CHAPTER XIV

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DEBATE

Virtue, Passion and Commerce

[I]

THE DEBATE WE HAVE UNCOVERED—that between virtue and passion, land and commerce, republic and empire, value and history—underlay a great part of the social thinking of the eighteenth century. In the two remaining chapters an attempt will be made to display its role in the American Revolution and the formation of American values, and to depict this part of the story in a wider context of the development of European thought, so that Jefferson and Hamilton may emerge in a broadly discernible relationship to Rousseau and Marx. It can be shown both that the American Revolution and Constitution in some sense form the last act of the civic Renaissance, and that the ideas of the civic humanist tradition—the blend of Aristotelian and Machiavellian thought concerning the zōon politikon—provide an important key to the paradoxes of modern tensions between individual self-awareness on the one hand and consciousness of society, property, and history on the other. The American founders occupied a “Machiavellian moment”—a crisis in the relations between personality and society, virtue and corruption—but at the same time stood at a moment in history when that problem was being either left behind or admitted insoluble; it depended on the point of view. Our task in the present chapter is to understand as fully as possible the reasons why the inherited complex of ideas concerning republican virtue and its place in social time was transmitted into the eighteenth century in a form at once so adamant and so vulnerable, so little changed and yet so radically challenged.

The story as we have traced it is, first, that of how the Athenian assertion that man was zōon politikon, by nature a citizen, was revived in a paradoxical though not a directly challenging relation with the Christian assertion that man was homo religiosus, formed to live in a transcendent and eternal communion, known, however, by the ominously political name of civitas Dei; second, that of how the ensuing debate merged with some consequences of the Protestant assertion that all believers were priests, and society, rather than church, the true ecclesia. As Puritanism, followed in this respect by rational deism, denied more and more systematically the separateness of the religious organization of society, it became increasingly necessary to affirm that civic was one with religious liberty, and virtue—in the civic sense—one with salvation. The terms in which such claims were made might be evangelical and millenarian; at another extreme they might be post-Christian and utopian; but in either case they reflected the secularization of personality, its increasing involvement with a projection of society that was historical whether or not it was soterial. Since awareness of what transcendental Christianity meant did not die out, it was not forgotten that this affirmation was paradoxical and subversive: Montesquieu could reiterate Machiavelli’s acknowledgment that civic virtue was self-contained and secular, identical neither with the Christian communion nor with a social morality founded on purely Christian values.1 But as the citizen became less like the saint, his civic personality required a virtù less like his soul’s capacity for redemption and more like the autonomy of Aristotle’s megalopsychic man or—in the period that concerns us—the amour de soi-même of Rousseau; and this morality required a foundation less spiritual and more social and even material.

We have seen how this foundation was supplied, first by arms and then by property—of which real, inheritable, and, so to speak, natural property in land² was the paradigmatic case; for since the function of property was to affirm and maintain the reality of personal autonomy, liberty, and virtue, it must if possible display a reality (one is tempted to say a realty) capable of spanning the generations and permitting the living to succeed the dead in a real and natural order.³ Inheritance, therefore, appeared more than ever before the mode of economic transmission proper to a society’s existence in time. Land and inheritance remained essential to virtue, and virtue to the ego’s reality in its own sight; there is an element of existential fear about the dread of corruption so prominent in eighteenth-century social values. For the ideal of personality-sustaining property was no sooner formulated than it was seen to be threatened—Locke helping to give expression to ambiguities that had meant nothing to Harrington. Forms of property were seen to arise which conveyed the notion of inherent dependence: salaried office, reliance on private or political patronage, on public credit. For these the appropriate term in the republican lexicon was corruption—the substitution of private dependencies for public authority—and the threat to individual integrity and self-knowledge which corruption had always implied was reinforced by the rise of forms of property seeming to rest on fantasy and false consciousness. Once property was seen to have a symbolic value, expressed in coin or in credit, the foundations of personality themselves appeared imaginary or at best consensual: the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him by his fellows, and these evaluations, though constant and public, were too irrationally performed to be seen as acts of political decision or virtue. The threat posed by corruption cut deep; we have next to consider why, and with what effects, there was no consoling or satisfactory answer to it.

The counter-ethics and counter-politics we have watched beginning to arise were based on a series of mitigations of the concept of fantasy or imagination: passion, opinion, interest. To the extent to which the credit economy could be convincingly presented as based on the exchange of real goods and the perception of real values, it could be divorced from the threat of false consciousness and endowed with concepts of the public good and personal virtue. In what scholars have called a “Protestant ethic” of frugality, self-denial, and reinvestment, trading society could even be permitted its own version of that classical virtue which consisted in placing the common good (in this case the circulation of trade) above one’s personal profit. But to a very high degree indeed, the ethic of frugality was compelled to take second place to the ethic of self-interest. The landed man, successor to the master of the classical oikos, was permitted the leisure and autonomy to consider what was to others’ good as well as his own; but the individual engaged in exchange could discern only particular values—that of the commodity which was his, that of the commodity for which he exchanged it. His activity did not oblige or even permit him to contemplate the universal good as he acted upon it, and he consequently continued to lack classical rationality. It followed that he was not conscious master of himself, and that in the last analysis he must be thought of as activated by nonrational forces—those governing the universe of credit rather than the universe of trade. Techniques certainly existed—of which Addison was a literary master—of elevating his motivation to at least the lower forms of rationality and morality: opinion, prudence, confidence, sympathy, even charity; but behind all this lay the ancient problem of showing how society might operate rationally and beneficially when the individuals composing it were denied full rationality and virtue.

Solutions were of course to be found in seeking to depict society as an economic mechanism, in which the exchange of goods and the division of labor operated to turn universal selfishness to universal benefit. In Addison, Mandeville, and Montesquieu we find variously presented4 the image of the woman who wants a new gown for thoroughly selfish and whimsical reasons—woman as capricious consumer is a recurrent feature of the rather prominent sexism found in Augustan social criticism—and instantly sets tradesmen and artisans to work in ways whose benefit to society is in no way commensurate with the triviality of her motivation. The reason as Montesquieu gives it is that “self-interest is the strongest monarch in the world.”⁵ But there was an important sense in which all this was either beside the point or the admission of a necessary evil: social morality was becoming divorced from personal morality, and from the ego’s confidence in its own integrity and reality. Mandeville, whose principal works appeared between 1714 and 1732, won a reputation in his own time akin to those of Machiavelli and Hobbes in theirs, by proclaiming that “private vices” were “public benefits.” He argued that the mainspring of social behavior was not self-love—based on knowledge of one’s self as one was; Rousseau’s amour de soi-même—but what he called self-liking and Rousseau was to call amour-propre: based on the figure one cut in one’s own eyes and those of others.⁶ On this basis he built up a complex social psychology based on the ideas of custom—by which he meant manners rather than usages, fantasy rather than experience—and honor, by which was meant no feudal ethos of heroic pride and shame, but the other-directed intersubjectivity that had led Defoe to use honor as a synonym for credit. At bottom he was saying that the real world of economy and polity rested on a myriad fantasy worlds maintained by private egos; and he deeply disturbed his contemporaries, less by telling them that they were greedy and selfish than by telling them that they were unreal, and must remain so if society was to persist. The specter of false consciousness had arisen, and was proving more frightening than that of Machiavellian realpolitik.

In the civic humanist ethos, then, the individual knew himself to be rational and virtuous, and possessed what we can now call amour de soi-même, inasmuch as he knew himself to be a citizen and knew how to play his role and take decisions within the politeia or modo di vivere of a republic. Given the spatio-temporal finitude and instability of any republic, this had always been a precarious and threatened mode of self-affirmation, requiring heroic virtue if not a special grace; and the great Florentine theorists had worked out the implications of this paradox. In Puritan England and Augustan Britain, there had emerged a theory of freehold and real property as the foundations of personality, autonomy, and commonwealth; but the challenge posed to this by the emergence of new forms of property and political economy restated in a new form the problem of individuality and temporal instability—in other words, that of value and history. The universe of real property and personal autonomy now seemed to belong to a historic past; new and dynamic forces, of government, commerce, and war, presented a universe which was effectively superseding the old but condemned the individual to inhabit a realm of fantasy, passion, and amour-propre. He could explain this realm, in the sense that he could identify the forces of change that were producing it; he could identify and pursue the goals proposed to him by his passions and fantasies; but he could not explain himself by locating himself as a real and rational being within it. The worlds of history and value therefore extruded one another, and what would later be described as the alienation of man from his history had begun to be felt; but, far from seeing himself as a mere product of historical forces, the civic and propertied individual was endowed with an ethic that clearly and massively depicted him as a citizen of classical virtue, the inhabitant of a classical republic, but exacted the price of obliging him to regard all the changes transforming the world of government, commerce, and war as corruption—corruption essentially the same as that which had transformed Rome from republic into empire. Hence the age’s intense and nervous neoclassicism. The dominant paradigm for the individual inhabiting the world of value was that of civic man; but the dominant paradigm for the individual as engaged in historic actuality was that of economic and inter-subjective man, and it was peculiarly hard to bring the two together.

We therefore find that all that sociology of liberty which had developed from Aristotle through Machiavelli and Harrington was accessible to British (and to French anglomanic) thought in the form of the “Country” or “Old Whig” ideology, which expressed in great detail the values of civic liberty, the moral and political conditions under which they flourished or decayed, and the interpretation of European and English history in which they were seen as developing and as increasingly exposed to threats of corruption; but that this was obliged by its postulates to attack as corruptive a number of important trends which it isolated as those of a “modern” world. In opposition to it can be found, less eloquently rhetorical because less morally normative, a “Court” ideology—prefigured in such writings as Defoe’s—which accurately identified the forces making for historical change and explained how government must and did work on its new foundations, but which supplied neither polity nor personality with a coherent moral structure. Its attitude to historical change was one of pragmatic acceptance; it denied that government was based on principles to which there could be a return; and its moral and philosophical theory affirmed that the mainsprings of both motivation and perception in human beings were pride and passion, fantasy and self-interest, which it tended to describe in Mandevillean and Hobbesian terms. Hard as it was to reconcile the philosophies of value and history, virtue and passion, property and credit, self-love and self-liking, the conditions of British politics in the eighteenth century, with their sharply prescribed interdependence between Court and Country, commanded that some such attempt be made and that neither thesis could be expounded without making some concessions to the other. But in the American colonies—the present state of research strongly suggests—the ideology that presented virtue as ever threatened by corruption was little mitigated by any sense that it was possible to live with the forces of history and contain them. This circumstance helped bring about the division of the Atlantic world in the great civil war of the American Revolution; it presented the civic humanist intellect with an unparalleled opportunity of applying the sociology of liberty to legislation in the sense of actual state-founding; but since the forces of change and modernity had crossed the Atlantic somewhat in advance of the governmental imperative that compelled their recognition, it further ensured that the attempt at classical legislation would encounter its crises and display its paradoxes.

[II]

Cato’s Letters, which were originally published in the London Journal between 1720 and 1724, were written by John Trenchard—a veteran of the “paper war” of 1698—and his protégé Thomas Gordon, and with the far more anticlerical The Independent Whig, appearing from the same pens about the same time, formed some of the most widely distributed political reading of the contemporary American colonists.7 Cato was mainly bent on diagnosing and proposing to remedy the state of national corruption revealed by the failure of the South Sea Company—much, it should be noted, as Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721) were concerned with the similar state of affairs precipitated in France by the failure of John Law’s Mississippi schemes;⁸ but in Britain the themes it appeared necessary to Cato to take up had been the matter of debate for a quarter of a century. It was neither accidental nor surprising that an old adversary of the standing army should find himself denouncing a gigantic job of the “monied interest,” since the two were taken to be at bottom one and the same phenomenon. Cato—Trenchard was the senior partner, though Gordon’s contributions were numerous—develops an unmistakably Machiavellian and neo-Harringtonian critique of corruption and of the republic which is its opposite; and he specifically declares that England (or Britain) is a republic, of that peculiarly happy kind which has a king as its chief magistrate.⁹ This republic instantly begins to display Machiavellian characteristics: it must be inexorably revengeful against those (the South Sea Directors) who have wronged it,¹⁰ and its freedom cannot long continue without an equality in the distribution of property and consequently of power.¹¹ Machiavelli had discussed the necessity of an equalità of this order, but like him Cato had in mind not so much a leveling of property as “an agrarian law, or something like it” to ensure that no individual or group became so rich as to reduce others to dependence.¹² The words “or something like it” reveal that we are no longer in a purely landed commonwealth; what is to be dreaded is not vassalage, but indebtedness and the corruption through dependence that it brings. Peculation is the worst of crimes against the public,¹³ the freeholders should never let themselves be represented in parliament by “men whose estates are embarked in companies”;¹⁴ exclusive trading companies, like those designed for the East Indies and the South Seas, reduce the landowner to debt, bring about the destruction of trade and corrupt government by introducing inequality.15 Spurius Melius, who sought to bring the people into dependence by monopolizing the corn supply, was heroic Rome’s chief enemy within,¹⁶ whereas to Harrington he was no more than the subject of a remark in passing about the minor dangers to liberty presented by trade.¹⁷ Cato has fully accepted the fact, if also the danger, of such a society; something more than an agrarian law will be needed to ensure that equality which means that all men are equally free and equally subject to public authority—equal in their opportunity of virtue, for if they are not there can be no virtue.

But equality in this sense tends to preclude the discovery of any precise equivalent to an agrarian law, and apart from the undesirability of exclusive companies and a heavy burden of public debt, Cato does not tell us what specific measures should be taken to ensure equality in a trading society. If “equality” means no more than an equal subjection to the res publica, no more need (or can) be done to ensure it than to reassert the public authority—Machiavelli’s ridurre ai principii, which turned out to have little more concrete content than that; but (to approach the problem from its other aspect) since where the public authority is impeded by inequality there is corruption, and where there is corruption there is no virtue, the reassertion of the res publica in its uncorrupt form is readily identifiable with the reassertion of virtue. Cato’s call for equality therefore makes up in moral fervor for what it lacks by way of a specific program; and though for much of the time he is merely calling for uprightness and independence in the people and their representatives and magistrates, the summons need not have been limited to a purely moral content. The crucial evil of corruption was, to many a theorist, that it disturbed the balance of the constitution; that of the growth of a monied interest that it perverted the relationships between executive, parliament, and propertied people; and a call for virtue and the restitution of the res publica might have been a program for restoration of constitutional relationships in what was supposed to have been their properly balanced form.

Cato, however, was not primarily a constitutional theorist, and to the extent that he was not the concept of virtue dictated a politics of personal morality. As we follow out the explorations of this theme, we find it repeatedly conceded that a trading society possesses a psychology of its own, and that this complicates the pursuit and preservation of virtue. Cato’s vision presupposes no agrarian utopia, although Gordon tells us of Trenchard in an obituary preface that “though he was careful to preserve his Estate, he was no ways anxious to increase it”;18 the reader is left in no doubt that a society founded in land alone entails the barbarism and vassalage of Poland or the Scottish Highlands and that trade must be added to husbandry if the darker aspects of Gothic society are to be overcome.¹⁹ It is true that

in the first Rise and Beginning of States, a rough and unhewn Virtue, a rude and savage Fierceness, and an unpolished Passion for Liberty, are the Qualities chiefly in Repute: To these succeed military Accomplishments, domestick Arts and Sciences, and such political Knowledge and Acquirements, as are necessary to make States great and formidable Abroad, and to preserve Equality and domestick Happiness and Security at Home; and lastly, when these are attained, follow Politeness, speculative Knowledge, moral and experimental Philosophy, with other Branches of Learning, and the whole Train of the Muses.²⁰

But the transition from unpolished virtue to politeness must be made, and made with the assistance of commerce; and we are assured that maritime trade not only can flourish only where there is civil liberty, but can present no possible danger to it. Sailors do not menace the commonwealth as standing armies do. Virtue and liberty protect commerce, and commerce ensures liberty and politeness.²¹ But a complex formula has been required in order to bring virtue and commerce together, and we discover the reason when we find, once again, that considerable intellectual effort has been exerted to make the transition from commerce as fantasy to commerce as enriched and ordered reality.

Nothing is more certain than that Trade cannot be forced; she is a coy and humorous Dame, who must be won by Flattery and Allurements, and always flies Force and Power; she is not confined to Nations, Sects, or Climates, but travels and wanders about the Earth, till she fixes her Residence where she finds the best Welcome and kindest Reception; her Contexture is so nice and delicate, that she cannot breathe in a tyrannical Air; Will and Pleasure are so opposite to her Nature, that but touch her with the Sword and she dies: But if you give her gentle and kind Entertainment, she is a grateful and beneficent Mistress; she will turn Desarts into fruitful Fields, Villages into great Cities, Cottages into Palaces, Beggars into Princes, convert Cowards into Heroes, Blockheads into Philosophers; will change the Coverings of little Worms into the richest Brocades, the Fleeces of harmless Sheep into the Pride and Ornaments of Kings, and by a farther Metamorphosis will transmute them again into armed Hosts and haughty Fleets.22

But this is Circe’s island; marriage to this enchantress means that we must live in a world of magic and transformation; and the price to be paid is admission that we are governed by our fantasies and passions. Cato explains at length that men are governed by passion, not principle,²³ and that the objects of our hopes and fears are for the most part illusory and fantastic;²⁴ it is through the sound of words that men are deceived and misled,²⁵ and stockjobbers form only one class of villains who manipulate and corrupt men through images of false goods and false honor.²⁶ Nor is this possible merely because human nature has its weaker side; it is essentially “chimerical” and the good man as well as the bad must govern by knowing the passions of men.²⁷ The language of the Letters grows Hobbesian:

When we say, that if such a Thing happened, we would be easie; we can only mean, or ought only to mean, that we would be more easie than we are: And in that too we are often mistaken; for new Acquisitions bring new Wants, and imaginary Wants are as pungent as real ones. So that there is the same End of Wishing as of Living, and Death only can still the Appetites.²⁸

But the ideal of civic virtue is not abandoned. Though we are told that to serve the public good is itself a passion, and that passions are called good when they serve the public and bad when they do not, it is no less unequivocally stated:

There is scarce any one of the Passions but what is truly laudable, when it centers in the Publick, and makes that its Object. Ambition, Avarice, Revenge, are all so many Virtues, when they aim at the general Welfare. I know that it is exceeding hard and rare, for any Man to separate his Passions from his own Person and Interest; but it is certain that there have been such Men. Brutus, Cato, Regulus, Timoleon, Dion, and Epaminondas, were such, as were many more ancient Greeks and Romans; and, I hope, England has still some such. And though in pursuing publick Views, Men regard themselves and their own Advantages; yet if they regard the Publick more, or their own in Subserviency to the Publick, they may justly be esteemed virtuous and good.29

It is a Machiavellian virtù, in the sense that civic does not always accord with personal morality; but it is a real and classical virtue nonetheless. The passions now appear as the pursuits of private and particular goods, familiar to us from the whole tradition of Aristotelian politics and ethics; virtue is the passion for pursuing the public good, with which the lesser passions may compete, but into which they may equally be transformed. And corruption is the failure, or the consequences of the failure, to effect this transformation. The “Publick” (res publica) is then, to a certain extent, what government was soon to appear in the political theory of Hume: a device or mechanism for requiring men to take long views instead of short, to identify their private interests with the general good, to erect an edifice of reason and virtue on a foundation of passion; but rather more unequivocally than with Hume is it also a device for bringing men out of the cave into the sunlight, from a realm of fantasy into one of reality. And the heroes of the ancient polities are not the mere products of the socializing machine; their virtue is active and authentic, and may be invoked as a principal means of ensuring virtue in others. As well as the moral example of the virtuous hero, other means of preventing corruption are named which are startlingly classical and humanist. There is the people as guardia della libertà; though the limitations of their public experience render them liable to be deceived by the sound of words and unreal objects, the fact that they do not seek power for themselves means that they have no interest in multiplying fantasies for the corruption of others, and for this reason they may be trusted to undeceive themselves given time.³⁰ In a free society, where the danger of deception is in any case less, even their fantasies may tend to the public good: for,

as Machiavel well observes, When the People are dissatisfied, and have taken a Prejudice against their Governors, there is no Thing nor Person that they ought not to fear.³¹

There is even a sense in which inequality stands to equality in precisely the relation of fortuna to virtus, and reveals with particular clarity that the “equality” which is necessary to republics is strictly speaking an isonomia. Men are equal by nature, in the sense that all men are born equipped with the same capacities; but fortune unjustly and capriciously distributes the circumstantial advantages of this world, so that some have more of them than others. This makes for emulation, envy, and acquisitiveness, which are not without their utility to society; it also makes for the existence of a ruling class, whose authority checks the tendency of emulation to run to excess. The more and the less fortunate, it seems probable, act as checks on one another, and oblige each other’s passions to turn toward service to the common good; and the arbitrariness of fortune constantly challenges me to affirm my virtue, in remembering that it at least is not fortune’s gift.

We cannot bring more natural Advantages into the World, than other Men do; but we can acquire more Virtue in it than we generally acquire. To be great, is not in every Man’s Power; but to be good, is in the Power of all: Thus far every Man may be upon a Level with another, the lowest with the highest; and Men might thus come to be morally as well as naturally equal.32

These forces, and others like them, operate to maintain virtue in free societies. It is clear that the classical republic, with its distribution of powers and rotation of offices, is the paradigm case of the free society, and that the Ancient Constitution of England resembled the republic in most respects—including the rotation of magistracies,³³ by which the authors seem to have meant frequent parliaments (though nothing is said of the fact that Trenchard had supported the Septennial Act in 1717). But an important modification appears at a later stage in the argument.³⁴ England, it is affirmed, is in its present condition capable of no other form of government than a limited monarchy, because the distribution of property is such that there exists a powerful nobility and a beneficed clergy, both of whom depend upon the patronage of the crown for the wealth and influence which bring other men into dependence on them. There is not, therefore, that equality of property necessary for the existence of a pure republic (even, presumably, a republic of the kind whose head may be a king), and the relations of monarchy and nobility display that restless interdependence which characterized the feudal or “Gothic” monarchy of Harrington. Forces usually identified as those of corruption—courtiers, placemen, exclusive trading companies—operate to maintain the present system; but, insists Cato:

If this be the true Circumstance of England at present, as I conceive it indisputably is, we have nothing left to do, or indeed which we can do, but to make the best of our own Constitution, which, if duly administered, provides excellently well for general Liberty; and to secure the Possession of Property, and to use our best Endeavours to make it answer the other Purposes of private Virtue, as far as the Nature of it is capable of producing that End.35

Spartam—or rather Venetiam—nactus es; after all, it would appear, Englishmen have not inherited an equality of property so perfect as to permit the practice of a public, as opposed to private, virtue in a republic, and must make the most of what they have. Limited monarchy is not a perfectly balanced commonwealth; it is merely a balance between the forces making for liberty and for corruption, between property and dependence, executive and parliament, good enough to ensure liberty and private virtue and prevent the worst ravages of corruption and fantasy. Trenchard is the writer here, and we plainly hear the voice of 1714-1719; Old Whigs who had joined Tories in a “Country” movement had been driven by the latter’s High Church excesses to accept a Court Whig regime,³⁶ which had passed the Septennial Act and was now moving through the South Sea crisis toward the perfection of Walpolean government. To writers of the neo-Harringtonian lineage, this meant acceptance of a rule by patronage and finance which they could never regard as wholly uncorrupt, which could never be restored to the purity of any principle. And the acceptance of facts meant acceptance of the supremacy of passion and interest.

There is another aspect to Trenchard’s and Gordon’s indictments of the world of corruption and unreality, which should not pass unremarked. From the depiction of the false consciousness of the speculative society,³⁷ in which men insanely pursue the fairy gold of paper schemes, they move to portray other forms of false honor and false consciousness, the product of excessive authority rather than excessive liberty: the world of absolute monarchy, in which individuals and their values are not merely subject to the autocrat’s power, but exist even in their own eyes simply as defined by him and his courtiers;³⁸ the world of superstition and priestcraft, which is nothing other than that “kingdom of the fairies” described by Hobbes in Book IV of Leviathan, where men are kept in subjection by being obliged to live in a dreamworld of unreal essences and entities.³⁹ The unstated alliance which we earlier noted between Leviathan and Oceana is still operative in these neo-Harringtonians. The authority of the sovereign and the virtue of the citizen both drive away fantasies and depict things and persons as they really are; but where false consciousness for Hobbes was productive of rebellion, in the republican tradition it issues in corruption. Men who live by fantasies are manipulated by other men who rule through them. Autocrats, priests, and stockjobbers form a common enemy, and the structure of the argument as we have traced it suggests that it was the last who served as catalyst in precipitating the theory. In the Lettres Persanes, written about the same time as Cato’s Letters under the shock of the Mississippi failure, Law appears as a northern magician, selling the wind in bags and making people believe that it is gold.40 He is empowered to do this by the authority of a king whose courtiers live, and compel others to live, in a mental world constructed out of nothing but honor in the sense of reputation, itself determined partly by the autocrat’s fiat and partly by the courtiers’ mutual self-delusion.⁴¹ The courtier is equated with the priest, monk, and bogus philosopher; and analysts⁴² of those of the Lettres Persanes which deal at a distance with the tragedy of Usbek’s harem have forcibly suggested that the courtier is to be further equated with the eunuch and the corrupt citizen with the alienated woman, so that Montesquieu is carrying the analysis of fantasy and corruption into the sexual basis of the classical oikos. If so, he seems to have abandoned the quest for a virtus in marriage itself (Mandeville had drawn attention to the root masculinity of the term’s derivation from vir); the only idyllic relationships in the work are based on brother-sister incest and polyandrous erotics respectively,⁴³ and we might come to believe that Montesquieu had despaired of exogamy altogether. Be that as it may, it is apparent that the opposition of virtue to false consciousness was capable of supporting a wide range of sociological analysis.

It is perhaps more immediately significant that both Cato and Montesquieu employ it in the cause of a vigorous anticlericalism. The man of virtue is capable of conducting his own worship, and does so in a setting which is civic where it is not private; the cleric, claiming a monopoly over this activity, appears, like the soldier, lawyer, and stockjobber, one who corrupts by interposing himself in a virtue which all men should practice equally, and—like the latter at least—he can do so only by placing unreal entities before the minds of those he deceives in order to corrupt.44 Trenchard and Gordon shared this view with Neville’s Plato Redivivus, and we recall how Harrington’s republicanism merged with the Independent tradition in reducing the clergy to civic functionaries. What is noteworthy here is that there is a high degree of correlation in the early eighteenth century between neo-Harringtonian republicanism and deism. Swift and his Sentiments of a Church of England Man should indeed not be forgotten; but the republican lineage includes, as well as Cato himself, Toland, Bolingbroke, and in France Henri de Boulainvilliers, an ardent member of the anti-Christian literary underground whose Essai sur la Noblesse and Lettres sur les Parlements seek to invest the French nobility with an autonomous virtù founded in sang and epèe rather than in freehold property.⁴⁵ Franco Venturi has suggested that the republican example, notably in its English variant, made a more important contribution to the early Enlightenment than has been recognized;⁴⁶ and in this connection it is interesting to see that republicanism and deism alike carried on the English and Puritan crusade against a clergy enjoying separate or jure divino authority.

There is, of course, one entirely crucial breach in continuity between Puritanism and deism. We have seen that Harrington’s thought conformed—perhaps a shade mechanically—to an older tradition which required the republic to locate itself in an apocalyptic moment, and in so doing conformed to another tradition of which Puritanism has a great many instances. Now apocalyptic was founded upon prophecy, and Hobbes also was among the students of prophecy; but deism, and the Enlightenment generally, were based on a singularly complete rejection of prophecy, revelation, and the Hebrew mode of thought at large. It would be possible to preserve the continuity of deism with Puritanism in the respect which concerns us, by emphasizing such matters as the self-secularizing tendency inherent in apocalyptic, the emergence of Socinian over millenarian trends in the post-Puritan inheritance—Toland helped mediate both Milton and Harrington to the thought of the eighteenth century—and that transition, explored by Tuveson, from millennium to utopia. The more successful we are, however, in anchoring English republican deism in its Puritan inheritance, the more we shall be stressing respects in which England was too modern to need an Enlightenment and was already engaged upon the quarrel with modernity itself. Cato’s Letters and the Lettres Persanes alike denounce autocracy, priestcraft, and speculative corruption; but in lands where absolute monarchy and Tridentine Catholicism were realities and not bogeys, they could not be the rhetorical embellishments of the case against corruption that they were in England. Where the philosophes were fighting to liberate secular history from the authority of the sacred books, the postmillenarist Augustan social critics were examining the impact of historical change on a humanist theory of the social personality which was already wholly secular. It was much more than a persistence of medieval and Renaissance theories of senectus mundi—far from dead as these were—that made the Augustans brood over a still cyclical vision of the corruption of nations;47 they were possessed of a thoroughly social and secular theory of the civic personality, whose parameters suggested that for some centuries social change had been undermining its foundations. They were proto-Rousseauan beneath their Whig combativeness, closer to the romantics than to the philosophes who read them. The Old Whigs who appeared about 1698 were, it may be suggested, the first intellectuals of the Left, denouncing their own party’s official leadership for betrayal of its own wholly secular principles; and the poets and satirists who followed Bolingbroke in the 1730s—whether we call them Independent Whigs or Tories—erected Sir Robert Walpole into a figure doubly symbolic, to them a monster of corruption but to us the first modern statesman to impress a modern intelligentsia with the belief that his policies and personality were undermining the moral structure of human society.⁴⁸ Their language was humanist, their enemy was modernity, and their posture had something of the sixteenth century about it and something of the twentieth. The still ebullient Enlightenment had some way to go before it could overtake this dualism.

[III]

The Anglo-Atlantic equivalent of the “Machiavellian moment,” we have now recognized, had some positive complexities, in terms of economics and psychology, not to be found in its Florentine original. The most resonant formulation of its constitutional aspects was the work of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, between his first and second exiles—both of which were self-chosen—when he elected to conduct a press and pamphlet campaign against Walpole’s administration in language directly continuous with that of 1698-1702 and 1711-1714.49 The Country program—frequent parliaments, exclusion of placemen, a qualification in landed property for members of the House of Commons—had originated in the attack on Danby’s ministry in 1675 and had continued as a campaign against major war and its effects on government and finance. Following the collapse of the Tory party in 1714, a succession of Whig administrations, while not contesting the decision to withdraw from large-scale European campaigning, had set about constructing that political style known as “the growth of oligarchy.”⁵⁰ Its characteristics were a strong and stable executive representing a guaranteed Protestant monarchy in parliament, and a steady diminution of political competitiveness; its means included compromised elections, a Septennial (replacing a Triennial) Act extending the duration of parliaments, and a system of political management in which patronage played a visible if not an oversignificant part. It further retained that financial structure of banks and funds which had come into being to support war, and whose adversaries, denouncing it as corruption, saw in its continuation as part of the permanent establishment of government the fulfillment of their darkest prophecies—the hysteria of the South Sea Bubble having done nothing to lessen their fears. From standing armies to stockjobbers, therefore, the vocabulary of the Country ideology remained valid after half a century’s shaping, and though Walpole’s was a resolutely peace-seeking administration, Bolingbroke and Pulteney in their journal The Craftsman, supported by writers of the caliber of Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, and Fielding, were able to attack it in the language used against the warmaking Juntos of William and Anne’s reigns and to represent it as their historical successor and continuation.

The function of every Country ideology was to mobilize country gentlemen and their independent representatives in parliament against the administration of the day, and the rhetoric of virtue employed to this end was invariably as much constitutional as it was moral. This characteristic, of course, kept it well within the classical mainstream. We know that the Aristotelian polity, the ultimate paradigm of all civic humanism, was simultaneously a distribution of political functions and powers and a partnership between many kinds of virtue, and that virtus and virtù had themselves been used to convey the notion of power as well as that of moral quality. Bolingbroke, like all ideologists in the Country tradition, exploited this ambivalence in attempting to solve his basic problem of accepting the constitutional implications of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 while passionately rejecting the allegedly corruptive consequences of the Financial Revolution that had inseparably attended it; and did so by means that in their turn looked back to the central ambivalence of the King’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions. That document, authoritatively formulating the doctrine that England enjoyed a balanced constitution, had left it unavoidably unclear whether king, lords, and commons—standing for the classical one, few, and many—formed a partnership and equilibrium within the process of legislation, a partnership of different functions and powers within some more broadly defined process of government, or a partnership of different social virtues within a politeia or res publica. As we know, it was only when the concept of legislation assumed a high degree of importance that it was really necessary to draw distinctions between these possible meanings.

Ever since Shaftesbury had pioneered the attack on the Crown and its servants for corrupting the House of Commons, this had been capable of rhetorical expression as an attack on “the executive” (or “ministers”) for seeking to bring “the legislative” (or “representative”) into dependence or subjection, thus disturbing “the balance” with consequences potentially as grave as those of 1642; but the underlying ambiguities had remained. Whenever a conflict had seemed to occur between prerogative and parliament, the language of balance had been used in its functional sense, and the offending party had been denounced for usurping a jurisdiction not properly its own. But whenever—as was increasingly common—patronage and corruption were the issue, the executive had been attacked less for exceeding its constitutional powers than for bringing the individuals composing the legislature into a personal and demoralizing dependence on the Crown and the financial resources it controlled. While this was, in an important sense, to move from the language of function to that of virtue, the two had never been distinct and tended to coalesce. Even the rise of the “monied interest,” depicted in sweeping historical terms as that of a “new form of property,” was thought of as increasing “the influence of the Crown” by vastly enlarging the number and wealth of its dependents. A corollary, however, was that threats to the balance of the constitution and increases in the power of the executive were thought to entail the terrifying social and moral threats we have considered. To disturb the balance was, as ever, to corrupt virtue.

One of Bolingbroke’s more arresting hypotheses about modern history was that the danger from prerogative had been virtually replaced by the danger from corruption51—an argument at bottom neo-Harringtonian—but he nevertheless continued to conflate the languages of function and morality in ways which may have affected the thought of Montesquieu and through him, of the American Founding Fathers. This is the famous problem of the “separation of powers.”⁵² Bolingbroke at times used terminology which seemed to suggest that king, lords, and commons performed separate political functions which could be distinguished as executive, judicial, and legislative, that the balance of the constitution consisted in the ability of any two of these to check the third, and that since it was vital to prevent any one of them from establishing a permanent ascendancy over any other, the “independence” of each of the three must at all costs be preserved. In spite of the many difficulties of this analysis when applied to British government, it may have been at Bolingbroke’s persuasion that Montesquieu⁵³ substituted the triad of executive, judicial, and legislative for that duality of functions proper to a few and a many—Guicciardini’s deliberazione and approvazione, Harrington’s “debate” and “result”—which theorists of the philo-Venetian tradition had insisted must be kept apart, thus constituting a “separation of powers” in the strict sense. Bolingbroke was promptly attacked by his journalistic adversaries—obscure men whose ability has been much underrated—for advancing a chimerical theory of the constitution, and he as promptly conceded that British government could not be analyzed into these absolutely distinct powers. He acknowledged that king, lords, and commons joined in a common political activity, which might as well be termed legislation as government, and insisted that by “independence” he had meant not a rigorous separation of function, but the elimination of “any influence, direct or indirect,” which one of the three might exercise over any other.⁵⁴ Unless the argument were to go round in a circle again—which it often did and still does—Bolingbroke must be interpreted as meaning, not encroachment by one jurisdiction upon another, but corruption occurring when “indirect influence” made the members of one governing body personally dependent upon another; as talking, not the language of function, but that of morality. There is plenty of evidence that his contemporaries so understood him.

But the ambivalence could not be quite so easily dispelled. In arguing that government by three independent powers was absurd, Bolingbroke’s critics were not simply returning to the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century debate between sovereignty and mixed government, though they were echoing a line of argument, found at least as early as Swift’s Discourse of the Nobles and the Commons, in which it was maintained that in every government there must be a final, absolute, and uncontrollable power, but that this could well be exercised by a complex and concurrent body (like king-in-parliament). They were in fact returning to the position of the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions or the Humble Petition and Advice, according to which the principles of balanced government could be found within the structure of parliamentary mixed monarchy, and against which Harrington had contended that a true republic was necessary. Montesquieu, it should be noted, for all his separation of powers, virtually accepted their position when he declared that Harrington had erected an imaginary government while having before his eyes a real one containing everything he needed.55 But in addition to this, Bolingbroke’s critics were affirming something at which Plato Redivivus had at least hinted and which Cato’s Letters had acknowledged more directly: that parliamentary monarchy, in which king, lords, and commons must work together, could not subsist without a measure of patronage or “indirect influence.” The neo-Harringtonian restatement of English history could be used to make this point: in feudal society, homage and tenure had combined to ensure that free men were responsive to the authority of their superiors, but once property carried with it no element of subjection at all, something must take the place of the vanished liens de dépendance. Trenchard may have hoped that a true equality of property would some day make even mixed monarchy unnecessary, but there is a group of works of the 1740s⁵⁶ concerned with rendering permanent a structure of influence which has come to replace feudal tenure. Such was a recognized implication of the acceptance of the need for parliamentary sovereignty.

Donato Giannotti would have followed this part of the debate with interest, recalling his own attempts to invest one of the three components of government with poca dependenza upon the other two; even Bolingbroke once or twice confessed that a subordination, as well as a balance, of powers was necessary to maintain government in an imperfect world.57 Under eighteenth-century conditions, however, it was even harder than it had been in Florence to show that dependence and influence could mean anything but corruption. The man who lived in the expectation of reward for his civic actions was a creature of passion, not of virtue, and by definition lacked the quality necessary to resist further degeneration. Bolingbroke, therefore, on weak ground when it came to eliminating patronage altogether from politics, was driven to find more and more devices for the reaffirmation of virtue. Hence his retention of such staples of the Country program as frequent, instead of septennial, parliaments and the abolition of placemen and standing armies. It is plain also that one motive for his stress on the independence of the three parts of government was the desire to affirm the classical balance in as formulaic a way as possible, and so invest the constitution with “principles” to which there might be a “return”—that most Renaissance of means to the reassertion of virtue. Even about this he displayed ambivalence in his later writings,⁵⁸ but in the Craftsman period he made the historical reality of principles a cardinal doctrine, and drew heavily on the idealization of “Gothic” society in order to discover a structure of balance in the Ancient Constitution. But here too his critics—Cook and Arnall in the London Journal, Lord Hervey in Ancient and Modern Liberty Stated and Compared—pressed hard upon him, demonstrating in the tradition of Brady and Defoe that there had been no ancient liberty in the turbulent world of barons and vassals, and consequently no principles to which to return.59 For all his superb arrogance of style, Bolingbroke in his lifetime fought a losing battle; and it does not lessen this truth to point out that the Walpolean writers proclaimed a world of kinetic history, without principles or virtue, in which men were governed through the interests and passions that made them what they were at the moment.

The dichotomy of virtue and interest also accounts for Bolingbroke’s—and very generally the age’s—inability to devise a satisfactory theory of party. To moderns it seems tolerably evident that competitive pressure groups may be made to function to the overall benefit of the political system; but to the still highly Aristotelian Augustans it was far from clear how any group intent upon its private interest could have any sense of the common good at all, and if it had not it would be no more than a faction, driving its members to further and further excesses of greed and frenzy and robbing them of that virtue, or sense of the common good, which only individuals, not groups, could possess. In societies like Machiavellian Rome, where the relations between the orders were improperly worked out, there might with advantage be conflicting parties embodying the virtues, or “principles,” of the nobility or the people; and where the commonwealth itself was threatened, there might (in Ciceronian language) be a party of good men who stood for it, a faction of bad men who were against it.⁶⁰ Bolingbroke argued that the terms Whig and Tory were now obsolete, and that there was only the Country, or party of virtue, contending against the Court, or faction of corruption; but this was not essentially different from the arguments of Toland and others in 1714, when—after years of denouncing party as an instrument of corruptive rule—they had conceded that there were still Whigs, who upheld the principles of 1688, and Tories, who could not be trusted to do so, and that a strong executive founded upon a Septennial Act was therefore necessary.⁶¹ Party was for most men tolerable only when it embodied principle and so was capable of virtue; two parties representing different particular interests would perpetuate the reign of corruption and fantasy.

Bolingbroke once remarked that the relation of stockjobbing to trade was much the same as that of faction to liberty62 (the obvious Polybian comment would be that the good and bad aspects of any “virtue” were always hard to keep separate). The apophthegm reveals the dominance and the limitations of the ideal of virtue; it remained a public and a personal characteristic, a devotion of the self to the universal good, in one form or another, which only a highly autonomous self could perform. Politics must be reduced to ethics if it was not to reduce itself to corruption; the rhetoric of the classical style commanded this, irrespective of the sincerity with which Bolingbroke or any other employed it. Therefore the Aristotelian, Polybian, Machiavellian, and now Harringtonian “science of virtue,” or sociology of civic ethics, had to be restated with paradigmatic force and comprehensiveness for the eighteenth-century West at large. Montesquieu, seen from this angle, is the greatest practitioner of that science, and this is the period during which Machiavelli’s reputation as the chief of civic moralists stood at its highest and blanketed most references to his moral ambiguity. But the price to be paid was that every treatise on politics which could not transcend the limitations of this style was likely to end, not only in moral exhortation, but in the suggestion that virtue as a quality of the personality was the only agency likely to cure corruption. Machiavelli had taken this line, while conceding that individual virtue in a corrupt society faced a task so difficult that merely human actors would almost certainly be defeated by it; only the heroic, the quasidivine or the truly inspired might succeed. Bolingbroke’s later writings, especially those written after he failed to wreck Walpole, are mere exhortations to the leaders of society, and finally to the Patriot King, to display heroic virtue and redeem a corrupt world; and John Brown, a highly intelligent if tragically unstable⁶³ disciple of Machiavelli, Cato, Bolingbroke, and Montesquieu who wrote between 1757 and 1765, reached at the end of his best-known work the unexpected conclusion that the national decadence could be cured only by the moral example of “some great minister.”64 Bolingbroke has been criticized for this retreat from Harringtonian empirical materialism to Machiavellian moral idealism;⁶⁵ but, in the first place, a civic virtue which was a dedication to universal public good must sooner or later be seen as independent of contingent and particular social causes, and in the second, it was no longer possible to believe with Harrington that an agrarian law might equalize in perpetuity the distribution of the material foundations of virtue. Land could not be freed from its dependence on trade, or trade from its dependence on credit; and the equivalent of an agrarian law for a speculative society was unknown and perhaps unthinkable. Men had therefore to be better than their circumstances; Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois is a magnificently paradoxical attempt to discover the circumstances under which this may be possible.

That Bolingbroke was driven to stake his intellectual and rhetorical all on the concept of virtue has consequences of which the most recent interpreters of his thought have perhaps not taken the fullest possible account. Observing that he differed—fairly explicitly—from Locke in holding that there were natural authority and order in society, that a virtuous king or aristocracy might exercise a paternal authority over lesser men, and that a Great Chain of Being formed the unifying structure of the deist’s universe, they have concluded that his ultimate allegiance was to the leadership of the landed gentry in a naturally hierarchical society, and that he felt a nostalgia for an older, Elizabethan or Jacobean, social and philosophical world.⁶⁶ But we have repeatedly seen that the ideal of virtue was political, and that the polis, based on the vita activa and including equality among its principles, was never finally reducible to the hierarchy. Certainly it included an elite, characterized by wisdom and experience, leisure and property, whose virtue was to lead and in that sense to rule; the authority these exercised over citizens not of the elite might be termed both natural and paternal, as the Roman senate had been termed patres conscripti; but Guicciardini, the most aristocratically minded of Florentine republican theorists, had made it clear that the few needed the many to save them from corruption, and that when the many accepted the few as their natural leaders they did not cease to display critical judgment or active citizenship. Leadership and deference were both active virtues; virtue, in a more abstract and formal sense, was a relationship between two modes of civic activity; and Bolingbroke’s nostalgia, if he felt any, might well have been for the open and turbulent world of Country politics in Anne’s reign, as compared with the placidly managed oligarchy of George II’s. We shall return to this theme in analyzing the problems of deference and equality in revolutionary America, where he was regarded as a second Machiavelli whose authority as a philosopher of morals and politics exceeded his ambiguity.

[IV]

The “Machiavellian moment” of the eighteenth century, like that of the sixteenth, confronted civic virtue with corruption, and saw the latter in terms of a chaos of appetites, productive of dependence and loss of personal autonomy, flourishing in a world of rapid and irrational change. But to sixteenth-century minds the symbol for that which made the appetites hard to coordinate in swiftly moving secular time was fortuna, a concept essentially expressing the inadequacies of classical epistemology; whereas those of the eighteenth century were able to define corruption and irrationality in terms far more positive, material, and dynamic, though these still lacked an ethical content to the point where the history they rendered concrete remained essentially a movement away from virtue. What may be termed the ideology of the Country was founded on a presumption of real property and an ethos of the civic life, in which the ego knew and loved itself in its relation to a patria, res publica or common good, organized as a polity, but was perpetually threatened by corruption operating through private appetites and false consciousness. To save personality, it urged an ideal of virtue which at times reached unreally Stoical heights of moral autonomy, and was based on the maintenance of a propertied independence hard to sustain in a speculative economy; to save polity, it depicted the British constitution as a classical balance of independent yet coordinate elements or powers, to maintain which was to maintain virtue but which only the assertion of personal virtue could in the last analysis maintain. Since its ethics were reducible to an ideal of the wholly self-sustaining personality, it found it terribly easy to see corruption as irreversible by merely human means; and since its economics tended to ground that personality on a form of property held to have existed in a pre-commercial past, it tended to see history as a movement away from value which only heroic, not social, action could reverse. But though it was increasingly susceptible to elegiac pessimism, it was endowed with all the riches of the complex and articulate vocabulary of civic humanism with which to expound the science and sociology of virtue. Its paradigms therefore tended to dominate discourse.

What may be termed the ideology of the Court, on the other hand, was consequently less prominent and had fewer magisterial exponents. We may synthesize it, however, as founded upon an acceptance of credit as a measure of economic value and of a psychology of imagination, passion, and interest as the mainsprings of human behavior. In the place of virtue it stressed the ego’s pursuit of satisfaction and self-esteem, and was beginning to explore theories of how the diversities of passionate and self-interested action might be manipulated and coordinated, or might magically or mechanically coordinate themselves, into promoting a common good no longer intimately connected with the inner moral life of the individual. Since it did not regard virtue as politically paradigmatic, it did not regard government as founded upon principles of virtue which needed to be regularly reasserted; it readily accepted that men were factious and interested beings and, instead of regarding these characteristics as fatal if unchecked to virtue and government, proposed to have them policed by a strong central executive, which did not itself need to be disciplined by the principles of virtue, but might without suffering harm appeal to the passions and interests of men. It saw personal morality as private rather than public, a matter of probity in interpersonal dealings which did not require to be expressed in acts of civic morality or statesmanlike virtue, and might contribute only indirectly if at all to the maintenance of a moral climate in politics.

Because of this, its ethical vocabulary was thin and limited by the lack of any theory which presented human virtue as that of a zōon politikon. This weakness relegated it to the margins—if at times to the avant-garde—of eighteenth-century moral theory; but the fact that it located no body of principles, or concept of property, in a past to which there might be return, gave it freedom to adapt itself to those social changes which rendered intelligible the new world of credit, professionalism, and empire. At the same time, however, these changes continued to be measured in terms of history’s departure from the world and its values depicted by the Country, and the ethics of the new world must be stated in language as intransigent as that of Mandeville. The Country took its republican ethos very largely from Machiavelli; but the Court was the more Machiavellian in its ability to accept that dynamic change might operate independently of values. The dualism of virtue and virtù returns to view here, and we recall that, as it was largely war which had opened up this dichotomy for Machiavelli, it was in part war as an aspect of commerce which had compelled the Augustans to recognize the nature of the new world. In the language of Addison’s Cato rather than Trenchard’s, the Court ideology could show how to command success, the Country how to deserve it; or, as Alexander Hamilton once put it—in an interesting employment of party terminology that might have been used by Swift—“Cato was the Tory, Caesar the Whig of his day.… The former perished with the republic, the latter destroyed it.”67 But if the Court ideology could claim a monopoly of the understanding of power, it must leave its counter-thesis in sole possession of a theory of virtue; and far more than for Machiavelli, to lack virtue was to be prey to fantasia and false consciousness. The gap between civic virtue and dynamic virtù was by that much the wider, and the charge that the road to power was the road to corruption and self-destruction the more compelling.

In Britain, however, Bolingbroke’s ideological campaign was in its author’s lifetime a failure. The country gentlemen were not being reduced to hopeless indebtedness; no monopolist of power and patronage succeeded Walpole; the wars of the mid-century, being fought largely beyond sea, produced no revolt against war finance like that which had brought down Godolphin and Marlborough; and over all, it seemed evident enough that Court and Country were in symbiosis rather than in opposition, so that there was much to be said for the view that the constitution was a parliamentary monarchy rather than a balance of separate powers. In such circumstances there was room for political theorists to reinspect the relations of crown and parliament: historians, those of the landed and trading interests; philosophers, those of reason and passion; and all these revaluations may be found in the writings of the most powerful minds which examined British politics about 1750. Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, in spite of its treatment of the separation of powers, may be thought of, in English terms, as somewhat more Whig than the Lettres Persanes; and there is, in Book XIX, chapter 27, a striking study of a free nation—obviously Britain—in the terms we have been considering.

Montesquieu tells us that this analysis will be based on moeurs and manières in their relation to laws, rather than on les principes de sa constitution;⁶⁸ and this proves to mean that the importance of keeping the legislative and executive powers separate and visibles is that, the passions of men being free, hatred, envy, and ambition shall be equally free to attach themselves to the one or the other.⁶⁹ Since the executive power has all offices in its gift, it will always be the object of hope rather than fear; those who are out of office will hope to return to it, and those who are in, though presumably fearing loss of place, know that even in that event they may hope to regain office in the way that they won it. The problem of Machiavellian innovation—that those it offends will react more dynamically than those it pleases—has to this extent been solved, and the executive power resembles the principe naturale, whose position is reinforced by the natures of his subjects, rather than the principe nuovo, doomed to act contrary to them. There is no doubt, however, that passion, rather than Machiavellian custom, is a mainspring of this kind of government;70 caprices and fantaisies will often lead men to change sides as between the two passionately jealous parties (of ins and outs) into which this society will be divided; there will be little loyalty or principle among the independent particulars who compose it, and the monarch will often be driven to disgrace his friends and promote his enemies.⁷¹ But because passions are free, amour propre (in Rousseau’s phrase, which Montesquieu does not use) will not become corruptive. Fear, and irrational fear at that, now makes a reappearance; the monopoly of patronage by the executive keeps the people in perpetual fear of they know not what, and the leaders of opposition to the Crown will magnify these fears rather than avow their own motives.⁷² But the emotion is healthy; Montesquieu is midway between Cato’s citation of Machiavelli to the effect that a people mistrusting its government knows no limits to its fears, and Burke’s observation of the Americans that “they snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.”⁷³ Because they fear unreal dangers to their liberty, they are alert to real ones before these arise74—to wait until experience has revealed them to be real is to delay until it is too late—and the elected legislature, being calmer than the people and having their confidence,⁷⁵ will allay their fears of unreal dangers and anticipate the rise of real ones; a role, it is worth noting, which only a few can play.

This nation, situated on an island, will engage in commerce rather than conquest; but its trading and colonizing ventures will be fiercely competitive and aggressive, it will engage in enterprises beyond its strength and even contrary to its interests,⁷⁶ and in order to do so will mobilize huge and fictitious power by borrowing. But since it borrows from itself, its crédit is sure; and though the wealth and power it creates are imaginary, its confiance in itself and its free government will convert fiction into reality.⁷⁷ Nothing could be further from Cato’s portrait of the South Sea mania, or Montesquieu’s own portrait of Law. He is now telling us that in a free society, where power is pluralized and distributed, passion itself is free, not merely to change its objects, but actually to recreate the world in accordance with its fantasies. This, however, operates in the domain of external virtù, of commerce and power beyond the frontiers and seacoasts; in the domain of civic virtue, fantasy and truth may coexist and reinforce one another, but there comes a point where prudence and wisdom must rigorously distinguish between the real and unreal as threats to liberty. Given liberty, however—which was lacking in the case of Law—passion and fantasy will contribute to this result; they will fuel the fires by whose light statesmen discern, and we are not in Plato’s cave. Montesquieu is not arguing here, as Swift, Cato, and Bolingbroke had argued, that a wisdom not grounded in commerce is needed to prevent the fantasies of speculation from corrupting society. He is saying that a free and fortunate society can absorb a great deal of false consciousness without suffering serious harm, and may use it in order to expand. The frenzies of his ins and outs, his office seekers, speculators, and aggressive merchants, recall those hatreds of the patricians and plebeians which Machiavelli contended had contributed to Roman liberty and greatness.

There may be found in Montesquieu—standing somewhat apart from his studies of British politics—a historical conspectus of the ways in which commerce, and therefore passion, contribute to liberty and civic values. Virtue, he laid down, was the principle of republics, but by this he intended a vertu politique, not identical (though not incompatible) with a vertu morale or a vertu chrétienne, and consisting—true to the Machiavellian tradition—in an equality of subjection to the republic’s laws and of devotion to her good.78 More clearly than his English predecessors, Montesquieu knew that virtue in this sense did not necessarily coincide with private values or personal morality; and in his treatment of early Sparta, Athens, and Rome he made it clear that the republic might enforce it with repugnant and inhuman harshness.⁷⁹ Like Machiavelli, he knew that the Christian ethos made demands to which the civic ethos might refuse to give way, and that the latter might flourish best in periods close to barbarism, when there was no need to accord the rights of humanity to those who were not of one’s city. But he also makes it clear that it was because the ethos of the ancient cities was essentially a warrior ethos, and commerce and even agriculture were despised, that Plato and Aristotle believed the personality could and must be entirely reshaped by music.80 That is, men who produce and exchange goods become aware of values which are not merely those of the city’s laws, and enter into relations with one another that do not consist exclusively in an equality of subjection to them. If they trade outside the city’s walls, they enter into human relations and develop codes of humane values over which the republic has only a contingent authority. On the one hand, manners are now softened, art and refinement can be developed, and the ferocity of Lycurgan or Draconian discipline can be mitigated; but on the other, this is the point at which Plato found it necessary to prohibit commerce outside the city and leave the socialization of the personality entirely to music and other modes of education controlled by the guardians. Commerce is the source of all social values save one—we sense that Christianity itself would be possible only in a world of inter-civic contacts, an oikumenē rather than a polis—but that one, the vertu politique, is that which makes man a zōon politikon and consequently human; and there is a radical disjunction between the two categories of value. Commerce, which makes men cultured, entails luxury, which makes them corrupt;⁸¹ there is no economic law which sets limits to the growth of luxury, and virtue is to be preserved only by the discipline of the republic, educating men in frugality—which indeed is conducive to further commercial growth—by means which include both music and the practice of arms.

Machiavelli, defining civic values as ultimately incompatible with Christian, had employed the concept of arms to express both the citizen’s total devotion to his republic and the notion of a world too harsh in its treatment of noncitizens to profess any universal humanity. Montesquieu had added to this the concept of commerce, and had restored the conclusion, hinted at by Fletcher and Davenant, that commerce and culture were incompatible with virtue and liberty. Commerce brought with it pleasures more lively, perceptions more refined, and values more universal than those of the primeval Spartan, Roman, or Gothic citizen-warrior; but because it represented a principle more universal, and of another order, than that of the finite polis, it was ultimately incompatible with virtue in the sense of vertu politique, and though laws, education, and manners might be devised that would check the growth of luxury, it could never be less than equally true that luxury corrupted laws, education, and manners. In the intermediate perspective, commerce and the arts could be seen as contributing to sociability and even to liberty and virtue, just as it was possible to establish a positive relationship between passion and reason; but the ultimate incompatibility remained. Commerce had taken the place of fortune; the republic could not control its own history forever or resist its own corruption; the particular and the universal remained at war.

It was possible at this point to restate the vision of history as an anakuklōsis, in which republics were transformed into empires by their own virtù and then corrupted and destroyed by the subsequent luxury. But to the eighteenth century, highly confident in its own culture, the intermediate perspective could seem of a surpassing importance, more positively fortified than the saeculum or historic present of Christian thought, and the moment of corruption more remote than the tribulations of the Christian apocalypse; there was even, contained in theories of progress, the possibility of a utopia in which culture should become self-sustaining. But as long as the ethos of civic virtue persisted, the threat of an apocalypse of self-destruction could not be eliminated; and the relations between personality and society seemed fragile enough to leave it possible that apocalypse by corruption might come swiftly and irresistibly. Such perspectives can be found even in the thought of David Hume.

It might well be imprudent to draw too close a connection—though a connection of some kind must exist—between the concern which Hume felt as a philosopher with the relation of reason to passion and the interest which he displayed as a historian of England in the relations of land to commerce and of executive to legislative.82 In the latter capacity, however, he appears as a historian predominantly of the Court persuasion. He followed Brady, Defoe, and the apologists for Walpole in rejecting the belief in an Ancient Constitution, and adopted the perspective of Harrington—whom he admired with reservations—against that of the neo-Harringtonians. There had been in England a Gothic government of landed warriors, barons, and their vassals, but this had been an uneasy tension between violent authority and violent liberty; no legitimizing principles, whether of precedent or balance, were to be found in it. The emancipation of the people from vassalage would have been impossible without the spread of commerce and of learning; but it had brought about a confrontation between a monarchy whose arbitrary and indeed absolute character stood revealed for the first time, and a people whose demand for liberty was fueled in no small measure by the superstition, fanaticism, and hypocrisy which were all Hume could discern in Puritanism. There were therefore connections between the growth of commerce, the release of passion, and the pursuit of liberty, and since the latter was not at bottom a rational but an appetitive demand, it is the easier to understand Hume’s dictum that authority and liberty must always confront one another in government and could never be wholly harmonized. Gothic government had stated this opposition in a form exceptionally crude; what had been achieved by 1688 was a synthesis somewhat more stable.83 It should be stressed, however, that Hume continued to regard the British constitution as a compromise between absolute monarchy and popular republic, and rated high the chances that it would gravitate toward one extreme or the other in the end.⁸⁴

Commerce and learning, he made clear, had effected more than a trivial transition from the superstition of medieval Christians to the fanaticism of the Puritans. They had enlarged men’s ideas by giving them more objects to feed upon, more concepts to entertain and more values to express; and in this way what was at bottom an increase in the appetitive and passional activities of the human mind had facilitated a growth in the rational capacities, including—once the frenzy of Puritanism was worked out—the capacities for rational liberty and (if there could be such a thing) rational religion.⁸⁵ Passion might inform reason, and help it rearrange the delicate relations between authority and liberty, but just as there could be no final harmony between the one pair, there could be none between the other; and it comes as no surprise to learn that Hume’s view of the eighteenth-century constitution was “Court” in the sense that he accepted the necessity of an ultimate repository of power and an executive possessed of the means of influencing the legislature.86 Patronage did not alarm him, since he saw men as creatures ruled by, or rather through, their passions, and government as a filtering device which induced them to transform their short-term perceptions of their private interests into long-term understanding of the general identity of interests—and, in that sense, of the public good. Ideally, a perfect commonwealth would consist of a one, few, and many of the classic type; but in reality, and even in ideality, there must be means of bringing the interests of all three into identity, and this involved the presence of a patronage-dispensing authority, which must always be in some degree of tension with the forces making for liberty.⁸⁷

Hume accepted the necessity for patronage and influence in government in the same way that he had accepted commerce as, for the present era in history, a liberating force which enlarged men’s minds through the nourishment of their appetites. It is of interest, at this point, to recall Goro Dati and those other writers of the quattrocento, who had argued that the Florentines were the more fitted for active citizenship by the fact that they were merchants, who traveled, studied and compared, and filled their minds with more knowledge than they could have inherited through the simple observance of custom.⁸⁸ In the hands of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, we realize, the civic ethos had to some extent turned against this original bourgeois ebullience; the citizen was required to subject particular to public goods so rigorously that he had begun to appear a trade-eschewing Spartan, a warrior, citizen, and farmer, and nothing more. In the eighteenth century, engrossed as it was with the problem of virtue and commerce, it was always from the Court perspective that entrepreneurial man was readmitted to the category of virtuous citizen. As Hume was prepared to accept duality and creative tension between reason and passion, authority and liberty, so in his treatment of English history he had begun—anticipating Coleridge and others of the nineteenth century—to accept a similar duality between the men of real property, who inherited liberty in the form of privilege and custom, and the men of mobile property, who affirmed it in the form of enlarged knowledge and expanding capacities; there was beginning to be an element of progress to pit against an element of conservation.⁸⁹

There were soon to appear enthusiasts—as Hume would assuredly have recognized them to be—of progress, who held that the expansion of trade and travel over the whole world would in due course equip man with all the data, from which he would draw all the conclusions, necessary to a complete understanding of himself and his environment. The stumbling block here was that such knowledge, being based in appetite and passion, must contain an element of fantasy, imagination, and false consciousness, which it was hard to imagine being finally eliminated from the operations of the mind. Hume was certainly under no such delusions; he was no kind of utopian at all; but he had equipped himself better than most men with the skeptic’s ability to accept that, if we must live very largely in a world of phantasms, we were capable of recognizing that they were phantasms and of constructing guidelines which would inform us how far, and within what limits, we had succeeded in converting them into true knowledge. Consequently—and it is a consequence—he did not unduly fear the extension of metal currency into paper credit; indeed, he rather maliciously suggested that it was a pity Lycurgus had not employed paper, rather than iron bars, to restrict the circulation of gold and silver at Sparta. He accepted that, under proper management, men in a credit economy trusted one another’s solvency rather than the market value of the funds—much as Montesquieu had shown crédit merging into confiance—and that paper could serve as a medium for the communication of durable, if not real, values.90

But there was a point beyond which credit and confidence could not operate, and it is striking to observe Hume’s language when he contemplates its being passed. The determining factor was the burden of public debt. If the time ever came when all property and industry were in debt to the nation up to the limit (nineteen shillings in the pound) to which debt could be imposed, and the nation’s debt to itself was secured upon its future revenues to all perpetuity, then public confidence could no longer persist. A ruling class of stockjobbers would appear, in all the horror in which Davenant or Bolingbroke had painted them, owning nothing except the debts of the public and yet owning everything, since the value of every object would now be the extent of its indebtedness. Military service and parliamentary representation would become tasks performed for hire, and men would have nothing to protect them against their own fantasies and gullibility, since the value and meaning of everything would have been destroyed. A “natural death” of national bankruptcy, or a “violent death” of foreign conquest, would be the only possible outcome; and this—Hume declared, and may have died believing in 1776—was by far the most predictable result of the state of affairs actually existing: “either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation.”91

Hume was by nature as little addicted to jeremiads as any philosopher in history; yet he was driven to adopt a jeremiad tone by the circumstance, now familiar to us, that commercial society did not contain any ultimate check on the forces making for its corruption. Like the King’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions, he ended by depicting the social balance as inherently fragile; like Machiavelli—and with as few illusions, perhaps fewer, since he had even less belief that government rested on virtue in the individual—he conceded that only legislative reform could resist the forces undermining virtue, and that there existed a point after which degeneration would swiftly prove irreversible. If, in Montesquieu’s language, virtue was the principle of republics, it was the inner meaning of the republican thesis that virtue must sustain the conditions necessary to virtue, and was self-isolated in its own heroism—from which, perhaps, flowed its evident attraction for the post-Puritan mind. This despite the fact that Hume’s philosophical, psychological, and economic analyses of society were as subtle and complex as any his age (or most others) had to offer, and did not oblige him to reify “virtue” as a stable entity on which everything else depended. He had a singularly broad understanding of the diversity of social forces going to make up the complex which was usually termed “virtue,” but he saw these forces as operating within certain conditions which they might themselves destroy; and once this happened, the established rhetoric of “corruption” was entirely appropriate.

Within this one limitation, however, it is part of what made Hume a great historian in the eighteenth century that he saw commerce and passion as dynamic forces contributing both to the construction of political society and to an active and kinetic history, and he was by no means incapable of taking a sanguine view of the present and future, in which ultimate corruption might be averted for a very long time. The great Scottish school of social philosophers, who are in a complex fashion his immediate heirs, continued the historical dialectic between virtue and commerce, and in doing so were greatly aided by his teachings.⁹² In spite of Hume’s much-quoted belief that human nature was in all times and places the same, his argument that reason was dependent on passion and passion on experience could, in conjunction with the increasingly held opinion that commerce enlarged the sphere of human experience, knowledge, and values, be employed to build up an image of men creating and transforming their own “second natures”—based, since Aristotle, on usage and love, or experience and passion—throughout the centuries of their growing economic life. If it were possible to say with certainty that the leaders of the Scottish school were acquainted with Vico’s doctrine that men created their own history through the linguistic and poetic imagination, it is easy to see how the link between commerce and imagination could have been made. And since land and commerce were already opposed as principles of conservation and growth, a movement of history from land toward commerce was enlarged, in the thinking of theoretical sociologists or “conjectural historians,” into a scheme of social development which passed from hunters to shepherds, farmers, and traders, with manufacturers beginning to make their appearance toward the end of the sequence. In each succeeding phase, men’s methods of providing and distributing the goods necessary to life furnished experience with the raw materials on which passion, imagination, and intellect fed, and in each, human personality was seen as constructed upon the configurations appropriate to that stage of culture. A theory of homo faber, of labor as the author of values, could now be invoked by Adam Smith. Man could now be described as a cultural animal and culture as a product of economics; and as the goods produced, and the techniques of producing and distributing them, grew in each phase more complex, human culture, imagination, and personality correspondingly increased in complexity. There was now a historical science of tracing and explaining the growth of culture and commerce; and man, becoming more and more a historical animal, was placed at the core of the resultant process.

But the contradiction between culture and liberty was not thereby fully overcome. The Scottish and French conjectural historians continued to employ the language of virtue and corruption—to employ, that is, the language of civic humanism in that English form which since 1698 had been a means of stating the quarrel between value and history—and they did so with results that were not less pessimistic than those found in Machiavelli. They came, by the time of Adam Smith, to see the division and specialization of labor, and the resulting intensification of exchange, as the driving force which had moved society from each phase of its economic history toward the next; and this is not accidentally related to the circumstance that the whole Anglo-Scottish inquiry into the role of commerce in society and history had begun as a protest against the growth of a professionalized army—against what the classical and civic tradition presented as the crucial and disastrous instance of specialization of social function. The citizen who allowed another to be paid to fight for him parted with a vital element of his virtus, in every sense of that word; and the priest, the lawyer, and the rentier had been grouped with the soldier as paradigmatic instances of individuals whose specialization made them the servants of others who became servants to them in their turn. Specialization, in short, was a prime cause of corruption; only the citizen as amateur, propertied, independent, and willing to perform in his own person all functions essential to the polis, could be said to practice virtue or live in a city where justice was truly distributed. There was no arte that he must not be willing to make his own. But if the arts proved to have been built up through a process of specialization, then culture itself was in contradiction with the ethos of the zōon politikon; and if it were further argued—as it clearly could be—that only specialization, commerce, and culture set men free enough to attend to the goods of others as well as their own, then it would follow that the polis was built up by the very forces that must destroy it. Once land and commerce were placed in historical sequence, civic man found himself existing in a historical contradiction.

Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society is perhaps the most Machiavellian of the Scottish disquisitions on this theme.93 He employs less the sequence of modes of production favored by his contemporaries than a movement of history from barbarism to civilization, from a warrior society marked by primitive virtue toward a state of commerce, refinement, and humanity. He stressed that the primitive human group was constantly in conflict with its neighbors, and derived from these conditions of war and struggle an intense passion of solidarity which socialized the individual and reinforced his ego.⁹⁴ This aggressive and disciplined passion is visibly Machiavelli’s virtù—as it is also the ’asabiyah of the Arab sociologist Ibn Khaldun—and it is the source of virtue in the ordinary sense, as the primitive warriors become patriotic citizens. But as war made societies more cohesive, and therefore more capable of refinement, relations between citizens became relations of specialization, interchange, and commerce; and the growth of professional armies marked for Ferguson—as it had for Fletcher—the moment at which men sought to enjoy the material, intellectual, and moral satisfactions of civilization and leave the defense of them to others paid for the purpose.95 This was the turning point at which it became problematical whether the contingent, secondary, yet in many scales of values higher, goods which civilization brought did not corrupt men by distracting them from the primary good of sociability itself; that primeval ’asabiyah or virtù which could be described in terms predominantly nonmoral—and was now being depicted as unmistakably a passion—and yet was the source of moral personality and moral relationships.

All Aristotelian theorists were in one way or another troubled by this problem of the universal versus the particular good, but few before Ferguson had stated it in so arrestingly primitivist a form, and the Machiavellian language which he uses indicates that his doing so is one more outcome of the humanist experiment of locating the republic in time. The problem had always been that of deciding when the particular or private goods should be seen as contributory to the universal or public good, when as competitive with it. Because the concept of civic virtue staked everything on an immediate relation between personality and republic, the vivere civile had tended to negate the secondary goods rather than to affirm them. Sparta, where the appetites had been repressed, had traditionally been preferred to Athens, where they had been transcended; it was only in nineteenth-century liberal England, when culture finally replaced property as the qualifying characteristic of the civic elite, that the Funeral Oration of Pericles was ranked among the sacred writings of liberal civilization. Once the republic was placed in time, its history tended to become one of the self-corruption of virtue by virtue; and the eighteenth century, to which Athens appeared the type of a commercial and ultimately effeminate empire,⁹⁶ faced this problem in an especially tormenting form. The paradigm of commerce presented the movement of history as being toward the indefinite multiplication of goods, and brought the whole progress of material, cultural, and moral civilization under this head. But so long as it did not contain any equivalent to the concept of the zōon politikon, of the individual as an autonomous, morally and politically choosing being, progress must appear to move away from something essential to human personality. And this corruption was self-generating; society as an engine for the production and multiplication of goods was inherently hostile to society as the moral foundation of personality. The history of commerce revealed once again that the republic had not solved the problem of existing as a universal value in particular and contingent time.

Ferguson may be thought of as stating this paradox by the device of distinguishing between virtù on the one hand—the primary value of oneness with the social basis of personality—and virtue, in the sense of the practice of every value derived from the progress of society, on the other. Montesquieu had done something similar when he observed that the vertu of a monk was that by which he repressed every human appetite and achieved complete devotion to his order;97 the philosopher did not regard monastic orders as being of any value to society. But Ferguson is playing this trick on civilization and personality themselves; and the effect, given the terminology of Scottish social science, is that the citizen, the social animal defined solely by his virtue, is pressed steadily back toward the condition usually defined as savagery, in which he acknowledged no value except group solidarity, and the group made possible no other virtue. There are some extraordinary pages in which Ferguson describes the character of the early city-state Greeks in terms which assimilate them as much as possible to the Homeric warriors, who are in turn identified with Lafitau’s American Indians and—the implication is very clear—the clansmen of Ferguson’s own Highlands.⁹⁸ If the citizen was to give up every virtue except virtù itself, he must regress more and more toward the condition of the tribesman, and his virtù toward what ethologists like to call the “territorial imperative.”

He had no alternative, given the premise—which the lack of a commercial ethos forced upon the philosopher—that the progress of civilization was a multiplication of secondary values, to pursue which necessitated the division of labor and the specialization of personalities. As the individual pursued any civilized value or combination of values, he became more and more the dependent of those with whom he had contracted to perform specialized functions other than his own, less and less a personality immediately related to society in its undifferentiated form; and if here alone were the roots of individuality to be found, he parted with an essential component of self in proportion as he became progressively refined. The personality was impoverished even as it was enriched. We are at the point where the classical concept of corruption merges into the modern concept of alienation, and the humanist roots of early Marxism become visible. Those theorists of the Scottish school who employ a more highly developed economic scheme of the stages of human progress exhibit the same problem. Certainly, in Adam Smith the principle of the division of labor and exchange of goods and services has been at work since the beginning of history; it has led, not merely to the satisfaction of more human needs, but to the development of new human capacities, wants, and aspirations, so that the personality has been progressively diversified and enriched; this is Smith’s expansion of the point that an admixture of commerce was necessary before man could become capable of citizenship. But we are aware of an intimation that some kind of optimum moment has been reached and passed. Those whose lives are spent in putting the heads on pins—the precursors of Marx’s proletariat and the assembly-line workers of the twentieth century—are not merely being denied the leisure to enjoy the multiplying goods now circulating in society; their actual capacity to do so is being systematically atrophied, and if specialization is producing an overall diversification of the human personality in history, it is having the reverse, one-dimensional effect upon theirs.99 John Millar, Smith’s most striking pupil and immediate successor, wrote a four-volume historical study of the growth of English political society in which the same point is made in terms which reveal the civic humanist origins of the whole perspective. Virtue and corruption are Millar’s organizing categories, and he recurs incessantly to the question whether, as society progresses to the point where men become capable of liberty and virtue, they do not become increasingly exposed to corruption;¹⁰⁰ not merely in the sense that, once men are virtuous, they have nothing to fear except corruption, but in the deeper and more alarming sense that the same historical forces which produce virtue produce also the distraction of the personality, less through the temptations of luxury than by the confusions and alienations of the moral identity, which we now intend when we use the word corruption. Questa ci esalta, questa ci disface. The virtuous, or socially healthy, personality is unmade even as it is made.

In the Scottish school we may see how the Machiavellian moment became a moment in a dialectical process. There was now a theory of history which showed how virtue was built up and demolished by the growth of society itself, an extension through time of that image of the centaur which Machiavelli had employed to show how, if man was by nature a zōon politikon, he never fully became himself; and there is a relation between Machiavelli’s belief that republics never became fully stable or fully virtuous, and the fact that political theory based on commerce increasingly showed society polarized into those enriched by progress and those impoverished by it, and justified government as a necessary evil in a world of specialization and class struggle. The moment was dialectical in the sense that, though it was possible to think of an optimum point at which the forces building up and the forces tearing down virtue were in equilibrium, the historical structure of the theory ensured that such a point could only be attained momentarily. When Ferguson analyzed the citizen in such a way as to reduce him to the clansman, he knew perfectly well that the citizen could only be explained in terms of progressive emergence from the world of the clansman. Contradiction was of the essence, and there had been no golden age to which men might return. The conversion of irrational fortuna into positive and progressive commerce had not altered the character of the moment at which virtue and fortune were held in confrontation.

But there are two sides to a dialectic, especially one composed of progress and disruption, and it would clearly be possible to write a study of the Scottish school in which nearly all the emphasis lay on those aspects of their thought which were progressive, in the sense that they were concerned with showing how commerce and specialization had built up society and culture; or conservative, in the sense that they sought to show how the progress of society and the alienation of personality might be mitigated or held in an equilibrium not too intolerable for any party. Scottish thought was not as a rule utopian, in the sense that it showed the forces of progress finally overcoming those of decay—it did not have a final answer to the problem of personality and society—but neither was it strongly marked by a tragic sense of historical contradiction. Are there perhaps concealed ironies in the use of the sobriquet “Modern Athens” to describe Edinburgh in its great years, given the opposition between Athens and Sparta or Rome? But if we concluded that Scottish philosophy envisaged a future in which progress and corruption might coexist for a very long period, it would be important to know whether the time-dimension of that future was simply contingent and secular—in the sense that nothing was held to exist but conflicting social forces and no final resolution of their conflict expected—or semi-apocalyptic, in the sense that the dramatic corruption and collapse of any human society was ultimately to be looked for, but that human efforts favored by circumstances might postpone it almost indefinitely. In either case, however, Jean-Jacques Rousseau—whose visit to Scotland, projected by Hume, was psychologically doomed never to take place—would have appeared among his hosts as an accuser of the brethren, paranoiacally proclaiming that the tensions between personality and society did have apocalyptic possibilities, that the apocalypse had arrived in his own person, and that if properly understood it would be seen to have been present since before the beginnings of human society itself.

Rousseau was the Machiavelli of the eighteenth century, in the sense that he dramatically and scandalously pointed out a contradiction that others were trying to live with.101 If the Scottish school believed that the contradiction between virtue and culture might be managed by men in society with good hopes of reasonable success, it was his role to insist that the contradiction was intolerable precisely at the moment of personal existence, and that this was and had been true at every moment in the history of society. Since by its nature society humanized man and by the same processes distracted and alienated him again, there was no point in past, present, or future time at which this double effect had not been going on. The entire social enterprise was by its nature necessary and self-defeating. The impact of this declaration was in many ways comparable to that of Machiavelli’s announcement of the divorce between civic and Christian values; and, as with Machiavelli, it took time to discern the extraordinary strength of intellect which kept Rousseau a major classical theorist in the humanist succession. He exposed the theme of the alienation of personality with such completeness that, it can be argued, no recourse was left short of the adoption of an idealist mode of discourse in which the personality was seen articulating in itself, and seeking to reunite, the contradictions of history—a line of thought which, in Marx, was recombined with the analysis of the social effects of the division of labor begun by the Scottish theorists. That story, however, is not to be told here. The present study of the civic ideal of personality, and the consequences of its articulation, must conclude with its last great pre-modern efflorescence, which took place in the American colonies, and with its effects upon the American sense of personality and history.

1 In the “Avertissement de l’Auteur” prefixed to the Esprit des Lois; quoted below, n. 78.

² Property is technically always artificial (vide the words of Ireton, above, p. 375); but property in land was thought to arise when men and their families moved freely, and in this sense “naturally,” on the face of the earth. It could also be argued that property in flocks and herds had preceded it and was more “natural” still.

³ See the language of Burke’s Reflections, discussed in Politics, Language and Time, pp. 210-12, in which it is argued that societies where property and rights are envisaged as inheritances are most like families and so most natural.

⁴ Addison, Spectator, no. 69 (see Bloom and Bloom, pp. 38-39); Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, Remark G (ed. Harth, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, p. 120); Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes, CVI.

⁵ “… l’intérêt est le plus grande monarque de la Terre.” Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 288.

⁶ See An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War, ed. and intro. M. M. Goldsmith (London: Frank Cass, 1971), pp. xiii, xxiii. Rousseau’s distinction is in the Discours sur l’inegalité (Vaughan, ed.), The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), I, 217. It is interesting that Mandeville was aware of the etymology and history of the word virtus and its origins in a warrior ethos; see his preface to the Enquiry, pp. iii-vii.

⁷ Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 115-25; Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: the Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953), pp. 141, 492; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1967), pp. 35-37, and The Origins of American Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), pp. 40-44; David L. Jacobson, The English Libertarian Heritage (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1965), introduction (the text consists wholly of selections from Cato).

⁸ Lettres Persanes, XXIV, XCVIII, CXXXII, CXXXVIII, CXLII, CXLVI.

⁹ Cato’s Letters: or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects; 3d ed., London, 1723, II, 28.

¹⁰ Cato’s Letters, I, 6-7, and passim.

¹¹ Cato’s Letters, I, 11.

¹² Cato’s Letters, II, 16, 71-74, 85-90.

¹³ Cato’s Letters, I, 134-35.

¹⁴ Cato’s Letters, III, 24.

¹⁵ Cato’s Letters, III, 199-213.

¹⁶ Cato’s Letters, I, 69-70.

¹⁷ Toland, Works, p. 28: “As for dominion personal or in mony, it may now and then stir up a Melius or a Manlius, which, if the commonwealth be not provided with some kind of dictatorian power, may be dangerous, though it has bin seldom or never successful: because to property producing empire, it is requir’d that it should have som certain root or foot-hold, which, except in land, it cannot have, being otherwise as it were upon the wing.”

¹⁸ Cato’s Letters, I, lvii.

¹⁹ Cato’s Letters, II, 305.

²⁰ Cato’s Letters, III, 27-28.

²¹ Cato’s Letters, II, 272-77.

²² Cato’s Letters, II, 267.

²³ Cato’s Letters, II, 77-84.

²⁴ Cato’s Letters, II, 51.

²⁵ Cato’s Letters, I, 82-83.

²⁶ Cato’s Letters, II, 192-201.

²⁷ Cato’s Letters, I, 124-27; II, 50-52.

²⁸ Cato’s Letters, II, 51.

²⁹ Cato’s Letters, II, 48-49.

³⁰ Cato’s Letters, I, 153-56, 177-83.

³¹ Cato’s Letters, I, 180-81. The thought is authentically Machiavellian, though it is not quite clear to what text this passage alludes.

³² Cato’s Letters, II, 90; see pp. 85-90 for the argument at length.

³³ Cato’s Letters, II, 234-40.

³⁴ Cato’s Letters, III, 159-65.

³⁵ Cato’s Letters, III, 162-63.

³⁶ For the decision of the Commonwealth intellectuals to swallow the Septennial Act, see Robbins, pp. 109-10.

³⁷ Cato’s Letters, I, 16-17, 25-27.

³⁸ Cato’s Letters, I, 88-90.

³⁹ Cato’s Letters, II, 105-12.

⁴⁰ Lettres Persanes, CXLII.

⁴¹ Lettres Persanes, LXXXVII-XC.

⁴² Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Atheneum, 1970), and Orest Ranum, “Personality and Politics in the Persian Letters,” Political Science Quarterly 84, no. 4 (1969), 606-27.

⁴³ “The Story of Apheridon and Astarte,” in Letter LXVII, and the tale of Anais and Ibrahim in Letter CXLI.

⁴⁴ Volume IV of Cato’s Letters, and the companion series of The Independent Whig, are largely devoted to working out this thesis.

⁴⁵ Renée Simon, Henry de Boulainviller; historien, politique, philosophe, astrologue, 1658-1722 (Paris: Boivin, 1941) and Un révolté du XVIII^e siècle, Henry de Boulainviller (Garches: Editions du nouvel humanisme, 1948); Ira O. Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 (Princeton University Press, 1938).

⁴⁶ Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1971).

⁴⁷ E.g., Cato’s Letters, I, 121.

⁴⁸ See Kramnick’s Bolingbroke and His Circle, and the present writer’s review in Journal of Modern History 42, no. 2 (1970), 251-54.

⁴⁹ Kramnick’s is the best study of the thought of these controversies; H. T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (London: Constable, 1970), relates them most fully to the pattern of Bolingbroke’s career.

⁵⁰ The term is of course that of J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1660-1730 (London: Macmillan, 1967).

⁵¹ This is the argument at large of A Dissertation Upon Parties (1733-35).

⁵² W. B. Gwyn, The Meaning of the Separation of Powers: an analysis of the doctrine from its origin to the adoption of the United States Constitution (New Orleans: Tulane Studies in Political Science, 1965), and M.J.C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967), are two thorough if slightly unhistorical treatments of this concept.

⁵³ Robert Shackleton, “Montesquieu, Bolingbroke and the Separation of Powers,” French Studies 3 (1949), 25-38, and Montesquieu: a Critical Biography (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1961).

⁵⁴ Dickinson, pp. 202-204, 305-306.

⁵⁵ Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, XI, 6: “… il a bâti Chalcédoine, ayant le rivage de Byzance devant les yeux.”

⁵⁶ A Letter from a Bystander to a Member of Parliament (1741); Earl of Egmont, Faction Detected by the Evidence of Facts (1743); Bishop Samuel Squire, An Enquiry into the Foundation of the English Constitution (1745), and A Historical Essay upon the Balance of Civil Power in England (1748).

⁵⁷ Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, on the Idea of a Patriot King, and on the State of Parties at the Accession of George the First (London, 1749), p. 45: “… powers, necessary to maintain subordination, and to carry on even good government, and therefore necessary to be preserved in the crown, notwithstanding the abuse that is sometimes made of them; for no human institution can arrive at perfection, and the most that human wisdom can do, is to procure the same or greater good, at the expence of less evil.” The language, which is Machiavellian, appears to allude to prerogative, not influence as suggested by Dickinson, p. 345. Cf. Letters, p. 93: “There must be an absolute, unlimited and uncontroulable power lodged somewhere in every government,” but this power is legislative, and is lodged in king, lords and commons jointly.

⁵⁸ Letters, p. 77 (On the Idea of a Patriot King): “My intention is not to introduce what I have to say concerning the duties of kings, by any nice inquiry into the original of their institution. What is to be known of it will appear plainly enough, to such as are able and can spare time to trace it, in the broken traditions which are come down to us of a few nations. But those, who are not able to trace it there, may trace something better and more worthy to be known, in their own thoughts: I mean what this institution ought to have been, whenever it began, according to the rule of reason, founded in the common rights, and interests, of mankind.”

⁵⁹ Kramnick, pp. 127-37.

⁶⁰ There is now a considerable literature on the idea of party in the eighteenth century. See among others, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago University Press, 1965); Kurt Kluxen, Das Problem der Politischen Opposition: Entwicklung und Wesen der englischen Zweiparteienpolitik im 18 Jahrhundert (Freiburg and Munich, 1956); Richard C. Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1969); J.A.W. Gunn, Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth-century England (London: Frank Cass, 1972).

⁶¹ Compare Toland’s The Art of Governing by Parties (1701) with his The State-Anatomy of Great Britain (1714). The two positions are not irreconcilable: in the first it is bad that there should be parties; in the second bad men have formed a party and good men must associate to resist it.

⁶² Remarks on the History of England, Letter XIV (2d ed., London, 1747, p. 169).

⁶³ For his life see D.N.B. He ended as a suicide, though, as an ordained clergyman, he had written against that act as a sin.

⁶⁴ John Brown, Essay on the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1757), the closing words. The elder Pitt may have been the person intended.

⁶⁵ Kramnick, pp. 166-69; Dickinson, pp. 256-65.

⁶⁶ Kramnick, pp. 76-83, 88-110, 261-65; Dickinson, pp. 22-24, 162-72, 119, 206-209, 300-302. The term “nostalgia” is taken from Kramnick’s subtitle.

⁶⁷ See below, p. 529.

⁶⁸ Esprit des Lois (Paris, Garnier, ed. Truc, n.d.), I, 335.

⁶⁹ Ibid.: “Comme il y aurait dans cet État deux pouvoirs visibles: la puissance legislative et l’exécutrice, et que tout citoyen y aurait sa volonté propre, et ferait valoir à son gré son indépendance, la plupart des gens auraient plus d’affection pour une de ces puissances que pour l’autre, le grand nombre n’ayant pas ordinairement assez d’équité ni de sens pour les affectionner également toutes les deux.”

⁷⁰ Ibid.: “Toutes les passions y étant libres, la haine, l’envie, la jalousie, l’ardeur de s’enrichir et de se distinguer, paraîtraient dans toute leur étendue.…”

⁷¹ Esprit, pp. 335-36: “Comme chaque particulier, toujours indépendant, suivrait beaucoup ses caprices et ses fantaisies, on changerait souvent de parti; on en abandonnerait un où l’on laisserait tous ses amis pour se lier à un autre dans lequel on trouverait tous ses ennemis; et souvent, dans cette nation, on pourrait oublier les lois de l’amitié et celles de la haine.

“Le monarque serait dans le cas des particuliers; et, contre les maximes ordinaires de la prudence, il serait souvent obligé de donner sa confiance à ceux qui l’auraient le plus choqué, et de disgracier ceux qui l’auraient le mieux servi, faisant par necessité ce que les autres princes font par chois.” The allusion could very well be to the reign of William III in England.

⁷² P. 336: “On craint de voir échapper un bien que l’on sent, que l’on ne connaît guère, et qu’on peut nous déguiser; et la crainte grossit toujours les objets. Le peuple serait inquiet sur sa situation, et croirait être en danger dans les moments même les plus sûrs.

“D’autant mieux que ceux qui s’opposeraient le plus vivement à la puissance éxecutrice, ne pouvant avouer les motifs intéressés de leur opposition, ils augmenteraient les terreurs du peuple, qui ne saurait jamais au juste s’il serait en danger ou non.”

⁷³ In the Speech on Conciliation in Works, II, 125.

⁷⁴ Esprit, loc. cit.: “Ainsi, quand les terreurs imprimées n’auraient point d’objet certain, elles ne produiraient que de vaines clameurs et des injures: et elles auraient même ce bon effet qu’elles tendraient tous les ressorts du gouvernement, et rendraient tous les citoyens attentifs. Mais si elles naissaient à l’occasion du renversement des lois fondamentales, elles seraient sourdes, funestes, atroces, et produiraient des catastrophes.”

⁷⁵ Ibid.: “… ayant la confiance du peuple, et étant plus eclairé que lui …”

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 337: “Cette nation, toujours échauffée, pourrait plus aisément être conduite par ses passions que par la raison, qui ne produit jamais de grands effets sur lesprit des hommes; et il facile à ceux qui la gouverneraient de lui faire faire des entreprises contre ses véritables intérêts.

“Cette nation aimerait prodigieusement sa liberté, parce que cette liberté serait vraie; et il pourrait arriver que, pour la defendre, elle sacrifierait son bien, son aisance, ses intérêts; qu’elle se chargerait des impôts les plus durs, et tels que le prince le plus absolu n’oserait les faire supporter à ses sujets.”

⁷⁷ Ibid.: “Elle aurait un crédit sûr, parce qu’elle emprunterait à elle-même, et se paierait elle-même. Il pourrait arriver qu’elle entreprendrait au-dessus de ses forces naturelles, et ferait valoir contre ses ennemis d’immenses richesses de fiction, que la confiance et la nature de son gouvernement rendraient réelles.”

⁷⁸ Esprit, p. 4 (“Avertissement de l’Auteur”): “… ce que j’appelle la vertu dans la republique est l’amour de la patrie, c’est-à-dire l’amour de l’égalité. Ce n’est point une vertu morale, ni une vertu chrétienne, c’est la vertu politique; et celle-ci est le ressort qui fait mouvoir le gouvernement républicain, comme l’honneur est le ressort qui fait mouvoir la monarchie. J’ai donc appelé vertu politique l’amour de la patrie et de l’égalité. J’ai eu des idées nouvelles; il a bien fallu trouver de nouveaux mots, ou donner aux anciens de nouvelles acceptations.…

“Enfin, l’homme de bien dont il est question dans le livre III, chapitre V, n’est pas l’homme de bien chrétien mais l’homme de bien politique, qui a la vertu politique dont j’ai parlé. C’est l’homme qui aime les lois de son pays, et qui agit par l’amour des lois de son pays. J’ai donné un nouveau jour à toutes ces choses dans cette édition-ci, en fixant encore plus les idées; et, dans la plupart des endroits ou je me suis servi du mot de vertu, j’ai mis vertu politique.”

⁷⁹ E.g., Book IV, ch. 6: Book v, ch. 19: “On est surpris que l’Aréopage ait fait mourir un enfant qui avait crevé les yeux à son oiseau. Qu’on fasse attention qu’il s’agit point là d’une condamnation pour crime, mais d’un jugement de moeurs dans une republique fondé sur les moeurs.”

⁸⁰ Book IV, ch. 8.

⁸¹ Book XX, ch. 1 (Gamier, ed., II, 8): “Le commerce guérit des préjugés destructeurs; et c’est presque une règle générale, que partout où il y a des moeurs douces, il y a du commerce; et que partout où il y a du commerce, il y a des moeurs douces.

“Qu’on ne s’étonne donc point si nos moeurs sont moins féroces qu’elles ne l’étaient autrefois. Le commerce a fait que la connaissance des moeurs de toutes les nations a pénétré partout: on les a comparées entre elles, et il en a resulté de grands biens.

“On peut dire que des lois du commerce perfectionnent les moeurs, par la même raison que ces mêmes lois perdent les moeurs. Le commerce corrompt les moeurs pures: c’était le sujet des plaintes de Platon: il polit et adoucit les moeurs barbares, comme nous le voyons tous les jours.”

⁸² For this caution see Duncan Forbes, “Politics and History in David Hume” (review article on Giarrizzo’s Hume politico e storico), The Historical Journal 6, no. 2 (1963), 280-94.

⁸³ The best recent studies of Hume’s historical thinking are those of Giuseppe Giarrizzo, op.cit. (Turin: Einaudi, 1962) and Duncan Forbes in his introduction to the Pelican Classics edition of The History of Great Britain, Volume One, containing the Reigns of James I and Charles I, originally published in 1754 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970).

⁸⁴ Essays Moral, Political and Literary of David Hume (World’s Classics edition, London: Grant Richards, 1903), no. 7: “Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic” (pp. 48-53).

⁸⁵ Essays, Part II, nos. 1 (“Of Commerce”) and 2 (“Of Refinement in the Arts”).

⁸⁶ Essays, Part I, no. 6, “Of the Independency of Parliament.”

⁸⁷ Essays, Part I, no. 3, “That Politics May be Reduced to a Science”; Part II, no. 16, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth.”

⁸⁸ Above, p. 91.

⁸⁹ Forbes, op.cit., pp. 38-39; Giarrizzo, op.cit., chs. II and III.

⁹⁰ Essays, Part II, nos. 3 (“Of Money”), 4 (“Of Interest”), 5 (“Of the Balance of Trade”). The reference to Lycurgus is on p. 326 of the World’s Classics edition. There is a recent edition of Hume’s Economic Writings by Eugene Rotwein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970).

⁹¹ Essays, Part II, no. 9: “Of Public Credit” (pp. 355-61). The words last quoted are on p. 366. See also p. 371: “These seem to be the events, which are not very remote, and which reason foresees as clearly almost as she can do any thing that lies in the womb of time.” For Hume’s state of mind in the last years of his life, see Giarrizzo, op.cit., p. 110, and John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

⁹² Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Enquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1945), is still the best one-volume study of the Scottish school.

⁹³ There is an edition, with introduction, by Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh University Press, 1966). See also David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965).

⁹⁴ Forbes, ed., p. 18: “It is here”—i.e., in society—“that a man is made to forget his weakness, his cares of safety, and his subsistence; and to act from those passions which make him discover his force. It is here he finds that his arrows fly swifter than the eagle, and his weapons wound deeper than the paw of the lion, or the tooth of the boar”; p. 59: “Athens was necessary to Sparta, in the exercise of her virtue, as steel is to flint in the production of fire”; and pp. 59-61 generally.

⁹⁵ Forbes, ed., p. 230: “The subdivision of arts and professions, in certain examples, tends to improve the practice of them, and to promote their ends. By having separated the arts of the clothier and the tanner, we are the better supplied with shoes and with cloth. But to separate the arts which form the citizen and the statesman, the arts of policy and war, is an attempt to dismember the human character, and to destroy those very arts we mean to improve.” Pp. 229-32, generally, and Kettler, pp. 88-91, 100-101, and passim.

⁹⁶ For a typical indictment of Pericles as belonging in the same class as Caesar and Walpole, see Cato’s Letters, II, 73-74.

⁹⁷ Esprit, Book V, ch. 2 (ed. Truc, I, 46). Montesquieu does not actually say that the monk’s devotion is vertu, but intimates that it is what vertu is in the citizen.

⁹⁸ Forbes, ed., pp. 193-202. For Ferguson as Highlander, see introduction, pp. xxxviii-ix.

⁹⁹ The pin-makers occur in Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. V. Cf. Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms (Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Schneider, New York: Hafner, 1948, pp. 320-21): “Another bad effect of commerce is that it sinks the courage of mankind, and tends to extinguish martial spirit. In all commercial countries the division of labour is infinite, and every one’s thoughts are employed about one particular thing.… The minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished. To remedy these defects would be an object worthy of serious attention.”

¹⁰⁰ John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government, from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain, to the Revolution in 1688: to which are Subjoined Some Dissertations Connected with the History of the Government from the Revolution to the Present Time … In four Volumes (4th ed., London, 1818). See in particular vols. III and IV; the incidental dissertations make up the last volume. W. C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow (Cambridge University Press, 1960), has selections from Millar’s works with a critical introduction; and see Duncan Forbes, “Scientific Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar,” Cambridge Journal 7 (1954), 643-70.

¹⁰¹ Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1969), is by far the best exposition of his thought as belonging to the civic humanist tradition.