The neo-roman theory of free states became a highly subversive ideology in early-modern Britain. The strategy followed by the theorists I have been considering was to appropriate the supreme moral value of freedom and apply it exclusively to certain rather radical forms of representative government. This eventually allowed them to stigmatise with the opprobrious name of slavery a number of governments – such as the ancien régime in France and the rule of the British in North America – that were widely regarded as legitimate and even progressive. So it is hardly surprising to find that, throughout the period I have been surveying, the neo-roman theory was subjected to a continuing barrage of violently hostile criticism.
Among these criticisms, the most sweeping was expressed in perhaps its most influential form in Hobbes’s Leviathan. It is the merest confusion, Hobbes insists, to suppose that there is any connection between the establishment of free states and the maintenance of individual liberty. The freedom described by the Roman writers and their modern admirers alike ‘is not the liberty of Particular men’; it is merely ‘the Liberties of the Common-wealth’.1
Hobbes’s objection was immediately taken up by Filmer,2 and has been repeated ever since.3 The writers I have been considering were concerned, we are told, with the liberty of cities, not the liberty of individual citizens.4 But this contention fails to come to grips with the structure of the neo-roman theory of liberty. While it is true that these writers take the idea of free states as their point of departure, they do so in part because of a radical thesis they wish to advance about the concept of individual liberty. Their thesis – to put it as bluntly as possible – is that it is only possible to be free in a free state.
It is true that this was not the main reason originally given for wanting to live as a citizen of a free state. Rather we need to take note at this juncture of an important division of opinion within the tradition of thought I have been laying out. According to the ancient Roman writers and their disciples in the Renaissance, the most important benefit of living in a civitas libera is that such communities are especially well adapted to attaining glory and greatness. Among the ancient writers, Sallust is constantly invoked as the indisputable authority on this point.5 Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae opens with an outline history of the rise of Rome from which we learn that ‘kingly authority, at first instituted to conserve liberty and increase the state, collapsed into arrogance and tyranny’.6 Faced with this crisis, the Roman people replaced their kings with a system of annual magistracies, after which ‘it is incredible to recollect how quickly the city, having once attained the status of liberty, went on to progress and increase’.7 The reason, Sallust explains, is that ‘to kings, good citizens are objects of greater suspicion than the evil, and the virtus of others always appears alarming’, whereas under free systems of government everyone strives for glory without the least fear of seeming a threat.8
Sallust’s sentiments were closely echoed by Machiavelli at the start of Book 2 of the Discorsi.9 ‘It is above all the most marvellous thing to consider what greatness Rome attained after she succeeded in liberating herself from her kings.’ ‘The reason’, Machiavelli goes on, ‘is easy to understand, for it is not the pursuit of individual good but of the common good that makes cities great, and it is beyond doubt that the common good is never considered except in republics. The opposite happens where there is a prince, for on most occasions what benefits him is offensive to the city, and what benefits the city is offensive to him.’10
The same sentiments were echoed in turn by a number of neo-roman writers in England during the 1650s. Harrington’s ideal of a commonwealth ‘capable of increase’ clearly alludes to Sallust’s argument,11 while Nedham in the Introduction to his Excellency of a Free State refers us directly to the two leading authorities on republican glory and greatness. First he reminds us that ‘it is incredible to be spoken (saith Sallust) how exceedingly the Roman commonwealth increased in a short time, after they had obtained liberty’.12 Then he paraphrases the crucial passage in which Machiavelli had explained why republics are better adapted than monarchies to scaling the peaks of glory:
The Romans arrived to such a height, as was beyond all imagination, after the expulsion of their kings, and kingly government. Nor do these things happen without special reason; it being usual in free-states to be more tender of the public in all their decrees, than of particular interests: whereas the case is otherwise in a monarchy, because in this form the prince’s pleasure weighs down all considerations of the common good. And hence it is, that a nation hath no sooner lost its liberty, and stoop’d under the yoke of a single tyrant, but it immediately loseth its former lustre.13
Although Nedham makes no mention of the Discorsi, his borrowing from Machiavelli is never more evident than at this moment in his argument.
For all these manifestations of their classical allegiances, however, we also encounter among Nedham and his contemporaries a growing suspicion of the ethics of glory and the pursuit of civic greatness. The chief authority on whom they rely at this juncture is, once again, Sallust in his Bellum Catilinae. Despite his admiration for the ‘increase’ of Rome after the expulsion of her kings, the moral drawn by Sallust from his outline history of the Roman republic is more sombre and ironic than this might lead one to expect. With greatness, Sallust laments, came ambition and a lust among Rome’s leaders for power; with growing power came avarice and an insatiable demand for yet more spoils of victory. The villain of the story is said to be Lucius Sulla, who raised a dangerously large army, taught it to covet Asiatic luxuries, and then used it to seize control of the Roman state, ‘thereby bringing everything from excellent beginnings to a bad end’.14
Among the neo-roman writers under the Interregnum in Britain, it became disturbingly easy to identify Oliver Cromwell with Sallust’s portrait of Sulla, especially after Cromwell’s conquest of Scotland and Ireland and his use of force to dissolve the Rump Parliament in 1653.15 Harrington sounds a clear note of warning when he reminds us that Sulla ‘overthrew the people and the commonwealth’ of Rome, and laid ‘the foundation of the succeeding monarchy’.16 A growing fear that the pursuit of glory abroad can lead to the collapse of liberty at home turned Harrington and his associates into vehement critics of the Cromwellian protectorate, and at the same time led them to think differently about the special merits of republican regimes. Rather than trumpeting the ability of free states to attain glory and greatness, they begin to place their main emphasis on the capacity of such regimes to secure and promote the liberties of their own citizens.17
This had always been a subsidiary theme in the ancient and Renaissance texts.18 ‘The common benefit of living in a free state’, Machiavelli had testified, ‘is that of being able to enjoy your own possessions freely and without any fear.’19 To this he had added, in Sallustian vein, that the reason why countries living in liberty always make immense gains is that ‘everyone knows not only that they are born in a state of freedom and not as slaves, but that they can rise by means of their virtù to positions of prominence’.20 This is the claim that the neo-roman writers of the English republic make central to their vision of free states. Harrington declares at the outset of Oceana that the special value of such communities derives from the fact that their laws are ‘framed by every private man’ to ‘protect the liberty of every private man, which by that means comes to be the liberty of the commonwealth’.21 Nedham speaks yet more expansively in The Excellency of a Free State, insisting that the reason why the people of England have decided in favour of a republic is their recognition that this ‘will best secure the liberties and freedoms of the people’.22 Later he confirms that one of his own principal reasons for believing that ‘a free state is much more excellent than a government by grandees or kings’ is that such states best provide for ‘the good and ease of the people, in a secure enjoyment of their rights’.23 Milton brings his Readie and Easie Way to a close with a ringing reaffirmation of the same sentiment. Besides our religious liberty, ‘the other part of our freedom consists in the civil rights and advancements of every person’, and it is beyond doubt that ‘the enjoyment of those [is] never more certain, and the access to these never more open, then in a free Commonwealth’.24
The main conclusion to which these writers are committed is thus that it is only possible to enjoy civil liberty to the full if you live as the citizen of a free state. As Hobbes is there to remind us, however, this is far from being a self-evident inference, and it looks on the face of it little better than a verbal sleight of hand. So we next need to consider what evidence the neo-roman writers bring in support of their conclusion, and how they defend themselves against Hobbes’s oft-repeated charge.
To follow their argument, we need to begin by reverting to their analogy between political bodies and natural ones. What it means to possess or lose your freedom, they assume, must be the same in the case of an individual citizen as in the case of a free commonwealth or state. This leads them to argue that, for individuals no less than for communities, there will always be two distinct routes by which freedom can be forfeited or undermined. First of all, you will of course be deprived of your liberty if the power of the state (or of your fellow-citizens) is used to force or coerce you into performing (or forbearing from performing) any action neither enjoined nor forbidden by law. To take the most obvious example, if political power lies in the hands of a tyrannical ruler, and if the tyrant uses his power to threaten or interfere with your life, your liberty or your estates, your freedom as a citizen will to that degree be undermined. This is why the refusal of John Hampden to pay the ship money tax in 1635 always looms so large in the explanations offered by these writers for the outbreak of the English civil war.25 As Milton interprets the episode in Eikonoklastes, the levying of the tax in time of peace, and without the consent of parliament, involved the king in confiscating the property of his subjects by force. But this involved him in using the coercive power of the law to deprive his subjects of one of their most fundamental civil liberties. And this, Milton concludes, was rightly seen as the enslaving act of a tyrannical government.26
The thesis on which the neo-roman writers chiefly insist, however, is that it is never necessary to suffer this kind of overt coercion in order to forfeit your civil liberty. You will also be rendered unfree if you merely fall into a condition of political subjection or dependence, thereby leaving yourself open to the danger of being forcibly or coercively deprived by your government of your life, liberty or estates.27 This is to say that, if you live under any form of government that allows for the exercise of prerogative or discretionary powers outside the law, you will already be living as a slave. Your rulers may choose not to exercise these powers, or may exercise them only with the tenderest regard for your individual liberties. So you may in practice continue to enjoy the full range of your civil rights. The very fact, however, that your rulers possess such arbitrary powers means that the continued enjoyment of your civil liberty remains at all times dependent on their goodwill. But this is to say that you remain subject or liable to having your rights of action curtailed or withdrawn at any time. And this, as they have already explained, is equivalent to living in a condition of servitude.
These inflammatory claims are put forward with the fullest assurance – or perhaps merely, as before, with the least subtlety – by a number of the lesser writers in defence of the English commonwealth. John Hall affirms that, if a ruler possesses absolute powers to which everyone is subject, this already means that ‘my very natural Liberty is taken away from me’.28 Francis Osborne similarly maintains that, if you hold your freedom and felicity as a subject ‘at the will of another’, you are already living in a condition of servitude.29 Marchamont Nedham agrees that any system of arbitrary power in which ‘every man’s right’ is placed ‘under the will of another’ can already be classified as ‘no less than tyranny’ and enslavement.30
This is not to say that the leading neo-roman theorists were any the less convinced of this central principle. We find it reaffirmed in the clearest possible terms at the start of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses, where he begins by examining what he calls ‘the common notions of liberty’:
For as liberty solely consists in an independency upon the will of another, and by the name of slave we understand a man, who can neither dispose of his person nor goods, but enjoys all at the will of his master; there is no such thing in nature as a slave, if those men or nations are not slaves, who have no other title to what they enjoy, than the grace of the prince, which he may revoke whensoever he pleaseth.31
As Sidney makes clear, it is the mere possibility of your being subjected with impunity to arbitrary coercion, not the fact of your being coerced, that takes away your liberty and reduces you to the condition of a slave.32
When Lord Bolingbroke revived these arguments in his Dissertation upon Parties as a means of denouncing the government of Sir Robert Walpole in the early 1730s, he chiefly singled out the capacity of overweening executives to induce the members of representative assemblies to vote and act in such a way as to undermine their duty to serve the common good.33 By contrast, the anxieties of the seventeenth-century writers chiefly centre on the spectre of the royal prerogative, and especially on those parts of the king’s discretionary powers that seemed to pose a standing threat to the liberties of individual subjects. This is why, in neo-roman explanations of the English civil war, the issue generally taken to be the last straw was Charles I’s insistence that the right to control the militia was lodged with him alone and not with parliament.34 Charles’s fatal obduracy on this issue provides Milton with the occasion of another of his great set-pieces in Eikonoklastes:
As for sole power of the Militia … give him but that, and as good give him in a lump all our Laws and Liberties. For if the power of the Sword were any where separate and undepending from the power of Law, which is originally seated in the Highest Court, then would that power of the Sword be soon maister of the law, & being at one mans disposal, might, when he pleas’d, controule the Law, and in derision of our Magna Charta, which were but weak resistance against an armed Tyrant, might absolutely enslave us.35
Milton’s invective already enunciates one of the basic principles bequeathed by the neo-roman writers to the age of the American revolution and beyond: that the maintenance of a standing army will always prove inconsistent with the preservation of civil liberty.36
It is said to follow that, if you wish to maintain your liberty, you must ensure that you live under a political system in which there is no element of discretionary power, and hence no possibility that your civil rights will be dependent on the goodwill of a ruler, a ruling group, or any other agent of the state.37 You must live, in other words, under a system in which the sole power of making laws remains with the people or their accredited representatives, and in which all individual members of the body politic – rulers and citizens alike – remain equally subject to whatever laws they choose to impose upon themselves.38 If and only if you live under such a self-governing system will your rulers be deprived of any discretionary powers of coercion, and in consequence deprived of any tyrannical capacity to reduce you and your fellow-citizens to a condition of dependence on their goodwill, and hence to the status of slaves.
This is the system that Harrington describes – translating Livy – as ‘the empire of laws and not of men’,39 and this is the system that Milton grandly celebrates in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates when vindicating the decision to bring Charles I to justice:
And surely they that shall boast, as we doe, to be a free Nation, and not have in themselves the power to remove, or to abolish any governour supreme, or subordinat, with the government it self upon urgent causes, may please their fancy with a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to coz’n babies; but are indeed under tyranny and servitude; as wanting that power, which is the root and sourse of all liberty, to dispose and oeconomize in the Land which God hath giv’n them, as Maisters of Family in thir own house and free inheritance. Without which natural and essential power of a free Nation, though bearing high thir heads, they can in due esteem be thought no better then slaves and vassals born, to the tenure and occupation of another inheriting Lord. Whose government, though not illegal, or intolerable, hangs over them as a Lordly scourge, not as a free government; and therfore to be abrogated.40
From the perspective of the individual citizen, the alternatives are stark: unless you live under a system of self-government you will live as a slave.41
With these arguments, the neo-roman writers feel able to write QED under their fundamental contention to the effect that it is only possible to be free in a free state. They have already defined free states as those in which the laws are made by the will of the people as a whole. But they have now explained that you can only hope to remain free of personal servitude if you live as the subject of just such a state. Harrington draws the moral with admirable succinctness in the preliminaries to Oceana. If and only if everyone remains equal in the making of the laws will it be possible to assure ‘the liberty not only of the commonwealth, but of every man’. For if and only if we live under such conditions will the laws be ‘framed by every private man unto no other end (or they may thank themselves) than to protect the liberty of every private man’.42
Hobbes’s incapacity (or perhaps refusal) to see any connection between public and private liberty was undoubtedly influential, but most critics of the neo-roman writers acknowledged that the desire to establish such a connection lay at the heart of their argument. Among these critics, however, two further objections were commonly raised against what we can now see to be the most basic contention of the ideology I have been examining, namely that it is only possible to escape from personal servitude if you live as an active citizen under a representative form of government.
A number of critics argued that, even if this contention is not actually incoherent, the suggestion that an equal right to participate in government is indispensable to the maintenance of civil liberty is so utopian as to make it irrelevant to the political world in which we live. This objection was widely canvassed at the time of the American and French revolutions, with William Paley coming forward in his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy in 1785 as perhaps the most influential spokesman for what became the classical liberal case.43 As Paley urges in minatory tones, ‘those definitions of liberty ought to be rejected, which by making that essential to civil freedom which is unattainable in experience, inflame expectations that can never be gratified, and disturb the public content with complaints’.44 Paley’s warning takes on an added significance in the light of the fact that his Principles became a leading text-book for the teaching of political theory throughout the nineteenth century.45
I shall not attempt to counter Paley’s criticism,46 save by observing that I have never understood why the charge of utopianism is necessarily thought to be an objection to a theory of politics. One legitimate aspiration of moral and political theory is surely to show us what lines of action we are committed to undertaking by the values we profess to accept.47 It may well be massively inconvenient to suggest that, if we truly value individual freedom, this commits us to establishing political equality as a substantive ideal. If this is true, however, what this insight offers us is not a critique of our principles as unduly demanding in practice; rather it offers us a critique of our practice as insufficiently attentive to our principles.
I want to concentrate, however, on the other and more knock-down objection commonly levelled against the theory I have been laying out. According to a number of eminent critics, the analysis of the concept of liberty underlying the claim that it is only possible to live freely in a free state is itself misleading and confused. Those who have raised this objection commonly mount their attack in two waves. First they reaffirm the Hobbesian principle that the extent of your individual liberty depends on the extent to which the performance of actions within your powers is or is not physically or legally constrained. As Paley, for example, puts it, ‘the degree of actual liberty’ will always bear ‘a reversed proportion to the number and severity of the restrictions’ placed on your ability to pursue your chosen ends.48 But the neo-roman theorists, according to Paley, are not talking about this situation. They are talking about the extent to which the performance of such actions may or may not be free from the possible danger of being constrained.49 But this, Paley goes on, is to confuse the idea of liberty with a wholly different value, that of enjoying security for your liberty and the exercise of your rights. So the neo-roman writers ‘do not so much describe liberty itself, as the safeguards and preservatives of liberty: for example, a man’s being governed by no laws, but those to which he has given his consent, were it practicable, is no otherwise necessary to the enjoyment of civil liberty, than as it affords a probable security against the dictation of laws, imposing arbitrary and superfluous restrictions upon his private will’.50
The second wave of the attack then follows at once. As soon as this confusion is uncovered, we can see that the basic claim made by the neo-roman theorists to the effect that you can only be free in a free state is simply a mistake. The extent of your freedom as a citizen depends on the extent to which you are left unconstrained by the coercive apparatus of the law from exercising your powers at will. But this means that what matters for civic liberty is not who makes the laws, but simply how many laws are made, and thus how many of your actions are in fact constrained. This in turn shows that there is no necessary connection between the preservation of individual liberty and the maintenance of any particular form of government. As Paley concludes, there is no reason in principle why ‘an absolute form of government’ might not leave you ‘no less free than the purest democracy’.51
The objection seems a not unnatural one; even Philip Pettit, the most powerful advocate of the neo-roman theory among contemporary political philosophers, has felt inclined to concede it.52 It seems to me, however, that Paley’s line of criticism fails to come to terms with the most basic and distinctive claim that the neo-roman theorists are labouring to make about the concept of civil liberty. The claim is implicit in the analysis I have already given, but it is now time to spell it out.
The neo-roman writers fully accept that the extent of your freedom as a citizen should be measured by the extent to which you are or are not constrained from acting at will in pursuit of your chosen ends. They have no quarrel, that is, with the liberal tenet that, as Jeremy Bentham was later to formulate it, the concept of liberty ‘is merely a negative one’ in the sense that its presence is always marked by the absence of something, and specifically by the absence of some measure of restraint or constraint.53 Nor have they any wish to deny that the exercise of force or the coercive threat of it must be listed among the forms of constraint that interfere with individual liberty.54 Despite what a number of recent commentators have implied, they are far from merely wishing to put forward an alternative account of unfreedom according to which it is held to be the product not of coercion but only of dependence.55
What, then, divides the neo-roman from the liberal understanding of freedom? What the neo-roman writers repudiate avant la lettre is the key assumption of classical liberalism to the effect that force or the coercive threat of it constitute the only forms of constraint that interfere with individual liberty.56 The neo-roman writers insist, by contrast, that to live in a condition of dependence is in itself a source and a form of constraint. As soon as you recognise that you are living in such a condition, this will serve in itself to constrain you from exercising a number of your civil rights. This is why they insist, pace Paley, that to live in such a condition is to suffer a diminution not merely of security for your liberty but of liberty itself.57
The issue, in short, is how to interpret the underlying idea of constraint.58 Among the writers I have been considering, the question surfaces most challengingly in Harrington’s response to the satirical comments on the neo-roman theory made by Hobbes in Leviathan.59 Hobbes speaks with scorn of the self-governing republic of Lucca and the illusions fostered by its citizens about their allegedly free way of life. They have written, he tells us, ‘on the Turrets of the city of Luca in great characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS’.60 But they have no reason to believe that, as ordinary citizens, they have any more liberty than they would have had under the sultan in Constantinople. For they fail to realise that what matters for individual liberty is not the source of the law but its extent, and thus that whether a Common-wealth be Monarchical, or Popular, the Freedome is still the same’.61
Harrington retorts with the lie direct.62 If you are a subject of the sultan, you will be less free than a citizen of Lucca, simply because your freedom in Constantinople, however great in extent, will remain wholly dependent on the sultan’s goodwill. But this means that in Constantinople you will suffer from a form of constraint unknown even to the humblest citizen of Lucca. You will find yourself constrained in what you can say and do by the reflection that, as Harrington brutally puts it, even the greatest bashaw in Constantinople is merely a tenant of his head, liable to lose it as soon as he speaks or acts in such a way as to cause the sultan offence.63 The very fact, in other words, that the law and the will of the sultan are one and the same has the effect of limiting your liberty. Whether the commonwealth be monarchical or popular, the freedom is not still the same.
Algernon Sidney draws the crucial inference even more forcefully when discussing the laws of nature in his Discourses. ‘As liberty consists only in being subject to no man’s will, and nothing denotes a slave but a dependence on the will of another; if there be no other law in a kingdom than the will of a prince, there is no such thing as liberty.’ Anyone who says that ‘kings and tyrants are bound to preserve their subjects’ lands, liberties, goods and lives, and yet lays for a foundation, that laws are no more than the significations of their pleasure, seeks to delude the world with words which signify nothing’.64
By way of illustrating their argument, the neo-roman writers generally focus on the predicament of those whom they regard as pre-eminently deserving of the title of citizens in the fullest classical sense. They focus, that is, on those who devote themselves to public service by acting as advisers and counsellors to the rulers and governments of modern Europe. The specific freedom these citizens need to be able to exercise above all is that of speaking and acting as conscience dictates in the name of the common good. If this aspect of their civil liberty is in any way limited or taken away, they will be prevented from performing their highest duty as virtuous citizens, that of promoting the policies they believe to be of the greatest benefit to the state.
This is why, in the whig interpretation of English history, a special place was always reserved for Sir Thomas More and the plea he entered as Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523 for freedom of speech.65 ‘In your High Court of Parliament’, he dared to remind Henry VIII, ‘is nothing entreated but matter of weight and importance concerning your Realm and your own royal estate.’ This being so, ‘it could not fail to let and put to silence from the giving of their advice and counsel many of your discreet Commons, to the great hindrance of the common affairs’ if any member of the House were to feel inhibited from speaking and acting ‘freely, without doubt of your dreadful displeasure’ in such a way as to ‘discharge his conscience and boldly in every thing incident among us to declare his advice’.66
More himself, however, had already argued in his Utopia of 1516 that there is no possibility of being able to exercise this crucial freedom in the service of modern governments. His reasons are put into the mouth of Raphael Hythloday, the traveller to the island of Utopia. One problem is that, even if you have the courage to speak your mind in favour of fair and honourable policies, few rulers will pay the least heed to your advice. They will generally prefer to pursue their dreams of conquest and glory even if these lead to the ruin of their states.67 But the chief difficulty arises from the conditions of slavish dependence under which all courtiers and advisers are made to live and work. They cannot hope to speak and act for the common good, since they find themselves ‘obliged to endorse whatever is said by those who enjoy the greatest favour with the prince, no matter how absurd their sayings may be, and find themselves obliged at the same time to play the part of parasites, devoting themselves to pleasing such favourites by means of flattery’.68 The outcome of acting under such humiliating conditions, Hythloday concludes, is that ‘there is only one syllable of difference between service to kings and servitude’.69
More’s reaction was widely echoed in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. The courts of princes are centres of faction and flattery,70 of lying and spies,71 and are actively inimical to the aspirations of those who wish to serve the common good. The growing popularity of Tacitus in the same period reflects the sense that, of all the ancient moralists, he best understood the destructive implications of centring national politics on princely courts. No one can hope to speak truth to power if everyone is obliged to cultivate the flattering arts required to appease a ruler on whose favour everyone depends.72
The same attack was launched once again after the restoration of Charles II in 1660 brought with it a court of notably dissolute manners and, it was feared, of increasingly tyrannical proclivities. Algernon Sidney speaks with puritanical contempt of the corruption typical of those who make their careers as advisers and ministers to the princes of the age. Such rulers ‘think themselves wronged and degraded, when they are not suffer’d to do what they please’, and ‘the nearer they come to a power that is not easily restrained by law, the more passionately they desire to abolish all that opposes it’.73 The more they develop these despotic tendencies, the more their counsellors decline into the condition of slaves. They find themselves ‘under their power’, forced to ‘depend upon their pleasure’, entirely beholden to them for bare survival, to say nothing of reward or advancement.74
It is of course possible to flourish under such a regime, although it is Sidney’s main and much-repeated contention that none but the worst will care to follow a life of public service under such circumstances. But Sidney also emphasises the life of extreme precariousness that everyone is made to suffer under such forms of government. He illustrates his point by way of a Tacitean examination of the growing corruption of the Roman empire, but his language is at the same time strikingly reminiscent of Harrington’s discussion of life under the Turk:
Whilst the will of a governor passed for a law, and the power did usually pass into the hands of such as were most bold and violent, the utmost security that any man could have for his person or estate, depended upon his temper; and princes themselves, whether good or bad, had no longer leases of their lives, than the furious and corrupted soldiers would give them.75
The outcome of living under such a regime, as Sidney stresses in his chapter on the difference between absolute and popular government, is that everyone lives in continual fear and danger of incurring the tyrant’s displeasure. It becomes everyone’s chief preoccupation ‘to avoid the effects of his rage’.76
Sidney’s principal conclusion is that, if you live under such conditions of dependence, this will serve in itself to limit what you can say and do as an adviser or minister. You will be constrained in the first place from saying or doing anything liable to give offence. No one will ‘dare to attempt the breaking of the yoke’ laid upon them, ‘nor trust one another in any generous design for the recovery of their liberty’.77 You will also be constrained to act in any number of flattering and obsequious ways, obliged to recognise that ‘the chief art of a courtier’ is that of ‘rendering himself subservient’78 and ‘conformable’.79 Sidney points the moral in his chapter on the public good, again drawing on Tacitus’s account of what happened in Rome when all preferments were ‘given to those who were most propense to slavery’.80 The inevitable effect of a system in which everything is ‘calculated to the humour or advantage of one man’, and in which his favour can be ‘gained only by a most obsequious respect, or a pretended affection for his person, together with a servile obedience to his commands’, is that ‘all application to virtuous actions will cease’ and any ability to pursue the public good will be lost.81
The crucial assumption underlying Sidney’s despairing analysis is that none of these effects need ever be the outcome of coercive threats. The lack of freedom suffered by those who advise the powerful may of course be due to coercion or force. But the slavish behaviour typical of such counsellors may equally well be due to their basic condition of dependence and their understanding of what their clientage demands of them. As soon as they begin to ‘slide into a blind dependence upon one who has wealth and power’, they begin to desire ‘only to know his will’, and eventually ‘care not what injustice they do, if they may be rewarded’.82
One way in which the neo-roman theorists describe these servile supporters of absolute power is as persons of obnoxious character. As we have seen, the term obnoxius had originally been used to refer to the predicament of those who live at the mercy of other people. With the rise of neo-roman theories of freedom, however, the term came to be used instead to describe the slavish conduct to be expected of those who live under the thumb of princes and ruling oligarchies.83 We already find Bacon speaking with distaste in his Essays of 1625 about the eunuchs employed by kings in the role of spies as ‘obnoxious and officious’ servants.84 George Wither, in his poem of 1652 addressed To the Parliament and People of the Commonwealth of England, likewise reviles those whose private failings make them obnoxious under a free state.85 Still more indignant is the reaction of the anonymous writer of an admonitory letter to the Duke of Monmouth in 1680. He too refers to the flattering machinations of little politicians’, and declares it ‘the duty of every loyal-hearted subject’ to attempt by ‘discovering the intrigues of such men’ to ‘make them loathsome and obnoxious to the people’.86
These disgusted reactions help to explain why the neo-roman writers so often champion the figure of the independent country gentleman as the leading repository of moral dignity and worth in modern societies. As Harrington declares in Oceana, ‘there is something first in the making of a commonwealth, then in the governing of her’ that ‘seems to be peculiar unto the genius of a gentleman’.87 The figure they wish to hold out for our admiration is described again and again. He is plain and plain-hearted;88 he is upright and full of integrity;89 above all he is a man of true manliness, of dependable valour and fortitude.90 His virtues are repeatedly contrasted with the vices characteristic of the obnoxious lackeys and parasites who flourish at court. The courtier, instead of being plain and plain-hearted, is lewd, dissolute and debauched;91 instead of being upright, he is cringing, servile and base;92 instead of being brave, he is fawning, abject and lacking in manliness.93
This moral vision is presented by the writers I have been discussing with absolute confidence in the righteousness – and, in Harrington’s case, the inevitable triumph – of their cause. Within a surprisingly short space of time, however, the fortunes of the neo-roman theory began to decline and fall. With the rise of classical utilitarianism in the eighteenth century, and with the use of utilitarian principles to underpin so much of the liberal state in the century following, the theory of free states fell increasing into disrepute, and eventually slipped almost wholly out of sight.
One reason for this collapse was that the social assumptions underlying the theory began to appear outdated and even absurd. With the extension of the manners of the court to the bourgeoisie in the early eighteenth century, the virtues of the independent country gentleman began to look irrelevant and even inimical to a polite and commercial age. The hero of the neo-roman writers came to be viewed not as plain-hearted but as rude and boorish; not as upright but as obstinate and quarrelsome; not as a man of fortitude but of mere insensibility. His detractors eventually succeeded in transforming him into the ludicrous figure of Squire Western, rustic and unpolished when he ought to be urbane, polite and refined.
Still more important to the discrediting of the neo-roman theory was the constant reiteration of the claim that its underlying theory of liberty is simply confused.94 I have singled out William Paley’s way of mounting the case, but his basic argument had earlier been stated by Sir William Blackstone95 and John Lind,96 and was subsequently reinforced by Jeremy Bentham’s and John Austin’s jurisprudence.97 By the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Sidgwick felt able to declare in his great summation of classical liberalism that the errors underlying the neo-roman theory of liberty are beyond dispute. To speak of individual liberty, Sidgwick first reminds us in his Elements of Politics, is to speak of an absence of external impediments to action, either in the form of ‘physical coercion or confinement’, or else of coercive threats that inhibit us by ‘the fear of painful consequences’.98 Once this is understood, we can see that to think of the freedom of citizens as possible only within free states is simply to fall into ‘the confusion which the common use of the word “Freedom” is apt to cause’. The truth is that individual freedom has no necessary connection with forms of government, since it is perfectly possible for a representative legislature to ‘interfere with the free action of individuals more than an absolute monarch’.99 With this reiteration of the classical utilitarian case, Sidgwick clearly felt that the neo-roman theory had finally been laid to rest.
1 Hobbes 1996, p. 149.
2 Filmer 1991, p. 275.
3 Perhaps the two most celebrated restatements have been those of Benjamin Constant and, in our own time, Isaiah Berlin. See Constant 1988, esp. pp. 309, 316–17 and Berlin 1958, esp. pp. 39–47.
4 See, for example, Scott 1993, p. 152 note.
5 On Sallust’s argument and its influence see Skinner 1990b.
6 Sallust 1931, 6. 7, p. 12: ‘regium imperium, quod initio conservandae libertatis atque augendae rei publicae fuerat, in superbiam dominationemque se convortit’.
7 Sallust 1931, 7. 3, pp. 12–14: ‘Sed civitas incredibile memoratu est adepta libertate quantum brevi creverit.’
8 Sallust 1931, 7. 2, p. 12: ‘Nam regibus boni quam mali suspectiores sunt semperque eis aliena virtus formidulosa est.’
9 For Machiavelli on the theme of grandezza see Skinner 1981, esp. pp. 50–7, and Skinner 1990b, esp. pp. 138–41.
10 Machiavelli 1960, II. 2, p. 280: ‘Ma sopra tutto maravigliosissima è a considerare a quanta grandezza venne Roma poiché la si liberò da’ suoi Re. La ragione è facile a intendere: perché non il bene particulare ma il bene comune è quello che fa grandi le città. E sanza dubbio questo bene comune non è osservato se non nelle republiche … Al contrario interviene quando vi è uno principe, dove il piú delle volte quello che fa per lui offenda la città, e quello che fa per la città offende lui.’
11 Harrington 1992, p. 33.
12 Nedham 1767, p. xxv.
13 Nedham 1767, p. xxvi.
14 Sallust 1931, 11. 4, pp. 18–20: ‘L. Sulla … bonis initiis malos eventus habuit’.
15 See the excellent discussion in Armitage 1995, pp. 206–14.
16 Harrington 1992, p. 44.
17 As Worden 1991, pp. 467–8 emphasises, later English writers in the neo-roman tradition, such as Robert Molesworth and John Trenchard, explicitly denounced the pursuit of conquest and military glory.
18 Wirszubski 1960, p. 3 puts the point still more strongly when he claims that, under the law of Rome, ‘freedom of the citizen and internal freedom of the State’ were ‘different aspects of the same thing’.
19 Machiavelli 1960, I. 16, p. 174: the ‘comune utilità’ of living under a vivere libero is ‘di potere godere liberamente le cose sue sanza alcuno sospetto’.
20 Machiavelli 1960, II. 2, p. 284: ‘si conosce non solamente che nascono liberi e non schiavi, ma eh’ ei possono mediante la virtù loro diventare principi’.
21 Harrington 1992, p. 20. Sidney was later to put the argument the other way round: ‘He that oppugns the publick liberty, overthrows his own.’ See Sidney 1990, I. 5, p. 18; cf. II. 27, p. 263; II. 28, p. 270.
22 Nedham 1767, p. v.
23 Nedham 1767, p. 11.
24 Milton 1980, p. 458.
25 On Hampden’s case see Kenyon 1966, pp. 104–5, 109–11.
26 Milton 1962, pp. 448–9, 574–5.
27 I have previously assumed that what is at issue between the neo-roman theorists and their classical liberal critics is not a disagreement about the meaning of liberty, but only about the conditions that must be met if liberty is to be secured. See Skinner 1983, 1984, 1986. But Philip Pettit has convinced me that the two schools of thought do in fact disagree about (among other things) the meaning of liberty itself.
28 [Hall] 1700, pp. 3, 6.
29 [Osborne] 1811, p. 164.
30 Nedham 1767, pp. 48–9.
31 Sidney 1990, I. 5, p. 17.
32 For the same contrast between personal liberty and servitude see Sidney 1990, I. 10, p. 31; I. 18, p. 57.
33 Bolingbroke 1997, esp. Letter XIX, pp. 177–91.
34 The claim was duly taken up by the earliest ‘whig’ historians of the English revolution. See, for example, Rapin 1732–3, vol. II, p. 431, col. 1, who says that this was ‘the most immediate cause of the civil war which quickly ensued’.
35 Milton 1962, p. 454.
36 For the later claim that standing armies pose a special threat to liberty see Skinner 1974, esp. pp. 118–20, 123.
37 The question of what constitutional forms would be needed for the modern state to meet these requirements is examined in Pettit 1997, pp.171–205.
38 This is not to say that individual freedom according to these writers can in some sense be equated with virtue or the right of political participation, and thus that liberty consists in membership of a self-governing state (as is assumed, for example, in Miller 1991, p. 6; Wootton 1994, pp. 17–18; Worden 1994d, p. 174). The writers I am discussing merely argue that participation (at least by way of representation) constitutes a necessary condition of maintaining individual liberty. See Skinner 1983, 1984, 1986 and cf. Pettit 1997, pp. 27–31.
39 Harrington 1992, pp. 8, 20.
40 Milton 1991, pp. 32–3. Corns 1995, p. 26 says of Milton in the Tenure that he appears ‘as a regicide rather than as a republican’. I do not disagree, but Milton’s references to free states and personal servitude show him far more ready than the ‘monarchomach’ writers of the 1640s (such as Henry Parker) to modulate into a republican register.
41 For later developments of the same argument see Nedham 1767, pp. 32–3; Milton 1980, pp. 427–8; Sidney 1990, III. 21, pp. 439–46.
42 Harrington 1992, pp. 19–20.
43 I have followed Pettit 1997, pp. 73–8 in taking Paley as my example, since this enables me to contrast my response to Paley’s objections with Pettit’s rather different response. For Paley’s utilitarianism see Lieberman 1989, esp. pp. 5, 210–11; for his view of civil liberty see Miller 1994, pp. 397–9.
44 Paley 1785, p. 447.
45 On its popularity as a university text-book see LeMahieu 1976, pp. 155–6.
46 For a counter to it see Pettit 1997, pp. 77–8.
47 I take it, for example, that Rawls 1971 is a utopian treatise in this sense, and none the worse for that.
48 Paley 1785, p. 443.
49 Paley 1785, pp. 444–5.
50 Paley 1785, pp. 446–7. Joseph Priestley had made the same point in 1768. See Priestley 1993, pp. 32–3 and cf. Canovan 1978 and Miller 1994, pp. 376–9.
51 Paley 1785, p. 445. As Paley implies in the same passage, however, there might well be a reason in practice, for we have to assume ‘that the welfare and accommodation of the people would be as studiously, and as providently, consulted in the edicts of a despotic prince, as by the resolutions of a popular assembly’.
52 Pettit, for example, appears to concede that, whereas a classical liberal theorist like Paley analyses unfreedom in terms of interference, the rival tradition analyses it in terms of security from interference. See Pettit 1997, pp. 24–7, 51, 69, 113, 273 and cf. Pettit 1993a and 1993b. (Cf. Pitkin 1988, pp. 534–5 on the struggle for libertas among the Roman plebs as a struggle for security.) Pettit accordingly confines himself to objecting that what Paley fails to recognise is that the neo-roman writers seek only a specific kind of security, and seek it only against a specific kind of interference. See Pettit 1997, pp. 73–4. But cf. Pettit 1997, p. 5, where he more forthrightly declares that persons ‘subject to arbitrary sway’ are ‘straightforwardly unfree’.
53 Bentham first spoke of this ‘discovery’ in a letter to John Lind of 1776, quoted and discussed in Long 1977, pp. 54–5. See also Miller 1994, pp. 393–7. That the neo-roman writers are theorists of negative liberty I have already sought to demonstrate. See Skinner 1983, 1984 and 1986. For further arguments to the same effect see Spitz 1995, pp. 179–220, Patten 1996 and Pettit 1997, pp. 27–31.
54 Pettit imputes to the defenders of ‘republican’ freedom the view that, since it is only arbitrary domination that limits individual liberty, the act of obeying a law to which you have given your consent is ‘entirely consistent with freedom’ (Pettit 1997, p. 66; cf. pp. 55, 56n., 104, 271). The writers I am discussing never deal in such paradoxes. For them the difference between the rule of law and government by personal prerogative is not that the former leaves you in full possession of your liberty while the latter does not; it is rather that the former only coerces you while the latter additionally leaves you in a state of dependence. That it was likewise assumed in ancient Rome that libertas is constrained by law is argued in Wirszubski 1960, pp. 7–9.
55 For the idea of an ‘alternative ideal’, according to which ‘freedom is defined as the antonym of domination’ rather than interference, see Pettit 1997, pp. 66, 110, 273. But cf. Pettit 1997, pp. 51, 148, where he instead argues that the alternative tradition demands, in the name of freedom, something more than absence of interference. The latter formulation implies that, according to the neo-roman theorists, unfreedom can be produced either by interference or by dependence, which seems to me correct.
56 I hope this constitutes a sufficient response to those critics who complain that I fail to point to any interesting disagreements between republicans and liberals. For this criticism see Patten 1996, esp. pp. 25, 44.
57 One might say that the neo-roman and classical liberal accounts of freedom embody rival understandings of autonomy. For the latter, the will is autonomous provided it is not coerced; for the former, the will can only be described as autonomous if it is independent of the danger of being coerced.
58 For an account of the extent to which the debate about negative liberty resolves into a debate about what should count as constraint, see MacCallum 1991, a classic article to which I am greatly indebted.
59 The passage has been much discussed. See Pocock 1985, pp. 41–2; Schneewind 1993, pp. 187–92; Pettit 1997, pp. 32–3, 38–9.
60 Hobbes 1996, p. 149.
61 Hobbes 1996, p. 149.
62 Scott 1993, pp. 155–63 seems to me to overlook the significance of this passage when he describes Harrington as a disciple of Hobbes who sacrifices the moral bases of classical republicanism.
63 Harrington 1992, p. 20.
64 Sidney 1990, III. 16, pp. 402–3; cf. III. 21, p. 440.
65 On the speech and its context see Elton 1960, pp. 254–5, 262–3.
66 Roper 1963, p. 9.
67 More 1965, p. 56.
68 More 1965, p. 56: ‘nisi quod absurdissimis quibusque dictis assentiuntur dc supparasitantur eorum, quos ut maxime apud principem gratiae, student assentatione demereri sibi’. See also More 1965, p. 84 for an example and p. 102 for a summary of Hythloday’s doubts.
69 More 1965, p. 54: ‘Hoc [sc. ‘ut inservias regibus’] est … una syllaba plusquam servias’.
70 On this theme see Adams 1991 and Worden 1996, esp. pp. 217–24.
71 On the spy in the literature on court culture see Archer 1993.
72 On the need for dissimulation at court see Javitch 1978; on Tacitus and court-centred politics see Smuts 1994, esp. pp. 25–40.
73 Sidney 1990, II. 19, pp. 187, 188.
74 Sidney 1990, II. 25, p. 252; II. 19, p. 188.
75 Sidney 1990, II. 11, p. 140.
76 Sidney 1990, II. 28, p. 271.
77 Sidney 1990, II. 19, p. 185.
78 Sidney 1990, II. 27, p. 266.
79 Sidney 1990, II. 25, p. 256.
80 Sidney 1990, II. 28, p. 271.
81 Sidney 1990, II. 28, p. 274.
82 Sidney 1990, III. 19, p. 435.
83 But there is a precedent in Livy for treating obnoxiousness as a quality of servility. See Livy 23. 12. 9 in Livy 1940, p. 38.
84 Bacon 1972, p. 131.
85 Wither 1874, p. 5:
Although, I peradventure, may appear
On some occasions, bitterly severe,
To those, in whom, I private-failings see,
Which, to the Publike may obnoxious be.
86 [F., C.] 1812, p. 217.
87 Harrington 1992, p. 36; cf. Neville 1969, p. 185.
88 Nedham 1767, p. 16; Neville 1969, p. 121.
89 Neville 1969, p. 167; Sidney 1990, II. 19, p. 186; II. 25, p. 257.
90 Milton 1962, pp. 344, 392; Milton 1980, p. 424; Sidney 1990, II. 25, p. 255; II. 28, p. 272; II. 28, p. 277. On the later fortunes of the ideal see Burrow 1988, esp. pp. 86–93.
91 Milton 1962, p. 455; Milton 1980, p. 425; Neville 1969, p. 190; Sidney 1990, II. 14, p. 161; II. 27, p. 269.
92 Milton 1980, pp. 425–6, 428, 460–1; Sidney 1990, II. 25, pp. 251, 254–5; II. 28, pp. 272, 274, 277.
93 Harrington 1992, p. 5; Milton 1980, pp. 426–7; Sidney 1990, III. 34, p. 515.
94 For the development of this criticism in the writings of Lind, Bentham and Paley see Miller 1994, esp. pp. 379–99, and Pettit 1997, pp. 41–50.
95 Blackstone 1765–9, vol. I, p. 130 offers a purely Hobbesian definition of the liberty of subjects according to which liberty is infringed only by ‘imprisonment or restraint’. On this aspect of Blackstone’s Commentaries see Lieberman 1989, esp. pp. 36–40.
96 For Lind’s attack on the restatement of the neo-roman theory by such writers as Price see Long 1977, pp. 51–7.
97 On Paley and Bentham see Long 1977, esp. pp. 178–91; on Paley and Austin see Austin 1995, pp. 159–60; for Austin’s praise of Hobbes and Bentham see the long note in Austin 1995, pp. 229–34.
98 Sidgwick 1897, p. 45.
99 Sidgwick 1897, p. 375.