CHAPTER XIII

NEO-MACHIAVELLIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY

The Augustan Debate over Land, Trade and Credit

[I]

THE HALF-CENTURY FOLLOWING the Revolution of 1688 is a period till recently little studied, but nevertheless of great importance, in the history of English political thought—not least because, strictly speaking, it witnesses the latter’s transformation from “English” to “British” in the year 1707. Between the Englishman John Locke at the beginning of the period so designated, and the Scot David Hume commencing his work as it closed, no political theorist or philosopher to be ranked among the giants emerged in Anglophone culture; and yet the period was one of change and development in some ways more radical and significant even than those of the Civil War and Interregnum. Specifically it can be shown that this was the era in which political thought became engrossed with the conscious recognition of change in the economic and social foundations of politics and the political personality, so that the zōon politikon took on his modern character of participant observer in processes of material and historical change fundamentally affecting his nature; and it can be shown that these changes in perception came about through the development of a neo-Machiavellian, as well as neo-Harringtonian, style in the theory of political economy, in response to England’s emergence as Britain, a major commercial, military, and imperial power. The processes observed, and the changes in language consequent upon the observation, were in a material and secular sense more revolutionary than anything to be detected in the generation of radical Puritanism; and among the phenomena will be found the appearance of Machiavellian thought as a criticism of modernity.

In studying this development in the history of thought, we shall allot a crucial role to neither the justification of the Revolution of 1688 itself, nor the political writings of Locke. The deposition of James II could of its nature give rise to little more than a reexamination of the conditionality of political authority, which in the Machiavellian tradition had always appeared as a feature of the contingent world, and a countervailing emphasis upon the relation of tradition and custom to consent;1 nor did James—possibly the most unsubtle figure in the history of English political interpretation—ever appear as one of those archetypes of corruption, like Shaftesbury’s Danby or Bolingbroke’s Walpole, out of whom the mythology of English neo-Machiavellism was to be built. As for Locke, it has to be admitted that the present is an unfortunate moment for including him in syntheses. Among the revolutionary effects of the reevaluation of his historical role initiated by Laslett and continued by Dunn² has been a shattering demolition of his myth: not that he was other than a great and authoritative thinker, but that his greatness and authority have been wildly distorted by a habit of taking them unhistorically for granted. Since he was no kind of classical or Machiavellian republican, he does not contribute directly to the formation of the tradition we are to study; it seems possible rather to allot him a place, and debate its magnitude, among that tradition’s adversaries.³ But the deemphasizing of Locke is for the present a tactical necessity. The historical context must be reconstructed without him before he can be fitted back into it.

The acceptance of William III as king proved to mean something not fully foreseen or desired by those who invited him over: the commitment of England—of English troops and money—to a sequence of major continental wars. This involved a quasi-permanent enlargement of that standing army whose sinister role in the public imagination of the seventies had lost nothing in the days of James II and the persecution of the Huguenots; and in addition, by the end of the Nine Years War of 1688-1697 (King William’s War in the notation of American historiography), two further massive consequences had made their way to recognition. The maritime losses of this war, undertaken in alliance with the Dutch, had made explicit certain facts of the era of the Dutch Wars now ending: that England was now a trading nation—something which Scotland desperately longed to become—and that according to the assumptions of the age, commerce was an aggressive action, an acquisition to the trading society’s self of something which might have been acquired by another, an end to which war might or might not be an appropriate means. It was a further aspect of this perception that something called national prosperity was an intelligible field of study, and that there existed an art called “political arithmetic,” a quantitative means of estimating every individual’s contribution to the political good by measuring what he put into or withdrew from the national stock.4 At a very rapid pace, an entity known as Trade entered the language of politics, and became something which no orator, pamphleteer, or theorist could afford to neglect and which, in an era of war, was intimately connected with the concepts of external relations and national power.

But the second consequence of England’s involvement in major war was perceived in terms more far-reaching still. In what has been called the “financial revolution”⁵ that began in the nineties, means were found of associating the national prosperity directly with the stability of the regime, the expanding activities of government and—most significant of these—the prosecution of war. The institutions of the new finance, of which the Bank of England and the National Debt came to be the most important, were essentially a series of devices for encouraging the large or small investor to lend capital to the state, investing in its future political stability and strengthening this by the act of investment itself, while deriving a guaranteed income from the return on the sum invested. With the aid of the invested capital, the state was able to maintain larger and more permanent armies and bureaucracies—incidentally increasing the resources at the disposal of political patronage—and as long as its affairs visibly prospered, it was able to attract further investments and conduct larger and longer wars. The era of the condottiere—the short-term military contractor—ended, his place being taken by the military administrator as one arm of the bureaucratic state. But as the volume of investment increased, two further consequences followed. The state felt able to accept more credit, and conduct greater activities, than could be paid for by the existing volume of capital, and it guaranteed the repayment of loans on the security of revenues to be collected, and investments to be made, in the future; the National Debt had been born and entailed upon posterity. It was noted that this did not save war from being paid for by a rapidly increasing land tax which, unlike those in previous generations, was efficiently collected; the state was too strong and too heavily legitimated to be defied by the nonpayment of the early Stuart period. Secondly, the volume of investment meant that the shares, tickets, or tallies entitling the possessor to a share of repayment from the public funds became marketable property, whose value rose and fell as public confidence in the state’s political, military, and financial transactions waxed and waned. The fund-holder and the stockjobber, the bull and the bear, had come upon the stage; and the figure around which they were grouped, the concept which they introduced into the language of English politics, was not Trade but Credit.

The rapidly developing style of political economy, which is the dominant mode of Augustan political thought, took shape around the varying relationships which publicists were prepared to allow between land, trade, and credit as sources not merely of public wealth, but of political stability and virtue. The stress laid upon the last-named is so great that we have to recognize that the first chapter in the history of political economy is also a further chapter in the continuing history of civic humanism; and the Augustan debate derives its Harringtonian and Machiavellian character from the circumstance that the critics of the new finance denounced it as a continuation of that alliance between patronage and militarism, corruption and the standing army, which had figured in the debate of 1675 and had already become so far a staple of political polemic that the defenders of the new order were obliged to accept many of its postulates and assumptions. Debate along these lines reaches a series of peaks during the Augustan half-century: first in the “standing army controversy” or “paper war” of approximately 1698-1702,6 in which John Toland, John Trenchard, Walter Moyle, Andrew Fletcher, and Charles Davenant wrote for the Country party and Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift for the Court; second, during the “four last years” of Queen Anne, when Swift for the Tories was opposed by the Whigs Addison and—with some changes of front—Defoe;⁷ thirdly, during the storms of the South Sea crisis, dominated in the field of journalism by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, conducting Cato’s Letters and The Independent Whig; and lastly, between 1726 and 1734, when Bolingbroke attempted to destroy Walpole by a journalistic campaign in The Craftsman, supported by most of the great writers of the age and countered by The London Journal and Lord Hervey.8 The main lines of argument in all these debates are strikingly consistent, to the point where, with Defoe in 1698 and the Walpolean writers thirty-five years later, one can see the lineaments of a “Court” theory of economics, politics, and history, constructed to meet the challenge of what has become known as the “Country” ideology. By the end of the period the way was clear for the great summations of the controversy written by Montesquieu and Hume at mid-century; and the ideological stage was not significantly altered until the era of the French Revolution.

The “paper war” of the last years of William III’s reign is also known as the “standing army controversy,”⁹ because it turned largely on the Country party’s desire to reduce the king’s English and foreign forces immediately after the peace treaty of 1697; but it also involved issues of corruption in at least three senses of the term, varying from ancient to very new. Courtiers, including both foreigners and women, were found to have received excessively large grants of Irish land; there was a recrudescent desire to exclude placemen from the House of Commons; and, most innovatory of all, there were the beginnings of what became a very widespread denunciation of the “corruption” of parliament and society by fundholders and stockjobbers, rentiers living off their share (however acquired) of the public debts. The conjunction of eulogy of the militia with jeremiads against corruption by the executive, with which we are already familiar, developed into a new analysis of the relation of war and commerce to virtue, and into a new controversy concerning the course of English and European history, which with its underlying ambiguities reveals the neo-Machiavellian character of thought about and in the new age. Its study can best be initiated by exploring the writings of Andrew Fletcher, Charles Davenant, and Daniel Defoe.

Fletcher¹⁰ was a Scot, one of the first of a long line of percipient North Britons who understood the language of English controversy better, in some respects, than the English themselves. He had been out with Monmouth in 1685, but had left Somerset hurriedly after shooting a Taunton notable in a quarrel over a horse. The impression of archaic truculence which this detail may leave is misleading; the man was a patriot ideologue of high intellectual attainments, who would have made an admirable contemporary of Patrick Henry and Richard H. Lee. In the Discourse of Government with Relation to Militias, he developed the neo-Harringtonian version of history further than anyone had yet carried it, and significantly revealed its latent ambivalences.

He argues that from A.D. 400 to 1500 the Gothic mode of government had guaranteed liberty to Europe by keeping the sword in the hands of the landholding subject. The barons had held of the kings and the vassals of the barons, and

when this was done, there was no longer any Standing Army kept on foot, but every man went to live upon his own Lands; and when the Defence of the Country required an Army, the King summoned the Barons to his Standard, who came attended with their Vassals. Thus were the Armies of Europe composed for about eleven hundred years; and this Constitution of Government put the Sword into the hands of the Subject, because the Vassals depended more immediately on the Barons than on the King, which effectually secured the freedom of those Governments. For the Barons could not make use of their Power to destroy those limited Monarchies, without destroying their own Grandeur; nor could the King invade their Privileges, having no other Forces than the Vassals of his own Demeasnes to rely upon for his support in such an Attempt.

I lay no great stress on any other Limitations of those Monarchies; nor do I think any so essential to the Liberties of the People, as that which placed the Sword in the hands of the Subject.…

I do not deny that these limited Monarchies during the greatness of the Barons, had some Defects: I know few Governments free from them. But after all, there was a Balance that kept those Governments steady, and an effectual Provision against the Encroachments of the Crown.11

By this typically Whig slurring over of the dependence of tenant upon lord, Fletcher had once more eliminated Harrington’s sharp distincticn between “ancient prudence” and “ancient constitution,” and had located the balanced commonwealth of armed freemen in the era of “modern prudence” which, with its apparatus of king, lords, and commons, Harrington had dismissed as an ill-regulated disequilibrium. Feudal tenure now became a means to balance, because it ensured an equilibrium between king and barons, and to liberty and equality, because it made the commoner-vassals contributors to that balance. Unlike Harrington’s vassal, whose land and sword were his master’s, Fletcher seems to have seen his vassal—who was after all a Scot—as intractable upon his own plot of ground, helping to keep the sword where it belonged, in the hands of the proprietors of land. The barons of 1215, or any other date, could be shown defending the principles of ancient balance, virtù and liberty, even as they defended their feudal privileges.

But this state of affairs had gone and could not be restored. “About the year 1500,” there had occurred an “Alteration of Government … in most Countries of Europe,” which had left nothing of the old constitutions but “the ancient Terms and outward Forms,” so that “the generality of all Ranks of Men are cheated by Words and Names.”12 Harrington had assigned the same dating to the end of feudal tenures, but had seen this as a liberating process, initiated by conscious action even if its author, Henry VII, had not understood the power he was setting loose. It had been essentially legal action which emancipated the vassals from military service, though broader social consequences had ensued when the lords took to lives of conspicuous expenditure at court and the liberated “industry” of the people had seized upon the abbey lands sold them by Henry VIII. To Fletcher, the process was unintended,¹³ far more broadly social in its origins and profoundly ambivalent in its consequences.

I shall deduce from their Original, the Causes, Occasions, and the Complication of those many unforeseen Accidents; which falling out much about the same time, produced so great a Change. And it will at first sight seem very strange, when I shall name the Restoration of Learning, the Invention of Printing, of the Needle and of Gunpowder, as the chief of them; things in themselves so excellent, and which, the last only excepted, might have proved of infinite Advantage to the World, if their remote Influence upon Government had been obviated by suitable Remedies. Such odd Consequences, and of such a different Nature, accompany extraordinary Inventions of any kind.14

Innovation, we observe, is retaining its dangerous and unpredictable character; but, unlike Machiavelli’s concern for the effects upon men of stripping them of a framework of custom, Fletcher’s attention is directed toward causation, toward the long-term effects of action in the complex web of human society. Of the innovations he names, the restoration of learning and the invention of printing made the diversities of culture available to previously “Gothic” Europeans, and the invention of the compass opened up a world trade. The significance of gunpowder has yet to emerge.

By this means the Luxury of Asia and America was added to that of the Antients; and all Ages, and all Countries concurred to sink Europe into an Abyss of Pleasures; which were rendred the more expensive by a perpetual Change of the Fashions in Clothes, Equipage and Furniture of Houses.

These things brought a total Alteration in the way of living, upon which all Government depends. ’Tis true, Knowledg being mightily increased, and a great Curiosity and Nicety in every thing introduced, Men imagined themselves to be gainers in all points, by changing from their frugal and military way of living, which I must confess had some mixture of Rudeness and Ignorance in it, tho not inseparable from it. But at the same time they did not consider the unspeakable Evils that are altogether inseparable from an expensive way of living.¹⁵

The danger of luxury, we soon learn, is not that it produces effeminacy of taste or even mutability of fashion, so much as that it leads to choice and consequently to specialization. The Gothic warrior had nothing much to do but till his soil, bear his arms, and assert his freedom; the refined man of the Renaissance might pursue knowledge or luxury, pleasure or fashion, and so lost interest in defending himself. If he was a lord, he got into debt and commuted his vassals’ services for rents; if he was a commoner, he was content to be a tenant instead of a vassal. The kings meanwhile found their subjects willing to pay them a revenue out of which to hire mercenaries to defend them; and the invention of gunpowder, turning wars into long and expensive sieges, intensified this process as soon as it had begun. Once armies were paid for by taxes, taxes were collected by armies and the liberties of nearly all Europe were at an end.¹⁶ But rule by professional soldiers came about only because the subject was able to exercise choice, to prefer alternatives to bearing arms himself. What he did not like, he could pay another to do for him; what he alienated as he bought this immunity, he did not find out until the step was irreversible. “Luxury,” then, is shorthand for culture, leisure, and choice; these goods carry their concomitant ill. The most Fletcher can suggest is that rudeness and ignorance are not inseparable from warrior freedom, meaning presumably that the primitive freeman was still educable; but “an expensive way of living,” in which he sells the means of freedom to buy the materials of culture, is inseparable from corruption.

Fletcher has elaborated the neo-Harringtonian perspective to the point where it exposed the most difficult of the many problems to perplex eighteenth-century social thought: the apparent incompatibility of liberty and virtue with culture, which, more than commerce itself, opened up the problem of the diversity of human satisfactions. The freeman must desire nothing more than freedom, nothing more than the public good to which he dedicated himself; once he could exchange his freedom for some other commodity, the act became no less corrupting if that other commodity were knowledge itself. The humanist stress on arms and land as the preconditions of individual civic and moral autonomy had heightened the dilemma by presenting it in the form of an irreversible historical process. Virtue, in its paradigmatic social form, was now located in a past; but the era of freedom was also the era of barbarism and superstition, and the term “Gothic” might, with excruciating ambivalence, be applied in both senses. As for commerce, it was, so to speak, the active form of culture itself: if there were many satisfactions a man might choose between them, and if he assigned priorities, postponing a future satisfaction for the sake of a present one, he was already well on the way toward effecting exchanges. There was a morality for the Aristotelian citizen, joining in the determination of priorities; but if there was a morality for the trading man, exchanging one commodity for its equivalent value in another, that morality was conspicuously not linked to the virtue of the citizen—the only secular virtue yet known to Western man—which still demanded of the individual an autonomy he could not alienate without becoming corrupt. It would be wrong to suppose that Fletcher naively desired to restore an agrarian world of self-sufficient farming warriors; he wrote at length about the undeniably urgent problems of inducing some degree of commercial prosperity in the desperate society of Scotland;17 but his history of liberty, his “discourse of government in its relation to militias,” reveals to us a condition of thought about 1700 in which a bourgeois ideology, a civic morality for market man, was ardently desired but apparently not to be found. This is why he goes on—as Toland did in his contemporaneous The Militia Reformed18—to describe a scheme of military training for all freeholders, which is essentially a means of education in civic virtue.¹⁹ Men are no longer the barons and vassals of the Gothic world; they have choice, commerce, and the opportunity of corruption. To render unnecessary the professional armies which will make corruption irreversible, they must form a militia; but this austere mode of service to the commonwealth will teach them, by actualizing it in arms, the frugality, the surrender of private satisfactions—there is even an equivalent to the militia sermons which had praised poverty in the Florence of 1528-1530²⁰—and in short the virtue, which the social order itself no longer guarantees. To set up such a militia will be legislative, educative, and a ridurre ai principii; buone leggi, buona educazione, buone arme. Education, however, has begun its long career as a perceived mode of counteracting the course of social development.

But the neo-Harringtonian version of English history was singularly liable to attack; with Brady or with Harrington himself on his desk, a critic might argue that the Gothic epoch had been one of such subjection of the commons to the lords that no balance or liberty had existed. Defoe, in his reply to Fletcher and Trenchard,²¹ argued as against the former that

about the time, when this Service by Villenage and Vassalage began to be resented by the People, and by Peace and Trade they grew rich, and the Power of the Barons being too great, frequent Commotions, Civil Wars, and Battels, were the Consequence, nay sometimes without concerning the King in the Quarrel: One Nobleman would Invade another, in which the weakest suffered most, and the poor Man’s Blood was the Price of all; the People obtain’d Priviledges of their own, and oblig’d the King and the Barons to accept of an Equilibrium, this we call a Parliament: And from this the Due Ballance, we have so much heard of is deduced. I need not lead my Reader to the Times and Circumstances of this, but this Due Ballance is the Foundation on which we now stand … and I appeal to all Men to judge if this Ballance be not a much nobler Constitution in all its Points, than the old Gothick Model of Government….22

But ’tis said, the Barons growing poor by the Luxury of the Times, and the Common People growing rich, they exchang’d their Vassalage for Leases, Rents, Fines, and the like. They did so, and so became entituled to the Service of themselves; and so overthrew the Settlement, and from hence came a House of Commons: And I hope England has reason to value the Alteration. Let them that think not reflect on the Freedoms the Commons enjoy in Poland, where the Gothick Institution remains, and they will be satisfied.²³

Liberty and balanced government were modern, not ancient, and based upon an emancipation of the commons from feudal control, dated about where Harrington had located it in time. In his verse satire of two years later, The True-Born Englishman, Defoe made the same point in language which might have been that of a Leveller fifty years before:

The great Invading Norman let us know

What Conquerors in After-Times might do.…

He gave his Legions their Eternal Station

And made them all Freeholders of the Nation.…

The Rascals thus enrich’d, he called them Lords,

To please their Upstart Pride with new-made Words,

And Doomsday-Book his Tyranny records.

And here begins the Ancient Pedigree

That so exalts our Poor Nobility:

’Tis that from some French Trooper they derive,

Who with the Norman Bastard did arrive.…

Conquest, as by the Moderns ’tis exprest,

May give a Title to the Lands possest:

But that the Longest Sword shou’d be so Civil,

To make a Frenchman English, that’s the Devil.²⁴

To Lilburne or Harrington, however, such delegitimation of the past was a prelude to a millennial restoration of Saxon liberty or ancient prudence. Defoe’s expectations are neither restorationist nor apocalyptic; he is a modern, writing to defend the Junto Whigs, the Bank of England, and the standing army. He denies the antiquity of either liberty or virtue—as his successors were to deny that the constitution had any principles to return to—in the name of a balance discovered only two hundred years previously, and that by neither reason nor revelation. “By Peace and Trade they grew rich”; it is, with Defoe no less than with Fletcher—but the value-signs have been reversed—the principle of commerce which put an end to the Gothic constitution. Defoe liked to address himself to trading men, but it is unduly naive merely to invoke the apparition of a trading bourgeoisie to provide him with an audience and motive for writing as he did. In the tract of 1698 he remarked:

I propose to direct this Discourse to the Honest well meaning English-Freeholder, who has a share in the Terra firma, and therefore is concern’d to preserve Freedom; to the Inhabitant that loves his Liberty better than his Life, and won’t sell it for Money; and this is the Man who has the most reason to fear a Standing Army, for he has something to lose; as he is most concern’d for the Safety of a Ship, who has a Cargo on her Bottom.25

The language now might be that of Ireton at Putney, or Swift and Bolingbroke extolling the “landed interest” in 1711 or 1731. The most we can permit Defoe is the clear understanding that once land ceased to be valued in services, there must be trade and a circulation of money to permit of its being valued in “leases, rents and the like”; and to make land a source of rentals is not the same as to make it a marketable commodity. What he is arguing is that when revenue replaces services, the House of Commons can play its due role in a balanced constitution by exercising the power of supply. In The True-Born Englishman he launched a devastating blow at the neo-Harringtonian cult of the militia, with the couplet (referring to William I, to whom William III had been invidiously compared):

No Parliament his Army cou’d disband;

He rais’d no Money, for he paid in Land;²⁶

and the whole of his Argument in 1698 was directed at showing that a professional army was easily controlled so long as parliament commanded the sources of its pay. But this did not of itself meet the Country objection that the very existence of a standing army corrupted parliament and lessened its ability to refuse supply, or that the power of money provided the executive with means of corruption unknown in former ages. Defoe conceded the point that the nature of war and government had changed:

England now is in sundry Circumstances, different from England formerly, with respect to the Manner of Fighting, the Circumstances of our Neighbours, and of our Selves; and there are some Reasons why a Militia are not, and perhaps I might make it out cannot be made fit for the Uses of the present Wars.27

What he denied was that there was any need for a return to the pre-commercial militia, or a precommercial morality such as Fletcher and Toland saw their militias as inculcating. But there is as yet no sign that his modernism involved a shift to any new conception of morality—only to a greater degree of liberty; and as long as that was the case, the emancipation of the commons might entail entry upon a world less morally stabilized than the Gothic world preceding it. Defoe might abuse the latter for its feudal bloodshed and disorder; but it could be defended in terms of an Aristotelian ethic of self-sufficiency and autonomy. If he could furnish no alternative ethic, the move to a commercial polity might entail the search for a new form of Machiavellian virtù, but with all the Machiavellian categories at the service of those who would argue that such a virtù must be hopelessly corrupt before it could take hold.

At this point it is appropriate to bring in the name of Locke. In the Two Treatises of Government, published if not written nine or so years before this debate, he had argued that societies formed by the simple occupation and cultivation of vacant land would be unlikely to become more than patriarchal family groups, in which little or no institutional government was required to administer the natural law.²⁸ It was the invention of money that had changed this state of affairs. “Fancy and agreement” had assigned a fictitious value to gold and silver; and these, being more durable than the consumer goods of real value to man, could be stored up, used to assign an exchange value to goods and land, and employed as the means of acquiring more than a man required for satisfaction of his natural wants²⁹ (including, it might reasonably be added, power over other men). Money, therefore, that partly fictitious and partly perdurable entity, was the precondition of societies on a larger scale than the purely patriarchal, which required exchange relations between the natural rulers of families and tribes, governments capable of dealing with problems rather more complex than those arising between Abraham and Lot, and increasingly sophisticated conceptions of the property rights which were the occasion of individuals being in society at all. From the presence of these arguments in Locke’s writings, some very far-reaching conclusions have been drawn, and vigorously opposed;30 and if we are to take him as saying that post-patriarchal government exists merely in consequence of the growth of monetary exchange, it is tempting to conclude that he intended also to argue that government in a money-based society had no more to do than to administer exchange relationships, and that the individual took part in such a government merely to see that the exchange value of his property was maintained.³¹ It might further follow that Locke intended to dismiss to a nomadic and patriarchal past that participant civic virtue which Aristotle, Machiavelli, Harrington, and Fletcher had grounded on a conception of property increasingly seen as agrarian, and to contend that the individual under government inhabited an exchange-based society in which virtue was private, consisting in relationships which were guaranteed by government but not in participation in government as a self-creating act of citizenship.

For reasons given earlier, the problem of Locke’s intentions will not be pursued here, nor shall we find much occasion to consider what Augustan readers may have made of his writings. But we have found reason to believe that the civic or participatory ideal had come to be expressed in terms of an agrarian mode of property acknowledged to exist mainly in the past; that it employed a theory of social personality in which virtue was held to be civic and was grounded on material bases which could not be bartered away without the loss of virtue itself; that it recognized a modernity which looked very like corruption; and that it knew no theory of civic or moral personality which could easily be applied to the new society. We have now to pursue the analysis initiated by the confrontation of Fletcher with Defoe, bearing in mind among the possibilities that of a “liberal” or “bourgeois”—since such are the favored terms—shift toward privatization, toward the admission that in a commercial society the individual’s relation to his res publica could not be simply civic or virtuous.

[II]

We have already seen that neither Fletcher nor Defoe operated in terms of a simple opposition between land and trade—which should warn us against expecting Augustan politics to look like a simple confrontation between gentleman and merchant—but that each indicates in opposite ways the difficulties of constructing a fully legitimized history out of the movement from the one principle to the other. The emergence of the problem of history enjoins a Machiavellian analysis, and the most ambitious neo-Machiavellian thinker of the early Augustan period was the political economist Charles Davenant.32 His writings span a period from 1695 to about 1710, during which he can be found first accepting the necessity of prosecuting the Nine Years War (then in its last phase), next taking a furious, and at times questionable, part in the “paper war” and the Country attempt to reduce the scale of war, patronage and finance,³³ and then accepting once more the inescapability of English participation in the War of the Spanish Succession. Like most writers of his day—and like the Renaissance humanists from whom they were descended—he changed positions and allegiances for reasons which may not bear very much inspection; but an intellectual scaffolding can be discovered in his thought, a language of assumptions and problems more consistent than his behavior and shared to a considerable degree by writers on both sides of the political divide. It took shape around the ambivalence of his and their attitudes toward the Machiavellian problem of war and the Augustan problem of commerce. Davenant, more than Fletcher, Toland, or (at this time) Trenchard, was engrossed in the problem of war’s ability to generate corrupting forms of finance; and while a major significance of his thought to us is that he looked beyond the problem of trade to that of credit, he did so in the context provided by war.

In 1695 and again in 1701, a starting point of his thought is the menace of universal monarchy supposedly pursued by the French king.³⁴ He argues against this threat in a way which may well recall the contentions of Florentine republicans against Milanese imperialists, or the Etruscan myth pitted against that of Rome. Universal monarchy is a threat to civil and religious liberty, because it draws all authority together into one place; and he further takes issue³⁵ with the Spanish historian Pedro Mexia, who had contended that the empire of Charles V promoted trade. Universal rulers bring all virtue under their sway, says Davenant, and then destroy it; similarly, they bring all commerce to focus upon their centers of government, and destroy it also, by war, tyranny, and depopulation.36 It is better that there should be a number of centers of religion, of liberty, of power, and of trade; the earth’s limited stock, whether of virtue or of commerce, should not be concentrated in one spot, but should be dispersed so that its possessors may nourish one another.³⁷ Commonwealths are trading societies, and it is better that there should be a plurality of trading commonwealths than that there be the single emporium of a world government.

But between these independent commonwealths and their neighbors, as there will be trade, so there will be war; most commonwealths pursue increase rather than preservation;³⁸ and the more we explore Davenant’s thought on the relations between these two, the more consciously ambivalent it becomes. In the greater part of his writings, especially those belonging to the interwar years of 1697-1702, he seems concerned to argue that war is fatal to a trading commonwealth; but the precise meaning of the term “war,” as used here, is “war conducted by means of a land army, which has to be supported by public borrowing.” Even this is admitted to have entered the world by processes which are now irreversible:

Whenever this war ceases, it will not be for want of mutual hatred in the opposite parties, nor for want of men to fight the quarrel, but that side must first give out where money is first failing.…

For war is quite changed from what it was in the time of our forefathers; when in a hasty expedition, and a pitched field, the matter was decided by courage; but now the whole art of war is in a manner reduced to money; and now-a-days, that prince, who can best find money to feed, cloath, and pay his army, not he that has the most valiant troops, is surest of success and conquest.³⁹

Machiavelli had argued at great length against this proposition, but Davenant sees no point in doing so. The reason is less his interest in the theory of battle as such than his conviction—which Machiavelli, beholding Venice from afar with an unfriendly eye, did not share—that wars are fought by trading societies which employ money to keep armies upon foot. But everything he has to say about the maintenance of land armies stresses its fatal consequences, and the reason is always that it increases the burden of public debt. The Dutch, he remarks in terms that recall Harrington, can bear this better than the English; being wholly a trading society, cramped between the sea and their enemies, they can endure to be permanently in debt to one another, and practice a frugality which makes this debt bearable.⁴⁰ The English, part trading and part landed, find that the debts contracted to maintain armies are borne largely by the landed gentry,41 and that corruption is at its worst when indebtedness is concentrated where the power of returning representatives to parliament chiefly lies;⁴² while the merchants, who need to borrow in order to maintain their profitable enterprises, find that public debt forces up the price of money and exposes them to the activities of speculators and the fluctuations of public confidence.⁴³ Bad as it is in principle that one sector of the people should be in debt to another, in England this has been managed in the worst way possible. The institution of the public funds has led to the growth of a class of professional creditors, who have both the power and the interest to maximize the conditions producing public indebtedness, maintaining the standing army in time of peace, converting London from an emporium to the whole kingdom into a separate interest to which the whole kingdom is in debt,⁴⁴ and seeking to reduce the landed gentry to such a state of dependence that parliament may soon become meaningless and impotent. Faction is the result, but the managers of credit know how to manipulate this too to their own ends; the more it injures public confidence—including the public’s willingness to trade—the more it renders government dependent upon their willingness to borrow further money and corrupt more members of parliament, and they therefore promote faction by all means in their power. In The True Picture of a Modern Whig, Davenant drew a bloodcurdling caricature of people of this kind, and deliberately set no limits to their power to destroy the constitution. By the end of the dialogue, the confederates are discussing plans to stop the exchequer and close up parliament;⁴⁵ and the point is that there is no theoretical reason why they should not do so, since they are in a fair way to dispose of all wealth and social power. Everything has become dependent upon public credit, but the public debts have become a form of movable property. Those who own and manage it may own and manage everything—including, it is beginning to appear, the social perceptions and the minds of men. For he had earlier written:

of all beings that have existence only in the minds of men, nothing is more fantastical and nice than Credit; it is never to be forced; it hangs upon opinion, it depends upon our passions of hope and fear; it comes many times unsought for, and often goes away without reason, and when once lost, is hardly to be quite recovered.

It very much resembles, and, in many instances, is near akin to that fame and reputation which men obtain by wisdom in governing state affairs, or by valour and conduct in the field. An able statesman, and a great captain, may, by some ill accident, slip, or misfortune, be in disgrace, and lose the present vogue and opinion; yet this, in time, will be regained, where there is shining worth, and a real stock of merit. In the same manner, Credit, though it may be for a while obscured, and labour under some difficulties, yet it may, in some measure, recover, where there is a safe and good foundation at the bottom.46

Davenant has entered upon sociology of knowledge; he is discussing for us the epistemology of the investing society. Credit, or opinion, is the appropriate form for the ancient faculty of experience to take where money and war have speeded up the operations of society, and men must constantly translate their evaluations of the public good into actions of investment and speculation, so that political behavior is based upon opinion concerning a future rather than memory of a past. Here, writing just after the peace of 1697, he is depicting credit working in a benign and reasonable way; there are conditions under which men can assay one another, and their common affairs, much as they really are, and then

men’s minds will become quiet and appeased; mutual convenience will lead them into a desire of helping one another. They will find, that no trading nation ever did subsist, and carry on its business by real stock; that trust and confidence in each other, are as necessary to link and hold a people together, as obedience, love, friendship, or the intercourse of speech. And when experience has taught each man how weak he is, depending only upon himself, he will be willing to help others, and call upon the assistance of his neighbours, which of course, by degrees, must set credit again afloat.⁴⁷

There are the beginnings here of a civic morality of investment and exchange, and indeed of an equation of the commercial ethic with the Christian. It is when men realize that their well-being depends upon mutual support that credit is converted into confidence, into a mutual trust and a belief in one another; they realize that they cannot stand alone, that they are members one of another, and that—in words once used to allay a great financial panic of the twentieth century—they have nothing to fear but fear itself. They leave, it might be said, a Hobbesian state of nature and enter upon a Lockean. Yet it is the independent man of virtue, secure in the self-respect that comes of enjoying his real property, who aims at “depending only upon himself” and drawing from that autonomy the strength to be a citizen. In the century following Davenant’s writings, Montesquieu and other social theorists were to conclude that Spartan, Roman, or Gothic virtue, based upon the possession of land by austerely independent individuals, was inhumanly harsh, and that it was only with the spread of commerce and the arts that men became socialized into the capacity for trust, friendship, and Christian love. Machiavelli’s antithesis between civic and Christian virtue was in fact repeated in the form of a supposed historical progression from a morality founded on real property to one founded on mobile.

But the epistemological foundations of Davenant’s new morality are terribly fragile, and he never effects the full transition. Credit “hangs upon opinion” and “depends upon our passions of hope and fear”; and this is because the objects of its knowledge are not altogether real. It is only in part our opinions of men and things which we declare and which shape our actions, for this theory presupposes a society in which gold and paper have become the symbolic medium in which we express our feelings and translate them into actions, so that at the same time they acquire a fictitious value of their own. The language in which we communicate has itself been reified and has become an object of desire, so that the knowledge and messages it conveys have been perverted and rendered less rational. And the institution of funded debt and public stocks have turned the counters of language into marketable commodities, so that the manipulators of their value—like Tom Double, the political agent and stockjobber of The True Picture of a Modern Whig—are in a position to control and falsify “the intercourse of speech.”

Davenant could envisage a credit solidly founded upon sympathy and opinion, and he had his cures for the situation in which Double flourished. England must abandon, as soon as possible, the prosecution of war by a land army, funded by a public debt; the debts must themselves be paid off and the mortgaging of future generations’ revenues brought to an end; the agents and speculators must cease to disturb the balance of the Ancient Constitution by patronage, the promotion of faction and other forms of corruption;48 and men’s confidence in one another and the commonwealth would again be on the “foundation” of a “real stock of merit,” fortified by an understanding of the true principles of trade. Given the premise that Davenant’s thought is operating upon republican and Machiavellian assumptions, it is interesting to note that England as a trading nation is plainly a Venice rather than a Rome; war on the terra firma and the employment of mercenaries are what must be avoided. If we link his attacks upon the standing army with the encomiums of Trenchard, Toland, and Fletcher upon the militia, it will follow that the function of the latter is not external war and conquest, and that it exists to preserve a civic, not an imperial virtue; the principle that the sword (and all that goes with it) must be in the hands of the subject is what is to be preserved. There was one mode of war, however, which could be presented as appropriate to England’s character as a trading commonwealth less oligarchic than Venice and so obliged—as Machiavelli had pointed out—to pursue expansion and develop a concomitant virtù. “The sea gives law to the growth of Venice, but the growth of Oceana gives law to the sea.” Harrington had been unspecific as to what kind of expansion he had in mind: possibly agrarian plantation beyond seas—and Davenant and others in the neo-Harringtonian tradition were now writing on Roman colonization and its applicability to England, Ireland, and the Americas;49 but since at least 1621, Country groups in the House of Commons had intermittently pressed for war against Spain or France conducted at sea, as opposed to war on land which cost the country too much in land taxation. Davenant has many hints of the argument which other Country and Tory pamphleteers were to develop: that war should be conducted at sea, because it injures French and Spanish trade and so promotes English, because seamen do not menace the constitution as the officers and men of the standing army do,⁵⁰ because it does not require national debt and its consequent corruptions. There was the difficulty that the navy was a service of state and that trade was falling into the hands of great joint-stock companies closely allied with the Bank, the Court, and the credit structure; but an enthusiasm for interlopers in trade and the guerre de course at sea were Country attitudes and carry Machiavellian implications.

Whether or not Davenant thought of trade and naval power as a species of expansive virtù, his attitude toward trade itself is at bottom as morally ambivalent as Machiavelli’s toward virtù, and for very similar reasons. Trade is necessary to give land a value; it is as necessary as the virtues of individual men if the commonwealth is to be maintained:

for all countries have a certain stock with which their tillage, labour, arts, and manufactures are carried on. And it is the radical moisture of the commonwealth, and if it be quite drawn away the body politic becomes consumptive, hectical, and dies at last (being subject to diseases and death itself, like human frames); and as human bodies are not to be kept alive but by receiving in of nourishment, to repair the hourly decays which time produces, so nations cannot subsist long unless they receive from time to time reliefs and refreshments from abroad, which are no way so well to be administered as by the help of a well governed and extended Traffic.51

But a little later he wrote:

Trade, without doubt, is in its nature a pernicious thing; it brings in that wealth which introduces luxury; it gives a rise to fraud and avarice, and extinguishes virtue and simplicity of manners; it depraves a people, and makes way for that corruption which never fails to end in slavery, foreign or domestic. Lycurgus, in the most perfect model of government that was ever framed, did banish it from his commonwealth. But, the posture and condition of other countries considered, it is become with us a necessary evil. We shall be continually exposed to insults and invasions, without such a naval force as is not to be had naturally but where there is an extended traffic. However, if trade cannot be made subservient to the nation’s safety, it ought to be no more encouraged here than it was in Sparta: And it can never tend to make us safe, unless it be so managed as to make us encrease in shipping and the breed of seamen.⁵²

And about the same time, in an essay entitled “That Foreign Trade is beneficial to England,” Davenant gave his history of the phenomenon.

We shall hardly be permitted to live in the way our ancestors did, though inclined to it. The power of our neighbours, both by land and by sea, is grown so formidable, that perhaps we must be for some time upon our guard, with fleets too big to be maintained merely by the natural produce and income of our country.

We must therefore have recourse to those artificial helps which industry and a well governed trade may minister. If we could so contrive it, as never to have a foreign war, we might content ourselves with less Foreign Traffic, which not only brings in the money that must pay the men, but breeds up the very men that must defend us.

Mankind subsisted by their labour, and from what the earth produced, till their corruptions had brought in fraud, avarice, and force; but when the strong began to invade the weaker, and when strength was to be maintained by policy, they built cities, disciplined men, and erected dominions; and when great numbers were thus confined to a narrower space, their necessities could not be all answered by what was near them, and at hand; so that they were compelled to seek for remoter helps, and this gave rise to what we call Trade, which, at first was only permutation of commodities.… [a passage on the origin of money follows.]

It is true, in forming very great empires, the concerns of trade seem not to have been much regarded: As force began them, so force maintained them on; and what wealth they had, came from the spoil of conquered nations: War, and its discipline, was the chief object of their thoughts, as knowing that riches always follow power, and that iron brings to it the gold and silver of other places.

Trade was first entertained, cultivated, and put into regular methods, by little states that were surrounded by neighbours, in strength much superior to them; so the original traders we read of, were the Phoenicians, Athenians, Sicilians and Rhodians; and the helps it yielded, did support those commonwealths for a long time, against very potent enemies.53

Davenant proceeds to explain how great empires swallowed up the trading republics, so that all the wealth of the world was gathered into one place—like the finite stock of virtù in Machiavelli—but is now dispersed, though again threatened by universal monarchy. It is clear, then, that trade, like virtù, is an innovative force and a disturber of the natural order—not of the second nature from which we inherit our traditionally shaped personalities, but of the natural economy of a primitive age in which each man’s wants are supplied by each man’s labor. Its origins are in a chicken-and-egg relationship with those of violence; or rather, if exchange and trade came after robbery and deceit, both stemmed from luxury—the desire to have more than one needed. The relations between trade and corruption are exceedingly complex: trade generates war, and war debt (which is ultimately fatal to trade); luxury generates both robbery/war and exchange/trade, which generates money—the use of a fictitious medium of exchange—which, when extended from the use of gold coin to that of paper credit, generates debt and consequently corruption. Commerce, then, seems radically inseparable from conflict; it is a mode of power-relationships between finite and local commonwealths, both a cause and an effect of their particularity. In generating the little commonwealths, it generates liberty and prosperity, but at the same time generates the causes of their decline.

But while Machiavellian virtù simultaneously served to define both power within and without the republic and virtue within it, trade—a modality of power without the commonwealth—makes a material but not a moral contribution to its interior existence. The natural virtues are satisfactorily expressed in terms of the primitive economy. There may be a permutative virtue in giving fairly of a surplus of something necessary to sustain life in exchange for a surplus of some other necessary commodity; but trade is here defined in terms of luxury—the desire to have more than one needs, to have something one does not need. It brings power, and in a competitive world the commonwealth may die without it; and it brings corruption—but it does not bring a virtue of its own by which corruption may be resisted. There is a virtue, Davenant repeatedly assures us, which legislators and rulers may encourage as a means against corruption, but this virtue is frugality,54 the negation of luxury—the willingness to forego having more than one needs, to live by the standards of the natural economy although in the midst of the artificial. The trader should be frugal; but he will be no more frugal because he is a trader. The trading people should be frugal if they wish to wage war without becoming corrupt; but it is too late to expect them to attain such a degree of frugality that they can do without war and trade altogether, and their prospects of evading corruption are therefore limited.

Frugality, it is notorious, was part of the so-called Protestant ethic. By its means the trader escaped the twin reproaches of avarice and prodigality, which Dante had considered derived from a lack of faith in the goodness of fortune. Denying himself more than he needed, he reinvested his surplus in the circulating common stock, to bring fresh goods to himself and others. Augustan political economics mark the moment when the trader—and, still more pressingly, the financier—was challenged to prove that he could display civic virtue in the sense that the landed man could. It was easy to visualize the latter, anxious only to improve his estate for inheritance, engaging in civic actions which related his private to the public good; much harder to ascribe this role to one constantly engaged in increasing his wealth by exchanging quantities of fictitious tokens. Frugality could appear the civic virtue of the trader; assuming the circulation of goods to be a public benefit, he displayed in frugality and reinvestment his willingness to subordinate private satisfaction to public good, of which he would be rewarded with a further share. It may very well have been the Augustan debaters who discovered, if they did not invent, the “Protestant ethic”; whether or not it was already established in men’s minds, they may have been the first to have need of it in public debate. As handled by Davenant, however, it was a morality without a material foundation in any way peculiarly its own. The trader was asked to be frugal in just the way the primeval cultivator (who had needed no asking) had been; he was asked to imitate the natural man in place of his artificial self; and he was asked to do this to limit the negative effects of his own activity. The virtue enjoined on him was not of his own making, and was only contingently peculiar to him.

[III]

The analysis of the Machiavellian economics of Davenant has left us in a position to construct a schema of the attitudes toward land, trade, and credit of the Court and Country, Whig and Tory writers of the reigns of William III, Anne, and George I. These men, it is already clear, belong in the civic humanist succession by reason of their concern with virtue as the moral as well as material foundation of social and personal life, as well as their use of Machiavelli and Harrington to furnish the categories in which it could be discussed and their rapid development of a neoclassical style in British political rhetoric. Like the humanists of the quattrocento, they were not constant in their political allegiances. Swift, Davenant, Defoe—to go no further—were found in differing company at different times of their lives; and, again as with their predecessors, these changes of front are best explained not by attempting to assess questions of commitment and consistency, venality and ambition, but by recognizing that they were employing a highly ambivalent rhetoric, replete with alternatives, conflicts, and confusions, of which they were very well aware and in which they were to some extent entrapped. An anatomy of the great debate as between the “landed” and “monied” interests, conducted by the journalists and publicists of Anne’s reign, reveals that there were no pure dogmas or simple antitheses, and few assumptions that were not shared, and employed to differing purposes, by the writers on either side.

In the first place, though Country and Tory writers, from Fletcher to Bolingbroke, praised land as the basis of independent and armigerous virtue, and the Harley-St. John Tory party could make a good claim to be the party of the landed interest, no Court or Whig writer, neither Defoe nor Addison, ever dreamed of denying that land was substantially what its partisans said it was. They could indeed argue that land was of no value, even in rendering its proprietor independent, without money and trade, and there was a line of rhetoric which suggested that a society with no wealth but its land—Gothic England, contemporary Poland, or the Scottish Highlands—would lack both liberty (the tenants being subject to their lords) and culture. In contemporary social criticism, these strictures could be applied to the stay-at-home squire and his High Church politics, ignoring the fact that there was a Whig as well as a Tory style available to the discontented Country: Addison indicates how Sir Roger de Coverley of the Spectator can degenerate into the Foxhunter of the Freeholder,55 and he in turn is lineal ancestor to Fielding’s Squire Western. But in Tom Jones a balance is carefully maintained between Western, the foxhunting booby, and Allworthy, the honorable independent; the figure of the country gentleman remains bi-fronted, and it took Macaulay to accept Western as the portrait of a class.⁵⁶ No Augustan saw much need to do so, though there were doubtless plenty of Westerns to be met with.

If the agrarian values of independence and virtue remain a constant in this period’s social perceptions, we already know that the argument presenting land as dependent upon trade—not to mention credit—was accepted by Fletcher and Davenant, even as it was pressed by Defoe; and the same is true when we come to oppose Swift to Defoe and Addison. The neo-Harringtonians conceded that trade and bullion had come into the world and irrevocably modified the social character of land; they were merely, as we have seen, ambivalent in their feelings as to how far this change had introduced corruption, and how far corruption could ever be checked. Corruption, however, took the form of credit, accompanied by the diabolic trinity of stockjobbing, faction, and standing army; and when Swift, and later Bolingbroke, set up grand antitheses between the “landed” and “monied” interests, they invariably included among their denunciations of Whig war and Whig finance the charge that these had contributed to the neglect and ruin of trade, and they almost invariably defined the “monied interest” in terms designed to include financiers while excluding merchants.⁵⁷ Trade, like land, was a constant value, until it had to be affirmed or denied that trade entailed money and money credit;58 the Whigs, for obvious tactical reasons, sought to pillory the Tories as enemies of trade, to depict virtuous and benevolent merchants—like Sir Andrew Freeport of the Spectator—as emblems of their cause, and to argue that trade entailed credit in a similarly benignant form, all of which things they upheld. But trade, while exposed to theoretical criticisms like those of Davenant, was immune from polemical assault. The Augustan debate did not oppose agrarian to entrepreneurial interests, the manor to the market, and cannot be said to have arisen from a crude awareness of collisions going on between them.

As for credit, the same pattern of partly shared ambivalences can be detected in this most crucial case of all. No writer of either party presumed to defend stockjobbing, the speculative manipulation of the market values of shares in the public debt; it was universally agreed to be evil, and the sole difference on this score between the party publicists of Anne’s reign was that Swift, like Davenant before him, attacked the professional creditors as such—this was the true meaning of his term “the monied interest”—as constantly striving to promote, through war, the extent of the public debt and its value to them,⁵⁹ while Defoe hit back by accusing high churchmen and crypto-Jacobites of a design to lower the public credit through alarmism and mob violence, for ends of their own, partly superstitious and partly speculative.⁶⁰ Tories attacked bulls, in short, and Whigs bears. The crucial issue was not whether stockjobbing, but whether paper credit was more than a necessary evil; and here too straightforward confrontations are hard to find. Defoe argued at length that just as land could not thrive without trade, so trade could not thrive without money, money without credit, or gold without paper;61 he had no doubt the more coherent case, but when his opponents retorted by continued philippics against stockjobbing, he could not deny that stockjobbing was corruption.⁶² They, for their part, when asserting that funds were raised from the income upon lands,⁶³ or that public debts were ruinous to trade, plainly admitted the interdependence of land, trade and credit; and generally speaking, it is observable that while the National Debt usually is, the Bank of England usually is not the object of direct Country and Tory attacks. John Toland, editing and republishing the works of Harrington in 1699-1700—itself an ambivalent action, considering the gulf between Harringtonian and neo-Harringtonian views of history—claimed in later years that he had done so as a service to the Country leader Robert Harley;⁶⁴ but the edition is dedicated to the Lord Mayor, sheriffs, aldermen and common council of the City of London, and it is explicitly stated that the Bank of England perfectly exemplifies Harrington’s system of government.⁶⁵ No doubt the obvious explanation is that Toland was hedging his political bets;⁶⁶ but for him to do so at all, it must have been the case that, even in 1700, the relation between Bank and Country was not one of simple hostility. What emerges from every point in the analysis is that, even in the years of most embittered factional conflict, there were no simple antitheses between land and trade, or even land and credit; and that we are not invited to think in terms of a politics of crudely distinguished interest groups, but of politicians, publicists, and their followings maneuvering in a world of common perceptions and symbols and seeking to interpret it for their competitive advantage by means of a common value system. It is evident also that they were conceptualizing their common experience of a new politics and economics in ways which left them acutely aware that change was going on in both the material and the moral world, and that their means of evaluating such changes led to a profound consciousness of moral ambiguity.

Augustan neo-Machiavellism can be characterized in the following way. The Englishman had begun to envisage himself as civic individual through the use of Aristotelian and civic humanist categories, which required among other things that there be a material foundation, the equivalent of Aristotle’s oikos, for his independence, leisure and virtue. The nature of this equivalent had been described for him, first by Machiavelli in terms of arms, second by Harrington in terms of property; and the realities of the seventeenth-century social structure had established as paradigmatic the image of the freeholder, founded upon real or landed property which was inheritable rather than marketable, was protected by the ancient sanctions of the common law, and brought with it membership in the related structures of the militia and the parliamentary electorate, thus guaranteeing civic virtue. The advent from about 1675 of parliamentary patronage, a professional army, and a rentier class maintaining the two foregoing for its own profit, posed a threat of corruption to the whole edifice, including the balance between estates or powers of which the Ancient Constitution was now held to consist, pervading it with new social types whose economic substance if not property—pensions, offices, credit, funds—defined them as dependent on the executive power and hence incapable of virtue. All this, however, came to be seen during the Nine Years War and its sequel as inescapably based upon the fact that England was now a war-making power, requiring long-service soldiers and long-term debts, and that involvement in foreign war was in one way or another interconnected with the conduct of an extensive foreign trade.

The problem of trade, however—which Harrington had perceived as of altogether secondary importance in the politics of virtue—was, in one crucial sequence of Augustan thought, the last to be perceived among the causes of the new corruption. There was a dimension of this dilemma in which a threat was seen to be posed to the epistemological foundation of the world of real property. It will be recalled that Locke, defining money as crucial to the transition from natural to political economy, had remarked that “fancy and agreement” were what had originally assigned a value to gold and silver for purposes of exchange. Once it was admitted, then—as in the neo-Harringtonian version of English history it was admitted on both sides of the political fence—that land, which had been valued for the services performed by tenants, was now valued for the rents they paid, it must follow that the real property which defined the citizen to himself was itself defined by a blend of fictions, namely fantasy and convention; so that he was doomed to inhabit a world more unstable in its epistemological foundations than Plato’s cave. Locke, however, just as he had anchored the fragility of consent in the solid reality of inherited land, had countered the fantastic character of precious metals by alluding to their durability; they could be laid up in the earth and not corrode. It might remain true, for most gentle readers, that the best foundation for personality was still land; it passed from generation to generation by inheritance, carrying with it arms that might be hung up on the wall till needed. Goods possessing a real value to men might pass from hand to hand by exchange, and there was the objection to mobile property as a foundation for civic personality, that what had come might go in the same way; but the difference between real and mobile property was not yet that the latter was unreal. Money, the symbolic representation of value, was in part unreal; but its ability to outlast the things which it symbolized made it still a worthy medium for human existence. Locke—who helped recoin English money in 1696 and was one of the first stockholders of the Bank of England—could argue in 1691 that a man had a property in money he had lent the state in expectation of profit, without compromising the principle that property was what established civilized conditions among men.67

It is not clear that Locke meant to attack the neo-Harringtonian critics of society, and there is little sign that they felt the need to assail him. Within ten years of the Revolution, however, the subversion of real by mobile property had entered a phase in which reality was seen as endangered by fiction and fantasy. We have already studied that passage in which Davenant confesses that the ultimate determinant of national prosperity is now credit, which “has existence only in the minds of men,” than which “nothing is more fantastical and nice,” which “hangs upon opinion and depends upon our passions,” which “comes unsought for and goes away without reason.”⁶⁸ He is alluding to the perceived truth that in an economy dependent upon public finance, everything—including the value of land itself—depends upon the rate at which capital can be got; he is saying that this in turn depends upon men’s confidence in one another, and that this again, while in the long run it depends upon their perception of moral and material realities, is in the short run determined by opinion and passion, hope and fear, which render it peculiarly exposed to manipulation by corrupt speculators in the paper tokens to which it has been reduced. Paper, while produced by the same forces and serving the same functions as gold, is less durable in its physical form and therefore infinitely more liable to subjectivity. There is a danger that all men, and all sublunary things, will now become things of paper, which is worse even than to become things of gold.

Credit, to observers of the new economics, symbolized and made actual the power of opinion, passion, and fantasy in human affairs, where the perception of land (until it too was completely eroded by speculation) might still appear the perception of real property and human relations as they really and naturally were. The personification of Credit as an inconstant female figure, it is startling to discover, is a device of Whig rather than Tory writers, and in particular of Defoe and Addison at the time when they were undergoing the assaults which Swift, in the Examiner, had launched against all forms of property except land as “only what is transient or imaginary.”69 Personified Credit appears in Defoe’s Review as early as 1706, and in no very sedate shape:

Money has a younger Sister, a very useful and officious Servant in Trade, which in the absence of her senior Relation, but with her Consent, and on the Supposition of her Confederacy, is very assistant to her; frequently supplies her place for a Time, answers all the Ends of Trade perfectly, and to all Intents and Purposes, as well as Money herself; only with one Proviso, That her Sister constantly and punctually relieves her, keeps Time with her, and preserves her good Humour: but if she be never so little disappointed, she grows sullen, sick, and ill-natur’d, and will be gone for a great while together: Her Name in our Language is call’d CREDIT, in some Countries Honour, and in others, I know not what.

This is a coy Lass, and wonderful chary of her self; yet a most necessary, useful, industrious Creature: she has some Qualification so peculiar, and is so very nice in her Conduct, that a World of good People lose her Favour, before they well know her Name; others are courting her all their days to no purpose, and can never come into her Books.

If once she be disoblig’d, she’s the most difficult to be Friends again with us, of anything in the World; and yet she will court those most, that have no occasion for her; and will stand at their Doors neglected and ill-us’d, scorn’d, and rejected, like a Beggar, and never leave them: But let such have a Care of themselves, and be sure they never come to want her; for, if they do, they may depend upon it, she will pay them home, and never be reconcil’d to them, but upon a World of Entreaties, and the severe Penance of some years Prosperity.

’Tis a strange thing to think, how absolute this Lady is; how despotickly she governs all her Actions: If you court her, you lose her, or must buy her at unreasonable Rates; and if you do, she is always jealous of you, and Suspicious; and if you don’t discharge her to a Title of your Agreement, she is gone, and perhaps may never come again as long as you live; and if she does, ’tis with long Entreaty and abundance of Difficulty.70

The student of Renaissance humanism has no hesitation whatever in identifying the rhetoric of this passage. Defoe is describing Credit in precisely the idiom employed by Machiavelli to describe fortuna and occasione, and we may also appropriately recall that fantasia of whose supremacy Giovanni Cavalcanti had been convinced by the triumph of manipulative politics at Florence a hundred years earlier still.⁷¹ Like all these goddesses, Credit typifies the instability of secular things, brought about by the interactions of particular human wills, appetites and passions, and it comes as no surprise to find other passages written in 1706, in which she is shown operating malignantly and irrationally.

Some give Men no Rest till they are in their Debt, and then give them no Rest till they are out again; some will credit no body, and some again are for crediting every body; some get Credit till they can pay nothing, and some break tho’ they could pay all. No Nation in the World can show such mad Doings in Trade, as we do.

Debtors abuse Creditors, and Creditors starve and murther their Debtors; Compassion flies from human Nature in the Course of universal Commerce; and Englishmen, who in all other Cases are Men of Generosity, Tenderness, and more than common Compassion, are to their Debtors meer Lunaticks, Mad-men and Tyrants.⁷²

Is it a Mystery, that Nations should grow rich by War? that England can lose so many Ships by pyrating, and yet encrease? Why is War a greater Mystery than Trade, and why should Trade itself be more mysterious than in [sic] War? Why do East India Company’s Stock rise, when Ships are taken? Mine Adventures raise Annuities, when Funds fall; lose their Vein of Oar in the Mine, and yet find it in the Shares; let no Man wonder at these Paradoxes, since such strange things are practised every Day among us?

If any Man requires an Answer to such things as these, they may find it in this Ejaculation—Great is the Power of Imagination!

Trade is a Mystery, which will never be compleatly discover’d or understood; it has its Critical Junctures and Seasons, when acted by no visible Causes, it suffers Convulsion Fitts, hysterical Disorders, and most unaccountable Emotions—Sometimes it is acted by the evil Spirit of general Vogue, and like a meer Possession ’tis hurry’d out of all common Measures; today it obeys the Course of things, and submits to Causes and Consequences; tomorrow it suffers Violence from the Storms and Vapours of Human Fancy, operated by exotick Projects, and then all runs counter, the Motions are excentrick, unnatural and unaccountable—A Sort of Lunacy in Trade attends all its Circumstances, and no Man can give a rational Account of it.73

But the unbridled power of fantasy, which to the Whig and promoter of trade Defoe here seems the main importation of early capitalism into human affairs, is not simply the wheel of fortune running eccentrically about its unmoving axis; as he very well knows, it is part of a huge new force in human affairs, creating new modes of war and prosperity, a new balance of power in Europe, a new conquest of the planet. In this respect Credit resembled less fortuna than virtù, the innovative conquering force which, in the most dynamic moments of Machiavelli’s vision, created the disorder, symbolized as fortuna, which it then set out to dominate by means so far irrational and amoral that they could be seen as part of the anarchy they pretended to cure. It is arguable that not since Machiavelli himself have we met with language as evocative of his innermost ways of thinking as that of Davenant and Defoe.

But if Machiavelli may have supplied the language which Defoe found appropriate for depicting volcanic and irrational social innovation, he had at the same time supplied by way of Harrington—and in a form recognizable to contemporaries—the language and parameters by which what Credit was doing could be denounced as corruption. In 1710 Defoe, who by the next year would be facing fire from Swift’s Examiner, had to find means of depicting Credit as a stabilizing, virtuous, and intelligent agency; and here she appears as the daughter of Probity and Prudence, as volatile and temperamental as ever, but capable of recognizing what Davenant had called “the stock of real merit.” Among her characteristics is an extreme timorousness; she is thrown into fits at the mere sight of a Sacheverell mob and a panic among the Whigs is all but fatal to her.⁷⁴ Only as the public peace is restored and the public nerve is recovered, does she begin to revive, and Defoe is at pains to show that she is a public being, who can exist only where men have confidence in one another and in the kingdom. This confidence—the substance of which Credit is the volatile reflection—can only be publicly expressed.

The Diseases of Credit are as peculiar to Parliaments, as the Disease call’d the Evil, is to the Sovereign; none can cure them but themselves—The Royal Touch has no Healing Virtue in it for this Distemper; Queen and Parliament United may do it, but neither by themselves can.

Credit was not so short-sighted a Politician, as not to know this—The Thing is certain, Parliaments are the Foundation of our Funds; the Honour and Justice of Parliaments in preserving the Publick on one Hand, and a firm adherence to the great Principle of making good former Engagements, and supplying the Deficiency of Parliamentary Security, on the other, these are the great Channels of Credit.… Credit is not dependant on the Person of the Sovereign, upon a Ministry, or upon this or that Management; but upon the Honour of the Publick Administration in General, and the Justice of Parliaments in Particular, in keeping whole the Interest of those that have ventured their Estates upon the Publick Faith—Nor must any Intervention of Parties be of Notice in this Case—For if one Party being uppermost shall refuse to make good the Deficiencies of the Ministry that went before them, because another Party then had the Management, Parliamentary Credit would not be worth a Farthing.…

Credit is too wary, too Coy a Lady to stay with any People upon such mean Conditions; if you will entertain this Virgin, you must act upon the nice Principles of Honour, and Justice; you must preserve Sacred all the Foundations, and build regular Structures upon them; you must answer all Demands, with a respect to the Solemnity, and Value of the Engagement; with respect to Justice, and Honour; and without any respect to Parties—If this is not observ’d, Credit will not come; No, tho’ the Queen should call; tho’ the Parliament shou’d call, or tho’ the whole Nation should call.75

Addison took up the theme in number 3 of the Spectator. Credit appears seated in the Bank, beneath the emblems of the Ancient Constitution and the Revolution Settlement, and surrounded by heaps of gold and bags of money.

She appeared indeed infinitely timorous in all her Behaviour; And, whether it was from the Delicacy of her Constitution, or that she was troubled with Vapours, as I was afterwards told by one who I found was none of her Well-wishers, she changed Colour, and startled at everything she heard. She was likewise (as I afterwards found) a greater Valetudinarian than any I had ever met with, even in her own Sex, and subject to such Momentary Consumptions, that in the twinkling of an Eye, she would fall away from the most florid Complexion, and the most healthful State of Body, and wither into a Skeleton. Her Recoveries were often as sudden as her Decays, insomuch that she would revive in a Moment out of a wasting Distemper, into a Habit of the highest Health and Vigour.76

When the spirits of popery, tyranny, and republicanism appear before her, Credit collapses; the moneybags become filled with wind, and the gold is transformed into piles of paper and notched tallies; but with the entrance of the spirits of liberty, moderation, and the Protestant succession, all is restored.

Credit is now being translated into virtue, in the entirely moral and societal sense of that word. The precondition of her health is the health of all society and the practice of all the moral activities which society entails; and she is being endowed with a faculty of perception sufficient to inform her whether these conditions are being met. Show her real merit and real goods, and the goods which she returns to you will be real also. The wealth created by Credit is described in terms of real bullion, and it is characteristic of Addison that he depicted the Royal Exchange not as a place of dealing in stocks and funds, but as a concourse of solid merchants exchanging real commodities through the medium of money.⁷⁷ The ideological thrust was constantly toward the absorption of stockjobber into merchant: the rentier, who frightened social theorists, into the entrepreneur, who did not. Virtue was now the cognition of social, moral and commercial reality, and everything possible had been done to eliminate the element of fantasy and fiction which had seemed so subversive of property and personality.

But the restoration of virtue was subject to a single sharp limitation, one of singular relevance to the epistemological structure of this book. Imagination—the subversive, creative, and destructive power depicted in the boomtime of 1706—is replaced in the Whig literature of 1710-1711 by nothing more than opinion; in Locke’s terminology, the emphasis is switched from “fancy” to “agreement.” The latter, of course, is social where the former is arbitrary and egocentric, and this makes it more rational and virtuous. But the rationality is only that of opinion and experience; and none of the rhetoric about the transformation of Credit into confidence by supplying her judgment with real and concrete data serves to eliminate the volatility with which she oscillates between the extremes of hope and fear. Opinion, it was common form to assert, was the slave of these two passions; and in the case of Credit, not only were the data on which opinion was formed at least partly imaginary, but even those well founded in concrete reality figured to the imagination—in which opinion was shaped—as features of a mobile, somewhat Hobbesian, universe in which every object was potentially a source of either profit or loss, a subject of both hope and fear.

Hobbes had laid it down that the observation of covenants—to be exact, the establishment of a law of nature that covenants must be observed—was the only cure for the insecurity produced by the fears and fantasies of men, but had left it uncertain just how fearful and fantastic man arrived at the discovery of this law. Defoe and Addison, operating in a speculative society where the performance of one commercial covenant was the occasion—as with Machiavelli’s “innovation”—of the immediate embarking upon another, had greater need still to show how covenant might keep pace with fantasy but even greater difficulty in doing so; in their world reason was indeed the slave of the passions.

Nor was Credit a mere observer and reflector of this universe; she helped to shape it. As her hopes and fears overreacted to every stimulus, the objects concerning which she formed them gained or lost both value and reality; the universe of commerce and investment was, inescapably, to some degree fantastic and nonrational. Given all the resources of a virtuous society, Credit could coordinate them on a greater scale than ever before in history; but she contributed nothing beyond fantasy, opinion, and passion to making society virtuous in the first place. Virtue must involve the cognition of things as they really were; the power of Credit was irredeemably subjective and it would take all the authority of society to prevent her from breaking loose to submerge the world in a flood of fantasy. It seems possible that she is part of Pope’s Great Anarch.

At this point, much of the conventional wisdom in modern historiography of social thought encourages us to take up the theme of a labor theory of value. If Locke’s experimenting with such a theory had been intended or understood as a contribution to the Augustan debate, it might indeed have served as the powerful instrument of reification which Marx was to declare it had been. If men created by their labor the values of the goods they exchanged, the reality of a world of commodity and commerce would be assured; and it is conceivable that Adam Smith, three generations later, was engaged in such a venture of validation. But until more is known of the history of labor theory during the eighteenth century, we shall not have the evidence for asserting that Locke was used in the way described. Defoe and Addison do not seem to have reified the world of speculation and exchange by alluding to the labor that gave it value, and the substitution of homo faber for homo politicus was not effected. They sought instead to validate the commercial world by appeal to conceptions of public virtue, but found themselves confronted by the paradigm of a citizen whose virtue did not rest upon a capacity for exchange.

From this point there were two directions in which the Augustan mind might go. It might assert that the foundations of government were, as they had always been, in virtue, which presupposed both an individual capable of ruling and knowing himself, and a social structure which he could know clearly enough to rule his own part in it. The appropriate material foundation for this was land: real property cognizable as stable enough to link successive generations in social relationships belonging to, or founded in, the order of nature. Such a government would tend to be a commonwealth (with monarch) of independent proprietors with a balanced and ancient constitution, fortified by immemorial customs which helped keep the parts independent and in place; it would be patriotic in defense, but would avoid war and empire. But the ambivalences of the neo-Harringtonian posture reveal that those who took this direction could no longer present history in terms of an uninterrupted continuity of values. Change had occurred; they were looking to a past, and seeking to defend virtue against innovative forces, symbolized as trading empire,78 standing armies, and credit. The second stood for specialization and the alienation of one’s capacities; the last for fantasy, fiction, and social madness, the menace of a false consciousness which would engulf men in a sort of political Dunciad; both stood for corruption, and minds of this persuasion shared to the full the humanist tendency to see corruption as irreversible. Their attitude toward change was therefore negative, but they recognized it even as they repudiated it. Their thought was Machiavellian in its recognition that society was being cut loose from natural order, in its definition of the natural order that was being left behind, and in its affirmation that there were basic virtues, ordini and principii, to which a return might be made by means of moral legislation. When they set up frugality, the militia, or the independence of the parts of the balanced constitution, as ideals to which a patriot parliament or a patriot king might bring about a return by means of legislation or educative example, they revealed their acceptance of a disjunction between the moral and material components of society, and between value and history.79 They were conceding that social change was no longer guaranteeing virtue, but claiming that virtue might be reaffirmed independently of social conditions and might even change them.

The alternative was to admit that government was an affair of managing the passions. If money and credit had indeed dissolved the social frame into a shifting mobility of objects that were desired and fictions that were fantasized about, then passion, opinion, and imagination were indeed the motors of human behavior and the sources of human cognition. It is clear, however, from what we have seen that this was strong meat even for the tough-minded Defoe; he busied himself, especially when challenged by Swift, to show how opinion and passion might be grounded upon experience rather than imagination, and become the means of recognizing the real goods of society and the real sociability of men. As we saw, however, this did not eliminate the hysterical volatility of Credit, and all the resources of social stability must be mobilized by crown, parliament, and public, to satisfy the hypersensitive nervous system with which society was now endowed and to control the impulses of human hope and fear. So mobile a human universe, moreover, was unlikely to contain institutional orderings of values, located in a past to which return might be made; an eternal morality there was, but it consisted in the virtues of sociability themselves and not in any set of legislative constructs by which virtue was guaranteed.

The Court Whig version of history, therefore, was not directly legitimatory; it agreed with that of the neo-Harringtonians in finding a society of agrarian warriors in the past, but denied both that this could be restored and that it had embodied principles which could be reasserted in the present. The corresponding version of politics, as we shall see in a further section, denies that there is a formulaically balanced constitution whose principles are fundamental to government. For this to be so there must be a classically cognizable history and a classically cognizable society, neither of which is to be expected in a universe of mobile credit and expectation, concerning which and in which there can only be opinion and passion. The government of the Court Whigs reigns over a mobile society and has sovereign managerial powers, if only because there are no cognizable principles to which its authority can be reduced. It exists in a history of change and flux, and must pragmatically do what must be done by operating upon human passions in the ways demanded by the moment. Man remaining sociable—except when driven lunatic by cupidity and imagination—there are real virtues, real passions of sympathy and honesty, to secure the edifice of government in an actual moral universe. But the question is always pragmatic: is credit in harmony with confidence, are men’s opinions, hopes, and fears concerning each other operating to stabilize society and increase prosperity? Government’s business—the voice of Guicciardini’s Bernardo distantly assures us—is to act so that this happens, not to be constantly relegislating some formalized framework in which alone, it is assumed, virtue can flourish. And if there is no such framework, the individual as zōon politikon cannot be forever formally reasserting his own civic being, or renewing its principles. His business is to get on with his social life, practice its virtues, and make his contribution to the credit and confidence which men repose in one another;80 but his world will be primarily conventional and subjective, and only experience (and the state of the market) will tell him how far his opinions concerning reality are founded upon truth. We have perhaps reached the point of defining that “privatization” which modern historians are fond of detecting in the philosophies of commercial society.

This analysis of the language of Augustan social awareness has revealed it to be Machiavellian in a number of ways, which we could never have found it to be had we based the analysis on an explanation of Locke. We have found that Machiavellian and Harringtonian paradigms were exploited by late seventeenth-century minds in setting up an image of a free and uncorrupt society, and that something close to the Machiavellian vocabulary of virtù and fortuna was employed to express a sense of innovation, loss of legitimacy, and flux at the rapid movement of social change away from that ideal. We have found that a new version of the classical theory of corruption was necessitated by an awareness of the growing relations between government, war, and finance, and that mercantilist warfare caused a revival of interest in the external relationships of commonwealths with other commonwealths and with empires. We have found that it was through the image of the rentier, the officer, and the speculator in public funds, not through that of the merchant or dealer upon a market, that capitalism imparted its first shock and became involved in its first major controversy in the history of English-language political theory. We have found that a “bourgeois ideology,” a paradigm for capitalist man as zōon politikon, was immensely hampered in its development by the omnipresence of Aristotelian and civic humanist values which virtually defined rentier and entrepreneur as corrupt, and that if indeed capitalist thought ended by privatizing the individual, this may have been because it was unable to find an appropriate way of presenting him as citizen. “Bourgeois ideology,” which old-fashioned Marxism depicted as appearing with historic inevitability, had, it seems, to wage a struggle for existence and may never have fully won it.

Finally, the conflict between real and mobile property, seen by Augustans as the material foundations of social existence, proved to entail a conflict—or more properly, an ambivalence—between modes of social epistemology; the cognition of society through money and credit being unequivocally presented by all concerned in terms of opinion and passion, fantasy and false consciousness. The deep concern felt by eighteenth-century philosophers with the relations between reason and the passions would seem to have something to do with the conflict between the landed and monied interests; but it may be worth emphasizing that this conclusion has not been arrived at through formal or informal Marxist analysis. A Marxist would probably assert that the conflict between real and mobile property is a sole and sufficient explanation of the philosophers’ concern with reason and passion, but no need has been found to make that assertion here. It is normal Marxist procedure to arrive at connections between social perception and property relations through a process of “demystification,” but that too has not been necessary; Davenant and Defoe were thoroughly and explicitly aware of what they meant to say. Rather than performing an exercise in Marxist analysis, it would seem, we have been studying the historical beginnings of the sort of thought found in Marx. The Augustan journalists and critics were the first intellectuals on record to express an entirely secular awareness of social and economic changes going on in their society, and to say specifically that these changes affected both their values and their modes of perceiving social reality. They used largely Machiavellian paradigms to articulate and express this awareness.

1 This conclusion emerges from a study of the overall character of the State Tracts … on occasion of the Late Revolution (see above, ch. XII, n. 52), 1 (1705). There is one neo-Harringtonian analysis of the fall of James II: Some Remarks upon Government, and Particularly upon the Establishment of the English Monarchy, Relating to this Present Juncture, signed N. T. (pp. 149-62); its tone is consciously extra-moral and “Machiavellian.”

² John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge University Press, 1969), and “The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century,” in John W. Yolton (ed.), John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 45-80.

³ See Isaac F. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 61-63.

⁴ The founder of this art was held to be Sir William Petty. See E. Strauss, Sir William Petty: Portrait of a Genius (London: The Bodley Head, 1954), and William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1965).

⁵ P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967); Dennis Rubini, “Politics and the Battle for the Banks, 1688-1697,” English Historical Review 85 (1970), 693-714.

⁶ See Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 103-105; Frank H. Ellis, introduction to his edition of Swift, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967); W. T. Laprade, Public Opinion and Politics in Eighteenth-Century England to the Fall of Walpole (New York: Macmillan, 1936).

⁷ Michael Foot, The Pen and the Sword (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1957); Richard I. Cook, Jonathan Swift as a Tory Pamphleteer (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1967); James O. Richards, Party Propaganda under Queen Anne: the General Elections of 1702-13 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972).

⁸ Kramnick, op.cit.

⁹ Lois F. Schwoerer, “The Literature of the Standing Army Controversy,” Huntington Library Quarterly 28, no. 3 (1964-65), 187-212; Dennis Rubini, Court and Country, 1688-1702 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967).

¹⁰ Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 9-10, 180-84. His Political Works were published in 1732 and repeatedly thereafter. See also Lord Buchan, Essays on the Lives and Writings of Fletcher of Saltoun and the Poet Thomson (London, 1792).

¹¹ A Discourse of Government with Relation to Militias (Edinburgh, 1698), pp. 7-9.

¹² Discourse, p. 5.

¹³ Discourse, p. 6: “And ’tis worth observation, that tho this Change was fatal to their Liberty, yet it was not introduced by the Contrivance of ill-designing Men; nor were the mischievous Consequences perceived, unless perhaps by a few wise Men, who, if they saw it, wanted Power to prevent it.”

¹⁴ Discourse, pp. 9-10.

¹⁵ Discourse, pp. 12-13.

¹⁶ Discourse, pp. 13-15.

¹⁷ See the “First” and “Second Discourses on the Affairs of Scotland” in his Political Works.

¹⁸ State Tracts, 11, 594-614.

¹⁹ Discourse, pp. 50-62.

²⁰ Discourse, p. 54. These are to be delivered by members of the militia itself, churchmen being excluded from the camp. Cf. p. 52: “Their Drink should be Water, sometimes tempered with a proportion of Brandy, and at other times with Vinegar.”

²¹ An Argument Shewing that a Standing Army, with Consent of Parliament, Is Not Inconsistent with a Free Government (1698); reprinted in J. T. Boulton (ed.), Daniel Defoe (New York: Schocken Books, 1965). This was in answer to John Trenchard and Walter Moyle, An Argument Shewing that a Standing Army Is Inconsistent with a Free Government, and Absolutely Destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy (1697).

²² Boulton, pp. 44-45.

²³ Boulton, p. 45.

²⁴ The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr (1701), lines 195-96, 205-206, 209-15, 229-32 (Boulton, pp. 59-60).

²⁵ Boulton, pp. 37-38.

²⁶ Lines 203-204 (Boulton, p. 60).

²⁷ Boulton, p. 38.

²⁸ Second Treatise, #36-8; Laslett, ed. (Cambridge), pp. 334-38.

²⁹ #46-50; Laslett, pp. 342-44. “Fancy and agreement” is on p. 342; see also #37, pp. 335-36.

³⁰ Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, ch. V; Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, chs. 15-20.

³¹ An interpretation in which the schools of Marx, Strauss, and Voegelin concur.

³² The only study of his career seems to be that of D. Weddell, “Charles Davenant (1656-1714)—a Biographical Sketch,” Economic History Review, ser. 2, vol. 11 (1958-59), pp. 279-88. See also D.N.B.

³³ See Ellis, op.cit., n. 6.

³⁴ Sir Charles Whitworth, ed., The Political and Commercial Works of … Charles D’Avenant … (London, 1771), vol. 1: “An Essay upon Ways and Means” (written in 1695), pp. 4-10; vol. IV, “An Essay upon Universal Monarchy” (1701), pp. 1-42.

³⁵ Political and Commercial Works, IV, 29-37.

³⁶ Works, IV, 33-34, 40-41.

³⁷ Works, I, 348-49; IV, 36-39.

³⁸ Works, IV, 4-5.

³⁹ Works, I, 15-16.

⁴⁰ Works, I, 67, 142, 253-55 (misnumbered), 390-91.

⁴¹ Works, I, 61, 77, 269, 276; 11, pp. 296-97.

⁴² Works, I, 79.

⁴³ Works, I, 155-56, 268-69; III, p. 329.

⁴⁴ Works, IV, 217-18.

⁴⁵ Works, IV, 127-80, 183-266. The dialogue is in two parts.

⁴⁶ Works, I, 151 (“Discourses on the Public Revenues,” 1698).

⁴⁷ Works, I, 152.

⁴⁸ The “Discourse upon Grants and Resumptions” (1699), in Works, III, 1-298, was Davenant’s major essay upon this theme. For its impact, see Ellis, pp. 16-27.

⁴⁹ Works, II, 1-76 (“On the Plantation Trade”); Moyle, Essay on the Roman Government, in Robbins, Two Republican Tracts. See her introduction, pp. 26-27, and “The Excellent Use of Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., vol. 23, no. 4 (1966), pp. 620-26.

⁵⁰ Works, I, 408.

⁵¹ Works, II, 75 (“On the Plantation Trade,” 1698).

⁵² Works, II, 275 (“Essay upon the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade,” 1699).

⁵³ Works, 1, 348-49 (“Discourses on the Public Revenues …,” II, 1, 1698).

⁵⁴ E.g., Works, I, 389-92. Note the Guicciardinian language on p. 390: “But sometimes there are diseases so deeply fixed, that it is impossible to root them out; and in such a case there is nothing left, but to keep the distemper under, by natural and easy remedies.”

⁵⁵ Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Joseph Addison’s Sociable Animal: in the Market Place, on the Hustings, in the Pulpit (Providence: Brown University Press, 1971), passim.

⁵⁶ Macaulay, History of England, ch. III.

⁵⁷ Swift’s most sustained analysis of the “monied interest” is in The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen (ed. Herbert Davis, with an introduction by Harold Williams; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964), pp. 68-78. Note such phrases as “those whose money by the dangers and difficulties of trade lay dead upon their hands” (p. 68), “a monarchy whose wealth ariseth from the rents and improvements of lands, as well as trade and manufactures” (p. 69), “a new estate and property sprung up in the hands of mortgagees” (p. 70), “extremely injurious to trade and to the true interest of the nation” (p. 71). See also The Examiner, 1710-11 (ed. Davis, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), pp. 5-7, 62-63, 124-25, 134-35, 162-67; The Conduct of the Allies (in Political Tracts, 1711-14, ed. Davis, 1964), pp. 9-10, 16, 18-19, 41, 53-59.

⁵⁸ As clear a statement of this theme as any is to be found in Davenant, Works, I, 160: “Now, if the product of the land should sink in its value, it must naturally ensue, that the rents of England, and price of land, will fall in the same proportion. For the great stock that was subsisting in credit, and the great sum of money that circulated about the kingdom, did chiefly fix so high a price upon land and all its produce; and if peace should diminish this price (as perhaps it will), land and its rents will hardly recover their former value, till money can be made to circulate, and till credit is revived.”

⁵⁹ See references given in n. 57 above.

⁶⁰ Defoe, Review (published for the Facsimile Text Society in 23 facsimile books; New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), vol. VII, no. 26, pp. 97-99; no. 45, p. 175; no. 47, pp. 181-84; no. 48, pp. 186-87; no. 49, pp. 189-91; no. 50, pp. 195-96; no. 51, pp. 197-99; all in facsimile book 17; also passim. For a Swiftian attack on Whigs as bears, see Examiner, no. 35 (ed. cit., p. 125).

⁶¹ See Review, facsimile books 17-22, passim.

⁶² Review (facsimile book 19), vol. VIII, no. 55, p. 222 (an attack on bulls); no. 56, pp. 225-27; no. 59, pp. 237-40; no. 60, pp. 241-44 (bears); no. 68, pp. 273 (misnumbered)-75.

⁶³ Swift, Conduct of the Allies, in Political Tracts, 1711-14, p. 56.

⁶⁴ See Pierre Des Maizeaux, A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr John Toland (London, 1726), 11, 227; but the claim is made in a letter to Harley written in 1710.

⁶⁵ Toland, op.cit., pp. ii-iii, and the dedication generally.

⁶⁶ Several writers of the “paper war” puzzled even their enemies to know which side they were on; Ellis, op.cit., p. 38, n. 1. Toland appears in Davenant’s True Picture of a Modern Whig as “Mr Gospelscorn,” a confederate of the wicked Tom Double (who is himself partly a portrait of Defoe); Davenant, Works, IV, 240-42.

⁶⁷ Kramnick (above, n. 3), pp. 42, 61-63.

⁶⁸ Above, n. 46.

⁶⁹ Examiner, no. 34; ed. cit., p. 119. This passage is a defense of the Qualification Act, intended to exclude all but proprietors of land from the Commons.

⁷⁰ Defoe, Review (facsimile book 6), vol. III, no. 5, pp. 17-18; see also pp. 19-20, and no. 6, pp. 21-24; no. 7, pp. 25-27.

⁷¹ Above, ch. IV, n. 22.

⁷² Review (facsimile book 7), vol. III, no. 92, p. 365.

⁷³ Review (facsimile book 8), vol. III, no. 126, pp. 502-503.

⁷⁴ Review (facsimile book 17), vol. VII, no. 55, pp. 213-15; no. 57, pp. 221-23; no. 58, pp. 225-28; no. 59, pp. 229-31.

⁷⁵ Review (facsimile book 18), vol. VII, no. 116, p. 463.

⁷⁶ The Spectator, ed. Smith (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Everyman Library, 1961), p. 11.

⁷⁷ Spectator, no. 69; ed. cit., pp. 212-15. Note the neo-Harringtonian finale.

⁷⁸ See Bloom and Bloom, Joseph Addison’s Sociable Animal, pp. 67-83 (ch. 4, “The War of Economic Right”), for an interesting study of Addison conceding that commerce breeds war and must justify it.

⁷⁹ Kramnick, pp. 166-69, discusses this point with reference to Bolingbroke.

⁸⁰ Addison’s The Freeholder (1715-16) adjures the individual to limit both the intensity and the range of his participation in government. See nos. 5, 16, 24, 25, 29, 48, and especially nos. 51 (whose modernism should be compared with Hobbes on the political consequences of reading ancient politics) and 52-55.