whig Party and the French Revolution; Herbert Butterfield, "Charles James Fox and the
Whig Opposition, 1792," Cambridge HistoricalJournal IX, 3 (1949), pp. 293-330.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 285

that the French Revolution "had made Gibbon a Christian and Windham a
Tory."170 But the word could also be used to denote more generally a supporter
of the crown and its policies, as to Americans it had meant a supporter of royal
authority exercised in Parliament. Nothing could be more Whiggish than the
Grenvilles and Portlands who now rallied to support Pitt and the war with France;
nothing could be more Whiggish than the existing parliamentary and ecclesias-
tical structures, reform of which came to be demanded by those who were op-
posed to the war. It is not yet fully understood by what stages the word "Tory"
came, whether in contemporary or in historians' parlance, to be applied to stern
unbending defenders of the Septennial Act, the Toleration Act, and the national
debt.
The Foxite Whigs' decision to oppose the war with France reopened a problem
closely akin to that of fellow traveling. What came to be termed "antipolemic"
(meaning antiwar) argument could be, and was, expressed in language dating
from the Queen Anne Tories: A war in Europe with subsidized allies corrupted
the body politic; it multiplied patronage, pensions, honors, standing armies, and
the national debt. Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; the Common-
wealth voice was as audible as that of the country, and both remained so for the
next twenty years. But at the same time the war was an ideological conflict,
fought against what Burke was to term an armed doctrine; to oppose it, therefore,
was to declare it as doctrinaire as its adversary and to place its opponents in the
position of those who were above ideologies, or could choose between them with-
out choosing either. This was more than ever the case when it appeared that the
war must go on until monarchy was restored to France, and involved repressive
measures against ideological dissentients at home, not all of whom succeeded in
avoiding subversive actions. Quite unlike the opposition in the War of the Span-
ish Succession or even the American Revolution, the opposition to the Revolu-
tionary and (with modifications) the Napoleonic Wars was in the predicament of
a principled opposition to a principled war. It might very laudably oppose an
ideological crusade that had become repressive of domestic liberties; yet once the
opposition suggested that the ideological hostility of the adversary in the war was
not so harmful as domestic repression, it was unclear what standards it was using
to criticize the adversary, and it could be accused, without being certain of its
reply, of thinking a few treason trials at home worse than a reign of terror or a
military despotism abroad. Intelligent critics were aware of this problem, and
when Napoleon seemed to have converted the war into one against tyranny, or
the Spanish risings into a war for popular liberties, the critics could adjust their
position without losing their principles; yet the problem of the double standard
was almost structurally inescapable, as was that of the apparent defeatism that
170
Paul Turnbull, "The Supposed Infidelity of Edward Gibbon," Historical JournalXXVI, 1 (1982),
pp. 23-42. Quoted from Lord Glenbervie's diary.
286 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

arose when one doubted the military prospects of a war because one disapproved
of its moral foundations. What Americans might term the Copperhead role dogged
the antiwar Whigs to the end of the Hundred Days, and even William Cobbett,
who was more like John Bull than most Englishmen, was habitually defeatist
regarding the war in the Peninsula.17 x
Those who opposed the French wars were almost without exception patriots as
the term was used in the nineteenth century (very differently, as we have seen,
from its use in the prerevolutionary era to denote one whose ostensible concern
for public virtue carried him to the point of republicanism). Their loyalty was to
the national community and its values, and if they doubted the country's right
to victory they did not desire its defeat. Yet there were those who, without doing
anything to ensure defeat, spoke as if they expected it — as if the shortcomings
of the regime ensured that it would and should fail; they began with a laudable
desire to understand the enemy's point of view and ended by hero-worshipping
Napoleon as their successors would Stalin. It is desirable, though it will not be
welcome,172 to dwell on this, because we are dealing with the origins of what has
become an integral part of modern political culture.
From the age of the counterrevolutionary wars A. J. P. Taylor has traced the
lineage of "trouble-makers" and "dissenters" (as he uses the terms), who object
less to the misuse than to the use of national power, because they operate by
moral standards that must always condemn it. 173 Richard Price was among the
first of them, and it is tempting to explain them along Burkean lines: they erect
the community's morals into a standard of theory by which its practice can only
be condemned. But we must add to this by comprehending that these antipa-
triots were the heirs of the "patriots" so denned by eighteenth-century usage: the
"Mock Patriots" as Tucker splenetically called them. Where the patriot followed
public virtue to the point of rejecting his country's institutions, the antipatriot
follows moral virtue to the point of rejecting his country's community. To the
patriot in the modern or postrevolutionary sense, his country is his country right
or wrong, and he is tempted to pronounce it always right. The antipatriot is
tempted to pronounce it always wrong, because his notion of a country is a
congregation engaged in moral censure and admonition, but ruled by politicians
whose corruption is taken for granted. Tucker and Burke witnessed, and in their
eyes Price personified, the formation of this mentality, which came about when
the Old Whig and Nonconformist consciences were unified in the presence of the
ideological problem imposed upon discourse by the revolution in France. Burke
overstated but did not altogether misstate the case when he declared that the
17
G e o r g e Spater, William Cobbett: The Poor Man's Friend, 2 vols. ( C a m b r i d g e , 1982).
172
C o n t e m p o r a r y w r i t i n g about radicalism and repression in these years maintains a h i g h tempera-
ture. The present writer finds popular discontent and popular patriotism equally understandable.
173
A. J . P. Taylor, The Trouble-Makers: Dissent Over Foreign Policy 1792-1939 (London, 1957).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 287
opposition to the French war marked the end of patriotism as he had known it.
The antiwar intelligentsia had been born, with their moral certainties, their dou-
ble standards, and their love of vicarious capitulation. To that extent it was a
new world.
A deservedly more benign - though in no way uncritical - account of these
people has been given by J. E. Cookson.174 He emphasizes their role in the
development of nineteenth-century middle-class liberalism and the Nonconform-
ist conscience, terms that go together in consequence of the predominant degree
to which the antiwar movement was rooted in the radical Unitarian associations
of the 1780s. He is thus enabled to bring out the essentially ecclesiastical char-
acter of the terms "Tory" and "liberal" at the beginning of their modern history.
From the time of the first petitions for the relief of Dissenters from civil disabil-
ities, a "Tory" came to mean one who insisted that a Toleration Act and a Test
Act were interdependent, and that the Revolution Settlement implied a high
degree of identity between the political nation and an established church. Most
"Tories" in this sense were or had been Whigs, and it can even be doubted
whether Burke, with his support for the relief of Irish Catholics, would have
qualified for the term. A "liberal" thinker, on the other hand, was one who
advocated a religion of free inquiry and speculation, and for this reason held
religious freedom to entail an equality of civic rights. Though other meanings
attached themselves with varying degrees of rapidity, it was long before the word
"liberalism" took on the full range of political meanings, and longer still before
it took on the full range of economic meanings, with which we now burden it.
Dr. Cookson's "liberals" were before anything else an antiwar movement, and
he gives ample detail of the extent to which their opposition to war was an
opposition to aristocratic control of a military andfinancialstate, couched in the
established language of attack on a monied interest. It follows that their criti-
cisms were directed, much as were those of their Jeffersonian contemporaries in
the United States, against a military and financial, even more than a landed,
aristocracy; they did not need to echo, but would have fully endorsed, the Amer-
ican contention that the former sort of aristocracy would infallibly engender the
latter. This is the context in which we should read their incessant praise of the
"middle classes" as composed of self-reliant men of enterprise. They knew, as
their peers in New England and the mid-Atlantic states were coming to know,
that they were living in a society in which commercial relations were more and
more preponderating over agrarian relations; but they acclaimed the investor of
personal property in precisely the same language, and for precisely the same
independence and virtue as opposed to corruption, as their neo-Harringtonian
forebears had deployed in acclaiming the master of real property in land. In

174
The Friends of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England, 1793-1815 (Cambridge, 1982).
288 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

America if not in Britain, it is possible to discover antebellum Whigs who fol-

lowed John Taylor in reserving the term "capitalism" for a system of public
finance controlled by an aristocracy,175 and in Britain we may allow ourselves to
think of the later differences between northern and midland industry and London
and Westminster banking.176 There is a case for seeing praise of the individual
entrepreneur as the country ideology of capitalism.

(Jit)
Adopting language originally framed to excoriate the Whig order for which he
stood, Burke had diagnosed the French Revolution as the conspiracy of a monied
interest, aimed at establishing a new kind of despotism on the dissolution by
power and paper of all the natural ties among men — including, of course, the
natural ties of commerce. Paine retorted by directing this language back into its
historic channels; he denounced the war against the Revolution as the conspiracy
of a boroughmongering and patronage-wielding aristocracy, aimed at perpetuat-
ing the system of paper money and public credit on which its power rested. In
the second part of The Rights of Man he outlined a scheme for democratic control
of the fiscal structure and the institution of systems of worker insurance. The
French Revolution had in a sense been a national and democratic takeover of the
debts of the French crown, and schemes like Paine's, but even more ambitious,
were being propounded by such as Linguet.177 In English terms, we may read
Part II of The Rights of Man as marking a decisive move away from any dream of
a merely rustic, republican, or Anglo-Saxon democracy; revolutionaries must seize
the credit of the state because they lived in a world that credit had transformed.
Yet Paine's starting point (and in this respect Burke's) was in the country and
Commonwealth denunciation of the credit structure, which continued to carry
with it idealizations of the independence of the small proprietor, and quasi-
Harringtonian democratic Utopias continued to be constructed by Spence and
others; to seize the credit structure might be to perpetuate, to transform, or to
abolish it. Paine wrote several prophecies of the imminent collapse of British
aristocratic warfinance,and it was one of these that caught the eye of that quin-
tessentially country democrat William Cobbett, during his second American so-

175
Rush Welter, The Mind of America, 1820-1860 (New York; 1975). For an interesting account of
Joseph Priestley in his Pennsylvania years, seeking to reconcile the militia ideal with the idea of a
commercial society, see Lawrence Delbert Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and Militia in American
Society to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill; N.C., 1982).
176
W . D . R u b i n s t e i n , " W e a l t h , Elites a n d t h e Class S t r u c t u r e of M o d e r n B r i t a i n , " Past and Present
LXXVI (1977), pp. 99-126; and with reservations, Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the
Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge, 1981).
177
Darlene Gay Levy, The Ideas and Careers of Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet: A Study in Eighteenth-Century
French Politics (Urbana, 111., 1980).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 289
journ in 1817—19, and caused him to exhume Paine's bones and bring them back
to England as relics.178 To anyone but Cobbett it would have occurred - as to
everyone but Cobbett it immediately did — that he was also bringing back the
bones of the author of The Age of Reason.
The point of the incident is that British radicalism, throughout the age of
counterrevolutionary war, agrarian misery and rebellion, and industrial change,
continued to be expressed in terms of a sustained attack on the Whig oligarchy,
variously known as "Old Corruption" and "The Thing." Aristocratic control of
politics, patronage, and finance continued to be put forward as the root cause of
moral evils such as corruption and material evils such as poverty; removal of
aristocratic control was seen as the prerequisite if not the ultimate goal of all
reform. We know that the language in which Old Corruption was denned was
by this time a century old, and as much Tory as Whig in its origins and trans-
mission; the time has now come to claim that it remained paradigmatic. Even
had Cobbett been an isolated and eccentric exhibitionist, the depth of his in-
debtedness to Paine would demand our attention, but the phenomenon has a
deeper meaning. Both men were asserting, in the eighteenth-century tradition,
that the credit structure must soon collapse under the weight of its increasing
debts, paper issues, and corruption; where Paine differed from Hume and Price
was in his insistence that a national debt as such was benign and helped hold the
nation together, and that only aristocratic mismanagement ensured disaster.179
Cobbett was so certain of disaster that he offered to be broiled on a gridiron if it
did not occur, and when Huskisson and others appeared to have held the system
in equilibrium Cobbett hoisted a gridiron over his newspaper offices, partly as a
gesture of defiance, partly as a declaration that if the financial apocalypse were
not now, yet it would come.180 The survival of the banking edifice through the
1820s made two things possible. One was the 1832 reform of the parliamentary
structure by Whigs not acting on Commonwealth and country principles, a re-
form celebrated by Macaulay as an assurance of economic health 2nd progress.
The other was the sustained endeavor of Marx and many others to persuade the
English working classes that the causes of immiseration lay not in the aristocratic
structure of Old Corruption, but deeper within capitalism in the relations be-
tween capital and labor. There is a sense in which Whig recovery and reform
were necessary conditions of Marx's intellectual system, and this is one reason
why Marxists tend to be Whig historians.
A Marxist analysis encourages us to look for the supersession of a politics based
on the confrontation between the oligarchy and its rural and urban opponents by
l78
Spater, William Cobbett, vol. II, pp. 289-90, 313-16, 346-7, 376-9, 387, 556n. o.
179
This may be traced as far back as Common Sense; see Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Major Writings
of Thomas Paine (Secaucus, N.J., 1974), p. 32.
180
Spater, William Cobbett, Vol. II, pp. 365, 413, 421, 424.
290 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

one based on that between two classes, one of employers and the other of workers,
the one employing an ideology of the free market and the other an ideology of
the exploitation of labor. We should indeed look for the emergence of both these
ideologies, since it would seem that they did appear and the classes they presup-
pose may have appeared also. But to write of them Whiggishly — on the suppo-
sition that nothing matters except their appearance and that the transition from
one politics to the other was rapid and complete in proportion to its assumed
significance - is to divert the historian of ideology from his proper task, that of
discovering and articulating the languages in which the inhabitants of an era did
in fact present their society and cosmos to themselves and to each other. We have
supposed that a version of the entrenched radicalism of Commonwealth and coun-
try presented the context in which — if not the matrix out of which — new radical
languages must take shape; a sketch of the processes by which this occurred may
be offered if we examine some of the replies to Burke's Reflections, and some of the
ideologies that made their appearance soon after.
Paine's The Rights of Man is, of course, the most famous of these. It contained
elements probably new and certainly unfamiliar in the context of Commonwealth
and country radicalism, and these differentiate it from the reply to Burke written
by that simon-pure representative of the old quasi-republican tradition, Cather-
ine Macaulay; 181 but we have also seen how Paine inspired Cobbett to perpetuate
the ideology that had Old Corruption at its center. Not all replies to Burke,
however, were written by those Old Whigs whom he called New. Mary Woll-
stonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Man permits us to look toward that revo-
lutionary rationalism in which William Godwin a few years later was to blend a
secularized millennialism with elements of Locke and Rousseau,182 in a way that
Tucker would have had no difficulty in recognizing. Wollstonecraft, however,
had a quarrel of her own with Rousseau, which bore fruit in her far more striking
Vindication of the Rights of Women; from the standpoint of the present volume,
what is most noteworthy here is that the rights she claims for women are to the
material means of independence and virtue, but that she further claims that the
manners (and therefore the morals) of society need to be drastically revised before
the virtues expected of women can be defined without profound falsity.
We are traveling away from the central and of course masculine structures of
English and Scottish discourse, but a Rousseauist concern for the integrity of
personality in the confrontation with society — itself not distant from the familiar
concerns with virtue, corruption, and diversification — may serve to recall that
there took shape at this time a kind of radicalism to which we attach the epithet
"romantic." Godwin's early training as a Sandemanian makes us ask about the
181
C a t h e r i n e M a c a u l a y (afterward G r a h a m ) , Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund
Burke . . . in a letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Stanhope ( L o n d o n , 1 7 9 0 ) .
182
Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London, 1980).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 291

religious origins of his rationalism and reminds us at the same time that Whig
political culture unhesitatingly identified nearly all forms of radicalism as "en-
thusiasm." Nor was this diagnosis necessarily mistaken. The path that led from
an inner and personal religion to a rationalist and secular libertarian individual-
ism had been pointed out and marked with warning signs by Hume, Tucker,
and Burke, and there are hints that the immanentism and hermeticism of Mar-
garet Jacob's Radical Enlightenment were emerging from below ground to take
shape in a rich variety of gnoses. It is not merely that the years of revolution and
counterrevolution were fertile in millennialisms and illuminisms; 183 something
even deeper was happening. The two greatest system builders among English
romantics are assuredly Blake and Coleridge. In the one we hear voices coming
from very old and deep layers in the archaeology of heretical and antinomian
counterreligion, though some severance from these roots seems necessary in order
to account for Blake's need to invent his own mythology and nomenclature; only
great genius can make the difference between Golgonooza and Barsoom. In the
other we encounter a scholarly endeavor, carried out at the levels of elite literacy,
to uncover and recover what Coleridge claims to be the buried tradition of En-
glish Platonic and Neoplatonic thinking, to which a return must be made if a
revolution (or counterrevolution) is to be achieved. 184 In both, we discover the
invention of a countermyth, to which Coleridge's Platonism and Blake's Ever-
lasting Gospel were alike opposed: the myth that English thought had been
dominated since the early seventeenth century by the succession of Bacon, Hobbes,
Locke, and Newton, the cold mechanical philosophers of rationalist individual-
ism. How far from historic reality this myth was should by now be evident; Whig
society had been philosophically defended on grounds of its richness, fecundity,
and diversity, its capacity to develop sentiment and sympathy, transaction and
conversation, taste and science, the polite together with the mechanical arts. It
is not too much to say that commerce had been celebrated as poetry before it was
denounced as pushpin. Yet Bentham and Mill were by now on the scene, and
there was clearly a case for regarding them — though they were not Whigs — as
cold mechanical philosophers. The myth of "the single vision and Newton's sleep"
answered some deep needs of the imagination, which is not to say that we should
allow it to write our history for us. Of all the inventions of radical thought at
this period, it is the one most insistently and angrily maintained on right and
left at the present day.
The attack on the four philosophers of the single vision was intended as an
183
C l a r k e G a r r e t t , Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Bal-
t i m o r e , 1 9 7 5 ) ; W . H . O l i v e r , Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England
from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland and Oxford, 1978); J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming:
Popular Millenarism 1780-1850 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980).
184
To indicate the growth of Coleridge's thought in footnotes is a dangerous task, but see particularly
The Friend and On the Constitution of the Church and State, cited in note following.
292 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

attack on reigning Whig culture and reminds us that romantic radicalism, like
other radicalisms before it, flowed from both a republican and a Tory source; this
may help us understand the movement of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth
from republican youth to Tory old age, but it further complicates the meaning
of the word "Tory" at a time when it was increasingly used to denote a last-ditch
defender of the Whig order. Burke, in his one major departure from the Whig
mainstream, had declared that manners continued to rest on an ecclesiastical and
chivalric foundation and had drawn upon Anglican tradition to present the clergy
(or clerisy) as protectors of learning and culture; we saw how easily this could be
turned into a criticism rather than a defense of the Whig aristocracy. A "Tory"
in the post-Burkean sense might be one who sternly maintained that an estab-
lished clergy was needed to preserve both moral and cultural discipline, but he
would have to believe (as many did) in the conjunction of the clergy with the
landed aristocracy and gentry in order to qualify as a conservative. If he did not,
he might remain a Tory but would tend to become a radical: one who believed,
in an enlargement of the Bolingbrokean tradition, that the gentry needed outside
assistance in order to uphold the values for which they stood. Bolingbroke had
seen a "patriot king" in this role, but it could be performed by a democracy, a
clergy, or a clerisy. By 1828 Coleridge was devising a Tory Utopia in which
aristocracy, commerciality, and clerisy discharged separate but reinforcing func-
tions; but his "national church" or clerisy is concerned to maintain culture rather
than religion, and we move irrevocably out of the reigning and into the radical
mode of thought once it appears that the three agencies operate independently of
one another rather than in shared dependence on a central sovereignty. Coler-
idge's On the Constitution in Church and State is in many ways a counterpart to
Harrington's Oceana, which he admired185 and supposed to belong to his "Pla-
tonic" tradition (as possibly it does).186
A Tory radicalism — in the eighteenth century a means of maintaining Roman
virtue in a fading partnership with Christian dynasticism - could in the early
nineteenth century grow out of thefissuresBurke had managed to open between
aristocracy, commerce, and culture. It was post-Whig in the sense that it ac-
cepted and sought to exploit the primacy that Whig thought since Defoe and
Addison had accorded to the notions."of manners and culture, but it was also
paternalist to the extent that it seemed to make culture dependent on gentry and
clerical protection. Since a nostalgia for the Middle Ages was on the point of
developing (for reasons to be examined in a moment) we seem to be finding merit
at last in the theses of Thompson and Kramnick; but it is the defect of any
185
On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. and with an intro. by John Barrell (London, 1972),
p. 5 1 .
186
See Pocock, " C o n t e x t s for t h e Study of J a m e s H a r r i n g t o n , " / / Pensiero Politico X I , 1 ( 1 9 7 8 ) , p p .
20-35.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 293

"paternalist" interpretation of Tory opposition that paternalism could be (and

was) outbid by patronage any day of any week in the long years of Whig suprem-
acy. Radical Toryism derived its republican content from the fact that it was an
attempt to make clients act independently of their patrons, which was why read-
ers of Cicero so easily saw it as Catilinarian. In ecclesiastical matters, silent though
these may have been from Atterbury to Newman, its churchmanship could be so
high as to make the church independent of the establishment, while in the rela-
tions between classes the idea of a Tory democracy could at times go to surprising
lengths. J. B. Bernard, an unusually deviant Fellow of King's, was in the 1830s
close to calling for a workers' revolution in support of the landed interest. 187
We are on the wilder shores here, but their sands stretch far away. The prob-
lem of pauperism imposed itself on the English consciousness during the 1790s,
and Malthus's Essay on the Principles of Population is a result. This may be charac-
terized as a piece of pessimistic Whiggism, part of that "stem paideia" that max-
imized the prices to be paid for civil order the better to emphasize that the prices
would have to be paid. William Cobbett saw Malthus's Essay in that light, to-
gether with the whole developing science of political economy, and like others
he tried to imagine a rural society in which the cost in suffering and humiliation
would be less high. Since it was a commonplace that the Whig aristocracy and
the landowning class generally - whom he detested not as Norman conquerors
but as paper-money upstarts — had risen to power on the dissolution of the mon-
asteries, it was possible to imagine a time when the protectors of learning had
also been the protectors of the needy. Cobbett did not join the neomedievalist
gentry in nostalgia for a hearty and hospitable baronage whose doors had stood
open to the poor (he knew too much about rural life for that), but he did persuade
himself that charity to the unfortunate had been better managed by the monks
than by the poor-law overseers. He enlarged this issue until it became his key to
the understanding of history. His History of the Protestant Reformation in England
and Ireland (1824) was a total indictment of English Protestantism (dissent no
less than establishment), not merely for the destruction of medieval charity, but
for the erection of capitalist agriculture, political oligarchy, corruption, borough-
mongering, paper money, standing armies, and The Thing in all its aspects, with
the Puritan, American, and French revolutions thrown in as "Reformations Two,
Three, and Four." There is much more here than autodidact egocentricity; Cob-
bett appears as the first Englishman to reject, by wholesale and with his eyes
open, the three hundred years of history in which England had taken its modern
shape. To do this, we may wish to assert, he needed a fully revolutionary con-

187
James B. Bernard, Theory of the Constitution Compared with its Practice in Ancient and Modern Times
(London, 1834). See Gregory Claes, "A Utopian Tory Revolutionary at Cambridge: The Political
Ideas and Schemes of James Bernard, 1834-1839," Historical Journal XXV, 3 (1982), pp. 583-
604.
294 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

sciousness, and Marxism, with great plausibility, would have him find it in a
proletarian class-consciousness that should recognize capitalism as the agency
transforming the world and the proletariat as the victim, inheritor, and resolu-
tion of that transformation. But if there was a class present in Cobbett's thinking,
it consisted not of proletarians but of cottagers, and the most revolutionary act
they were likely to perform was to go to America and not come back (Cobbett
himself returned to England twice). The cottager was not likely to see himself as
inhabiting a world transformed by the cash nexus or as empowered by history to
carry on the process of creating it; he would prefer to inveigh against the capital-
ization of agriculture and the corruption of the unspecialized labor he had once
performed. The language of country opposition was suited to his purposes, and
since he already possessed a politicized but not precisely a class consciousness, he
found it far more natural to denounce his betters for corrupting the realm than
for exploiting his labor; his ideology was wide-ranging and unspecialized, and it
is entertaining to imagine Cobbett's observations on the phrase "the idiocy of
rural life."
It was hard to condemn the destruction of rural society without engaging in
some degree of nostalgia, and a wholesale condemnation of modernity necessarily
entailed some degree of neomedievalism. There was a neomedievalism among
romantic gentry who liked to imagine the days when they had been Tory protec-
tors of the poor, Whig defenders of their ancient liberties, and Burkean-Coleridgean
upholders of a code of chivalric manners. 188 But this is perhaps of less significance
than the opportunity that thinking like Cobbett's supplied to the clerics, aca-
demics, and gentlemen who were taking up the role of the clerisy and beginning
with the Arnolds to represent culture as the governing class's title to govern.
Their thinking could be Tory and even Anglo-Catholic, but it could also be as
violently radical as Cobbett's own, and given that a war between classes was
always quite as likely in the countryside as in the factory towns, a Tory radicalism
remained as lively a possibility in the nineteenth century as it had ever been in
the eighteenth and inherited some of its language from the former age. Even
today, it might not be impossible to classify English Marxist thinkers as either
progressive radical Whigs for whom socialism is the rebellious but natural son of
liberalism, or alienated Tory radicals who denounce liberal capitalism, instead of
praising it for its revolutionary role, as the destroyer of popular community and
moral economy. The difference has something to do with the distribution of
emphasis between rural and urban history, more with the view the individual
takes of the historic significance of the specialization of labor.

188
Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, Conn.,
1981).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 295

V. From Cobbett's History of the Reformation to

Macaulay's History of England

Where there are Tories there should also be Whigs, but the accidents of nomen-
clature during the counterrevolutionary wars left the term "Tory" denoting an
inflexible defender of the Revolution-Hanoverian Whig regime, and the term
"Whig" denoting an aristocratic frondeur and member of an antiwar rump, which
had survived from the earlier opposition to George III and become a magnet
attracting a miscellany of ideologies. It was of this "Whig party" that Byron
wrote:

Where are the Grenvilles? Turn'd, as usual. Where

My friends the Whigs? Exactly where they were.
. . . Nought's permanent among the human race
Except the Whigs not getting into place.189

But it has to be reiterated that Grenvilles were Whigs and had never been
anything else. We have to distinguish between the "Whig party" (Burke's "New
Whigs") and the century-old Whig regime that Burke's "Old Whigs" (survivors
of the Old Corps becoming known as "Tories") defended against its enemies.
What of "Old Whig" thought in the very different sense made known to us by
Caroline Robbins? Insofar as there was a continuous rhetoric demanding reform
of the franchise and the electoral system - the "Whig party" tended to avoid
using it - this contained elements as old as the First Whigs if not the New
Model Army: Old Whig in the Commonwealth sense. Insofar as the Whig party
and other radical groups kept up the attack on the king's ministers, in Parliament
and at war, as exponents of Old Corruption, it employed a language as old as
Robert Harley and Charles Davenant: both Commonwealth Whig and country
Tory. By 1832, however, the wars were over and the finances stabilized, Cobbett
was on his gridiron, and something like a "Walpolean moment" had recurred.
But instead of reimposing an oligarchic governo stretto, a recombination of Whig-
gisms, capable of governing and claiming to speak for the mainstream Whig
tradition, reversed the policy symbolized by the Septennial Act and carried a
cautious but at the same time far-reaching measure of parliamentary reform. This
was bitterly opposed by "Tories" who saw themselves as the heirs of Pitt and
Burke, but the greatest of its intellectual apologists presented reform as a Bur-
kean measure. Macaulay declared that because England had enjoyed a "preserving

189
Don Juan, canto XI, stanzas 79, 82.
296 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

revolution" in 1688, Britain had escaped a "destroying revolution" in 1848,19°

and it has recently been pointed out how little sympathy he displayed for either
the country or the Commonwealth criticisms of what was established in 1688
and after.191 A revision of ideologies accompanied the formation of Reform
Whiggism and the "Whig interpretation of history," and this long essay has been
concerned with how we must see history now that this interpretation has been
taken apart. It may therefore conclude with a study of how it was put together.
Given that reform was accomplished within the parameters of regime history,
we need to ask what role in preparing it was played by the various radicals who
during the Napoleonic wars were active in and around the city of Westminster:
Burdett, Hobhouse, Cartwright, Cobbett, Hunt, and Place. All of these heartily
mistrusted the Whig party as engaged in the aristocratic game of politics it
pretended to oppose, and all remembered with pleasure their victory over the
aging Sheridan. But it is always difficult to decide when reform ceases to be
radical and becomes accommodation, and though they found it easy to denounce
the aristocracy in politics as a monolith of Old Corruption, the Westminster
radicals could see within their own ranks evidence that gentlemen politicians
could demand reform and denounce corruption without ceasing to be what they
were; governo largo is an aristocratic strategy as well as governo stretto. This study
has insisted that the roots of radicalism reached far back in history, and it is with
satisfaction that one learns that Burdett was recognized as at heart a Queen Anne
Tory and used to meet with Byron, Hobhouse, Kinnaird, and Sir Robert Wilson
in a Westminster dining club called The Rota.192 Harringtonian echoes, while
they still resounded, placed these radicals not very far left of the heirs of Fox in
the Whig party. One is tempted, of course, to say that this was the end of the
neo-Harringtonian road; the latest historian of the Philosophic Radicals thinks
that the echoes of agrarian radicalism died out during the 1820s and that the
future in Westminster belonged to the Benthamite contributions to the West-
minster Review.193 These beyond doubt had not a neo-Harringtonian cell in their
bodies, and though they became radical democrats in order to do battle with Old
Corruption, it was because Mill had convinced Bentham (or Mill and Bentham
themselves) that the aristocratic regime would never enact philosophic legisla-
tion. But we have to be careful in evaluating their role. Burdett and Hobhouse
ended their days as conservatives, which will furnish some with more evidence of
the nostalgic and paternalist character of Harringtonian social criticism; yet the
attack on aristocratic corruption remained powerful in working-class rhetoric,
190
Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James II, ed. C. H . Firth (London, 1913).
191
J. W . Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981).
192
J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London: 1796-1821 (Oxford, 1982), p . 281.
See the following note.
193
William Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817-1841 (Oxford,
1979), pp. 47-57, 62 (the Rota Club), 95-6.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 297
and the names of Coleridge and Cobbett ought to remind us that agrarian values
remained valid in stating a radical (and in Cobbett's case an authentically popu-
list) criticism of a commercial society that certainly included the ideology of
Philosophic Radicalism. Perhaps we should emphasize less the proposition (which
is certainly true) that some kinds of radicalism became Tory, and more the prop-
osition (which has been neglected) that some kinds of Toryism remained radical.
The hypothesis that at some point in time a liberalism that was nothing but
bourgeois must be confronted by a socialism that could only be proletarian is
difficult to elaborate without blotting out the rural scene.
It may very well be, however, that such afigureas Cobbett was more effective
as a critic of the changing social relations of his age than as a source of the
arguments by which parliamentary reform was in fact justified; the Reform of
1832 was not carried by men he admired, nor was it intended to remedy the ills
of which he complained, and there are many contemporary radicals of whom the
same could be said. It was achieved by parliamentary aristocrats who believed in
a deferential society; what was changing rapidly was the understanding of defer-
ence itself and of the social, moral, and political framework within which it
operated.194 The ideology of reform was an ideology of modernization, a concept
long effective in the vocabulary of the Whig order. This is not the place in which
to review the long and complex debate that preceded the Reform Act, but an
attempt will be made to place it in the context of the history of Whiggism during
the preceding century — a context of which the debaters themselves were acutely
aware. We return, then, to the Revolution of 1688 as the point from which
regime and radical Whiggism divided, or rather to the seminal debate concerning
the relation between 1688 and 1789-
After Paine's The Rights of Man, the most significant of the various replies to
Burke's Reflections is probably Sir James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae, less be-
cause of its argumentative content than of the strategic place it occupies in the
argument. Mackintosh complained that Burke's appeal to precedent and prescrip-
tion was so absolute and constricting that it shut out all understanding of what
the French had been doing or why a revolution had occurred; it was a scientific
necessity, he said, to have some means of understanding these phenomena, which
Burke had left to seem a mere mystery of iniquity.195 The fact that Mackintosh
was not able to avoid the double-standard argument, the fact that a few years
later he performed what looks like an intellectual capitulation and submission to
Burke, should not obscure the further fact that we are listening here to a repre-
sentative of Scottish scientific Whiggism.196 Deeply though Burke was allied to
194
D . C . M o o r e , The Politics of Deference: A Study in the Mid-Nineteenth Century English Political System
(New York, 1976).
195
Vindiciae Gallicae, sec. V I .
196
Lionel A. McKenzie, "The French Revolution and English Parliamentary Reform; James Mack-
intosh and the Vindiciae Gallicae,11 Eighteenth-Century Studies XIV, 3 (1981), pp. 264-82.
298 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

the great Scottish theorists, his appeal to prescription has such roots in English
common-law thinking that it was out of place in Scotland; before Sir Walter
Scott could achieve a Scottish equivalent to Burke's conservatism he had to achieve
a new imaginative vision of the history of Scotland. Yet it has been argued earlier
here that the authority of Burke's argument was such that for a time it virtually
drove out and replaced the progressive modernisms of the Scottish Enlightenment
as a means of authorizing the Whig order; we have to look closely before we can
see in how many ways Burke was in fact an ally of the Scottish school.
Burke's was not a mode of thinking that Mackintosh could adopt, even when
he was obliged to endorse it; Gibbon, on the other hand, slipped into a Burkean
mode almost as soon as Burke himself. The fierceness of intellectual reaction and
repression in Scotland, however, was even greater than in England and forced
Scotsmen who might otherwise have thought like Burke's "New Whigs" to choose
between submission, emigration, and a risky independence. Mackintosh for some
years chose submission, and Dugald Stewart's career was a series of retreats from
the subversive attitudes of Hume to a sepulcher exalted above his on the Calton
Hill. John Millar, on the other hand, a still-youthful representative of the great
generation of the 1770s, was shielded by the patronage of opposition Whig no-
bility in both kingdoms, and his Historical View of the English Government, which
began appearing in 1787, is dedicated to Charles James Fox, without whose name
coming to mind (says Millar) it is impossible to think about the principles of the
constitution for very long. 197 This is not enough to make the Historical View a
radical work, but it does give its author a significant place in the process by
which the Whig mind recovered from the French Revolution and from Burke's
assaults on it.
Scottish scientific Whiggism — of which Millar's Origin of Ranks is an outstand-
ing representative — had employed the notion of a progress of society, from sav-
agery to commerce, as a means of vindicating the Whig order and presenting
commercial and specialized society as superior to the classical republics and their
ancient virtue. The Historical View does not retreat from this position or equate
corruption with the loss of classical virtue, but it does emphasize (as Millar was
entitled to stress) that corruption is the danger to which government and liberty
in commercial societies are peculiarly exposed; this notion is combined with an
apparent fear that the privatization of the socially specialized personality may
have gone further in England than in still underdeveloped Scotland and may have
begun to produce those deleterious effects that had troubled Adam Smith. 198
Millar further made it clear, as Hume would certainly not have done, that the
English constitution contained certain principles, built into it at an earlier time,
197
Millar, An Historical View of the English Government from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the
Revolution in 1688, 4th ed., 4 vols. (London, 1818), vol. I, sig. A2.
198
Historical View, vol. Ill, pp. 86-94; IV, 151-3, 198-9.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 299
designed to protect political liberty against the effects of corruption and that it
was the business of statesmen at all times to see that these principles were pre-
served. We encounter here the question of Millar's attitude toward the English
ancient constitution, which the modernism inherent in Scottish scientific history
had hitherto tended to overthrow. As an original theorist of European feudalism,
Millar could not deny that English history had passed through a feudal phase,
and he made it quite clear that this was incompatible with many of the suppos-
edly immemorial liberties (including the representation of the Commons in Par-
liament) on which the doctrine of an ancient constitution had rested. But by a
variety of moves - of which the hypothesis of a prefeudal phase of allodial prop-
erty was one199 — Millar was able to present the key events in the history of
medieval institutions as sometimes the recovery of former liberties and sometimes
the consolidation of new ones. He vested these tactics with such continuity that
by the time he reached the Stuart reigns in England he was able to maintain that
there now existed an ancient constitution - a set of rules based on reverence for
antiquity and long in the formation - that the kings were seeking to trans-
gress.200 His account of Charles I is as sternly Whiggish as Hume's had been
skeptical of Whiggism, and it would not be unduly difficult for his readers to
equate post-1688 attempts to disturb the principles of the constitution by cor-
ruption with post-1603 attempts to disturb them by prerogative. What these
principles were must be discovered by historical interpretation rather than in
legal precedent, but Millar was a scientific Whig and was prepared to construct
such interpretations. Addressing himself to Fox, therefore, he supplied a "Whig
interpretation of history" that Hume would have denied and the later Burke
would not have constructed.
Burke once remarked that even if the constitution were not as ancient as En-
glishmen had believed, they had always acted on the belief that it was.201 Millar's
reading of history is more sociologically sophisticated than Burke's and less un-
compromisingly presumptive, but the two are not at bottom very far apart. Men
in history act as the situation requires, and in historically changing situations
they act in changing ways; but to act pragmatically is to act in the consciousness
of precedent, and if historical change is continuous, precedents from former sit-
uations can be applied to the needs of new ones. Innovative reform may in these
circumstances be an essentially conservative activity. The belief is as old as Selden
and Hale, but it was Millar's task to write a circumstantial history of how old
actions could become new ones and could be used to justify them. If this could
be done, it could be shown how even a revolution might be an act of conserva-
tion. By the time he wrote, English and Scottish historians were agreed that this
199
Historical View, vol. I, pp. 131-4, 171, 185, 200-3, 290-301.
200
Historical View, vol. Ill, pp. 156-7, 189-92, 220-7.
201
Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, pp. 2 0 5 - 8 .
300 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

could be done for the English Revolution of 1688 but not for the French Revo-
lution of 1789, and Mackintosh had made, but subsequently withdrawn, the
charge against Burke that on his principles it could not be done at all. It seemed
to be the position of Burke and his disciples that 1688 was not repeatable and
contained no guide to subsequent practice, and this was becoming a ground for
holding that the constitution established after 1688 could not be reformed except
on principles as dangerous as those the French had followed. If this position were
maintained, there would indeed be something in Burke's rejection of theory pro-
foundly constrictive of practice; and Scottish Whiggism respected practice and
wished to advance it.
Lord Dacre has proposed ranking Millar, Mackintosh, and Macaulay as a
succession of historians through whom Whigs of the Holland House circle ef-
fected a reconstruction of the Whig view of politics and history.202 Details of this
continuous activity, if such it was, remain to be worked out. Millar lived out his
life in Glasgow, but it was as a Holland House habitue that Mackintosh formed
the extensive documentary collection on which Macaulay drew so heavily for his
understanding of the seventeenth century, while the Anglo-Saxon and Norman-
Angevin periods — the other great focus of Whig historiography since its begin-
nings — received the attention of Francis Palgrave and of Macaulay's colleague
on the Edinburgh Review, John Allen.203 There is reason to speak of a "Holland
House" school of historians, who under the patronage of the heirs of Fox engaged
in a reconciliation of old and new Whiggisms, blending the spirit of Scottish
scientific history with the headier brew of Burke, an enterprise that could be
carried on only by reaffirming the mainstream Whig belief in the continuity of
English institutions.
In medieval studies, these writers preserved the essence of the ancient consti-
tution through a variety of restatements of the theme of primeval Germanic lib-
erty. From Palgrave and Allen we are taught to look to Kemble and the reception
into England of the notion of the mark community,204 which linked the anthro-
pological scholarship of the nineteenth century with the allodial assemblies of the
eighteenth and the Tacitean folkgatherings of the seventeenth-century antiquar-
ians. However scrupulously the newer Whigs might stress the primitive and
agnatic character of early German institutions and the depth and abruptness of

202
Lord Macaulay, The History of England, ed. and abridged with an intro. by H u g h Trevor-Roper
( H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1979), p p . 12—13. For Scottish responses to both t h e French Revolution and
Burke's Reflections, see Stefan Collini, Donald W i n c h , and J o h n Burrow, That Noble Science of
Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-century Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1983), especially chaps. I, III,
and V I .
203
P . B . M . Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig
Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The H a g u e , 1978), p p . 7 2 -
110.
204
H e r e and in what follows I a m deeply indebted to J . W . Burrow, A Liberal Descent.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 301
the feudalizations they had subsequently undergone, any medieval experiment
with counsel, assembly, and representation must take on an appearance of a re-
turn to old norms: a recovery of the old and its adaptation to the new. And since
any departure from a supposed feudal pattern must look like an enlargement of
the consultative community beyond the immediate circle of tenants in chief, it
could be viewed as part of a transition from closed feudal to open freeholding and
commercial society: a liberalization to which the revival of prefeudal and even
tribal norms had paradoxically contributed. The equation of old with new cer-
tainly did not originate with these historians, but if we may think of them as
engaged in a reconciliation of scientific Whiggism with Burke, the importance
of that move in this context becomes evident.
Burke had presented the Whig order as a modern commercial society, of the
kind celebrated by the Scottish historians, but one that rested on and would not
repudiate its medieval, even its chivalric and clerical, foundations. He had pre-
sented these foundations as cultural rather than institutional; manners had inter-
ested him more than laws. It was not a long step from manners to customs,
however, and the ancient constitution had been a cluster of behavior patterns,
mentalities, and institutions bound up with perceiving political action as cus-
tomary and prescriptive. The question was whether the appeal to precedents, and
the adherence to a prescriptive manner of political behavior, could be presented
as carried over from one stage of social development to another; if it could, the
gap between manners and customs might be bridged, and the habit of basing
political action on the authority of former usages would appear valid throughout
the process of modernization of which the Scots had written. It is this that lends
peculiar importance to the studies of the crisis of the seventeenth century con-
ducted by Hallam and Macaulay. The latter in particular employed an analysis as
old as that used by Fletcher and Defoe in 1698. The feudal or Gothic mode of
asserting the public liberty in arms endured well enough, rough and violent as it
was, so long as the military strength of the kingdom consisted of vassals and
retainers following their lords; once it came to consist of mercenary or profes-
sional standing armies paid out of the public purse, the cause of liberty must
depend on whether that purse was to be dispensed and replenished by the king
alone or by the representatives of the kingdom giving their consent to the king's
actions.205 Perceiving this crisis before them, the parliaments of Charles I re-
sponded not by asserting that new times required that they be vested with new
powers, but by reviving and revising such precedents as they could find from
feudal times and affirming their validity under postfeudal circumstances. Whether
they did so anachronistically or in a conscious updating and translation hardly
mattered; the important consideration was that it was they who were acting
prescriptively and the king who was either innovating or falsifying the past b>
205
Macaulay, The History of England, vol. I, chap. 1, pp. 2 7 - 3 7 .
302 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

reading his new need of prerogative into the actions of his feudal predecessors.
The Commons had placed themselves in the mainstream of postfeudal history,
and left the king no option but to act in ill faith - an option that Charles I, in
Macaulay's view, had all too readily embraced. 206 It was a neat reversal of Hume's
perception that in a time of historical change the constitutional rules by which
king or Parliament should act had been underformulated.
When Macaulay arrives at the crisis of 1688 and the reign of William III,
there is a sense in which his long-term strategy seems a little less clear. This
statement may seem paradoxical. The years from 1688 to 1702 form both the
substance of his History as we have it and the hinge on which his understanding
of English history turns. In his interpretation of the Revolution Settlement he
shows himself more Burkean than Burke himself; like him Macaulay never men-
tions Locke as theorist of the event, 207 but emphasizes the prudential and pre-
scriptive character of the acts then taken almost to the exclusion of Burke's near-
Tory insistence that they were acts of necessity whose repetition was not to be
contemplated. Macaulay's revolution, one feels, could have been played again if
some duke of Cumberland had made it unavoidable, 208 but it is of far greater
importance to him to confront the issue of reform and explain that a preserving
revolution in the seventeenth century has rendered unnecessary a destroying rev-
olution in the nineteenth. However, if Macaulay were to repeat for 1688 the
pattern of interpretation he had established for 1641, this would have been the
moment to make clear what changes in the structure of society had occurred to
call for the updating of ancient precedents; yet, though social-change explana-
tions of political crises had become profoundly Whig, 1688 has never looked like
the product of a social transformation in the way that 1641 has — partly because
the lower orders were kept in the role of confused noise off.209 Crisis in this sense
followed a few years later, when the demands of William Ill's wars produced the
military, financial, political, and commercial structure to which Commonwealth
Whigs and country Tories set themselves in opposition. Macaulay, whose heroes
were William III and the conquerors of India, knew well enough that this cleav-

206
Macaulay, "Hallam's Constitutional History," in Critical and Historical Essays, vol. I, pp. 316—
22, 3 4 1 - 5 .
207
Macaulay considers Locke as exculpated from complicity in Monmouth's rebellion (Firth, ed.,
History of England, vol. II, chap. V, pp. 538—9n.), as author of the Letters on Toleration (vol. II
chap. VI, p . 670), as dedicator of the Essay on Human Understanding (vol. IV, chap. XV, p. 1,806),
and as active in the nonrenewal of the Licensing Act (vol. V, chap. XXI, p . 2,482) and the
recoinage of 1695 (ibid., p . 2,571).
208
The unacceptability of the last of George Ill's sons is a half-buried theme of the history of this
period. See Macaulay's memorandum on the assassination attempt against Victoria in 1840 in G.
M. Young, sel. and ed., Macaulay: Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 799-804:
"The King of Hanover cannot be implicated, one would think."
209
See the ballad The Orange reprinted in Goldie, "The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of
Political Argument."
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 303

age among Whigs and Tories alike had occurred, and we are not in any ultimate
doubt where he stood in regard to it. As J. W. Burrow has pointed out, Macaulay
had no sympathy whatever for the neo-Harringtonian critics of oligarchy and
corruption.210 If Somers is his paragon among the Revolution and Junto Whigs,
Treasurer Montagu ranks close behind; his labors in setting up the Bank of En-
gland are celebrated, the need for a new credit structure is explained, and Macau-
lay remarks on the paradox that of all the great English social thinkers only Burke
- he does not mention Tucker; few people did - has grasped the function of the
national debt and refrained from saying that it will ruin the nation.211 There is
hardly a grain of the Old Whig in Macaulay's composition, and this is important
to our understanding of his arguments for parliamentary reform.
What we lack is Macaulay's completed interpretation of the eighteenth cen-
tury, which he intended to bring to the death of George III but did not live to
carry past that of William. We must reconstruct, or conjecture, what it would
have been from his essays in the Edinburgh Review, but it is this that gives his
account of the foundations of Whig rule an air of incompleteness. It can be seen
that he approved of the Tory opposition to "no peace without Spain"212 — perhaps
because his hatred of Marlborough survived the latter's victories, perhaps as an
echo of Holland House disapproval of the war in the Peninsula — and might have
done justice to Harley if execution (we may be sure) upon Bolingbroke. For his
judgment of Walpole we must rely upon two rather slight essays on Horace
Walpole and the earlier career of the elder Pitt,213 and we are without his sus-
tained interpretation of the Septennial Act and the years between 1714 and 1760.
We should like to know how far he would have presented Old Corps rule as a
regime of oligarchy, patronage, and restriction, or conceded that the Whig re-
forms of his time were aimed at Whig foundations laid a century earlier. We
should like to know his sustained interpretation of the first half of George Ill's
reign, and whether he would have kept up his early contention that the ministries
of Bute (North? Pitt?) were "Tory" and the oppositions of Rockingham (Fox?
Grey?) the true heirs of Hampden, Russell, and Somers; for this would have been
crucial to his two-party reading of English history, with the Whigs perpetually
the party of progress and the Tories that of resistance. We should like to have his
study of Pitt, Fox, and Burke in the early years of the revolutionary wars, because
without it we do not know how he would have gone about reconciling the sun-
dered fragments of the Whig tradition or how he would have presented the early
history of parliamentary reform, and related this theme to those of European,

210
Burrow, A Liberal Descent, pp. 55-60.
21
Macaulay, History of England, vol. V, chap. XIX, p. 2,284.
212
Macaulay, "Lord Mahon's War of the Succession in Spain," Critical and Historical Essays, vol. II,
pp. 181-6.
213
Ibid., pp. 207-24 (for the Septennial Act, see pp. 221-2), 237-9.
304 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

imperial, and conservative power, made necessary in English history by the sec-
ond phase of oligarchic rule. All we are left with is the impression the essays
convey, namely, that Whig oligarchy was a necessary holding action, pending
the rise of the middle class.
The point is not that we know less than we might about Macaulay's historical
intellect, but that the authority — in many ways so great as to remain dominant
— of the "Whig interpretation of history" is in fact deficient to the extent that
we do not have a history of the greatest of Whig centuries by the greatest of
Whig historians. Hume stopped in 1688, and Smollett was a lesser if more
radical continuator. Macaulay did not go beyond 1702, and the Trevelyans and
Hammonds took a sterner view of George III and a more irenic view of the rivalry
between Pitt and Fox than Macaulay might have done. The Whig view of this
reign was a secondary construction, which blurred the answer to the question
Whigs were in fact confronting. In consequence the Whig interpretation has
been found vulnerable at its weakest point, which lies on either side of the year
1760, and has been replaced by an altogether different style of historiography,
which seeks to escape from eighteenth-century rhetoric and its categories. How
far this escape has been effected might be the subject of debate; the view that
there is nothing to government but high politics is profoundly oligarchic, and
Whig discourse can now be seen as a conversation about oligarchy. Against the
emergence of this paradigm Butterfield struggled, in some ways in vain; but if
there had really been an authoritative Whig interpretation of the reign of George
III the history of historiography would have been different.

By the time of Macaulay's History, however, Whig historiography had a long life
before it. P. B. M. Blaas does not see it undergoing significant modification until
the last years of the century; ideologically speaking, it is tempting to connect
this, somehow, with the watershed of 1886.214 In the meantime, there was one
major respect in which Macaulay may be said to have perfected the Whig inter-
pretation: He made it possible to see common-law and Burkean adherence to
precedent as compatible with, indeed as an instrument of, Scottish and scientific-
Whig progress and modernization. His view of political action was Burkean to
the point of conservatism; his view of social progress was commercial to the point
of philistinism, and in his minute on Indian education he endorsed the radical
utilitarianism of James Mill, which he had condemned as an approach to English
politics.215 The idea that a ruling class was charged with and legitimated by the
214
John Roach, "Liberalism and the Victorian Intelligentsia," Cambridge Historical Journal XIII, 1
(1957), pp. 3 7 - 5 7 . For Blaas, see n. 203.
215
Macaulay, "Mill's Essay on Government," "The Westminster Reviewer's Defence of Mill," both
in Critical and Historical Essays.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 305
maintenance of culture was about to pass from the hands of the heirs of Addison
into those of the heirs of Coleridge. But with these paradoxes and the extent to
which they could be reconciled in mind, we can now solve (it is hoped finally)
what may be termed das Herbert Butterfieldproblem: that of seeing how the compla-
cent progesssivism criticized in The Whig Interpretation of History could coexist
with the complacent antiquarianism admired in The Englishman and His History.
The Whig historians had at last discovered how to have it both ways, and from
this time on the enduring offense of Hume was his love of making the smooth
places rough: of insisting on the knots and fractures in what they desired to see
as the straight grain of the English oak.216
On the other hand, as we have seen, Macaulay left the Whig interpretation
weak, in the sense that he did not synthesize the history of the eighteenth century
as that of the conflict between the Whig order and its critics, many of whom in
America and England were or claimed to be more Whiggish than the Whigs.
We can see that Macaulay could and would have written such a history, and we
suspect that it would have been strongly supportive of the ruling order and scorn-
ful of a quasi-republican criticism, which, whether in Commonwealth or country
shape, he visibly disliked. What - we ask yet again - would have been his
history of the American Revolution? Yet his ideas were formed in some measure
by Holland House and the Edinburgh Review, by circles critical of, if not hostile
to, the oligarchy in its Pittite form and to its conduct of the wars, and we have
to ask (we cannot answer) how far he would have been able to detach himself
from the language still traditional with oppositions. His historical intellect took
further shape during the debates prior to 1832, when he was advocating in terms
reminiscent of Burke a reform of a parliamentary structure essentially Whig,
which the heirs of Pitt bitterly opposed and the heirs of Fox had left in the hands
of the Westminster radicals. It was one thing to pour the ashes of Burke into the
urn of Fox, to marry the historiographical style of Burke with that of Millar; in
1832 Macaulay was faced with the ghost of Burke and a living memory (Grey) of
the Society of the Friends of the People. It was an accident, but it was not an
accident without meaning, that Macaulay did not write the history of a reform
program that had until recently been conducted by Commonwealth Whigs and
Tory radicals. Unlike Hume, who had deliberately stopped short of the contests
over the character of the Whig regime, Macaulay did not live to write its history;
he would not have abstained from doing so. But the fact that his part of his
history remained unwritten lent strength to two of the ideological maneuvers
with which he was most involved. One is the conflation, under the name of
"Tories," of the defenders of the unreformed Whig structure, the King's Friends
in the early years of George III, the nostalgic and quasi-Jacobite squires of Wil-
liam Ill's reign, the more corrupt and sinister figures of Restoration politics, and

216
This is the object of allusion in Duncan Forbes's "terrible campaign country."
306 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

— still more remotely perceived in the historical pageant — the churchmen, cav-
aliers, and agents of the prerogative under the early Stuarts. It is hard to believe
that this would have been unmodified by a detailed narrative of Georgian politics.
Macaulay knew that Tories had used radical and republican language, and he
would have had to come to grips with the implications. We may regret that he
did not.
The second maneuver was the advocacy of reform in the terms that Macaulay
and others had employed in the debates preceding 1832. These too remained
unmodified by the History of England as published, but we may doubt if they
could have been unaffected had it been carried to completion. They furnish an
interesting blend of arguments emerging from the history of Whig discourse. It
had always been recognized that there was a formidable number of socially active
and conscious persons not represented in Parliament, and discourse had been
faced with the problems of finding terms in which they could be categorized and
arguments in which it could be debated whether they should be represented or
not. It was recognized that the social structure was too complex and the represen-
tative structure too random to leave it possible for long to dismiss these persons
merely as "the mob," and the more it was granted that many of them were
"respectable," the more it became necessary to determine in what their respecta-
bility consisted and in what ways if any it entitled them to be represented. In
quasi-republican language it was contended that the existing regime was corrupt
because too many of the persons it represented were in various ways dependent
and that the admission to the franchise of large numbers of persons presumed
independent would render it more virtuous. In more Lockean language it was
contended that because these persons were moral individuals, or because they
were in various ways proprietors, they possessed a right to be represented that
ought not to be denied them. There ensued from both arguments a debate regard-
ing what constituted independence and property, and what constituted these things
the prerequisites of either virtue or right; by some it was argued that the posses-
sion of a moral personality, and by others that the possession of a capacity to
labor, was enough to make the possessor at least potentially an independent moral
and political being. We have seen, however, how Tucker argued that this was to
misstate the case, because the individual needed a deeper involvement in com-
mercial relations before rights could be generated; we have also seen how Burke
followed the same strategy as Ireton at Putney, in attacking the abstract grounds
of a claim to representation rather than the expediency of granting the claim.
Well before 1832, the practice had developed of referring to the unrepresented
but active sector of the population as "public opinion," not because the repre-
sented lacked opinions ("the electors of Liskeard," remarked Gibbon, "are com-
monly of the same opinion as Mr. Elliott") 217 but because the unrepresented had

217
Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (New York, 1966), p. 162.
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 307

nothing else by which to make their presence felt. The term "opinion" was of
considerable antiquity in Whig political thinking. In Hume's hands it had of-
fered the reassurances of a conservative skeptic, who considered that opinions
were on the whole subject to the disciplines of social experience; but if we look
back as far as Sir William Temple, writing in 1672, we find it laid down that
the authority of rulers can rest upon nothing but opinion, because power (his
language has overtones of both Hobbes and Harrington) is invariably in the hands
of the ruled. 218 Some of Temple's implications are not reassuring. The state pos-
sesses no monopoly of the means of coercion, and opinion emancipated from its
discipline can prove wild and ungovernable. The specter of enthusiasm starts
from the page, and we recall how Burke attributed the French Revolution to the
growth of "middle classes," no longer deferential to their superiors, among whom
there was nothing to "resist an opinion in its course" and human energy could
break free from all the disciplines of property.
The reformers of 1832 declared that there now existed a "public opinion" and
a "middle class" or classes, which required only to be represented in Parliament
and did not need that representation mediated through the controls exerted by
aristocratic patronage or influence. The antireformers replied that to emancipate
parliamentary representation from the discipline, stern or gentle, exercised by
the natural superiors of society would be to liberate human energy in just the
same way as had happened in France and would infallibly lead to the same results.
Some of them seem to have been very much in earnest. To this some reformers
responded by drawing a distinction between patronage and deference, arguing
that the latter was given freely to natural superiors and need not be controlled or
influenced by the former; this opens up the larger question of just where they
situated the "public opinion" it was proposed to enfranchise, and how far the
1832 Reform Act was an experiment in the institutionalization of deference. A
considerable literature now exists on this subject, but it may be remarked that
any aristocratic polity experimenting with a governo largo must do so in some
degree of expectation that deference will continue to operate. Others again carried
the argument in a direction recalling Madison, contending that representation
itself ensured the presence of a natural aristocracy, or alternatively that it ren-
dered one unnecessary.219
The reformers did not share — though the antireformers in some cases did -
Burke's fear that the rule of the middle classes would subject all property to
nothing but the mind of desperate men. It is proper to observe that, since they
were not proposing to enfranchise numbers of workmen, they had every reason
to suppose that those they were enfranchising would be distinguished precisely
by the possession of property; but this does not cover every aspect of the case.
Burke had imagined the revolutionary middle class less as entrepreneurs and
218
Sir William Temple, "Of Government," Works, 3 vols (London, 1770), vol. I, p. 34.
219
See Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords, chap. VI.
308 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

speculators than as restless and power-hungry men of talent, who wanted to serve
an expanding state and seized the state in order to expand it: a Machiavellian and
Sorelian vision. There was enough substance left in eighteenth-century notions
of le doux commerce22® to make the idea of a middle class engaged primarily in
commerce and industry reassuring by comparison, and we can imagine how easily
it could be argued that such men would readily defer to their natural superiors if
the relationships linking them were not corrupt. The classes enfranchised in 1832
were by no means all of this sort; provincial rentiers and professionals (the so-
called pseudogentry) were conspicuous among them, and the debates reflect their
presence. Nevertheless there is an ideologue of the period - W. M. Mackinnon-
who specifically equates "the history of civilisation" itself with the advent of
government by "public opinion," and the latter with a "middle class" whose
"personal property" enables it to command the labor of others.221 It is, of course,
the formula for a Marxist bourgeoisie, except that Mackinnon considers this a
historically determinant but not a revolutionary class. Where Marx's bourgeoisie
captures and conquers the state, Mackinnon's is admitted to the councils of the
state by the reforming Whig aristocracy, this bourgeoisie's natural superiors and
historic allies. Civilization may be governed by opinion, but governments rule
with its consent; it is not incapable of a Bagehotian deference.
Macaulay and Mackinnon lived toward the end of the age of oligarchy, wit-
nessing the reform and partial disestablishment of a system of parliamentary re-
striction and control set up by a governing aristocracy between one and two
centuries earlier. Because that aristocracy was limited in size, scarcely large enough
to be called a class, it had felt obliged to rule in this way, fearing rivals and
enemies within its own ranks and in urban and rural populations outside them.
The coincidence of an expanding commerce, and a rapidly changing financial and
military technology, had enabled the aristocracy to preside over a rapid economic
modernization, with which it had successfully allied itself. An ideology of mod-
ernization had served it very effectively during the age in which it had ruled by
restrictive devices, though some of these were ancient and others modern, and
continued to serve it during the period in which it was desirable to dismantle
these devices and seek a wider circle of allies. In contrast, the groups excluded
from power by the oligarchic regime, who were several and diverse, found it
appropriate to adopt an ideology of ancient values, those of the classical republic
and its virtues; this, as is generally the case with the vocabularies of opposition,
served to articulate some highly telling criticisms of the values being rendered
dominant by the regime. Neither the republican discourse nor those who adopted
it can be written off as reactionary or nostalgic merely because they were opposed
220
Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, N . J . , 1976).
221
W . M. Mackinnon, On the Rise, Progress and Present State of Public Opinion in Great Britain and Other
Parts of the World (London^ 1828); History of Civilisation, 2 vols. (London, 1846).
 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 309
by an ideology of modernization, any more than they can be written up as bour-
geois and progressive merely because they were opposed by an entrenched aris-
tocracy; the whole point is that they were opposed by both at the same time. The
republican discourse enabled some to engage in the pursuit of modernization,
others to criticize it, and not a few to engage in it and criticize it at the same
time; America, where opposition Whiggism took off into a new theater of world
history, is perhaps the supreme example of this duality of mind. But the Amer-
ican Revolution effectively amputated republican rhetoric of the Commonwealth
mode from British political discourse. It became clear after that event, if it had
not been clear before, that the thrust of radical criticism in British politics must
be toward the reform, not the replacement, of a parliamentary system of govern-
ment, to which an intensely complex and dynamic society was committed. The
intellectual debate was correspondingly intense. It has remained unclear to this
day how far the growth of class conflict in Britain, bitter and obsessive as it has
long been in many ways, originates and continues within, and how far outside,
the parameters imposed by a parliamentary structure.
Reform in 1832 was effected by Burke's New Whigs, who had regrouped
themselves and become more like his Old Whigs; it was not effected by Old
Whigs as we have learned the term from Caroline Robbins, and there is a sense
in which it marks the moment of their demise. The Reform Whigs retained the
outlook of an aristocracy, but because this was not a noblesse d'ancienne extraction
there was the less need to write its history, and they were able to ignore those
eighteenth-century presentations of history that had emphasized that its rule was
little older than 1716 or 1688. The most telling way of undermining the Whig
aristocracy's role in history was to emphasize their origins under Henry VIII, but
Cobbett's History of the Reformation had virtually played itself off the board. The
myth of antiquity that best served the reforming aristocracy was that of the an-
cient constitution, and we have seen how a synthesis of Scottish and Burkean
elements could render this compatible with an ideology of progressive moderni-
zation. Proposals for reforming the franchise in 1832 went rather better with the
belief that the Commons had first been summoned to Parliament in 1265 than
with the belief that they had attended in pre-Conquest antiquity; in both cases,
it could be said, new and useful classes were being invited to the councils of the
realm. But in both cases there must already have existed a realm, governed by
counsel and capable of reforming itself within the parameters of its already exist-
ing institutions, and there was no reason why that realm's history, and that of its
Burkean capacity for self-reform, should not be traced back to the folkmoots of a
Teutonic dawn. The ghosts of Petyt and Brady, Bolingbroke and Hume, Cart-
wright and Tucker might now lie down together under the benignly amused eye
of John Selden.
What was being suppressed, but could not altogether be silenced, was the
310 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

eighteenth-century radical historiography that averred that constitution and so-

ciety had begun to be corrupted at a point in past time that could be fixed and
that reform must lie in a reaffirmation of principles (or a balance of principles)
that had existed before corruption set in. This was the reform language of the
Commonwealth Whigs, and there is an obvious sense in which it, and they, must
lose all reason for existence once regime Whiggism discovered a language, as
much its own as theirs, in which to reform itself. The story Caroline Robbins
began to tell therefore comes to an end, as far as Britain is concerned, in 1832;
the American republic has continued to lament the failure of its dream and the
loss of its innocence in every generation since it was founded. But the sociology
of Commonwealth and country criticism outlasts its role in constitutional debate.
The debates over reform in 1867222 as well as 1832 were debates over the nature
of the property, the independence, and the self and the capacity to respect it that
might qualify new classes for admission to the franchise; and the theme of an
equilibrium or harmony between landed, monied, and laboring interests, or classes,
is by no means absent from the debates. One foundation for franchised indepen-
dence, of course, was the control over personal property, and the capacity to
employ labor, which permitted the formation of an informed opinion, and it is
down this line that we should look for the emergence of conflict between a class
that employs labor and a class that has labor to sell. What is to be suspected is
the Whiggishness of writing all history as if it were subsumed under this conflict.
Another foundation for social and political personality, much discussed with re-
lation to the clerisies and service gentries of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, has been the possession and transmission of literate culture, and it is when
we look back from this debate to the ethos of politeness in the eighteenth century
that we catch sight of a major historical fissure. From Addison to Smith it had
been taken for granted that polite culture was the child of commerce and justified
the Whig order, but Burke and Coleridge in one way, Blake and even Cobbett
in others, had opened up serious cracks in this argument, which J. S. Mill,
Carlyle, Arnold, and Morris continued to explore. It is perhaps when the clerisies
— a better word than intelligentsias — both radical and Tory began to denounce
the Whig and Liberal ruling order as irremediably philistine, and seek for com-
munitarian, proletarian, or authoritarian allies against a cultural "bourgeoisie,"
that we may regard the Scottish Enlightenment as effectively dead.
222
F. B. Smith, The Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1966).
 Index

Abrams, Philip, 65 Anglo-Saxon period, 143, 226, 261, 288, 300

Academie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres, Anne, Queen, 79, 112, 139, 196, 200, 234-
143-4 5, 240, 247, 251, 285, 296
Acts, Book of, 44 Answer to the Nineteen Properties of Parliament, 66,
Adair, Douglass, 140 221, 250, 267, 269
Adams, John, 73, 81, 167, 269; Letters of No- Antonines, 147, 155
vanglus, 266n Appleby, Joyce O., 112, 123, 242n
Adams, Samuel, 82, 167 Aquinas, 103-5
Addison, Joseph, 99-100, 111, 113-14, 130, Arbuthnot, John, 131
219, 235-8, 248, 280,292, 305, 310 Arendt, Hannah, 44, 48, 60
Agitators, 226, 257 Argyll, dukes of, 77
Alaric, 148 Arius and Arians, 155
Albigensians, 155 Aristotle and Aristotelians, 42, 46, 103—4,
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d\ 212, 248 106, 171, 174
Alexandria, 144, 146, 153, 155 Arminianism and Arminians, 63, 155, 238
Alfonso the Wise, 10 Armorica, 149
Allen, John, 300 Arnold, Matthew, 310; Culture and Anarchy,
Ambrose, Saint, 153 190; Arnold, Thomas and Matthew, 294
America and Americans, 1, 47, 51, 66, 71, 77, Ascham, Anthony, 55
102, 145, 160-8 pass., 174, 178, 183-8 Ashcraft, Richard L., 224n, 226n
pass., 196, 217-18, 231, 240, 242n, 254, Asia, 118-19, 197
263-76, 282, 285-6,288, 294, 305, Athanasius, 145, 153
309-10; see also United States Athens, 144-5, 195, 249
American Revolution, 51, 66, 73-88, 101, Atlantic Ocean, 74, 77, 79, 81, 87, 162, 275
119, 125-43 pass., 149, 158-9, 161, Atterbury, Francis, 240, 293
165, 215-17, 250, 265-76 pass., 285, Atwood, William, 221-6 pass., 231; Jus An-
293, 295, 305, 309 glorum ab Antiquo, 222
Amsterdam, 226 Augustan period, 33, 66, 98-9, 219, 248-9
Ancient Constitution, 94-7, 134-5, 158, 180, Augustus, 146, 148, 248-9
187, 193, 216, 224-33 pass., 241, 246,
251-61 pass., 276-8, 280, 299 Bacon, Francis, 50, 190, 291
Angevins, 251, 300 Bagehot, Walter, 308
Anglicanism and Anglicans, 63, 120, 158, Bailyn, Bernard, 216, 265-7
190, 201, 211, 219, 226, 233, 237, 240, Bank of England, 76, 108, 158, 175, 197,
263, 281, 292 230, 303
Anglo-Irish, 73-4 Bank of the United States, 272

311
312 Index

Banning, Lance, 217 193-212, 279-84 pass., 290, 297-8,

Barbados, 183 300n; Speech on Conciliation with America,
Baron, Hans, 39 160-6 pass.; Thoughts on the Present Discon-
Barsoom, 291 tents, 82, 255-6
Bartolus, Bartolo, 40 Burrow, J. W., 303
Bastille, 282 Bute, Lord, 81-3, 137, 254, 303
Becker, CarlL., 217n Butler, Bishop, 161
Becker, Marvin, 114 Butterfield, Herbert, 215-16, 258, 277, 304-
Beckford, William, 178, 246, 253-4 5; The Englishman and His History, 215,
Bedford, duke of, 201 305; The Whig Interpretation of History, 215,
Bentham, Jeremy, 50, 123, 276, 291, 296; 305
Fragment on Government, 102, 276—7 Byron, Lord, 2 9 5 - 6
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 52 Byzantium, 143
Bernard, J. B., 293
Bill of Exclusion, 66 Caesar, Julius, 146, 184
Birmingham, 155 Calonne, Charles Alexandre de la, 212; Etat de
Blackstone, Sir William, 276, 278, 280 la France, 212
Blass, P. B. M., 304 Calton Hill, 298
Blake, William, 53, 155, 276, 291, 310 Calvinism and Calvinists, 48, 144, 164-5,
Bolingbroke, 79, 81, 84, 108, 129-39 pass., 238; see also Protestantism, Puritanism and
180, 196, 200, 240-55 pass., 260n, 284, Puritans
292, 303, 309; Dissertation upon Parties, Cambridge University, 2, 219, 278
241; The Idea of a Patriot King, 241; Remarks Canterbury, Province of, 190n
on the History of England, 241 Canterbury, University of, 157, 190n
Bomston, Milord, 256 Canterbury University College, 157
Boone, Daniel, 81 Capitoline Hill, 146
Borderers, 238 Caribbean, 263
Bossuet, J. B., 155 Carlyle, Thomas, 37, 310
Boston, 82, 139, 265 Carte, Thomas, 260n
Bourbons, 131, 250-1 Cartwright, John, I68n, 173n, 182, 296, 309
Bowood, 186 Catholicism and Catholics, 45, 144, 155, 158,
Brady, Robert, 3, 135, 181-2, 187, 221, 224, 189, 197, 240, 287, 294; see also Christian-
247, 251, 260n, 309; Boroughs, 260n ity
Brewer, John, 257, 259 Catiline, 178, 184, 245, 263, 293
Bristol, 85, 159n-6l, 166, 205 Cato, 235, 273
Britain, 1, 8, 31-4, 51, 73-87 pass., 101, Cato the Elder, 236
125-6, 136-49 pass., 159-67 pass., 186, Cato's Letters, 240
194-6, 209-10, 217, 224-41 pass., 249- Chambers, Sir Robert, 278n
50, 265-78 pass., 288-9, 309-10; see also Charles I, 40, 75, 233, 252, 299, 301-2
England, Ireland, Scotland Charles II, 75-6, 247, 254
British Museum, 257n Chartists, 257
Britons, ancient, 253 Chateaubriand, Francois Rene de, 159
Browning, Reed, 235 Chesapeake, 263
Brutus, 148 Chesterton, G. K., 275n
Buffon, Comte G. L. L. de, 118, 144 China and Chinese, 38, 149, 151
Burdett, Sir Francis, 296 Christ, 62
Burgh, James, 257, 260-1 Christianity and Christians, 41-2, 96, 98-9,
Burke, Edmund, 24, 33, 49, 65, 80-6 pass., 143, 145, 153-4, 158, 174, 189n-90,
94-5, 101, 139-40, 155-71, 186-91, 202, 209, 285, 292; see also Calvinism and
221-9 pass., 256-64 pass., 276-310 Calvinists, Catholicism and Catholics, Prot-
pass.; An Appeal from the New to the Old estantism, Puritanism, Socinians, Tho-
Whigs, 185n-7, 284; A Letter to a Noble mists, Unitarians
Lord, 2 0 1 , 205; Letters on a Regicide Peace, Chrysostom, John, 153
193-4, 2 0 5 - 1 2 ; Reflections on the Revolution Church Fathers, 153
in France, 11, 160-9 pass., 185n-90 pass., Churchill, Charles, 137, 237
 Index 313
Cicero, 42, 144, 171, 178, 235, 293 Cruickshanks, Eveline, 243
Cincinnatus, 235 Crusades, 182
Clarendon, earl of, 233; History of the Rebellion, Crusoe, Robinson, 94
233 Cumberland, Bishop, 219
Clark, George Rogers, 81 Cumberland, duke of, 302
Clark, J. C. D., 243-5
Clarke, William, clerk at Putney Debates, 17 Dauby, 226, 256
Clarkson, Lawrence, 54 Darien, 130; Darien Scheme, 113, 238
Clay, Henry, 86 Davenant, Charles, 231-2, 249n, 295
Clayton, Sir Robert, 233 Davie, George, 237-8
Cobbett, William, 201, 276, 286-97 pass., Declaration of Independence, 8 In, 86, 162,
310; History of the Protestant Reformation in 266-7, 274, 277
England and Ireland, 293, 309 Declaration of Rights, 225
Cochin, Augustin, 202n, 208n Declaratory Act, I66n
Cohn, Norman, 52 Defoe, Daniel, 67, 99, 111, 113, 116, 147-8,
Coke, Sir Edward, 193, 280 176n, 228n.-37 pass., 247-53 pass., 292,
Coleridge, S. T., 101-2, 155, 158, 276, 291- 301
7 pass., 310; On the Constitution of the Church De Geignes, Joseph, Histoire des Huns, 151
and State, 190, 282, 292 de la Court, Pieter, 46
Colley, Linda, 243, 245, 275n Denham., Sir John,, Cooper's Hill, 201
Collingwood, R. G., 10 de Pinto, Isaac, 132, 139
Comanche, 163 Dickinson, H. T., 239n
Commonwealth, British, 85 Diggers, 53, 123
Commonwealth, Puritan, 233, 265; see also Dissent and Dissenters, 155, 159-88 pass.,
Protectorate, Puritan Revolution 201, 211, 219, 229, 257, 283, 287, 293
Commonwealth ideology and Commonwealth- Dodington, Bubb, 244
men, 32, 66, 75-87 pass., 129-40 pass., Dublin, 230
158, 176-87 pass., 215-46 pass., 251-62 Duke of Omnium (Trollope), 88
pass., 267-74 pass., 279-90 pass., 295-6, Dumbarton, 253
302-10 pass.; see also Country ideology Dunbar, John, I68n
Communist Manifesto, 114 Dunn, John, 48, 65, 165
Condorcet, marquis de, 50
Confucius, 23 Eastern Empire, 154
Congress, U.S., 266, 269, 272 East India Company, 173n
Conquest, Norman, 94, 309; see also Norman- East Indies, 254
ism and Normans Edinburgh, 125-7, 196, 238-9, 252-3, 279
Constantine, 143 Edinburgh Review, 300, 303, 305
Constantinople, 146, 153, 155 Einig&Originalschriften des llluminatenordens, 203
Constitution, U.S., 88, 218 Eliot, Sir John, 233
Convention of 1689, 65, 224 Elliot, Gilbert, 127
Convention at Dungannon (1780), 277 Engagement Controversy, 55, 223
Cookson, J. E., 287 Engels, Friedrich, 242
Corinth, 249 England, 1, 33-4, 45, 51-6 pass., 61-7
Corporation Act, 159 pass., 73-85 pass., 91-113 pass., 119-40
Country ideology, 32, 66, 75-82 pass., 108, pass., 151, 155, 162-6, 175, 180-7 pass.,
123, 129-40 pass., 158, 176, 180-1, 196-212 pass., 218-54 pass., 259-66
216-35 pass., 241-9 pass., 257, 264, pass., 271-305 pass.; see also Britain
268, 277, 288-95 pass,, 302, 305, 310; see English language, 4, 7n, 44, 46, 48, 56, 73,
also Commonwealth ideology and Common- 121, 128, 150, 203-4, 207
wealthmen Enlightenment, 63, 118, 143-5, 148, 152,
Court Whigs, 135, 138, 235 158, 190, 218, 240, 264; Antonine, 155;
Covenanters, 238 English, 145; French, 144-5; Magisterial,
Craftsman, 180, 241, 246, 251-2 220; Radical, 220, 291; Scottish, 144,
Cromwell, Oliver, 63, 84, 155, 278 191, 230, 237-8, 298, 310
Cropsey, Joseph, 70, 105 Erasmus, 219-20
314 Index
Estwick, Samuel, 183 Garner, John Nance, 244
Europe, 8, 31, 33, 77, 102, 109-10, 118, Gaul, Merovingian, 143, 151
143-58 pass., 181-212 pass., 230, 240, Gay, John, 129, 131
248, 254, 270, 280, 285, 299, 303 Gay, Peter, 144
Everlasting Gospel (Blake), 291 Geneva, 148, 173
Exclusionists, 225, 230, 233, 257 George I, 183
George II, 244, 254
Familists, 53 George III, 80-5, 136-7, I49n, 241, 254-9
Federalism and Federalists, 140, 217, 271 pass., 295, 302-5
Federalist Papers, I6n, 140 Georgian period, 86, 258-62, 306
Ferguson, Adam, 123, 252—3, 264; Essay on the German language, 47, 103, 203
History of Civil Society, 130 Germany and Germans, 71, 94, 102, 115-19,
Ferguson, Robert, 225 143-51 pass., 180, 300
Fielding, Henry, 237 Giarrizzo, Giuseppe, 127
Filmer, Sir Robert, 2-3, 55, 64, 95, 108-9, Gibbon, Edward, 125-6, 131, 139-40, 158,
176, 177n, 181, 222-3, 262; Patriarcha, 180, 199, 234, 240, 252, 278, 280, 285,
3, 55n, 233 298, 306; Decline and Fall, 116-19, 121,
Financial Revolution, 68, 108-10, 112 128-9, 143-56; Essai sur I'etude de la litter-
First Whigs, 218-25 pass., 229, 256, 265, ature, 152; "General Observations on the
275, 295 Fall of the Roman Empire in the West,"
Fish, Stanley, 20-1 143-51 pass.
Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, 178, 230, 235- Glasgow, 252-3, 279, 300
9, 248, 251, 253, 272, 301; Discourse of Glasgow, University of, 196
Government in Relation to Militias, 231 Gloucester, 159-61, 166-7, 186, 189
Florence, 45, 126 Gnosticism and Gnostics, 153, 155
Forbes, Duncan, 4, 9-50, 105, 125-33 pass., God, 37, 41, 46, 55, 62, 93, 106, 163, 204,
238-9, 251-2, 3O5n 209, 219
Forster, E. M., Howard's End, 32n Godolphin, earl of, 102, 234
Founding Fathers, 83, 88, 140, 269-70, 275 Godwin, William, 276, 290-1
Fox, Charles James, 149, 187, 284-5, 296- Goldberg, Jonathan, 19n, 27n
305 pass. Goldie, Mark, 224n; "The Roots of True
Fox, George, 54 Whiggism," 225, 229-30
France and Frenchmen, 45, 47, 102, 110, 131, Golgonooza, 291
139, 143-5, 159-65 pass., 178, 186, Good Old Cause, 33, 226, 228-9
231-40 pass., 249, 260, 275-88 pass., Gordon, Thomas, 240, 248
307; see also French Revolution Gordon, Riots, 139, 155, 278
Franklin, Benjamin, 126, 160, 162, 167, 207, Goths, 48, 96-8, 101, 147-58 pass., 176-83
269, 276 pass., 231, 235, 261, 301
Franklin, Julian H . , John Locke and the Theory of Gottingen, 203n
Sovereignty, 223, 225n Grand Remonstrance, 233
Franks, 151 Great Awakening, 165
Freeholder, The {Joseph Addison], 237 Great Cultural Revolution, 191
The Freeholder's Grand Inquest, 3, 233 Great Recoinage, 110, 175n, 3O2n
French language, 6, 21, 40, 44, 204, 240, 260 Greece and Greeks, 96, 103, 144, 155, 186n,
French Revolution, 1, 87, 101, 143, 155-6, 235
158, 186-90 pass., 194-212, 215, 230, Greek language, 7, 40
276-88 pass., 293, 297-8, 300, 307 Greenberg, Janelle R., and Corinne C. Weston,
Freret, Nicolas, 152 Subjects and Sovereigns, 2 2 0 - 1 , 267
Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 178, 262 Gregory the Great, 153
Furet, Francois, 208n Grenvilles, 253, 279, 285, 295
Grey, Lord, 303, 305
Gaels, 253 Grotius, 105, 115, 171, 266
Gaius Gracchus, 184 Guicciardini, Francesco, 17, 25—6, 39—41
Gallie, W. B., 8 Gunnell, John G., 27
 Index 315
Hadrian, 153n Hudson Bay, 130
Haitsma Mulier, E. O. G., 47 Hume, David, 60, 78-81, 100-1, 105, 119-
Hale, Sir Matthew, 94, 299 54 pass., 159, 161, 177n, 181-8 pass.,
Hallam, Henry, 301 196-205 pass., 222, 234, 239, 248, 250-
Haller, William, 55 2, 262-8 pass., 273, 280, 289-99 pass.,
Hamilton, Alexander, 67, 78, 87, 140, 217- 302-9 pass.; "Character of Sir Robert Wal-
18, 272-3 pole," 129; Essays Moral, Political and Liter-
Hammond, Henry, 62 ary, 128-9, 131-2; History of England,
Hammond, J. L., and Barbara, 304 127-41 pass., 181, 187, 203, 251-2, 255;
Hampden, Richard, 225, 233, 255, 303 "Of the Social Contract," l60n; Treatise,
Hanoverians, 76, 131, 181, 216, 234, 239, 129; "Whether the British Government in-
245, 248, 254, 257, 295 clines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to a
Harley, Robert, 232, 295, 303 Republic," 133, 135
Harrington, James, and Harringtonians, 3, 41, Hume Society, 24
43, 55-68 pass., 75, 79-80, 96, 106-9, Hundred Days, 286
122, 126, 134, 208, 221-36 pass., 244n, Huns, 150-1
251-2, 268, 271, 288, 296, 307; Oceana, Hunt, Henry, 296
61-2, 78, 226, 292; see also neo-Harring- Huskisson, William, 289
tonians Hutcheson, Francis, 264
Hartley, David, 50
Hartz, Louis B., 265-6, 269 / Ching, 22
Hebrew language, 7 Illuminism and Illuminati, 155, 203—4
Hegel, G. W. F., 23 Independent Whig, 240
Heimert, Alan C , 165 Independent Whigs, 234, 257, 284
Helots, 190n India, 77, 118, 254, 278n, 302, 304
Henry VIII, 190, 201, 281, 309 Indians, American, 118, 163, 179-80
Hexter, J. H., 40, 46, 53-4 Indus River, 205
High Churchmanship, 189, 201, 232, 234, Ireland and Irishmen, 73-5, 80, 85, 128, 162,
240, 245, 264, 293 164, 189, 230, 264-78 pass., 287; see also
Highlands and Highlanders, 111, 130, 238, Britain
249 Ireton, Henry, 56-8, 306
Hill, Christopher, 30, 52-5, 123 Irish Parliament, 85
Hirschman, Albert, The Passions and the Inter- Irish Revolution of 1912-22, 74
ests, 113-14 Islam, 143, 155
Historical Journal, 193 Israel, 62
Historicists, 37 Italian language, 21
Hoadly, Bishop, 229, 251 Italy, 39-40, 42, 137
Hobbes, Thomas, 14-15, 24, 41, 47-68
pass., 96, 99, 112, 122, 170, 220, 270, Jackson, Andrew, 86
291, 307; Leviathan, 11, 14 Jacob, James R., 220
Hobhouse, J. C , 296 Jacob, MargaretC, 63-4, 220, 233, 291
Hobsbawm, Eric, Primitive Rebels, 53 Jacobinism and Jacobins, 190-1, 208, 211,
Hogarth, William, 237 274, 277, 283
Holbach, Paul-Henri, Baron d', 240 Jacobitism and Jacobites, 33, 176, 187, 225-
Holland and Dutchmen, 46, 109-10, 205, 34 pass., 238-50 pass., 254, 257, 264,
225, 238, 249, 260 305
Holland House, 187, 300, 303, 305 Jamaica, 178, 262
Hollis, Thomas, 233, 257 James II, 75, 223, 228n-9, 284
Honest Whigs, 215, 276, 284 Japan, 108
Hooker, Richard, 171-2 Jefferson, Thomas, 67, 81, 86, 126, 140-1,
House of Commons, 76-8, 181, 220-2, 267- 147, 217-18, 237, 269, 272-3, 287; A
8, 299, 302, 309 Summary View of the Rights of British America,
House of Lords, 75-8, 221, 256, 267-8 84, 266n
Hudibras, Sir, 165 Johnson, Samuel, 161, 178, 225, 278
316 Index

Jones, J. R., The First Whigs, 218 64-5, 108, 165, 167-9, 187, 217, 222-
Judaism and Jews, 144, 152—3 30, 258
Julian, Emperor, 145, 153 London and Londoners, 81-2, 126-7, 137-9,
Junto Whigs, 230, 234, 303 156-66 pass., 178, 181-5, 205, 220-32
pass., 237, 241, 246, 251-65 pass., 274,
276-7, 288
Kames, Lord, 159n, 177n Louis XIV, 202, 248
Kelley, Donald R., 43-4, 46, 50 Lowi, Theodore, 60
Kemble, John, 300 Lucca, 41
Kentucky, 163 Lucretius, 144
Kenyon, J. P., 233; Revolution Principles, 228n Ludlow, Edmund, 232
King's College, 293 Luther, Martin, 46
King's Friends, 305 Lycurgus, 114, 147
Kinnaird, Douglas, 296
Kiowa, 163 Mably, Gabriel Bonnet de, 144, 256
Kirk, Russell, 171 Macaulay, Catherine Sawbridge, 79, 82, 257,
Kramnick, Isaac F., 159n, 242, 260-2, 292; 290
"Republican Revisionism Revisited," 259 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord, 187,
Kuhn, Thomas S., 3, 61 196n, 224, 228, 237, 252, 255, 289,
295-6, 300-6; History of England, 302,
304, 306
La Capra, Dominick, 27 McCulloch, John Ramsay, 123
Lally Tollendal, Marquis T. G. de, 212 Machiavelli, Niccolo, and Machiavellianism,
Lamont, William M., 52 17, 38-46 pass., 96-104 pass., 113, 117,
La Rochefoucauld, 26 126, 146, 206-7, 308; // Principe, 14
Laslett, Peter, 2, 64, 217; The World We Have Machivellian moment, 180
Lost, 53; see also Philosophy, Politics, and Soci- Mcllwain, C. H., 221
ety Mackinnon, W. M., 308
Latin language, 7; Latin peoples, 143 Mackintosh, Sir James, 283, 300; Vindiciae
Latini, Brunetto, 40 Gallicae, 297-8
Latitudinarians, 63-4, 191, 220, 229-38 Macpherson, C. B., 53, 60-71 pass., 105,
pass., 264, 281 107, 209n; The Political Theory of Possessive
Laud, Archbishop, and Laudians, 61—3, 190, Individualism, 59
201, 281 Macpherson, James, Ossian, 130, 150, 253
Lausanne, 143, 148, 156 McWilliams, Wilson Carey, 60
Law, William, 240 Madison, James, l6n, 67, 140, 271, 273, 307
Lawson, George, 22 5 n; Politica Sacra et Civil is, Madox, Thomas, 182; Firma Burgi, 260n
223 Maecenas, 249
"Leicester House," 241 Magna Carta, 182, 280
Leslie, Charles, 160 Maistre, Comte Joseph Marie de, 158
Letter from a Person of Quality to His Friend in theMallet, David, 240
Country, 226 Malthus, Thomas, 276; Essay on the Principles of
Levellers, 57-9, 225, 228-9, 257 Population, 293
Levenson, Joseph, 158 Manchester, 184
Linguet, Simon-Nicolas-Henri, 288 Mandeville, Bernard, 70, 99, 114, 123
Liskeard, 306 Mansfield, Lord, 8 In
Livy, 206-7 Mao Zedong, 53
Locke, John, 2, 15, 45-52 pass., 59-68 pass., Marat, Jean Paul, 276
104-23 pass., 150, 160-90 pass., 219-51 Marie Antoinette, 197, 199
pass., 258-63, 266, 275, 279, 290-1, Maritime Powers, 249
302, 306; Essay on Human Understanding, Marius, 146
229-30, 3O2n; Letters on Toleration, 229, Marlborough, John Churchill, duke of, 102,
302n; Reasonableness of Christianity, 229; 139, 234, 303
Two Treatises of Government, 3, 18, 28, 48, Marsilius, 46
 Index 317
Marvell, Andrew, 232 Muggleton, Lodowicke, and Muggletonians,
Marx, Karl, 23, 61, 103-4, 122-3, 188, 53-4
208-9, 242, 246, 289, 308 Muhammad, 205
Marxism and Marxists, 3, 44-53 pass., 64,
71, 107, 133-4, 176, 191, 197, 199,
Namier, Sir Lewis, and Namierites, 34, 81-2,
208, 218, 23On, 241, 246, 258-9, 289-
90, 294, 308 158n, 243, 277
Napoleon, 102, 286
Massachusetts, 265
Napoleonic Wars, 205, 262, 285-7, 296
Medici, 14, 248
National Debt, 69, 76, 98, 112, 139-40,
Mediterranean, 77
175, 196, 234, 256, 285, 303
Mesmer, F. A., 207
Necker, Jacques, 212n
Methodism, 189
Nedham, Marchamont, 232
Mexicans, 205
neo-Harringtonians, 48, 64-5, 97, 107-8,
Meyer, August Ludwig, 203n
111, 191, 222, 226, 229-41 pass., 246,
Middle Ages, 109, 119, 121, 130, 147, 182,
251, 259, 261-2, 287, 296, 303
231, 292-3, 300-1
Neoplatonism, 145, 152n-3, 155, 291
Middlesex, 127, 161, 216, 277
Netherlands, see Holland
Milan, 153
Neville, Henry, 3, 222, 232, 235; Plato Redi-
Mill, James, 123, 276, 291, 296, 304
vivus, 222
Mill, J. S., 310
Newcastle, Duke of, 77, 81
Millar, John, 188, 196, 199, 252-3, 279,
New England and New Englanders, 73, 93,
298-300, 305; Historical View of the En-
172, 263, 273, 287
glish Government, 298; Origin of Ranks, 198,
Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 293
298
New Model Army, 276, 295
Milton, John, 285
Newton, Sir Isaac, and Newtonians, 50, 6 3 -
Mississippi Company, 113
Mitford, William, 186n 4, 291
Moderate [party in Scottish clergy], 220, 238- New Town (Edinburgh), 126
9, 264 "New Whigs" (Burke), 284, 290, 295, 298,
Modern Whigs, 231, 261 309
Molesworth, Viscount, 264; Account of Den- New Zealand, University of, 157
mark, 230 Nine Years' War, 230
Nixon, Richard, 83, 88
Moliere, 41
Nonconformists, 286-7
Molyneux, William, I68n, 264; Case of Ire-
Normanism and Normans, 95—6, 251, 276,
land's Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in
England, 230 293, 301
Monitor, 254 North, Lord, 82, 84, 149, 303
Monmouth's rebellion, 187, 225-6, 228, 245, North Britain, 127-8
302n North Briton, 137, 257
Monroe, James, 86 Northwest Ordinance, 86
Montagu, Charles earl of Halifax, Treasurer,
303 Oakeshott, Michael, 6, 13, 60
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 26, 219 Ockham, William of, 46
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, O'Gorman, F., 279n, 284n
78-9, 99-100, 113-18 pass., 122, 126, Ohio, 73, 81, 163
131, 144-50, 176n, 235; Esprit des Lois, Old Corps, 80, 284, 295, 303
42; Grandeur et Decadence des Romains, 206Old Corruption, 289-90, 295-6
Moore, James, 47 Old Whigs, 32, 69, 79-88 pass., 129-30,
Morning Chronicle, 284 137, 215-22 pass., 229-45 pass., 251,
Morris, William, 310 257-68 pass., 275-95 pass., 303, 309; see
Moses, 62, 153-4 also Whigs
Mossner, E. C , The Life of David Hume, 126, "Old Whigs" (Burke), 284, 295, 309
128 O'Neill, Sir Phelim, 73
Moyle, Walter, 244n Orangeism, 274
318 Index
Ossian, 130, 150, 253 Pompey, 146
Oxford, University of, 2, 63, 143, 189, 236 Pope, Alexander, 129, 131, 139, 240, 247n-
8; Dunciad, 139, 247
Paine, Thomas, 53, 74, 78n, 84, 175, 276- . Popper, Karl, 3
7, 288-9; The Age of Reason, 289; Common Portland, duke of, 255n, 279, 285
Sense, 78, 136, 167, 276, 289n; The Rights Posterior Analytics, 22
of Man, 288, 290, 297 Presbyterians, 63, 219
Paley, William, 278 Price, Dr. Richard, 139-40, 155, 160, 166-
Palgrave, Francis, 300 78 pass., 186, 196-7, 228n-9, 263-4,
Paris, 143, 279 274, 2 7 9 - 8 9 pass.; Observations on Civil
Parliament, 73-88, 91, 126, 138, 159, 161, Liberty, 160, 168
181-2, 184, 219-33 pass., 241, 247-56 Priestley, Joseph, 155, 160, 166-8 pass.,
pass., 266-9, 274-7, 285, 295, 299-309 2 6 3 - 4 , 283, 288n; Essay on Civil Govern-
pass.; Patriot Parliament, 278; Richard ment, 168
Cromwell's Parliament, 56, 75; see also Protectorate, 63, 96
Irish Parliament, Scotland, Parliament of Protestantism, 46, 144, 154-55, 164, 168,
Paul, Saint, 44 237, 250, 293; see also Calvinism and Cal-
Paulicans, 155 vinists, Methodism, Presbyterians, Puritan-
Peerage Bill, 239 ism and Puritans, Unitarianism and Uni-
Pelham Connection, 249, 253; see also Newcas- tarians
tle Ptolemy, 10
Pennsylvania, 73, 265, 288 Pufendorf, Baron Samuel von, 115, 266
Pericles, 248 Pulteney, William, 241
Persia, 249 Puritanism and Puritans, 52—4, 62—3, 84,
Peterhouse, 34, 220 93, 139, 155-66 pass., 172, 185, 201,
Peters, Marie C , 246 219, 236-7, 263, 265, 278
Petyt, William, 3, 221-2, 226, 233, 309; Puritan Revolution, 51, 55-6, 63, 73-7,
Antient Right of the Commons of England As- 136, 154, 201, 293, 302
serted, 222 Putney Debates, 17, 54-8, 240, 306
Philadelphia, 82, 265, 276 Pym, John, 73, 233
Phillips, Sir John, 246 Pyrenees, 205
Phillips, Neville, 157-8
Phillipson, Nicholas, 47, 237-8 Quebec Act, 80
Philosophic Radicalism, 277, 296-7
Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2 - 3 Rainborough, Thomas, 56
Phnom Penh, 191 Ranters, 53
Picts, 253n Rapin de Thoyras, Paul, 233, 251
Pitt, William, the elder, 80-2, 137-9, 156- Real Whigs, 284
66 pass., 196, 209, 246, 253-4, 257, Reeve, John, 54
284-5, 295, 303-5 Reformation, Protestant, 54n, 154, 201, 251
Pitt, William, the younger, 87, 102, 138 Reform Bills, 66, 207-8, 296-7, 306-10
Place, Francis, 296 Reid, Thomas, 278
Plantagenets, 95, 251 Renaissance, 41-3, 50, 99, 126, 145, 217
Plato and Platonism, 23, 114, 122, 144-53 Restoration, 51-3, 63-4, 75, 94, 97, 181,
pass., 174, 219, 283, 291-2 219-20, 236, 305
Plumb, J. H., 51, 76, 86, 216, 243 Revolution of 1688, 1, 51, 64-78 pass.,
Pocock, J. G. A., 217-18; The Ancient Consti- 185-7, 196-7, 201, 215-30 pass., 251,
tution and the Feudal Law, 2 1 5 - 1 6 , 2 2 0 - 1 ; 279-84 pass., 296-309 pass.
"Burke and the Ancient Constitution," Revolution Settlement, 158, 217, 287, 302
193-4, 210; The Machiavellian Moment, Revolution Society, 186, 196, 264, 279
31-2, 44 Rhodes, 249
Poland and Poles, 178, 183 Ricardo, David, 123
Polk, James, 86 Riesenberg, Peter N., 39
Polybius, 42, 96, 137, 145-6 Robbins, Caroline, 66, 215-16, 225-34
Polynesia, 151 pass., 244n, 260, 295, 309-10; The Eigh-
 Index 319
teenth-Century Commonwealthman, 215, 217,Seven Years' War, 159, 256
235 Shaftesbury, first earl of, 65n, 167, 218, 255-
Robertson, William, 128, 177n, 181, 188-9, 36 pass., 256, 263, 280
199, 210, 252, 264, 280; History of Amer- Shaftesbury, third earl of, 219, 230
ica, 118, 120n, 179-80; History of Scot- Shelburne, Lord, 167, 178, 186, 263, 279
land, 128; View of the Progress of Society in Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 155
Europe, 119, 198 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 296
Robespierre, 156 Shklar, Judith N., 119n
Rockingham, Lady, 255n Sidney, Algernon, 178, 223, 244n, 248n,
Rockingham Whigs, 82, 85, 255n, 303 251, 255, 263; Discourses on Government, 3,
Roman Empire, 86, 119, 146, 149, 154; see 222, 232
also Gibbon, Edward, Decline and Fall Skinner, Quentin, 3-7, 21, 48, 165; Founda-
Rome and Romans, 39, 41, 48, 69, 96-9, tions of Modern Political Thought, 5, 39-40,
104, 114, 121, 137-53 pass., 158, 176- 45-6
80 pass., 185, 195, 206, 210, 232-8 Smith, Adam, 70n, 78, 100, 111, 121, 123,
pass., 247, 249, 253-63 pass., 292 126, 138-50 pass., 161-2, 183n, 188-99
Romulus Augustulus, 143 pass., 209, 252-3, 274, 276, 279, 298,
Rota, The, 296 310; Lectures on Jurisprudence, 49; Wealth of
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 26, 47, 111, 118-33 Nations, 102
pass., 148, 160, 169, 173-4, 185, 249, Smollett, Tobias, 250-1, 253, 304; A History
256, 270, 290; Discours sur I'origine de I'ine- of England, 137; Humphry Clinker, 137
galite, 180 Society of the Friends of the People, 305
Royalists, 225 Socinians, 155
Royal Society, 63 Socrates, 41, 174
Rude, George, 53—4 Somers, John, 303
Russell, William, Lord, 178, 255n, 303 Sorbonne, 46
Russia and Russians, 149, 151, 275 South Britain, 128
Rye House Plot, 226 Southey, Robert, 292
South Sea Bubble, 113, 204, 238
Sabine, George H., 37 South Sea Company, 76, 240
Sacheverell, Henry, 284 Southwark, 181-2, 184
St. Lawrence River, 81 Spain and Spaniards, 46, 143, 285, 303
Sallust, 146, 148-9 Sparta and Spartans, 96, 176, 180, 190n,
Samuel, 62 210, 236, 249
Sandemanians, 290 Speck, W. A., 239n
Saratoga, 149 Spectator, 236—7; "Mr. Spectator," "Sir An-
Sarpi, Paolo, 27 drew," "Sir Roger," 236
Sawbridge family, 254 Spence, Thomas, 288
Schuyler, Robert Livingston, 161 Spinoza, Baruch, 46
Schwoerer, Lois G., 225, 228n Squire, Samuel, 182n
Scotland, Parliament of, 85 Stalin, Joseph, 19, 286
Scotland and Scots, 1, 33, 47, 73-81 pass., Stamp Act, 80
97-8, 100, 110-11, 123-38 pass., 144, Stanhope, Milord, 256
163, I65n., 175-81 pass., 187-9, 191, States party, 47
196-200, 210-20 pass., 230, 237-9, Steele, Richard, 99
248-64 pass., 273-80 pass., 290, 297- Stein, Peter, 49-50, 238
310 pass.; see also Britain Stewart, Dugald, 298
Scott, Sir Walter, 298 Stoicism, 145
Scriptures, 165 Stone, Lawrence, 75, 86
Second Amendment (U.S. Constitution), 218 Stourzh, Gerald, 140
Sedgwick, William, 54 Strahan, William, 126
Seekers, 53 Strauss, Leo, 27n, 60, 171
Selden, John, 299, 309 Stuarts, 76, 81, 225, 254, 299, 306
Septennial Act, 76, 158, 216, 234, 239-47 Suarez, Francisco, 105
pass., 255-65 pass., 270, 285, 295, 303 Sulla, 146
320 Index

Swift, Jonathan, 102, 108, 129-30, 139, Ulfilas, 154

176n, 196, 201, 205, 237, 240, 248 Union of 1707, 128, 131, 138, 237, 239,
System und Folgen des llluminatenordens, 203 250, 253
Unitarianism and Unitarians, 93, 139, 196,
Tacitus, 116-17, 125, 146-9, 248-9, 300; 263, 265, 287
De moribus Germanorum, 150 United States, 140, 269-71, 287; see also
Talbot, Richard, 73 America
Tawney's century, 67
Taylor, A. J. P., 286
Taylor, John, 273, 288; Arator and Inquiry into Vane, Sir Henry, 232
Vattel, Emmerich von, 266
the Principles and Policy of the Government of
the United States, 27 3n Venice, 232, 249
Temple, Sir William, 107, 120-1, 134, 307 Versailles, 279, 282
Test Act, 159, 219, 287 Vinerian professorship, 278
Teutons, 309 Virgil, 249; Georgia, 148, 190
Theodosians, 154 Virginia, 73, 107, 114, 178, 262-73 pass.
Voltaire, 144-5, 249; Siecle de Louis XIV, 248
Thing, The, 289, 293
Thomason collection, 257n
Thomists, 46, 104 Wadham College, 63
Thompson, E. P., 53-4, 242-3, 292 Wales, 137
Thrale, Hester, 158n Wallace, John M., 55n
Tiberius, 249 Walpole, Horace, 303
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 276 Walpole, Sir Robert, 77, 129-40 pass., 159,
Toland, John, 230, 232-4, 244n, 257, 264; 180-1, 209, 217, 240-55 pass., 262,
Life of Milton, 232 272, 277-8, 295, 303
Toleration Act, 158, 219, 285, 287 Warburton, Bishop, 178-9, 190
Toryism and Tories, 32-3, 65-87 pass., 95, War of the Spanish Succession, 234, 240, 285
126-40 pass., 176-201 pass., 211, 216- Washington, George, 178, 267
310 pass. Weinbrot, Howard, 249
Tower of London, 61 West, American, 163
Treaty of Rijswijk (1697), 234 West, the, 38, 94-5, 97-8, 103-4, 108,
Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 234 116, 119, 143, 146, 151, 154-5, 184
Trenchard, John, 230-1, 240, 244n West Indies, 190n, 246, 254
Trevelyan, G. O., 243;G. N. Trevalyan, 304 Westminster, 181-2, 184, 237, 253, 288,
Trevor-Roper, H. R., 220; Lord Dacre, 300 296, 305
Trollope, Anthony, 88 Westminster Review, 296
True Whiggism and True Whigs, 215, 222- Weston, Corinne C , 66; English Constitutional
34 pass., 257, 284 Theory and the House of Lords, 221; and Ja-
Tuck, Richard, 46; Natural Rights Theories, 45 nelle R. Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns,
Tucker, Josiah, 85, 101, 114, 119n, 138-40, 220-1, 267
159-91, 199, 229, 260n-73 pass., 279- Whiggism and Whigs, 31-4, 48, 53, 65-85
91 pass., 303, 306, 309; Address to the pass., 95-6, 101, 111, 119, 123, 126,
Landed Interest, 183; Apology for the Present 131-9 pass., 158-9, 171-2, 175, 181-
Church, 165; Essay on Trade, 184n; Four 211 pass., 215-310; see also Court Whigs,
Letters to Shelburne, 178; A Letter to Edmund Old Whigs, Rockingham Whigs
Burke, 163, 165-6; A Treatise Concerning Wilberforce, William, 156
Civil Government, 119-21, 160-1, 166-7, Wildman, John, 220, 224-6
171-2, 179-80, 185, 187 Wilkes, John, and Wilkites, 81-2, 137-8,
Tudors, 75, 183, 251 245, 254
Tully, James, 105, 108 Wilkins, John, 63
Tuveson, Ernest, Millennium and Utopia, 93 William III, 230, 302-3, 305
Tyrrell, James, 3n, 233, 244n; General History Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 190
of England, 233n; Patriarcha Non Monarcha,Wilson, Sir Robert, 296
222 Winch, Donald, 123
Tytler, William, 14 In Windham, William, 279, 285
 Index 321

Winstanley, Gerrard, 30, 54, 62 Worden, Blair, 232

Wolin, Sheldon, 16, 37, 60 Wordsworth, William, 257, 292
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 103; Vindication of the Wren, Matthew, 61-4, 67-8; Observations, 62
Rights of Man, 290; Vindication of the Rights
of Women, 290 Yorkshire, 101, 216, 277-8
Wood, Anthony, 236 Yorktown, 149, 162
Wood, Gordon, 101, 217, 269
Wootton, David, 27 Zoroastrianism, 152-3