LONG, LONG AGO, in what now seems a galaxy far, far away (actually, five years ago, in Washington, D.C.), I started out to write a study of the American founding. One thing led to another, however, and the result is the present book, devoted almost exclusively to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England. The ultimate aim remains the same: elucidating the American founding; as they might say in Hollywood, this book is the “prequel” to the one originally planned. The thesis of the original book can be quickly and easily put: with the American founding emerged a new kind of politics constituted by a new commitment to the philosophy of natural rights and dedicated to a new kind of republicanism based thereon. In a sense, that remains the thesis of the present book, although only a little is said about the way these themes work themselves out in the American materials. These two books are both parts of a broader project that bestrides two current, intertwined controversies or problems—the “America problem” and the “modernity problem.”
The initial goal of my inquiry into the earlier British materials is negative—to prove that the natural rights/social contract philosophy of the American Revolution was by no means the “common sense of the subject” for the English in the seventeenth century, as Thomas Jefferson claimed it was for the Americans in the eighteenth. My thesis about the American founding runs afoul of two sometimes intermingled, sometimes opposed views. One line of thought rejects both parts of my thesis, arguing that the Americans are best understood neither in terms of the new liberal philosophy of natural rights nor as proponents of a new republicanism congruent therewith, but rather as devotees of an old classical or civic humanist republicanism much at odds with modern natural rights liberalism. The other point of view concedes the role of the natural rights/social contract theory in the thought of the American founding generation, but denies it any claim to novelty. English Whig (or opposition, or parliamentary) thought of the seventeenth century is permeated with, if not monopolized by, contractarian themes, and, as the saying goes, a contract is a contract is a contract. The Americans, according to this line of thought, were merely following in the theoretical steps of some or all of their opposition predecessors—those who made the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89; the Whigs who promoted Exclusion in the 1670s; the men who fought the Civil War in the 1640s; the leaders of the opposition to James I and Charles I before the Civil War. Both views respond to the “America problem” with an answer about modernity: either that America is not in its origins modern, or that modernity is best understood as a continuation or modification of something old.
Both views merit serious consideration, even though, as I think, both are false. The sponsors of the theory of the old republicanism have brought to the fore thinkers and styles of thought that had been neglected in the past and are undeniably important—indeed, they are important precisely for their contribution to the new natural rights republicanism. Likewise, a reconsideration of opposition thought with an eye to its contractarianism is also revealing, in part because the real differences between most of it and the late-emerging Lockean variety reveals much about the latter’s modernity.
Because of this, it became increasingly clear that establishing my claims about the political innovativeness and modernity of the Americans required a much more extensive foray into what came before the American founding than I had originally planned. Thus, an introductory chapter became a thick book of its own.
St. Paul
December 1992