THAT THE WHIGS of the seventeenth century were Grotians rather than Lockeans undermines the version of the story of Anglo-American political thought that told of continuities between 1649, 1689, and 1776, or some set of points in between. Insight into the Grotianism of the Whigs helps highlight the role the very un-Grotian doctrines of the state of nature and natural rights came to play for Locke and his American successors, and thus to highlight the essential differences between Locke and the Americans, on the one hand, and the Grotian Whigs, on the other. Insight into the Grotianism of the pre-Lockean Whigs thus also shows something about the “modernity problem.” In adopting natural rights/state of nature theory the Americans were not merely reaffirming an old—that is, a premodern—approach to moral and political matters. Something centrally important changed between 1688–89 and 1776.
Whether appreciative of the modernity of rights or not, discussion of the thought surrounding the American founding premeinently in terms of rights would have been almost a matter of course not too many years ago.1 That is no longer so. A prevalent new approach emphasizes instead of rights the idea of republicanism, and thus is often referred to by historians as “the republican synthesis.”2 Scholars now find themselves “admitting, often grudgingly, the incontestable reality of America’s republican roots.” That recognition has led to “a dramatic reorientation . . . in interpretation of the Revolutionary and early national periods,”3 and of later American history as well. The discovery of republicanism has, according to Joyce Appleby, “produced a reaction among historians akin to the reaction of chemists to a new element. Once having been identified, it can be found everywhere.”4
Scholars have often been “grudging” in their willingness to recognize “America’s republican roots,” because this required a major shift away from the older emphases on natural and constitutional rights and individual liberty, from the older identification of Locke as the chief if not sole intellectual influence on the Americans, and from the Toquevillian claim that America was quintessentially modern in and from its origins—“the first new nation.”5 As Appleby put it, “Republicanism has come to represent a declaration of independence from older scholarship.”6 Earlier scholars had passed over the significance of republicanism because they had “assumed that republicanism represented simply a form of government.” Within the republican synthesis, on the other hand, republicanism is “a dynamic ideology assuming moral dimensions and involving the very character of . . . society.”7
Although the republican synthesis represents “a new consensus” among scholars,8 there are distinct differences in the way republicanism is understood within that school of thought.9 The “republican synthesis,” in a word, is not so monolithic as to deserve the appellation “synthesis.” The failure to recognize or admit this has led many scholars who deploy the idea of republicanism to rely on a very general conception that papers over the fissures in the synthesis by discussing it in terms of “themes,” usually presented in a list of items only loosely and partially related to each other.10
The discovery of republicanism is of undeniable importance, for it can help us understand the new republicanism of the American order, but not in the form of the current “republican synthesis.” Much of what is said of republicanism is useful and true, but much is not, and even the true must be set more carefully into its context before it can be useful. The notion of the “republican synthesis” does not conduce to that kind of sorting and judging. I propose first, therefore, to unravel the separate strands from which the synthesis has been constructed. The result will supply not only a clearer sense of the different theses that make up the synthesis, but will supply also a form of the arguments that will facilitate judgment on what in the whole set of conceptions is sound and what is not. Most important, it will allow us to grasp the relationship between natural rights and republicanism.
On one issue there is perfect agreement among all scholars of the republican synthesis: although it had many forerunners and many contributors, three men in particular “established the . . . perception of republicanism that has become so familiar”—Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock. “Bailyn was the progenitor” who “established a new paradigm for interpreting the Revolution.”11 Wood’s most obvious contribution was to carry the story of republicanism beyond the revolution and into the era of constitution-making. Pocock extended the story in the other direction, back into its roots in English thought, and from there back to Italian Renaissance humanism and classical political philosophy. (Pocock is thus of most interest here.)12 At the same time, he attempted to deepen as well as broaden the republican idea by supplying it a richer philosophic meaning than it had received from the pens of Bailyn and Wood. However, this sequential description is only superficial, and threatens to mislead in the same way that the idea of a republican synthesis itself does; the three only partly relate as a series of contributions to one progressively unfolding adumbration of a singular conception.
Bailyn “established a new paradigm” by setting himself simultaneously against both previously prevailing modes of “interpreting the Revolution.” He rejected the progressive approach that focused on economic interests and dismissed the colonists’ theorizing as propaganda.13 But he also rejected the chief alternative view, which took the colonists’ intellectualizing more or less at face value and traced the revolution to the influence of Enlightenment philosophers like Locke, or to the complex constitutional argumentation of the likes of John Adams.14 He agreed with the intellectualizers that the Americans “were led by the force of ideas,” but he shared the Progressives’ skepticism that ideas as “abstruse” or high-flown as Enlightenment philosophy, “abstractions” as “disembodied” as those of the “philosophes,” or “the formal arguments of the constitutional lawyers . . . could constitute motives.”15 “Formal discourse” is not by itself so important, he said, but it “becomes politically powerful when it becomes ideology.”16
Bailyn devoted a good deal of attention to the question of the source of American ideology, and he found the answer to be complex. At least five different kinds of writings helped shape the American mind: writings of the ancients, especially ancient historians; writings by the Enlightenment philosophers, such as Locke and Voltaire; writings deriving from Protestant, and especially Puritan, sources; writing on the English common law by such as Edward Coke; and finally, writings in the Whig Opposition tradition, by the likes of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (as “Cato”), Walter Moyle, and James Burgh. The last group was most important, because it “dominated the colonists’ miscellaneous learning and shaped it into a coherent whole”; all the other “clusters of ideas” floating about in the American mind “did not in themselves form a coherent intellectual pattern.”17
Bailyn credited the other four strands of thought with only a tangential shaping role. Least important were the classics: they “are everywhere in the literature of the revolution, but are everywhere illustrative, not determinative of thought”; they were “not the source of political and social beliefs.”18 He found that the common law tradition was “manifestly influential” but that “it did not in itself determine the kinds of conclusions men would draw in the crisis of the time.”19 Puritan ideas were important, but “limited and parochial . . . restricted . . . to those who continued to understand the world, as the original Puritans had, in theological terms.”20 Contrary to many of his predecessors and many of his successors, Bailyn believed that “the efforts . . . to discount the influence of the ‘glittering generalities’ of the European Enlightenment” are misplaced. “Their influence remains and is profusely illustrated in the political literature.” Those writers “were quoted everywhere in the colonies, by everyone who claimed a broad awareness. . . . In pamphlet after pamphlet,” Bailyn found, “the American writers cited Locke on natural rights.” After almost a page of examples, he gave up: “Examples could be multiplied without end.”21 The Enlightenment writers, he concluded, “contributed significantly to the thought of the Americans.” And yet, with the major exception of Locke, “their influence, though more decisive than that of the authors of classical antiquity, was neither clearly dominant nor wholly determinative.”22 In contrast, it will be recalled, Bailyn asserted that the Whig Opposition writers “dominated.” The Americans cited the Enlightenment writers all the time, but “the knowledge they reflect . . . is at times superficial.” Yet he failed to inform the reader wherein their knowledge was superficial. Locke, he said, “is cited often with precision on points of political theory, but at other times he is referred to in the most off-hand way, as if he could be relied on to support anything the writers happened to be arguing.”23 The one piece of evidence Bailyn produced to support that last claim does not appear to do so, however. He made reference to a sermon in which the author had cited Locke on the state of nature in order “to validate” the use of the state of nature idea; that seems perfectly appropriate, in that Locke did put forward a doctrine of the state of nature and did defend the state of nature against those who doubted its existence or relevance.24
Bailyn, in other words, was hard put to give a persuasive reason for his reorientation away from Locke and the other Enlightenment authors. He was, in fact, more modest in the reorientation he proposed than later scholars who claimed to follow him. He did not put it as an either/or: either Locke or the Whig Opposition writers. Indeed, he conceded that ideas typical of Locke, like natural rights and “the contractual basis of society and government,” were pervasive in the Opposition literature itself.25 The question Bailyn led up to, but did not quite address, was this: What is the relationship between his Whig Opposition tradition and the natural rights tradition of Locke? The evidence available thus far would seem consistent with the thesis that the Opposition was itself Lockean.
Bailyn did not deny that conclusion, but he leaned in another direction. He identified the Whigs as “distinctive,” and while their thought “overlapped” that of the other traditions, especially Locke, it “was yet distinct in its essential characteristics and unique in its determinative power.” Its essential distinctiveness seems partly a function, in turn, of its source, for “the ultimate origins of this distinctive ideological strain lay in the radical social and political thought of the English Civil War and of the Commonwealth period.”26 Bailyn devoted precious little effort, however, to detailing the character of that earlier thought, or of its echoes in the Opposition tradition. For that he relied mainly on Caroline Robbins’s loose discussion in The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen.27 That particular lacuna has since been addressed at length by J. G. A. Pocock, and I will return to it below.
Although Bailyn concedes that Lockean and Enlightenment ideas appeared frequently, they were set in the context of other ideas of a content and temper quite different. Where the Enlightenment produced “glittering generalities,” the Americans, like the Opposition writers, had a quite specific political analysis that explained the events they were experiencing and gave specific guidance on how to respond to them. This other set of ideas was not only more specific and practical, it was more simplistic, vulgar, and crude. Accordingly, it was more suited to serve as an ideology, to marshal the emotions and energies of a people, than the merely philosophic musings of a Locke or a Montesquieu.28
Thus Bailyn did not deny the presence of the themes of natural rights that had so dominated earlier scholarship, though he self-consciously identified other terms as more central. Natural rights were “all-important,” but, he deprecatingly said, “they are defined in a significantly ambiguous way. They were understood to be at one and the same time the inalienable, indefeasible rights inherent in people as such, and the concrete specifications of English law.”29 That ambiguity seems to have justified for Bailyn his search elsewhere for the “triggering” and “organizing” components of the beliefs of the Americans, for a “significantly ambiguous” idea could hardly provide clear and decisive guidance.30
According to Bailyn, the political understanding of the Americans was not organized so much around the ideas of natural rights, social contract, consent of the governed, and the other doctrines epitomized in the Declaration of Independence, but rather around a quite different set of concepts, the most important of which probably were liberty, power, and conspiracy. Americans of the revolutionary era considered organized political life to be a steady and unremitting contest between liberty and power: rulers strive to encroach on the sphere of liberty carved out by the ruled; political history is the record of the oscillating fortunes of one and then the other force. Opposition thought thus shared “the traditional anti-statism of seventeenth century liberalism.” But it “was yet distinct in its insistence that all power—royal or plebiscitarian, autocratic or democratic—was evil: necessary, no doubt, for ordered life, but evil nevertheless in the threat it would always pose to the progress of liberty.”31 In the contest between liberty and power, liberty most often has the worst of it—witness the rarity of free polities in the world. Clever rulers regularly mount conspiracies against liberty.32 The colonists were prepared by their theory to interpret the events after 1765 as yet another instance of a dread conspiracy. Opposition thought gave them a ready-made frame within which to interpret British actions, a frame more determinative and energizing than generalities and slogans like “no taxation without representation.”33
Bailyn did not rid himself of natural rights, for they remain ensconced in a central place in his account. The good for the sake of which the colonists contended was liberty, which, said Bailyn, is “the capacity to exercise ‘natural rights’ within limits set not by the mere will or desire of men in power but by non-arbitrary law.”34 Liberty, in other words, is security in one’s natural rights. In the final analysis, Bailyn’s opposition-Whig-inspired Americans sound much like Locke, and this is so even though Bailyn omitted any discussion of the Declaration of Independence, an omission for which some critics have legitimately berated him.35
Bailyn no doubt unearthed an important dimension of the intellectual orientation of the Americans circa 1776, but he was not helpful in relating what he discovered to what was already visible. Bailyn did not pose his new tradition as a genuine alternative, in the sense of an either/or, to the Lockean or liberal tradition, but he opened the way to that development, which occurred very soon after his Ideological Origins was published.
Gordon Wood not only carried Bailyn’s story forward in time, but in doing so he changed much of it, adding along the way a much fuller specification of the nature of the “non-Lockean tradition” Bailyn had haltingly invoked. The modification of Bailyn’s work is not the most striking feature of Wood’s analysis, however, for he opens his Creation of the American Republic with an acknowledgment of an “incalculable debt” to Bailyn, and much of his discussion obviously echoes Bailyn’s book. Wood’s first chapter, for example, “The Whig Science of Politics,” contains as its centerpiece a section titled “Power against Liberty” that restates some of Bailyn’s main arguments.36 Yet for all the echoes and common ground, there is a major difference, captured summarily in the fact that Bailyn called the ideology he found at the core of the Americans’ revolutionary political culture an Opposition Whig tradition, whereas Wood called the ideology he found at the core of the Americans’ revolutionary political culture a classical republican tradition. Bailyn and Wood had in mind the same tradition, but Wood redescribed it in a significantly different way.37
Both the “classical” and the “republican” parts of Wood’s label indicate important differences. Where Bailyn had dismissed classical influences as indecisive, Wood was more impressed with “the appeal of antiquity”; it was “a source of republican inspiration”—indeed, “the deepest origin” of their political thinking.38 Wood firmly connected the Whig or Opposition tradition Bailyn had identified to the Renaissance and, behind that, to classical authors like Cicero and Aristotle.39 That closer link to classical-Renaissance republicanism probably accounts for Wood’s somewhat more summary dismissal of Locke: the English Whigs on whom the Americans depended “perhaps owed more to Machiavelli and Montesquieu than [they] did to Locke.”40
The classical roots came to the fore because, according to Wood, “republicanism was the basic premise of American thinking—the central presupposition behind all other ideas.”41 This is quite different from Bailyn, for despite the frequency with which Bailyn is invoked as one of the trinity of the republican synthesis, Joyce Appleby was nonetheless correct when she observed that “curiously the word, republicanism, does not figure prominently in his text.”42 “Republic” receives only one entry in Bailyn’s index, and that pretty fairly suggests its place in his book. Bailyn’s book is not about republicanism but about the dialectic of liberty and power.
Wood’s book is not only about republicanism, but about an old republicanism: for Wood’s Americans, republicanism was a pervasive and deep-going commitment:
Republicanism meant more for Americans than simply the elimination of a king and the institution of an elective system. It added a moral dimension, a utopian depth, to the political separation from England—a depth that involved the very character of their society.43
Wood emphasized the “moral dimension” and the “utopian depth” of American republicanism because he saw “the essence of republicanism” in the call for “the sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole.” The “public good,” or “common interest,” was understood “not, as we might today think of it, [as] simply the sum or consensus of the particular interests that made up the community,” but rather as “an entity in itself, prior to and distinct from the various private interests of groups and individuals.” This public good was the center of Wood’s republicanism.44 From that conception came the chief requisite of the old republican regime: “Virtue is the lifeblood of the republic.” The republic required the individual to be willing “to sacrifice his private interests for the good of the community.” This willingness was “public virtue,” which “was primarily the consequence of men’s individual private virtues.” Only private virtue could produce public virtue; thus the republic of virtue “demanded an extraordinary moral character in the people.”45
Such notions of virtue and the common good rested in turn on a more fundamental presupposition about political life. “Most English colonists did not conceive of society in rational, mechanistic terms; rather society was organic and developmental.” The Americans were attempting “to realize the traditional commonwealth idea of a corporate society, in which the common good would be the only objective of government.” The Americans continued to endorse the “traditional conception of the organic community.”46 Here is Wood’s ground for calling this republicanism classical: it rested at bottom on a classical conception of an organic or natural polity. In such an organic society the good of the whole is not only higher than, but to some degree independent of and separate from, the goods of the parts. Just as the parts of a living body have a good only so far as they contribute to the good of the whole, so the members of an organic community have a good subordinate to that of the whole. Just as a limb may have to be sacrificed on occasion for the health of the whole, so may the interests of an individual be submerged or denied for the sake of the community. “The ideal republicanism was beautifully designed to express was still a harmonious integration of all the parts of the community,” on the model of a well-functioning, healthy organism.47
Wood’s reconceptualization of the “ideological origins” in terms of classical republicanism not merely led him to bring to the fore notions like virtue that had not figured prominently in Bailyn’s text (“virtue” has no index entry at all in Bailyn), but it led him to redefine even the terms that had figured prominently for Bailyn.48 Most revealing is the fate of liberty. Bailyn’s notion of liberty as security in one’s natural rights was at its core an individualistic idea, but, said Wood, “ideally republicanism obliterated the individual.” Wood therefore could hardly understand liberty individualistically; he salvaged it by claiming that the “important liberty in the Whig ideology was public or political liberty,” which was “equivalent [to] participation by the people in the government.”49 Liberty is thus itself the corporate involvement of the people in ruling, and not the individual security of natural rights.
Wood’s classical republicanism stands as a thorough alternative to the kind of commitment to natural rights contained in the Declaration of Independence. We find an either/or we did not find in Bailyn; it is an either/or because the Declaration denies almost all the theses most characteristic of Wood’s classical republicanism.50 Polity is not natural and organic but artificial and constructed. The Declaration does not set as an ideal “the obliteration of the individual,” but rather the security of his or her rights. Liberty is not “in the first instance public liberty,” but prepolitical individual liberty, a right with which “all men are endowed by their creator.” Gary Schmitt and Robert Webking put the issue very clearly: according to the standards of rightful government voiced in the Declaration, “both the monarchy of George III and Wood’s republicanism in which the individual is obliterated must be judged to be illegitimate governmental forms.”51 Wood’s classical republicanism is not a supplement to the theory of rights, but a full-blown alternative to it.52
Wood not only reconceived the original tradition of American politics as classical republicanism, but he effectuated one other major shift from the Bailyn version of “the ideological origins.” Not merely did he sketch the rise, but he also traced the “death of classical politics.” The Americans “constructed not simply new forms of government, but an entirely new conception of politics, a conception that took them out of an essentially classical and medieval world of political discussion into one that was recognizably modern.”53 This “recognizably modern” conception found its embodiment in the federal constitution of 1787 and the Federalist political science that generated and explained it.54
This modern conception, said Wood, was the antithesis of the tradition it replaced. “The Americans of 1787 shattered the classical Whig world of 1776.” All of the old ideas were now reversed. Within the new understanding, “the public good could not be the transcending of the different interests, but the reconciling of them. . . . The public good could not be an entity distinct from its parts; it was rather ‘the general combined interest of all the state put together, as it were, upon an average.’” With the public good no longer seen as distinct and opposed to private interests, the old republican virtue was no longer required. “The aim of instilling a spartan creed in America thus began to seem more and more nonsensical.” Another consequence of the shift lay in a new definition of liberty: “The liberty that was now emphasized was personal or private, the protection of individual rights.” This in turn dismantled the organic conception of society that had stood at the base of the earlier classical republicanism:
Once the people were thought to be composed of various interests in opposition to one another, all sense of a graduated organic chain in the social hierarchy became irrelevant, symbolized by the increasing emphasis on the image of a social contract. The people were not an order organically tied together by their unity of interest but rather an agglomeration of hostile individuals coming together for their mutual benefit.55
The American political tradition was “transformed” into its opposite: from organic to individualistic, from classical to modern, from individual-obliterating to individual-affirming—a transformation of some magnitude. According to Wood, “by 1787 Lockean liberalism [came to] overshadow republican sentiment.”56 The process leading from the Revolution to the Constitution entailed, for Wood hardly less than for Charles Beard before him, “the repudiation of 1776.” That repudiation brought a new “alliance of power and liberty,” exactly the forces Bailyn had seen as inalterably opposed to each other in the Whig Opposition political science. At the same time, said Wood, “the Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period.”57
One measure of Wood’s distance from Bailyn’s version of the founding is Bailyn’s denial of Wood’s theory of the “transformation”: “The Constitution was neither a repudiation of ’76, nor an instrument devised to protect aristocracies threatened in the states. . . . It is a second generation expression of the original ideological impulses of the Revolution applied to everyday, practical problems of the 1780s.” According to Bailyn, there was in fact no shift away from the viewpoints of 1776. The “earlier opposition ideology survived intact and fundamentally shaped the emerging state.”58 Because he revised Bailyn’s Opposition ideology in the direction of classical republicanism, Wood was driven to find the Constitution and what succeeded it further removed from what preceded it than Bailyn did.
J. G. A. Pocock, the third in the trinity of the “republican synthesis,” had much to do with Wood’s move away from Bailyn. Pocock’s work stands in ambiguous temporal relation to that of the other two. His major work, The Machiavellian Moment, appeared after and drew from theirs, yet several shorter preliminary studies had appeared before Bailyn and Wood wrote, and both scholars were obviously influenced by at least one of these earlier studies.59 Some of the differences between Bailyn and Wood stem from the greater degree to which Wood allowed Pocock’s conceptions to shape him. Pocock developed far stronger connections between Whig Opposition thought and classical republicanism than either Bailyn or Robbins before him had done.60 Nonetheless, neither Bailyn nor Wood saw the full scope of Pocock’s project when they wrote, and his conceptions differ even from Wood’s in two very important respects.
Perhaps the most significant difference is again the one signalled by a shift in terminology. Although Pocock was not averse to the phrase “classical republicanism,” he gravitated more naturally to “civic humanism.”61 He accepted “classical republicanism” because he too traced the Opposition Whig tradition back to the ancients, especially to Aristotle. Pocock described the thought of James Harrington, whom he saw to be the main figure in the Anglo-American version of the republican tradition, as “essentially Greek”; Harrington put forward a “fundamentally Aristotelian theory of citizenship.” In modified form, Harrington’s “classicism” founded the Whig Opposition tradition that Bailyn and Wood traced into the American founding.62
Yet Pocock’s adoption of the label “civic humanism” signifies two major differences from Wood. First, Pocock understood the ancient—that is, Aristotelian—foundation of the republican tradition in a humanistic rather than a naturalistic manner; and secondly, he believed that Renaissance humanism produced an important modification in “classical republicanism,” such that the American founding is better understood as occurring at a “Machiavellian” rather than an “Aristotelian moment.”63
Wood had interpreted classical republicanism in a naturalistic manner, for he had found at its ground the old notion of an organic or natural community. That notion in turn gave meaning to the republican ideals of the common good and virtue. Aristotle’s doctrine of the naturalness of the polis is the obvious origin of Wood’s organic conception in which the whole has an unconditional priority over the parts. The political community, Aristotle suggested, is just the sort of natural whole the human body is.64
Pocock emphasized different Aristotelian themes. At its most general, he said,
civic humanism is a style of thought . . . in which it is contended that the development of an individual toward self-fulfillment is possible only when the individual acts as a citizen, that is, as a conscious and autonomous participant in an autonomous decision-taking community, the polis or republic.65
Pocock’s conception was peculiarly political: he emphasized citizenship and political participation, not ontological subordination of part to whole. The latter idea, Wood’s idea, leads to a conception of man as a social animal, but not to the zoon politikon that Pocock found at the center of the civic humanist tradition. Participation in shaping the public good, not subordination to it, became for Pocock the highest expression of one’s humanity.
The beginning point for Pocock’s humanistic interpretation was the observation that for Aristotle “every human activity was value-oriented in the sense that it aimed at some theoretically identifiable good.” In this view, such “valuing” is always social, for the goods are sought with and in reference to others. Human sociability requires that some “common valuing” be arrived at. The polis is the universal association, for it encompasses all the particular individuals and associations and their “values” or goods. Since human beings are defined by their valuing activity, “participation in the value-oriented direction” of the universal association, the polis, “forms both a means to an end,” the achievement of one’s particular values or goods, “and an end—or good—in itself.”66 Pocock’s Aristotle recognized an indefinite number of values that might be pursued by citizens, but found that the good of the whole takes priority over those of the particular members. “Having entered the political process in pursuit of his particular good, [the citizen] now found himself joining with others to direct the actions of all in pursuit of the good of all; the attainment of his private good was not lost but must take a lower priority”67 (a lower priority—not, as with Wood, extinction). Participation in decisions regarding the values that should rule, and to what degree, is most important as an end in itself, for sharing in the determination of the ruling values is the decisive way of expressing one’s human character as a valuing being. To be human, therefore, is preeminently to be a citizen.
Certain specific political imperatives followed from this conception. Each group or individual, having a particular good, “was to have power to pursue” it, but only “in such a way as to involve it in the pursuit of other goods by other groups.” Each group and individual, therefore, was to share both in ruling and in being ruled. “The evil to be avoided was the situation in which any group was able to exercise an unshared power over the whole”; this was “despotism.”68 Politics involves blending and sharing powers among groups in varying and flexible patterns.69 In the hands of Polybius and later theorists this took the form of a concern, deep and abiding with the republicans, for the “balance” of the constitution.
Virtue came to light for Pocock’s Aristotle as an eminently political quality: not so much self-sacrifice, but participation as a citizen, is the core of virtue. “The polity must be a perfect partnership of all citizens and all values since, if it was less, a part would be ruling in the name of the whole.” The “perfect partnership” imposed the duty of “perfect citizenship,” for without this a man would fall short of his own virtue and “tempt his fellows . . . to injustice and corruption.” Apolitical retreat was not the only mode of falling short of “perfect citizenship”:
To become the dependent of another was as great a crime as to reduce another to dependence on oneself. The dereliction of one citizen, therefore, reduced the others’ chances of attaining and maintaining virtue, since virtue was now politicized; it consisted in a partnership of ruling and being ruled with others who must be as morally autonomous as oneself. In embracing the civic ideal, therefore, the humanist staked his future as a moral person on the political health of his city.70
Corruption, or loss of virtue, then, was above all “loss of autonomy.”71
Pocock’s Aristotle is humanistic precisely because the core of humanity is said to consist in the non-natural and uniquely human activity of “valuing.” He is “civic” because the valuing is done in a political and not just a social setting. Politics, or republican citizenship, is more an end in itself than a means to other ends. Virtue is the active and independent participation in political life. Liberty is “freedom from restraints upon the practice” of political life.72 All of this differs substantially from Wood’s version of classical republicanism, even though there are overlapping elements and common terms.73
According to Pocock, the Aristotelian foundations of this republican tradition were modified during the Renaissance, especially by Machiavelli. In part because of their Christian roots, the Italians of the fifteenth century were more concerned with the problem of time than Aristotle had been. The civic humanist ideal made the republic, the particular city existing in the here and now, the locus of all virtue and fulfillment; but the Christian heritage made the here and now, the whole temporal sphere, an arena of irrationality, particularity, and mortality. In the form of fortuna, history—that is, existence in time—threatened the very existence of the republic. One typical response was the attempt to raise barricades against change—to recur to extremely static models of republics that would resist the depredations of time. Machiavelli followed the bolder and newer path of proposing that the republic attempt to dominate rather than hide from history. But the problem he addressed was just the same as that addressed by his more conservative peers: how to realize and guarantee the continued existence of the republic in time. A dynamic rather than a static internal ordering—Rome, not Sparta or Venice—and a popular, not an aristocratic, republic (again, Rome, not Sparta or Venice) stood at the center of Machiavelli’s revision of the civic humanist tradition. As part of his drive for a popular dynamic republic Machiavelli placed unprecedented emphasis on the citizen-soldier; the virtuous city became the one with the armed citizenry. This was a major shift from Aristotle, who placed the pursuits of peace ahead of the pursuits of war, and it became the basis for the abiding concern within Opposition literature about standing armies.74
Despite Machiavelli’s revisions, the modified republican tradition maintained a negative view toward time, which continued to appear as the realm of the particular, the irrational, and the mortal. Change, therefore, continued to be viewed with suspicion. Change was regress, corruption, decay; it either had to be resisted altogether or countered with a “return to first principles.”75
A number of consequences flow from Pocock’s reconceptualization of republicanism. First, the American founders as carriers of the republican virus faced not forward, to modernity, but backward, to antiquity. Not only did they act on the basis of an old, thoroughly traditional understanding of politics, but that understanding was itself distrustful of change, of time, of the future. “The American Revolution,” Pocock decreed, was “less the first act of revolutionary enlightenment than . . . the last great act of the Renaissance.” America was founded in a “dread of modernity.”76
Another consequence was the deepening of the chasm between natural-rights-centered ideas and the republican tradition. As much or even more than Wood did, Pocock presented the republicanism of the Americans in opposition to an alleged “Lockean liberalism.” Kramnick surveyed some of Pocock’s most colorful claims regarding the place of Locke:
Pocock has seen the history of political thought “dominated by a fiction of Locke,” whose importance “has been wildly distorted.” . . . To understand the debates of eighteenth century politics does “not necessitate reference to Locke at all.” Pocock has applied this revisionist verdict about Locke to an alternative reading of America and its founding. . . . The proper interpretation “stresses Machiavelli at the expense of Locke.”77
“It is clear,” said Pocock, “that Locke played no predominant role in the formation of what Caroline Robbins has called the Whig canon. . . . [Those] seventeenth-century writers . . . are defined by their relation to the classical republican tradition, with which Locke had little if anything to do.”78
When Pocock attributed the inspiration for the American founding to his civic humanism he was explicitly intending to depreciate the role and importance of rights, natural or otherwise, for, as he said, liberalism “is a matter of law and right.” The language of law and right has a separate “vocabulary” from that of civic humanism; “they are markedly discontinuous with one another because they premise different values, encounter different problems, and employ different strategies of speech and argument.” Even though some scholars seem inclined to blend the two traditions together, Pocock found it “highly important to stress that the two modes remained incommensurate. Virtue was not reducible to right.”79
Having reconceived republicanism in a richer and more supple manner than either Bailyn or Wood had done, Pocock proceeded to reject Wood’s story about the “end of classical politics”: The republican tradition, in somewhat modified form, perhaps, lived on well beyond 1787, argued Pocock and his followers (although just how long has become a matter of great controversy).80 Civic humanism was composed of a more complex amalgam of ideas than Wood had realized, and therefore the changes effected in early “Whig political science” by the Federalists did not move beyond the older republicanism, to say nothing of the persistence of the latter in Jeffersonianism and elsewhere. Moreover, Pocock implied, republicanism was a far more flexible, changeable tradition than Wood had realized. By the time of the American Revolution it had undergone a number of significant transformations, and to undergo further modification was not foreign to its protean nature.
Pocock’s rejection of Wood’s “death of republicanism” thesis spoke to one of the most troublesome features of Wood’s whole construction. Not only did the Americans, according to Wood, “shift paradigms” in the years between 1776 and 1787, but the shift was of momentous proportion. The earlier ideology turned nearly into its opposite. Not only is such a shift implausible on its face, but nobody at the time seemed quite aware of having made it. As Wood himself admitted in a later restatement, “None of the Founding Fathers had any sense that he had to choose or was choosing between Machiavelli and Locke.”81 Pocock’s claim that they did not choose, that they did stay with Machiavelli, could account for their failure to notice that they faced a significant choice.
It is now possible to draw some conclusions from this unraveling of the republican synthesis: (1) One feature of the synthesis remains intact; all three agree that the formative tradition for the Americans of the founding era was not the Lockean, or natural rights, tradition, but the English Whig Opposition tradition of the eighteenth century, represented by writers like Trenchard and Gordon and James Burgh. (2) Beyond that, however, agreement breaks down, in that all three understand that tradition differently. For Wood and Pocock it is essentially a republican tradition, but not so for Bailyn. (3) Wood understands it as “naturalistic” republicanism based on an organic conception of society, whereas Pocock understands it as “humanistic” republicanism. The all-important notion of republican virtue differs accordingly. (4) Two of the three understand the formative tradition as a clear alternative, as quite different from the natural-rights-centered doctrine of the Declaration of Independence; Bailyn does not appear to view the two as an either/or. (5) Wood sees a real shift in the “reigning paradigm” during the founding era; the other two do not.
The differences among the trinity, and the even more diverse positions that have emerged more recently among later scholars, ultimately trace back to the (largely unacknowledged) different fundamental conceptions of republicanism brought to the materials. The questions that require reconsideration are What was the real nature of that “other” tradition, and how did it relate to the natural rights doctrine? The Declaration of Independence, conveniently ignored in the republican literature, insistently points toward natural rights; Bailyn and the others have established a case for something like republicanism. But the two themes have nowhere been brought adequately into conjunction with each other. Having sorted out the different strands of the “synthesis,” we are now favorably situated for the attempt to address these issues, and ultimately to bring out the relationship between natural rights and (the new) republicanism.
No matter how much they may differ from each other on some matters, the republican synthesizers nonetheless agree both in what they ignore and about the surface of the tradition with which they are concerned: there was a line of British political thinkers (called by some commonwealthmen, by others the Whig or country Opposition or classical republicans) to whom the Americans of the founding generation looked for their political education. Influential as the British thinkers were in America, they were decidedly less so at home. During the period of Whig ascendancy in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, these men were “voices in the wilderness,” mostly a permanent and more or less radical opposition. They thus carried on the original Whig tradition of opposition to the government, but now in a new context, because the government they opposed was controlled by self-professed Whigs. As Opposition Whigs they were far less visible than their more successful counterparts, and that accounts, in part, for the historians’ slowness in catching sight of them.
The synthesizers are perfectly correct to emphasize the role this Whig or country Opposition had in shaping the frame of political mind with which the Americans entered what proved to be the founding era. But the synthesizers have misunderstood the character of this British Opposition tradition, and their misunderstandings have set in motion false debates and unproductive controversies based on false dichotomies and unproductive categories.
A better ingress to the Opposition tradition lies along a path marked out by a distinction that John Locke (and many others) have drawn regarding political knowledge. “Politics,” Locke said, “contains parts very different the one from the other, the one containing the original of societies and the rise and extent of political power, the other, the art of governing of men in society.” He placed his own Two Treatises of Government in the first class of political works.82 Just a century later, Thomas Jefferson repeated Locke’s distinction, this time in terms of “theory” and “practice.” The first kind of book, according to Jefferson, considers “the general principles of liberty and the rights of man, in nature and in society.”83 He apparently considered the character of the second so self-evident as not to require a description, but he provided examples of each—again Locke’s Treatises in the first class, and The Federalist in the second. In terms of current academic discourse we might state this distinction as one between political philosophy (or theory) and political science.84 However best described, that distinction will be indispensable in the effort to relate natural rights to the political themes discussed by the republican synthesizers.
My central contention, in brief, is as follows: The synthesizers have more (Pocock) or less (Bailyn) confused political thinking at these two levels and construed lines of thought that differed in level as though they were at the same level and opposed to one another. That confusion has led in turn to the synthesizers’ postulation of “gog-and-magog” battles between liberals and republicans—of which, one of the synthesizers now admits, the alleged “participants” were quite unaware.85 They were unaware of these battles because the reality was quite otherwise than the one described by the synthesizers. Most of what is currently discussed as classical republicanism is political thought at the level of political science; most of what is discussed as liberalism is reflection at the level of political philosophy. Lines of thought at these different levels, as both Locke and Jefferson implied so clearly, do not necessarily conflict.
Of course, they can conflict. Some “political science” may be more congruent with one “political philosophy” than with another. Likewise, a political science originally connected to a particular understanding of the issues of political philosophy may be taken over and adapted to another. That happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the Restoration there was a Whig political philosophy—essentially one or another form of modernized natural law philosophy (e.g., Hooker or Grotius)—and a Whig political science. Over the course of the eighteenth century Locke, and to a lesser but still important degree Algernon Sidney, replaced Grotius as the chief authority in political philosophy, but many of the elements of the older Whig political science were carried forward, assimilated to and at least somewhat transformed by their connections to the new Lockean political philosophy.
The creation of a new and comprehensive Whig politics was the work of several generations of British political thinkers—indeed, it was a process that never came to a clear completion. But an unended process is not necessarily a shapeless process, nor one without its markers and monuments. The synthesizers themselves have called attention to these moments. Although their republican tradition is very old, and has roots at least as far back as Aristotle, there was a moment when the Opposition tradition emerged on English soil. According to Pocock, that moment was almost identical to the moment of birth of the Whig Party itself; at least, the parents of both were the same: the first Earl of Shaftesbury and his “circle.” The second well-noted marker in the tradition is the series of articles written by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters, published almost half a century after Shaftesbury’s alleged formulation of the themes of the classical republican tradition. This marker has more the character of a monument; so far as the Whig Opposition produced a masterpiece, most of the synthesizers agree this was it. Certainly none of the writers said to be part of this tradition was more admired or read in America than “Cato.”86
All the synthesizers agree on the importance of the Whig Opposition tradition, but all except Pocock take its existence for granted. Pocock sets for himself the explicit problem of explaining how a way of thinking that originated in pagan Greece and was revived and refined in Renaissance Florence came to be planted and then to thrive in England. A consideration of the origins of the Whig Opposition tradition becomes, perforce, a reconsideration of Pocock’s narrative of the English tradition of civic humanism.
Post-Reformation but prerevolutionary England had been marked by ways of conceiving politics very distant from Machiavellian civic humanism. “As long as these modes of consciousness held, it would be difficult if not unnecessary to envisage the Englishman as Machiavellian citizen.” The latter “mode of consciousness” exists only “where a political society becomes highly conscious that its vita is activa to the point of creating its own morality.” The English “defined . . . a public realm and a mode of action therein,” but they did so “in traditionalist terms,” meaning that “the liberties of the subject were rooted in custom and birthright, property and inheritance—the mechanisms of antiquity.” The resultant view of politics fell well short of the republican polis. Viewing politics as an inheritance, they did not view themselves as “creating their own morality.”87
English political consciousness began to change in response to the conflicts preceding the Civil War. “The English, monarchical and customary animals by nature, took up the rhetoric of balance and republic only because their traditional constitution was threatened by disorder in such a form—a dispute over the sharing of power—as to make this an appropriate response.” During the years of the Interregnum, Machiavellian and civic republican themes appeared with some frequency; but the decisive moment came in 1656, when James Harrington published his Oceana. That book, declared Pocock, “marks a moment of paradigmatic breakthrough, a major revision of English political theory and history in the light of concepts drawn from civic humanism and Machiavellian republicanism.”88
Harrington stands literally at the center of Pocock’s story of “Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition” (Pocock’s subtitle to The Machiavellian Moment), for through him Machiavellianized civic humanism flowed into England in a form that took hold, and, even though not himself “a specially visible figure in the rhetoric of opposition,” the Opposition tradition that constituted “Atlantic republicanism” derived from him.89 Pocock’s Harrington transmitted the republican tradition by “anglicizing” it. Harrington both retained and modified the chief elements of the previous tradition. He kept the founding Aristotelian theme of the primacy of citizenship in the constitution of human personality and the Machiavellian addition of “the possession of arms as necessary to political personality.” His modification was relatively simple, but of immense significance for (Pocock’s picture of) what would happen later in England and America: Harrington adapted a previously urban tradition of politics to England’s rural and historically feudal situation. On that basis he introduced the idea of property—landed freehold property—into the republican tradition. “The bearing of arms, once it was seen as a function of feudal tenure, proved to be based upon the possession of property.” One who possessed property in freehold had the means to be armed and the basis for the independence that constituted civic virtue in the humanist tradition. “The function of free proprietorship became the liberation of arms and consequently of the personality, for free public action and civic virtue.” And so, with Harrington “the politicization of the human person had now attained full expression in the language of English political thought; God’s Englishman was now zoon politikon in virtue of his sword and his freehold.”90
Property for Pocock’s Harrington was thus not the dynamic, productive, plenty-producing entity of capitalism or protocapitalism—of Locke or Adam Smith or Marx—but the means whereby a man could take his place as a full citizen of the English extended rural republic. Property was not an economic but a political phenomenon.91 “As with Aristotle, the end of land is not profit, but leisure: the opportunity to act in the public realm, . . . to display virtue. . . . Harrington’s economics and his politics were alike essentially Greek.”92 This theory of landed property provided “a means whereby the country free-holder could equate himself with the Greco-Roman polites and profess a wholly classical and Aristotelian doctrine of the relations between property, liberty and power.”93
This new interpretation of Harrington supplied Pocock with markers, rather like radioisotopes, whereby he could trace the presence and permutations of civic humanism. Property, arms (or militia), and independence (or virtue) became for Pocock indicators of the presence of the republican tradition. It was not that any or all these things self-evidently signified republicanism, but that in the Harringtonian version of that tradition—or rather, in Pocock’s rendition of it—these elements were attached, as means or condition, to the yet more fundamental core of citizenship, of participation in republican politics as the defining human act. Pocock’s Harrington displays the almost complete chain of the anglicized version of republicanism: freehold (Harrington)—arms (Machiavelli)—balance of political power (Polybius)—citizenship, independence, sharing in political power (Aristotle).94 When Pocock espies one or another of the elements of this chain in later political thought, he infers the entire chain even when the other elements are not explicitly present. As I shall argue below, this procedure turns out to be the source of much misinterpretation by Pocock of political thought subsequent to Harrington.
According to Pocock, the Anglo-American republican tradition was generated from Harrington, but it was a transformed Harrington, a “neo-Harrington.” To the untutored eye, however, Pocock’s neo-Harringtonians appear far more “neo” than “Harringtonian.”95 The master himself had been a full-fledged republican, or commonwealthman, because he thought England had decisively left behind the “ancient constitution,” the “Gothic” or feudal order, the mixed constitution that had been its historical legacy. The destruction of the monarchy and the abolition of the House of Lords were the natural and inevitable results of long-term trends in the distribution of property. Harrington shed no tears for the passing of this “Gothic” order: it was an inherently unstable system, full of conflict and irrationality. The ancient constitution was “incoherent,” a vice it shared with all monarchies. Harrington argued “that there can be no such thing as a stable monarchy,” for a monarchy cannot successfully solve the problem of the role of force in politics. Harrington therefore rejected “any return to the traditional ‘ancient’ or ‘balanced’ constitution.”96 The balance he sought was no longer the balance of the “orders” represented by king, lords, and commons.
Yet Pocock’s “neos” wrote in the very context Harrington had insisted could never recur; after the Restoration there was once more a monarchy and a House of Lords. Moreover, the “neos” accepted this return of the ancient constitution. Rather than seeing the Gothic order as irrational and unstable, they affirmed it as “free, stable, and natural.” They embraced the monarchy and rejected the republic.97 They seem very distant indeed from James Harrington.
Pocock therefore emphasizes the transformative character of their thought. “The neo-Harringtonian interpretation . . . involved a complete reversal of the historical order found in Harrington’s own account of English government, the reconciliation of his norms . . . with the Ancient Constitution.” This reversal constituted the very “essence of neo-Harringtonianism”: neo-Harringtonianism emerged when Harringtonian themes were adapted to the situation of the continued and accepted existence of the ancient constitution.98 The neo-Harringtonians “reconcile Harrington with the historical complacency of the English”; they effect a synthesis or “uneasy marriage” of two heretofore separate traditions.99
Despite the non-Harringtonian elements of this synthesis, “the root idea was Harrington’s,” according to Pocock, for “it was he who first stated in English terms the theses that only the armed freeholder was capable of independence and virtue, and that such a proprietor required a republic in which to be independent and virtuous.” Put another way, “If the end of property was independence, the end of independence was citizenship and moral personality.” These Harringtonian (or neo-Harringtonian) isotopes mark the presence of civic humanist thinking within traditional rhetoric about the ancient constitution.
The central Harringtonian idea is that property confers independence, and the central idea of the Harringtonian balance is that power must not be so distributed that it encroaches on the independence of property. In neo-Harringtonian hands this was transformed to read: the English constitution consists of an ideal balance between the powers of the Crown and those of Parliament, which stands for property and independence.
Counter to Parliamentary independence, resting on land and arms, are the encroaching forces of the Crown. It “has not only a tendency to encroach, but a means of doing so. The particular means is what we collectively call corruption.”100
Thus Pocock adds some links to the chain we have already identified, some further “markers” signalling the presence of civic humanist politics: fear of standing army (or enthusiasm for militia), praise of parliamentary independence based on property (or blame of parliamentary influence and corruption), encouragement of parliamentary opposition to the executive (or rejection of parliamentary cooperation with or dependence on the executive). The ear trained by Pocock hears civic humanism in discourse containing those ideas even if that discourse is otherwise and mostly couched in the traditional language of the constitution.101
Harrington’s commonwealth, or republican, commitment thus metamorphosed into a country position “in the full sense of the term.” As the ideology of the country gentry discontented with change and progress sponsored by or associated with the court, the neo-Harringtonians were not “liberal” forces, but rather reactionaries. “Neo-Harringtonian ideas . . . provided . . . an ideology for ‘ancients’ who would have none of the ‘modern’ world that was emerging.” They found their “political norm . . . in the past” and saw all change as decline, as “corruption.” Thus, this ideology “sounded an unmistakably paranoic note at times.” Its doctrines and concerns were “bogeys intended for country gentlemen.” As a reactionary doctrine it was “barren,” for it could conceive no positive uses for power. As reactionaries, the Opposition theorists were nowhere as near to “constitutional reality” as were their court counterparts.102 Pocock, in other words, is no partisan of the republican tradition he has unearthed.
From the early neo-Harringtonians of the 1670s, to the full-blown Whig Opposition of the eighteenth century, to the American founding generation—in one more or less continuous and smooth sweep Pocock’s neo-Harringtonians complete the chain linking Aristotle at one end to Jefferson, Madison, and Adams at the other. That chain provides him with the decisive means of characterizing the later links. His neo-Harringtonians were not liberals in any sense. The neo-Harringtonians, including the American founders, consistently took the side of “participatory ideals. . . . Harrington and his successors will be found invariably ranged on the side of participation, in defence of a republican ideal of virtue against those who would lessen it in the name of other [liberal] values.”103
The foundations of the country ideology were laid, says Pocock, in the mid-1670s by the Earl of Shaftesbury and men close to him politically, especially the poet Andrew Marvell. Pocock identifies the very beginning of the neo-Harringtonian transformation in some parliamentary speeches by Shaftesbury in 1675 and in a pamphlet of that year, “A Letter from a Person of Quality to His Friend in the Country.”104 The thought in the pamphlet, its language, even its metaphors are extraordinarily close to the thought and language of Shaftesbury’s speeches, so it is at least plausible to suspect the same authorship for both sets of statements.105 For convenience’s sake, I am going to call that author Shaftesbury, recognizing full well that his authorship of the pamphlet, much less of the speeches he delivered, has not been definitively established.106 It is a bit like the problem of Homer: if Homer was not the author of Homer’s works, it must have been some other poet or poets whom we might as well call Homer.
Our question is this: What have these so-called neo-Harringtonians to do with civic humanism? The link, according to Pocock, is Harrington, but he concedes there is little in the way of a direct and explicit tie. Harrington was barely mentioned by Opposition writers, and “there is no sign of contact between Shaftesbury,” the supposed founder of this branch of Harringtonians, and the master himself, who still lived in 1675. The “relation between what Shaftesbury now began to say and Harrington’s writings” must, therefore, be inferred entirely from “textual analysis.”
The “textual analysis” does not appear very promising for displaying those “relations,” however. Not only does Shaftesbury differ from Harrington in the broad ways discussed above, but the three specific themes that Pocock finds in Shaftesbury supposedly linking him to Harrington are themselves foreign to the latter. According to Pocock, Shaftesbury was contending against the use by the Earl of Danby, the king’s minister, of “patronage, places, and pensions,” known collectively as “corruption,” in order to control Parliament. But, he admits, “in Harrington neither Court, corruption, nor office had been major elements of political analysis. . . . Corruption had not been a prominent term in Harrington’s vocabulary.”107 Secondly, Shaftesbury and after him the other “neo-Harringtonians” had been greatly exercised over the question of a standing army. Pocock admits Harrington had not much considered such a possibility, and so far as he had, he “had flatly declared it impossible.”108 Finally, says Pocock, the third Harringtonian theme in Shaftesbury is the crucial role of the House of Lords, but, he admits, Harrington had “no place for them [the Lords].”109
Given all these concessions and admissions by Pocock, how does he yet connect Shaftesbury to Harrington and through him to civic humanism? The answer, I am compelled to say, is not well; on examination, the textual evidence of connection is remarkably thin, and Pocock processes what evidence there is through a screen so beset with a priori judgments as to amount to question-begging.110 Not only does he squeeze Shaftesbury into a mold foreign to him, but he misses what is actually there.
Pocock’s best evidence—really his only textual evidence linking Shaftesbury to Harrington, linking Shaftesbury’s praise of the House of Lords to Harrington’s rejection of the same—is this: When Shaftesbury spoke of the Lords, he conceived of it as an alternative to monarchical military rule. “There is no Prince that ever governed without nobility or an army.” Now, according to Pocock, this “language is unmistakably Harringtonian, . . . for Oceana had expressed the thought that the monarchy had been driven to attempt military rule when the feudal power of the peers had failed it.” Pocock concedes, as he ought, that Harrington’s point was different, that he was describing the already accomplished changes (as of 1656) that had impelled the king to attempt military rule. Shaftesbury’s rejection of this Harringtonian context of the argument (that is, the view that the nobility was no longer available as a potential prop for the monarchy) amounts to a rejection of what really was Harrington’s point, the explanation of the appearance in England of a commonwealth.111
The pairing of the peerage and the military is not by itself sufficient to decree this “neo-Harringtonianism,” however. Shaftesbury made his own point clear enough and it has little to do with Harrington. Peers and army are alternate means to monarchical rule, in that the prince, being but one person, requires agents—subordinate powers—in order to actualize, localize, and particularize his rule; these powers, moreover, must have a coercive presence. Two very different kinds of subordinate powers have been deployed historically: powers more or less independent of the prince and powers dependent on him. We might be more inclined to call the latter sort bureaucratic rather than military, but Shaftesbury thereby emphasized the coercive, and thus threatening, aspect of this political alternative. The evil that the Whigs constantly feared arising from a monarchy—absolute and arbitrary power—is obviously more likely to arise where the king’s agents are entirely dependent on him and possess a monopoly of coercive authority than where they are independent powers with a stake in their own and others’ freedom. “A standing force can be for nothing but prerogative, by whom it hath its idle living and subsistence.”
Moreover, “history shows the power of peerage and a standing army are like two buckets, the proportion that one goes down, the other exactly goes up.” Why? That same history shows that “standing forces, military, and arbitrary government came . . . plainly in by the same steps that the nobility were lessened.” When the nobility was “in power and greatness,” they did not “permit the least shadow of any of them.” Not merely did the nobility stand as a safer mode of governance than military or bureaucratized rule, but it had the power and incentive to resist attempts by rulers to introduce the devices of “arbitrary government.”112 Shaftesbury here voices precisely the point Montesquieu and then Tocqueville later made when they called attention to the role of independent intermediate powers in society as a mode of resisting despotism.113 Nothing in this idea requires or implies anything of civic humanism.
As violent as Pocock’s interpretation of the role of the House of Lords is, even more so is his treatment of the fear of a standing army. According to Pocock, “the threats of military dictatorship . . . form the small change of standing army debate: . . . The more immediate threat [is] the corruption of Parliament: . . . The standing army appears in this context as an instrument of corruption rather than of dictatorship. The threat of rule by the sword is there, but it is muted.” The real problem is “the presence of military men in Parliament as a specially dangerous form of placemanship.” The army provides places with which the Crown can subvert the independence of Parliament, and once having done that, can prevail upon Parliament to support the very army that supplied so many of its members their places. “The professional officer is the cause as well as the effect of this corruption.”
Evidence we have already seen strongly counters Pocock’s claim that fears of military rule were “the small change” of the debate: they were rather, to escalate Pocock’s metaphor, the Brinks trucks of Shaftesbury’s concern. “If ever there should happen in future ages (which God forbid),” thundered Shaftesbury in the House of Lords in 1675, “a king governing by an army, without his Parliament, ’tis a government I own not, am not obliged to, nor was born under.”114 Not a corrupted Parliament, but no Parliament, not an army which offers places and positions to compromise the independence of the polites, but genuine, no-fooling-around military rule—these are Shaftesbury’s real fears.115 They are little different from the fear that animated those who spoke out on the army issue both before and after Shaftesbury.116 The issue underlying all such concern was “whether government should move toward the absolutism of the continent or not.”117
Pocock’s tack on the army issue reveals extraordinarily well the truth of the old adage “context is all.” He comes to Shaftesbury with Harrington filling his mind. Harrington said standing or professional armies are impossible, never to be achieved; Shaftesbury must, thinks Pocock, be responding to Harrington, must be trying to show how a standing army is possible. Pocock is certain, in other words, that Shaftesbury is answering a question implicitly posed by Harrington: “A standing army is possible, Mr. Harrington, because the king can use it to corrupt Parliament and then induce the corrupted Parliament to support it.” This is not so much wrong as it is wrong-headed, missing Shaftesbury’s point and concern. The same can be said for Pocock’s treatment of the militia, the alternative to the professional army. “The militia . . . could be seen as a means to the reactivation of virtue”—thus says Professor Pocock, neatly attaching the supporters of the militia to civic humanism. “The militia must, and can never be otherwise than for English liberty, because else it destroy itself”—thus said the Earl of Shaftesbury, neatly attaching his support for the militia to his opposition to absolutist rule.118 What Pocock sees as “most purely Harringtonian in all this [are] the associated ideas of propertied independence and the militia,” which are the center of “Harrington’s theory of citizenship.” Now, this may or may not be Harringtonian, but it is not what Shaftesbury was saying. The earl knew that the militia, composed of and under the control of the nation itself, could not be used as an instrument of oppression. There is nothing here of virtue, of vivere civile, of ridurre ai principii, of polites or cives. Instead, there is a hard-headed and realistic politician who appreciated the role of force in politics, and who took his bearings politically not from Harrington but from the precedents “of former times,” from “privileges” and “rights” inherent in birth into the orders of English life, from the “rights, privileges, and freedoms, which men now enjoy by the laws established,” from “the great liberty we enjoy as Englishmen,” from “the law and constitution of the government,” which do not support “an absolute and arbitrary government.” Shaftesbury thought in terms of the ancient constitution and customary rights, not Pocock’s Harringtonian tradition of civic humanism.119
The same distortions, deriving from the same causes, appear in Pocock’s discussion of parliamentary corruption. This last is, in his eyes, the truly central issue, for it is the ultimate point of both the other two and provides the link to civic humanism through the idea of citizen independence. Pocock, as we have seen already, identifies court patronage through placemen in Parliament as the chief threat to his Harringtonian affirmation of civic independence as the precondition for “the liberation . . . of personality, for free public action and civic virtue.” It was the center, he says, of Harrington’s “politicization of the human person.”120
Shaftesbury’s texts cohere very little with this reading of them, however. For an issue supposedly so much at the heart of his concern, he spent remarkably little space on it—perhaps one-half column out of nearly thirty columns in the “Letter from a Person of Quality.” What he did say of it had none of the neo-Harringtonian overlay Pocock consistently gives it. Shaftesbury complained, for example, that “all places of profit, command, and trust [were] only given to the old Cavaliers.” This sounds, in part at least, suspiciously like the kind of partisan complaint familiar to all students of political parties, for Shaftesbury coupled that complaint with the whining observation that “no man that had served or been of the contrary party, [was] left in any [offices].” The complaint was not about office holding as such, but about the exclusion of him and his supporters. More important, he saw this pattern of appointment as evidence for the conspiracy he saw afoot, a conspiracy to revive the old Civil War cleavages, to set aside the Act of Oblivion, to restore the Cavalier party and secure for it a victory in politics that it could not win in battle.121
Shaftesbury’s other significant mention of the pensioners and placemen occurred in the context of his account of the “dread” many felt in anticipation of the parliamentary session of April 1675:
The officers, court lords, and bishops were clearly the major role in the lords house; and they assured themselves to have the commons as much at their disposal, when they reckoned the number of courtiers, officers, and pensioners, increased by the addition of the Church and Cavalier-party, besides the address they made to men of the best quality there, by hopes of honour, great employments, and such things as would take.122
Shaftesbury’s worry here was much simpler, and more obvious, than Pocock’s high-falutin notion of citizenship. The influence the court had in Parliament would allow it to carry majorities there for principles and policies that Shaftesbury was convinced were nefarious. Dependence on the court was not presented here as an evil in itself, as a denial of the very telos of the human personality or anything of that sort, but because it could be a means to the accomplishment of very bad things. Shaftesbury’s concern was not much different from that of present-day political analysts who point to the politics of pork and patronage as means whereby whoever controls those prizes can control outcomes in Congress, often to the detriment of the public good and contrary to the nation’s true interests. There is nothing remotely “neo-Harringtonian” in this. So far as it was different from concern over pork-barrel politics, the difference lay in the more serious threat Shaftesbury thought he discerned in the court policy that was being thus supported. The members of Parliament who succumbed to court blandishments were not merely supporting a misappropriation of public funds, they were furthering a policy aimed at “introducing an absolute and arbitrary government.” That fear provided the context for Shaftesbury’s denunciation of these practices.123
One would never know from Pocock’s account that Shaftesbury and his fellows foresaw so ominous an outcome as “absolute and arbitrary government.” One would never realize from Pocock’s account that passions ran very high on both sides, that some men, including Shaftesbury himself, ended up in the Tower, or in exile, or on the scaffold for what they said and did in the decade or so prior to the Glorious Revolution. One would hardly suspect from Pocock’s account, in other words, that all this political “discourse” was related to politics. Instead of the passion of politics or the passion of philosophy, Pocock serves up colorless and odorless “paradigms,” coupling and decoupling silently in the night.
All of this is done in the name of a more historically adequate account of political thought, which, Pocock insists, means one properly contextual.124 But, ironically, it is precisely context that is lacking from his version. Or rather, he supplies his own context—his Harringtonian civic humanism—and pays altogether too little attention to what Shaftesbury and the others understood about their own context and how they understood their thought and action in relation to that context.
The arbitrariness of Pocock’s treatment of context glows like neon if we consider the remarkably selective account he gives. He claims to present the thought of the Whig Opposition, but hardly mentions Milton. Nowhere does he mention Hugo Grotius. Nor does Algernon Sidney figure much in his story of “the Atlantic republican tradition,” even though later Whigs, both English and American, looked to Sidney frequently and explicitly.125 And of course there is Pocock’s depreciation of Locke.126
Yet more telling is his omission of the political context proper.127 The chief expression of the Shaftesburean position came in the “Letter from a Person of Quality,” which announced its own occasion quite clearly in its subtitle: “Giving an account of the debates and resolution in the House of Lords, in April and May, 1675, concerning a bill, entitled, ‘A Bill to Prevent the Dangers which may arise from Persons disaffected to the Government.’ ” The measure proposed in that bill to “prevent dangers” was an oath, drafted by Danby, to be subscribed by all officeholders, including members of both houses of Parliament, which would commit the subscriber to denying the legitimacy of all armed resistance to the king or any of his agents, and promising never to “endeavour the alteration of the government either in Church or State.” Fifteen years after the Restoration and more than thirty years after the outbreak of the Civil War, the bill was attempting to commit the entirety of the political community to positions that would have made the Civil War impossible. It might thus be seen as a genially ineffective example of the “barn-door” phenomenon, common enough in politics not to require much comment.
Shaftesbury and his colleagues, however, saw it in a much less benign light, not as a foolish attempt to prevent an event that had occurred a generation in the past, but as an effort to revive the old battle lines and refight the old battles. Understood “in its whole extent,” the oath was an effort
to make a distinct party from the rest of the nation of the high Episcopal Man, and of the old cavalier; who are to swallow the hopes of enjoying all the power and office of the kingdom; being tempted also by the advantage they may receive from overthrowing the Act of Oblivion; and not a little rejoicing to think how valiant they should prove, if they could get any to fight the old guard over again, now they are possessed of the arms, forts, and ammunition of the nation.128
Despite what may appear to be hyperbolic rhetoric, there were, concludes Shaftesbury’s biographer, “concrete issues at stake. . . . If Danby’s test had been applied to all office-holders, justices of the peace and members of Parliament, it would have made difficulties for many conscientious people; it could have been the basis for a government purge; and it could have seriously embarrassed any attempts at “alterations” in the existing order.”129
The oath, thought Shaftesbury, was a piece of a plot motivated by the twin forces of interest and revenge.130 The plot was both subtle and complex: in forcing all men to swear the government of the church to be unalterable, the bill would “tacitly own it to be of Divine Right,” even though that was contrary to the Oath of Supremacy that conceded the authority of the king over the church. For this grant of independence from king (and Parliament), the church would in turn “declare the government absolute and arbitrary, and allow monarchy, as well as episcopacy, to be Jure Divino, and not to be bounded or limited by any human laws.—And to secure all this they resolve to take away the power and opportunity of parliament to alter anything in the Church or State.” The solemn declaration against nonresistance would play a major role in rendering the monarch absolute and unlimited, for the option of resistance was necessary to the preservation of the specific limits set to the powers of the king: “It is not out of the way to suppose, that if any king, hereafter, contrary to the Petition of Rights, demand and levy money by privy seal, or otherwise, and cause soldiers to enter and distrain for such illegal taxes, that in such a case any man may by law defend his house against them.”131 That is, unless he is bound by Danby’s oath never to resist any agents commissioned by the king.
The plot was, then, in the first instance, a straightforward trade: the Crown “parts with its supremacy” over the church, and “in requital” the church supports the Crown’s claims to divine right and absolute powers. The clergy, Shaftesbury asserted, had never been champions of “the rights and liberties of the people,” either in England or elsewhere, if they had first been able to extract the independence they would acquire here.132
But there was a yet further step to this scheme: “As the top stone of the whole fabric, a pretence shall be taken from the jealousies they themselves have raised, and a real necessity from the smallness of their party, to increase and keep up a standing army.” With the acquisition of a standing army, however, “the Cavalier and the Churchman will be made greater fools, but as arrant slaves as the rest of the nation.”133 The king and his very narrow circle of favorites (including, presumably, the Earl of Danby) would be the real beneficiaries; The original “party” of Cavaliers and churchmen would be thrust aside soon after the parliamentarians they would have helped defeat. Resistance to the plot, Shaftesbury implied, was in the interest of all.
The oath was the chief means (to that point) to effectuate a regime in which Parliament would be reduced to a nullity and the monarchy elevated to an absolutism; but the chief means whereby the oath was to be effected was Parliament. The forces of absolutism in the post-Restoration era operated differently, more subtly than in the pre–Civil War era. In the days of Charles I, the constitution itself was in contest; the question of who had what powers was directly raised, as the Crown attempted to rule without Parliament—attempted, for example, to raise money without parliamentary authorization. Shaftesbury did not identify that kind of outright unconstitutionality as the real danger posed by Charles II. (Unlike some other Whigs, he made light, for example, of the constitutional issues raised by the Declaration of Indulgence.)134 Charles II and his minister Danby posed the far more subtle threat of subverting the constitution and the rights and liberties of Englishmen through actions themselves formally constitutional—adopted by Parliament—at least up to the last moment when, according to the scenario, the standing army would put an end to the very forms of liberty. This is the context in which Pocock’s themes of corruption, standing armies, and the place of the House of Lords became important. According to the logic implicit in the constitution, Parliament is to guarantee the liberties of the community and to restrain the monarch.135 Danby’s devices for managing Parliament through the use of patronage, pensions, and outright bribery meant that Parliament could play its formal role in the constitution, but could yet fail to play its substantive role. “The oath rendered Parliament but a snare, not a security to the people.”136
Danby provoked the new departure in Whig political analysis because “he strove to [accomplish] something which no one had previously achieved, control on the king’s behalf of the House of Commons.”137 Danby’s policies were demonstrating in practice, and Shaftesbury was attempting to demonstrate in theory, that the formal constitution was not enough. So far as Shaftesbury and the Whigs of the 1670s introduced any novelties into political analysis, it is here. So far as there is something Harringtonian or Machiavellian to this Whig political science, it is this appreciation of the politics—in contrast to the formal legal arrangements—of the constitution, and has nothing to do with Pocock’s civic humanism.
The Shaftesbury Whigs were quite traditional in their political theory: they accepted either a historical-legal-traditionalist account of the ancient constitution or one or another form of Grotian (or Hookerian) contractarianism that cohered readily with the ancient constitution. They moved beyond that in the development of a political science that probed beneath the formal realities and presumptions of constitutional law to the actual operations of institutions. They injected this political analysis into an English political discourse that had been largely formalist, historical (in the sense of precedent-obsessed), and theological-moralistic (in its concern for the moral and scriptural grounds of obedience and resistance).
The Shaftesbury Whigs, in other words, accomplished in the seventeenth century what American political science claimed to have discovered for the first time in the twentieth—a “realistic” analysis of politics that does not take formal structures at face value but insists that the reality of politics is both more informal and more fluid than the formal or constitutional prescriptions suggest. Unlike the American “new” political science, however, the Whigs made no break with the prescriptive constitutional order; theirs was no “value-free” political science. The constitutional order as the Whigs understood it prescribed a “bounded” monarchy and the Whig political science took its bearings at all points from that prescription. Thus Shaftesbury objected to the effort on the part of the sponsors of the oath to remove all fear of popular resistance from the mind of the king. “There can be no distinction left between absolute and bounded monarchies, if monarchs have only the fear of God, and no fear of human resistance to restrain them. . . . They overthrew the government that propose to place any part of it above the fear of man.”138
The Whig political science attempted to rally those in positions of power within the formal institutions to operate them so as to secure a limited rather than an absolutist monarchy for England. For the most part, that rallying took the form of exhortation: those in Parliament (especially) should do their duty to the country and not succumb to the private benefits proffered by the court. As Shaftesbury made clear in his warning to the Cavaliers and churchmen who were the instruments of the Crown in 1875, public duty to the constitution was identical with long-term self-interest as well. Shaftesbury did not call for a superhuman commitment to civic virtue or the public good.
But it was not all exhortation. Shaftesbury sought to reinforce those parts of the constitution that could be especially immune to the informal devices that threatened absolutism. In this context the House of Lords loomed large in his thinking, for the lords, independently possessed of wealth and position, might resist the court more readily than the commons, so long as the authority of their constitutional institution was maintained. That is one reason he rallied his fellow lords to repudiate any suggestion that peers could be denied their right to sit in the House for any reason, much less the failure to accede to Danby’s test oath. With somewhat less success he attempted to persuade the House to preserve all its privileges, including the right of free debate, the right of supreme judicial appeal, and the right to be free from intimidation by the king or his agents.139
By jamming Shaftesbury into a civic humanist context foreign to him, Pocock has thus missed the structure, motives, and grounds of Shaftesbury’s position. Not attending much to Shaftesbury’s indication of his own concerns, but instead deploying his radioisotopic markers, he transforms Shaftesbury into his kind of Harringtonian. But the whole enterprise is based on a logical failure: Even admitting (arguendo) that these markers (e.g., independence of Parliament from the king) might be part of a civic humanist structure of thought such as Pocock assembles, it does not follow that the presence of any one (or more) of them necessarily implies the whole structure. As is the case with Shaftesbury, these elements can be part of quite other structures of thought and action as well. One can identify the character of a given body of thought only by attending to it and not to isolated fragments of it. Pocock, here as elsewhere, fails to adhere to the crucial maxim that we must first attempt to understand a thinker as he understood himself.
Many of the same difficulties vitiate Pocock’s interpretation of Andrew Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government. Marvell’s lengthy pamphlet contains many of the same themes and concerns as Shaftesbury’s “Person of Quality” essay. Like Shaftesbury, Marvell took his point of departure from “a design” he had discovered “to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny,” and in this case, “to convert the established Protestant religion into downright Popery.” The stakes, Marvell believed, were “as great and weighty as ever was any in England,” because they “concerned our very being, and included our religion, liberty and property.”140
The details of the “design” Marvell discovered differed somewhat from what Shaftesbury described. Writing more than two years later, he had many more events to sweep up into the pattern of duplicity, including a foreign-policy dimension that Shaftesbury had ignored. The conspiracy aligned king and court with the French king, the most powerful ruler in Europe, champion of Catholicism and the very model of the type of absolute monarch the Whigs dreaded. Contrary to his own public statements and the more or less settled policy desires of Parliament, Charles was duplicitously supporting Louis in his designs on the Dutch republic—a bastion of liberty and Protestantism—rather than allying with the Dutch to oppose Louis.
Like Shaftesbury, Marvell saw both political and religious dimensions to the conspiracy, but again the details differed. Marvell insisted that the conspiracy aimed to reintroduce Catholicism in England, although not for reasons of religious conviction. In fact, he praised those Catholics, including James, Duke of York, who acted sincerely on the basis of their faith, despite his own certainty that no religion was so “false and unreasonable,” so “absurd,” so marked by “cruelty” as “popery.” The “persons that have . . . taken the work” of the conspiracy “in hand, are such as lie under no temptation of religion.” As Marvell presented it, the aim of these plotters was somewhat obscure, but that apparent obscurity may have had more to do with limitations on what might and might not be said about the king than with any unclarity in his mind. Explicitly, he stated that the designers were “obliged by all the most sacred ties of malice and ambition to advance the ruin of the king and kingdom”;141 that is, the king was the chief victim and sheer malice the chief motive for the conspiracy. But Marvell regularly expressed allegiance to the convention that the king could do no wrong: if wrong was being done, it must be by others and against the will and interests of the king. Yet, like many of the Whigs we have previously encountered,142 he implied that these unbelievers were promoting popery because, entirely unlike reformed Christianity, it was “compiled of terrors to the phancy, contradictions to sense, and impositions on the understanding,” all of which fit men for slavish obedience. Thus the aim of the plot would be the institution of a religion of slavishness that would prepare the way for a political regime of slavishness.143 The ultimate sponsor of such a plot therefore could be none other than Charles himself, or those in his circle who sought to please him. The instruments of the conspiracy included both foreign policies—for example, the machinations on behalf of Louis—and domestic policies—for example, Danby’s test oath.
Marvell gets filed away in the neo-Harringtonian pigeonhole, however, because Pocock finds in him “the clearest of this group of statements of the theme of corruption by the executive.”144 Marvell did, indeed, devote a few pages to that subject, but Pocock leaves his readers with a misleading impression of its role in his treatise. Corruption, placemen, and related themes are but a few among a large set of evils that came under fire from Marvell’s pen, and, as with Shaftesbury, his concern with them must be set into the broader context of his objections to royal policies aimed at overcoming the constitutional limits on the monarchy and imposing a new and objectionable religion on the nation. Those policies, to repeat, include many other practices that Marvell found equally or more objectionable.145
Indeed, Marvell called the discussion of parliamentary corruption (in the broad sense) a “digression”; it surely was not the center of his concern. Moreover, he presented it in such a way as to reveal very clearly that he grasped it altogether differently from Pocock’s civic humanism (vivere civile). The problem with corruption is not the way it compromises or undercuts the specifically public or citizenly character of political actors, but rather the way it produces a potential conflict of interest. “No honorable person,” concluded Marvell, “related to his Majestie’s more particular service, but will in that place and opportunity suspect himself, lest his gratitude to his master, with his self-interest, should tempt him beyond his obligation there to the publick.” The problem is not one peculiar to public life or public obligation, but is altogether parallel to conflicts of interest in the private sphere: “The same [consideration] excludes him that may next inherit from being guardian to an infant.” This last could not be said if Pocock’s special brand of republican virtue were the issue.
Once again, attention to the more specific context of Marvell’s discussion clarifies its genesis and function in his argument. The discussion was provoked by the opening of the parliamentary session of February 1677. Parliament had been prorogued since November 1675, and the Whigs in Parliament raised the question whether such a long prorogation did not amount to a dissolution and whether, therefore, new elections were not necessary. The king and his supporters resisted this constitutional interpretation. Both groups were acting consistently with their overall strategies regarding Parliament. The court sought to get by with the minimum number of meetings of Parliament and therefore attempted to keep it out of session as much as possible. At the same time, the king sought to prevent new elections, for the Parliament of the mid-1670s was still the one elected in 1660, at the time of the Restoration. This Cavalier Parliament was relatively well disposed to the cause of the king and hostile to that of the king’s opponents. The Whigs sought a new election because they were certain that opinion in the country was much more favorable to their cause by the mid-1670s than it had been in 1660; the King’s efforts to avoid elections indicated that he agreed with this assessment.
In February 1677, after a prorogation of over a year, the Whigs attempted to declare the session illegal. They were eager not only to force elections, but also to assert the rights of Parliament to share regularly in governance. The Whig effort failed, however, and that failure stimulated Marvell to reflect on the role of officeholders and placemen in the House of Commons. His point was nearly identical to that of Shaftesbury: Parliament had an opportunity to assert its proper role in the constitution, but declined to do so because of the private benefits that some members received from the king. The court’s ability to appeal to private interest prevented the constitution from operating properly in this case, and, Marvell feared, would prevent it from operating properly in general.
How improper would it seem for a privy-counsellor if in the House of Commons he should not justify the most arbitrary proceedings of the council-table, represent affairs of state with another face, defend any misgovernment, patronize the greatest offenders against the kingdom . . . and extend the supposed prerogative on all occasions, to the detriment of the subject’s certain and due liberties! . . . And whatsoever they may commit in the House of Commons against the national interest, they take themselves to be justified by their circumstances.146
Thus Marvell, too, missed Pocock’s neo-Harringtonian moment.147 If Harrington was the civic humanist Pocock presents him to be, then these early Whigs have nothing much to do with Harrington. They were, it is true, as little natural rights thinkers as they were civic republicans. But Pocock’s interpretation of their thought in terms of the republican idea systematically stands in the way of understanding the development that soon occurred—the amalgamation of the Whig political science we have just discussed with a political philosophy of Lockean natural rights. By the time of Cato’s Letters such an amalgamation had taken place, and it was in that form that Whig political science came to be a force in the era of the American founding. Pocock would make that amalgamation impossible, for he understands Whig political science to be part of his civic humanist tradition which, he insists, differs essentially and thoroughly from natural-rights-oriented politics.
Pocock’s “neo-Harringtonian” Whig thinkers hold up no better as classical republicans à la Gordon Wood than they do as Pocockian civic humanists. They displayed little of what Wood identified as the central themes of the Opposition tradition. They were not republicans, much less classical republicans dedicated to self-abnegating public virtue and the organic polity. Natural law and the original contract, the ancient constitution and the historic rights of Englishmen—and virulent public anti-Catholicism—held the loyalties of these founders of the Whig movement, and remained the chief commitments of the Grotian Whigs of 1688–89.
Of the synthesizers, Bernard Bailyn is the only one whose characterization of the Opposition tradition truly reverberates with those early Whigs: They do believe in a conspiracy of power against liberty. They do sense the fragility of liberty, and they do assume that those in authority seek to destroy it. Above all, they do (emphatically) believe in conspiracies.
Of the three synthesizers, Bailyn is also best able to accommodate to the later emergence of a new comprehensive mode of Whig political thought (as in Cato), replacing the seventeenth century’s Grotianism with the new Lockean political philosophy and combining that with the Whig political science developed in the early days of the movement. Since Cato and his successors were indeed germinal for the eighteenth-century Americans, the synthesizers are correct to call attention to the Whig Opposition as an important ingress to the frame of political mind of the colonial and revolutionary Americans. Pocock and Wood, however, mischaracterize the political orientation they explored as an older republicanism, and thus miss its modernity. As a consequence they leave us with unintelligible events, such as the synthesis of incompatible liberal and classical positions, or implausible events, such as the transformation of one kind of political thought into its opposite with hardly anybody noticing.
Bailyn makes no such error, and thus he has no difficulty acknowledging the Lockean liberal dimension of the new republicanism. Nonetheless, he never adequately integrates the Lockean and other elements of his opposition tradition, and thus never provides a full portrayal either of the Opposition tradition itself or of the American thought supposedly built upon it. Bailyn points in the right direction, in other words, but his work must be supplemented with a more serious attempt to make Locke part of the story, and then to reinterpret the Opposition tradition the light of what comes into view with Locke. To the first of these tasks we must now turn.