The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

THE AMERICANIZATION OF VIRTUE

Corruption, Constitution and Frontier

[I]

DURING THE NINETEEN-SIXTIES, a number of important works of scholarship appeared which have sharply altered our perception of the mind of the Revolutionary generation in America.1 They have shown, first, that the mental processes which led to revolution involved a drastic rearticulation of the language and outlook of English opposition thought; second, that through this they were, as we already know, anchored in that Aristotelian and Machiavellian tradition which this book has studied; third, that the experience of the War of Independence and the constitution-making which followed it necessitated a further revision of the classical tradition, and in some respects a departure from it. The American Revolution, which to an older school of historians seemed a rationalist or naturalist breach with an old world and its history, now appears to have been involved in a complex relation both with English and Renaissance cultural history and with a tradition of thought which had from its beginnings confronted political man with his own history and was, by the time of the Revolution, being used to express an early form of the quarrel with modernity. It is now possible to explore the history of American consciousness in search of what manifestations of the problems of the republican perspective may be found there.

In the first place, it has been established that a political culture took shape in the eighteenth-century colonies which possessed all the characteristics of neo-Harringtonian civic humanism. Anglophone civilization seems indeed to present the picture of a number of variants of this culture—English, Scottish, Anglo-Irish, New England, Pennsylvanian, and Virginian, to look no further—distributed around the Atlantic shores. The Whig canon and the neo-Harringtonians, Milton, Harrington and Sidney, Trenchard, Gordon and Bolingbroke, together with the Greek, Roman, and Renaissance masters of the tradition as far as Montesquieu, formed the authoritative literature of this culture; and its values and concepts were those with which we have grown familiar—a civic and patriot ideal in which the personality was founded in property, perfected in citizenship but perpetually threatened by corruption; government figuring paradoxically as the principal source of corruption and operating through such means as patronage, faction, standing armies (opposed to the ideal of the militia), established churches (opposed to the Puritan and deist modes of American religion) and the promotion of a monied interest—though the formulation of this last concept was somewhat hindered by the keen desire for readily available paper credit common in colonies of settlement. A neoclassical politics provided both the ethos of the elites and the rhetoric of the upwardly mobile, and accounts for the singular cultural and intellectual homogeneity of the Founding Fathers and their generation. Not all Americans were schooled in this tradition, but there was (it would almost appear) no alternative tradition in which to be schooled.

In consequence, Bailyn and others have argued, the ideology of eighteenth-century opposition acted as a restricting and compulsive force in the approaches to revolution. The Machiavellian assumptions it contained proved to be self-actualizing. Corruption, which threatened the civic bases of personality, was irremediable except by personal virtue itself, and therefore must very soon become irreversible if action was not taken in time. When ministers at Westminster—the rhetoric habitually identified ministers as the source of most evils—began to take actions which seemed to encroach on colonial liberties, the appropriate language in which to denounce them was that in which the Junto Whigs and Walpole had been denounced in their day; the more so as the enemies of Bute and the friends of Wilkes were already employing that language against the ministries of George III. But once Americans began to talk of corruption, the situation rapidly passed out of intellectual control. If corruption was being attempted from the other side of the Atlantic, the government and (it followed) the society attempting it must themselves be hopelessly corrupt. The virtue and personal integrity of every American were therefore threatened by corruption emanating from a source now alien, on which Americans had formerly believed themselves securely dependent. The language began to sound that paranoiac note which is heard when men are forced by the logic of mental restriction to conclude that malign agencies are conspiring against the inner citadels of their personalities; only diabolical conspiracy could account for actions each one of which appeared more blatantly subversive than the last.2 Virtue, once endangered, was compelled to fall back on itself, and there was no remedy which Americans could seek short of rinnovazione and ridurre ai principii; a return to the fundamental principles of British government or—once that was seen as containing the seeds of its own corruption—of the constitution of the commonwealth itself; an attempt to reconstitute that form of polity in which virtue would be both free and secure. The Americans thus repeated, but in actuality, the thought-experiments of Nedham and Harrington, repudiating parliamentary monarchy in favor of an English-derived version of vivere civile; and down to this point—soon to be surpassed—the Revolution was paradigmatically determined and an essay in Kuhnian “normal science.”

But though virtue and corruption, taken by themselves, formed a closed and compulsive scheme, they could only operate as such when no other scheme was known. In Britain, as we have seen, there existed a “Court” ideology, less articulate and prominent than that of the “Country,” but capable both of furnishing some effective replies to the philippics of Bolingbroke and of being enlarged by Hume and his successors into a complex and ambivalent historical philosophy. It was based not on a simple antithesis between virtue and commerce, but on an awareness that the two interpenetrated one another as did land and currency, authority and liberty; we have seen that as far back as 1698, the founders of “Country” ideology admitted this truth, while drawing different conclusions from it. In Britain, moreover, Court and Country themselves were in symbiosis, and the country gentlemen never as radically independent as they liked to pretend.³ The funds, the army, and the patronage-wielding executive were facts of life, just as the property that made men virtuous derived part of its capacity to do so from the mechanisms of trade and the fluctuations of credit; and while it was hard to deny that these things exerted a corrupting influence, it was no less hard to deny that virtue must exist in the world of commerce, value in the world of an ongoing history. The political independence of the gentry consisted in their ability to affect these processes, to mitigate and limit what might otherwise corrupt their independence; and the probability of an ultimate catastrophe was offset by that of its indefinite postponement. The doctrine of parliamentary monarchy, asserting that executive and representative had the means of coexisting while conceding that some measure of patronage was necessary to get things done, was one mode of responding to this perception of politics, as were Hume’s teachings that authority and liberty, selfishness and altruism, passion and reason, existed in comparable relations of tension and symbiosis. English and Scottish theorists could not free themselves from the vision of some ultimate corruption, but had for the most part freed themselves from riding upon a wheel where the catastrophe might come at any moment.

If the perception of reality obtaining in the colonies was so much more fragile, part of the explanation may lie in the fact that they constituted a Country without a Court; they were not face to face with modern government as a force they must and could find means of living with, but, while created by it at a distance, were not in a relation of immediate symbiosis. The greater their apparent independence, the greater their sense that their virtue was their own; but the more active a government in which they did not directly participate, the greater their sense that their independence and virtue were threatened by a force they could only call corruption; and, as Machiavelli and Cato had taught them, once they mistrusted government there was nothing they should not fear. Tyranny was indeed to be dreaded “in every tainted breeze.” The interpretation put forward by Bailyn and Wood altogether replaces that of Boorstin and Hartz, who seem to have held that there was no ideology in America, because ideology could be produced only by Old World social tensions which had not been transplanted.4 As we now see it, modern and effective government had transplanted to America the dread of modernity itself, of which the threat to virtue by corruption was the contemporary ideological expression.

America had been established by plantation, but secured by conquest. The steps by British governments which initiated the process of classical revolution were taken in the course of the reorganization which followed the Seven Years War. From this Britain had emerged triumphant in North America and India; there had occurred a huge expansion of her commercial, naval and colonial power, and she was recognized as possessing empire on a giant scale. This was the appropriate moment, according to all the conventions of the classical vocabulary, at which to utter warnings against the fate of Rome, transformed from a republic to a despotism by the conquest of an empire whose wealth corrupted the citizenry and could only be distributed by a Caesar; but though such warnings were heard in Britain, they were directed mainly against the supposed activities of Indian and West Indian nabobs, whose movable wealth might cause them to swell a new “monied interest” and buy up parliament through the purchase of boroughs.5 The conquest of the internal river system of North America aroused fewer such fears, and seems to have been assimilated to that profitable yet not corrupting maritime war which Country politicians had long compared favorably with war by land in Europe; it was involvement on the side of Hanover and Prussia which Chatham had found needed most defending in parliament. For Americans, however, there was an evident paradox in the discovery that imperial conquests, which had rendered them secure against foreign and aboriginal enemies, now faced them with the threat of corruption by their own government. In such circumstances the rhetoric of republic and Caesar was appropriate and was used;⁶ yet were not Americans, even in their own eyes, a system of colonies extending an empire, and not a republic at all?

But the term “empire,” it is important to note, was capable in the Machiavellian tradition of being used in more than one way. On the one hand, Rome had been corrupted by conquest, and in that sense by empire; and it was and has remained normal usage to distinguish between the republic and “the empire,” meaning the rule by principes who were also imperatores which succeeded it. On the other hand, the Roman people had exercised imperium in the ense of power over other peoples, which they had built up as Machiavelli’s “commonwealth for expansion” and by the exercise of Machiavellian virtù. Must the successful exercise of virtù be in the end the cause of its corruption? Machiavelli had on the whole thought that it must, and the neo-Harringtonians had equated the decay of the republic with commercial empire, which had as in their own day led to the growth of monied interests and professional armies. But it was part of the Augustan paradox that this kind of military and financial corruption was thought of as growing through the pursuit of land war in Europe, while war at sea and in the colonies was part of the non-corrupting virtus of the Country. Harrington’s Oceana had “given laws to the sea,” pursuing foreign plantations which made her a “commonwealth for expansion” unthreatened by corruption; and Americans gazing beyond the Appalachians could—with the aid of a little contemplated genocide—share the same vision. Even if empire must ultimately corrupt, there was a historical anakuklōsis whereby liberty-loving warriors—Greeks, Romans, and Goths—won empires by their virtue and held them so long as it lasted. This, hinted at in Machiavelli’s theory of the exhaustion and revival of virtù, had become assimilated to the medieval doctrine of translatio imperii and helps explain the freedom with which Americans of the early national period spoke of the “empire” which was to be theirs in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. An empire compatible with virtue was a concept very necessary to them if they were to accept themselves as what they were by the circumstances of their foundation and prehistory.

The American version of translatio imperii was expressed as early as 1725 in the famous last stanza of Berkeley’s Verses on the Prospect of the Arts and Learning in America:

Westward the course of empire takes its way;

The four first acts already past

A fifth shall close the drama with the day;

Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

Ernest Tuveson, the author of an illuminating study of the millennial vision of America, denies that these lines are properly millennial, on the grounds that there is insufficient evidence that the fifth act of the drama will partake of the characteristics of a true millennium; he sees in them only a late-Renaissance vision of the decline and revival of the arts, married to the language of the Book of Daniel.7 But the translatio studii, like the translatio imperii, is dependent on the transition of virtus (as Berkeley himself makes manifest) and we are accustomed to see virtue demand, if it does not substitute itself for, an apocalyptic context of grace acting in history; and Tuveson himself has shown how far the true millennium, of Christ’s reign over the saints, had become identified with a future utopia,⁸ in which human capacities would have providentially and progressively arrived at their perfection. It is hard to doubt that Berkeley’s “fifth act” was sometimes taken to mean a Fifth Monarchy, the more so as Tuveson has extensively demonstrated the existence of an American apocalyptic, in which the translatio imperii, ensuring that the westward cycle of world history culminates in America, became one mode of assigning to that imperial republic precisely the millennial-utopian role he has described.

The national apocalyptic pioneered by Elizabethan Protestants possessed an American variant which survived there without undergoing the extensive recession suffered by this mode of thought in England after the Restoration. New England’s initial covenant with the Lord could very easily be given a role in the struggle against Antichrist, and this was in no sense minimized by the persistent jeremiad preachings in which the heirs of the covenant were denounced for falling away from it. A covenanted or chosen people may apostasize many times, and the record of the struggle against the Adversary may be the record of its apostasies and regenerations. But we have seen how readily, in late Puritan and even deist thought, the commonwealth in which there is no clergy, and religion is a civic function conducted by an assembly of citizens, can become equated with the priesthood of all believers and the rule of the saints foretold for the millennium; and the more millennium became utopia, and the rule of the saints the perfection of human capacities, the easier it was to equate the commonwealth with the Fifth Monarchy to which it had always tended to become assimilated. And the perfection of human capacities, seen as providentially directed progress rather than a sudden and apocalyptic infusion of grace, was a secular and historical phenomenon which might well take place within the closed circle of the “westward course.” America’s apocalyptic-utopian role, therefore, was regularly seen as the maintenance of religious liberty—Whiggish tolerance merging into the holy commonwealth—and part of a structure of Gothic freedom and virtue, which survived in the “westward course” to the “close” of the “drama” after corruption had destroyed it in the Old World.

But this was to identify corruption with the work of Antichrist in both hemispheres, and in particular with the ever-present threat of apostasy in the covenanted lands of the New World. It is therefore logical that Tuveson should have traced the existence of what he calls “apocalyptic Whiggism” and found its echoes even in the language of so un-chiliastic a work as John Adams’s Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Laws.9 The city upon a hill became identified with the balanced government, in which neither an established clergy nor any other agency of corruption disturbed the virtue and freedom of the people, and the corruption which threatened the latter was as much the work of Antichrist as the apostasy which threatened the former. As the operations of grace in sacred history became conflated with the providential progress of secular enlightenment, Antichrist in his turn became identified with the historical forces—Roman clericalism, feudal survivals, modern corruptions—operating to delay progress or pervert it. Arbitrary taxation, standing armies, established churches, could still appear the works of the malign agency which had pursued and undermined Roman, Gothic, and now British virtue through the translatio and anakuklōsis of the world’s history. It was of eschatological as well as global importance to determine whether empire would corrupt American virtue or sustain it, and the latter outcome might be hard to distinguish from the millennium or Fifth Monarchy. The jeremiad—that most American of all rhetorical modes—was merged with the language of classical republican theory to the point where one can almost speak of an apocalyptic Machiavellism; and this too heightened the tendency to see that moment at which corruption threatened America as one of unique and universal crisis.

[II]

The apocalyptic dimension, however, while apparent in the rhetoric of the Revolution, is hardly dominant there. Americans of that generation saw themselves as freemen in arms, manifesting a patriot virtue, rather than as covenanted saints. The reasons for emphasizing in these pages that apocalyptic was still an available recourse are analytical and diagnostic; its presence, and continued compatibility with Old Whig civic humanism, illustrates how far American thought and speech still belonged to the Renaissance tradition we have studied, in which the citizen often required for his self-dramatization the apocalyptic context otherwise properly the saint’s. But all those who have recently studied the Revolution in terms of the continuity of this tradition—Bailyn, Pole, and Wood—insist that, in the period of the making of the Constitution and the Federalist-Republican debate, the civic tradition underwent a transforming crisis and was never the same again; Wood in particular speaks of an “end of classical politics.”10 To arrive at so massively dialectical a culmination would indeed be satisfying to the hard-pressed architect of a book such as this, and Wood’s thesis requires careful investigation; certain reservations will, however, be expressed.

Perceptive students of the American scene, writing earlier than the crisis which led to independence, had observed that the volatility of colonial politics could be explained by reference to the lack of any equivalent to the House of Lords.11 By this they meant two not very compatible things. In the first place they were alluding to the doctrine that the Lords in the British constitution played the role of a classical Few, exhibiting greater leisure and experience—it was possible to defend their hereditary character on the ground that it guaranteed these qualities—and discharging a conservative and moderating function which could be depicted as that of a pouvoir intermédiaire, a “screen and bank” in the language of 1642, between king and commons, one and many, executive and legislative. Without an aristocracy, it had been argued since at latest 1675, the commons would be restive and turbulent and could be managed only by force or by corruption. The Country tradition of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke was in no sense hostile to the peerage; it saw hereditary status as a reinforcement of propertied independence and a guard against the machinations of the Court, and the Peerage Bill of 1719 had failed because it was felt that any attempt to legislate further independence for the Upper House must be self-defeating.

In the second place, however, analysts of colonial politics knew that an ancient aristocracy was hard to establish in a new society and a manorial nobility did not seem to thrive under settler conditions (though the Hudson Valley might offer grounds for disputing this). The Harringtonian constitutions devised by Locke, Penn, and others for the Carolinas, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had all proved abortive,¹² and if an independent aristocracy could not be created under colonial conditions, to propose a reinforced second chamber was to propose a dependent oligarchy, nominated by the governor and precariously holding office at his will, like the Cromwellian Other House of 1657-1659. The republican tradition, as voiced by Machiavelli and Harrington, indeed declared that colonies and provinces should be ruled through insecure oligarchies dependent on the controlling power;¹³ like an Italian dominio, they were not fully incorporated in the city or realm of justice; but once a colony began thinking of itself as a commonwealth or autonomously just society—a vital change of perspective to which the adoption of classical language powerfully contributed—such an oligarchy appeared inherently corrupt and, since it could not in practice be distinguished from the governor’s council, a breach of the separation of powers as well.

The conditions of colonial politics therefore pointed powerfully if illogically toward that repudiation of hereditary aristocracy as making for corruption rather than for virtue, which had been unheard of in England since the radical movements of the Commonwealth; and in the era—supposedly begun by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense—when Americans set about repudiating the British constitutional structure, the existence of a hereditary peerage in the latter helped them to take up the option—which they may have learned from Cato’s Letters—of dismissing parliamentary mixed monarchy as founded upon corruption. To reject parliamentary monarchy was, for minds still as English as theirs, to revert to the Harringtonian tradition in which English political history was restated as leading to a republican culmination; but in Harrington as in every other republican classic, it was unequivocally stated that the alternative to a hereditary, entrenched, or artificial aristocracy was a natural aristocracy—an elite of persons distinguished by natural superiority of talent, but also by contingent material advantages such as property, leisure, and learning, as possessing the qualities of mind required by the classical Few. It was assumed that a supply of such persons was guaranteed by nature, and part of the case against artificially established aristocracies was that the true elite were naturally recognizable by the Many. The democracy could discover the aristocracy by using its own modes of discernment, and there was no need to legislate its choice in advance; a theory of deference was usually invoked in order to democratize the polity.

In most American colonies a patrician elite—distinguished indeed by its visible property and culture—stood ready to play the role of natural aristocracy. The literature of colonial Virginia in particular contains some interesting idealizations of the relationship supposed to exist between the self-evident leaders of society and the respectful but by no means uncritical yeomanry.14 These illustrate once again that deference was not a hierarchical but a republican characteristic. The Many of ideal Virginia—small white proprietors—are not politically dynamic, but they are not inactive; they exercise their own kind of judgment and exert their own kind of power. All that could be called hierarchical is that they do not expect to discharge the same role as the Few; but they have their virtue as the Few have theirs, and there is a higher virtue whereby the Few and Many respect the virtues exercised by one another. The Few are not above a kind of deference to the judgment of the Many, even when they deem its expression naive; so that there is a point at which deference and virtue become very nearly identical.

In defense of their virtue against a corrupt parliamentary monarchy, then, the Americans set about reconstituting themselves as a confederation of republics; down to this point, their revolution was a rinnovazione in exactly the sense intelligible to Savonarola or Machiavelli.15 But it is Wood’s thesis, documented in great detail from the language and experience of the Revolutionaries themselves, that this consciously undertaken classical enterprise failed at precisely the point we have been examining. When there occurred a Lockean “dissolution of government”—in some areas it was so described, with invocations of Locke’s name—the people were found not to differentiate themselves into a naturally distinguishable few and many, performing complementary roles and practicing complementary virtues. In Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, there were deliberately engineered constitutional experiments aimed at identifying the natural aristocracy by applying the Aristotelian criteria of property, as in Massachusetts, or self-selection, as in the unicameral legislature which was tried in Pennsylvania. None of these experiments succeeded, and soon after the end of the War of Independence, the Revolution faced a crisis of confidence born of the realization that the naturally differentiated people, presupposed by every republican theorist from Aristotle to Montesquieu, had simply failed to appear.¹⁶ And this meant far more than that the patrician elites, having led or survived the struggle for independence, now felt threatened in their ideologically justifying role as natural aristocracies; it meant that there was a threat to the concept of virtue itself.

Unless the people were qualitatively dissimilar, each qualitatively defined category having a function and a virtue appropriate to it, they could not join in a polity where the practice of politics obliged each citizen to practice the virtue of respecting his neighbor’s virtue; and any political structure in which they might be united would bear no direct relationship to the unique moral personality of the individual, and would consequently corrupt it by subjecting it to power. When Machiavelli and Montesquieu had laid it down that only equality—in the sense of isonomia—made possible the practice of virtue, they had also implied that men who were equal must practice virtue or become corrupt. When the neo-Harringtonians had associated the decline of the baron-vassal relationship with the rise of corruption, they had added to Harrington’s doctrine that equals must be governed freely or by force the perception that they might also be governed by manipulation and false consciousness. If corruption was to be avoided, there must be virtue within equality; and the still largely Christian minds of eighteenth-century civic humanists had sought to ensure this by employing the classical differentiation into one, few, and many to make the people a trinity-in-unity, within which there could be relationship and hence virtue. But this orthodoxy now seemed to be failing. The materia was beginning to seem too monophysite and one-dimensional to be given form, and the paradigm of the zōon politikon was in danger. There is an audible note of dismay in the American writings of the early 1780s.

Wood traces, through the rich complexity of the utterances of this period—all articulate Americans seem to have been versed in the vocabulary of the sociology of liberty—the emergence of a new paradigm of democratic politics, designed by the masters of Federalist theory to overcome the crisis caused by the failure of natural aristocracy—though whether they intended to replace the last-named, or to restore it, is not always clear. The crucial revision was that of the concept of the people. Instead of being differentiated into diversely qualified and functioning groups, the people was left in so monistic a condition that it mattered little what characteristics it was thought of as possessing; and the various agencies of government—still essentially the legislature, judiciary, and executive of separation theory—were thought of as exercised not immediately, by social groups possessing the relevant capacities, but mediately, by individuals whose title to authority was that they acted as representing the people. All power was entrusted to representatives, and every mode of exercising power was a mode of representing the people. If the people were an undifferentiated mass, possessed of infinitely diverse qualities, they possessed also an infinite capacity for differentiating between diverse modes of power and embodying themselves in correspondingly diverse means of representation. They had come a long way from the Florentine materia.

There was a distinction between the exercise of power in government, and the power of designating representatives to exercise it; and it could be argued both that all government was the people’s and that the people had withdrawn from government altogether, leaving its exercise to a diversity of representatives who, situated as they were where the art of ruling might be learned from experience, took on the characteristics of the old natural aristocracy or specialized Few. Rousseau, with his insistence that the volonté générale should never engage in the taking of particular decisions, might have approved of this distinction between a constituent and a governing people; and he might have joined the Federalists in seeing Machiavelli’s ridurre ensured in the provision that the power of constitutional revision was always in the people and its exercise always potentially imminent.17 Here, at least, the people as such were active in a fairly immediate sense. What Rousseau would not have approved—and what is no part of the republican tradition as we have studied it—is the universal intervention in government of the relation between represented and representative; and here certainly the character of Federalist thought is medieval rather than classical and sovereign rather than republican—Hobbesian, it might even be added, rather than Lockean.

English parliamentary monarchy had been built up by the king’s commanding the shires and boroughs to elect representatives, with full power to share in the government of the realm by himself and his council, and the power of these representatives had greatly increased over time. However, as the king’s command that they be given full power to act in matters to be proposed by him clearly showed, there was a sense in which they were merely admitted to a share in the function of the true representative of the realm—the king himself, who, as all theory of incorporation insisted, represented the realm as the head did the body. Once representation became a means to the creation and establishment of a sovereign, the act of choosing—or acknowledging—a representative became logically almost the reverse of participation; it was rather the act of saying that there existed a person whose acts were so far authoritative that they were to be taken as equivalent to one’s own; and Hobbes, spelling out this interpretation with admirable clarity, had pointed out that a sovereign assembly of representatives was no different in this respect from a sovereign and representative individual. The choice of a representative was a surrender, a transfer to another of one’s plenitude of power and one’s persona if not one’s individuality; and republican humanism, which was fundamentally concerned with the affirmation of moral personality in civic action, had cause to ask whether the concept of representation did not exclude that of virtue. How could I designate another to be virtuous for me, in my place and wearing my mask? At the core of Hobbes’s moral theory is indeed the statement that it is only when I become capable of owning another’s actions as my own that I become a being capable of civic morality;¹⁸ but the zōon politikon, the being naturally civic, must act immediately and in his own person. Rousseau, an ambiguous master within the classical tradition, had insisted that there was no virtue in the mere choice of a representative and that consequently people governed by plenipotentiary representatives of their own choosing were not free.19

The Country tradition in English politics—partially descended from Harrington’s republicanism, in which rotation ensures that the people take part in government as individuals and by turns, rather than through representatives—had made an important contribution toward redefining England as a commonwealth when it stressed the importance of short parliaments. The implication was that the people, being propertied and independent, were by definition virtuous, but that their representatives were constantly exposed to the temptations of power and corruption; it was therefore necessary that the representation should return regularly to the represented, to have virtue renewed (ridurre ai principii) by the choice of new representatives if necessary. Virtue was an active principle, and in the election of a new parliament the people displayed virtue in action and performed more than a Hobbesian role. But it now became hard to decide whether the electors were one estate or order of the commonwealth (a classical Many) and the elected another (a classical Few), the relations between whom must be preserved from corruption; or whether the elected were at bottom mere servants, stewards, or ministers, who must be presumed corruptible virtually by definition. If the latter, then they must be considered delegates, subject to instruction and recall; but there would be the difficulty that the relation between them and their electors would no longer be a virtuous relation between civic equals. During the years of the American crisis, Burke was propounding to the electors of Bristol the view that their representative was chosen by them to act for the good of the whole realm, and thus to play a part which they could not play themselves. He therefore owed them the exercise of his judgment concerning the common good, even when it conflicted with theirs.²⁰ They would be exercising their judgment with equal propriety if they decided not to reelect him at the close of his term, but they should not seek to impede his judgment by instructing or recalling him. The relationship is classical, that of the Few to the Many, and virtuous in the sense derived from Aristotle. Each has his judgment, his mode of discernment, and respects that of the other.

In Revolutionary America, the tide had been running strongly in favor of the view that elected representatives were highly corruptible delegates, who must be subject to instruction and recall; but Madison seems to have leaned toward a Burkean position which presented their role as that of a Few, and their ranks as to be filled, if possible, by members of the patrician elites.21 The crucial question remained, however, that raised by Rousseau. Given that a natural aristocracy had not emerged, and was not expected to emerge, from the electoral process, was the mere act of choosing a representative, the mere relationship between representative and elector, sufficient to ensure virtue? For some Federalists the answer was predetermined. If there was no natural aristocracy, the people could not be virtuous; if none had emerged, the most probable explanation was that the people were already corrupt; government accordingly became a Guicciardinian affair of guiding a people who were not virtuous, or helping them guide themselves, along paths as satisfactory as could be hoped for in these circumstances. This perspective, of course, did not prevent those who adopted it from regarding themselves as members of a virtuous natural aristocracy, Catos of the deserving side. Madison’s position, as we shall see, was more complex; but Wood shows that the Federalists talked both as if virtue was to be restored, and as if it had vanished and must be replaced by new paradigms.²² And it was, as always, difficult to hit upon surrogates for virtue in its classical sense. There was this to be said for Rousseau’s critique of representation. Virtue consisted in a particular being’s regard for the common good, and was contingent upon his association with other particular beings who regarded the same good through different eyes. The differentiation of Few from Many, of natural aristocracy from natural democracy, was the paradigm case of this association between men of different qualities; and without some theory of qualitative and moral differentiation between individuals, it was hard to see how the relations between citizens that constituted virtue could be established. The act of choosing a person to act for me, one with whom I asserted an artificial identity, could never be the same as that of recognizing a person who acted with me, and with whom I formed a natural association. This was why it was hard to see the relation of representative to represented as one of classical virtue. Neither the Federalists nor their critics employed Rousseau as a tool of analysis,²³ but there are perceptible tensions between their remodeling of the theory of representation and their unwillingness to abandon the paradigm of the republic of virtue.

They sought—so successfully as to bring about something like a paradigmatic revolution—to reconcile the two by developing a theory of multiple representation. Instead of a medieval or Hobbesian identity, natural or artificial, between the representative and the represented as simple entities, they asserted that there was a plurality of modes of exercising power and that every one of these—the quasi-classical executive, judiciary, and legislative were the obvious examples—constituted a separate mode in which the people chose to be represented. The people’s representatives taken as individuals formed a plurality of functionally differentiated groups, and to that extent might still be looked upon as a natural aristocracy; the plurality of functions which they exercised ensured the existence between and among them of a system of checks and balances, so that it could be said they were prevented from becoming corrupt, or corrupting the people, by any one’s acquiring so much power as to bring the rest into dependence.24 The rhetoric of the classical tradition, from Aristotle to Montesquieu, thus remained appropriate over wide fields of the phenomena presented by the new government; but beneath it—and accounting for the widespread belief that the concept of representation was the only great discovery in theoretical politics made since antiquity—lay that sharply new perspective which leads Wood to speak of an “end of classical politics.” The people were still thought of as uncorrupted, but there were important senses in which they need not and could not be said to affirm their virtue in action. They were not differentiated into groups of diverse quality and function, each of which exercised citizenship in its own way and between which there existed the relationships of virtue; nor, since they were not politically active in a diversity of ways functionally differentiated, could it strictly be said that they were directly or immediately engaged in governing at all. They were directly engaged in the choice of representatives, and the multiplicity of the federal structure ensured that this function could be seen as ongoing and perpetual; they were also constituent, directly engaged in the establishment and revision of constitutions, and there are passages of rhetoric which suggest that this too was seen as a continuous activity.²⁵ Even Machiavelli, the most kinetic of republican theorists, had seen ridurre and ripigliare lo stato as no more than an affair of exemplary purges at intervals of a few years; even Rousseau had envisaged no more than occasional if frequent assemblies of the sovereign people, for the duration of which any constitution was necessarily suspended. If Federalist theory surpassed tradition at this point too, it is important to understand how.

The decline of virtue had as its logical corollary the rise of interest.²⁶ If men no longer enjoyed the conditions thought necessary to make them capable of perceiving the common good, all that each man was capable of perceiving was his own particular interest; and to the extent that there survived the very ancient presumption that only perception of the common good was truly rational, perception of one’s interest was primarily a matter of appetite and passion and only secondarily of profit-and-loss rational calculation which might extend so far as perception of one’s interest as interdependent with that of another’s. Nonvirtuous man was a creature of his passions and fantasies, and when passion was contrasted with virtue its corruptive potential remained high; but we have already seen how in eighteenth-century theory fantasy and commerce could appear an explosive and transforming force, possessing the dynamism if also the limitations of Machiavellian virtù, and rather more than the latter’s capacity to transform the natures of men. Interest was both a limiting and an expanding force. As Federalist thought took shape, and the people were less and less seen as possessing virtue in the classical sense, it is not surprising to find, in Madison’s writings and those of others—the tenth issue of The Federalist is the locus classicus—an increasing recognition of the importance, and the legitimacy, in human affairs of the faction pursuing a collective but particular interest,27 which in older Country and republican theory had figured as one of the most deadly means to the corruption of virtue by passion. Interest and faction are the modes in which the decreasingly virtuous people discern and pursue their activities in politics; but in Madison’s thought two consequences soon follow. In the first place, the checks, balances, and separations of powers, to be built into the federal structure, ensure as we have seen that interest does not corrupt, so that the full rhetoric of balance and stability can still be invoked in praise of an edifice no longer founded in virtue, and the very fact that it is no longer so founded can easily be masked and forgotten.²⁸ In the second place, there are passages which strikingly indicate that the capacity of this structure for absorbing and reconciling conflicting interests is without known limits.²⁹ There is no interest which cannot be represented and given its place in the distribution of power—only the most peculiar of institutions, it has seemed to historians in the Federalist tradition, was to prove an exception to this rule—and should the growth and change of the people generate new interests, the federal republic can grow and change to accommodate them.

In this “end of classical politics,” Wood detects primarily a partial shift from republicanism to liberalism 30—from, that is to say, the classical theory of the individual as civic and active being, directly participant in the res publica according to his measure, toward (if not fully reaching) a theory in which he appears as conscious chiefly of his interest and takes part in government in order to press for its realization, making only an indirect contribution to that mediating activity whereby government achieves a reconciliation of conflicts which is all the common good there is. In this sense, representative democracy involves a recession, on the part of both individual and “people,” from direct participation in government, of which the “decline of virtue” is the measure; but it does not involve political quiescence or a lowering of tensions. It also coincides with a vast expansion of party activity and appeal to a highly responsible electorate. Wood further detects in Madison a dimension of thought which is kinetic and romantic. Because “the people” is now undifferentiated, it is not circumscribed by the definition and distribution of specific qualities. It is of unknown mass and force, and can develop new and unpredicted needs, capacities, and powers. All of these can be received and coordinated within the structure of federalism, so that the classical rhetoric of balance and stability is still appropriate, but this structure can be proclaimed capable of indefinite expansion, since there is no need to insist in advance that the new social elements which will seek representation be those previously conceived as part of the harmonics of virtue. They are not perceived rationally as elements in the architecture of the common good, but as interests conceived and pursued in passion; the federal structure, however, is capable of absorbing new passions and grows by absorbing them. If the people are perpetually constituent, therefore, this is because they and their republic are in perpetual and kinetic growth. The republic of represented interests is a commonwealth for expansion. Something has been lost to virtue, but more has been gained by virtù. The liberal structure is not tame or sedate; like archetypal Rome before it, it is at once stable and expansive.

Wood’s “end of classical politics” is at bottom predicated upon an abandonment of the closely related paradigms of deference and virtue. Because natural aristocracy failed the Americans in the moment of classical rinnovazione, they had to abandon any theory of the people as qualitatively differentiated, and therefore either virtuous in the classical sense or participant in government in ways directly related to personality; and at the heart of Federalist thought arose something akin to the paradoxes of Rousseau—all government was the people’s, and yet the people never directly governed. This price once paid, the advantages of the great restatement of paradigms which accompanied the conservative revolution of 1787-89 were enormous. It permitted the overcoming of the widely accepted limitation which enjoined republics to be of finite size if they would escape corruption; the new federation could be both republic and empire, continental in its initial dimensions and capable of further expansion by means of simple extensions of the federative principle, greatly surpassing the semimilitary complex of colonies and provinces which had extended the Roman hegemony. It permitted the growth of new modes of association in pursuit of particular ends—political parties which, it has been argued by Chambers,31 were modern in precisely the sense that they were not based on deference, and which mobilized participant energies on a scale undreamed of in ancient republics. It is not surprising, then, that Wood and Chambers tend to speak of deference as the principle of the classical republic, and that republic itself as a subspecies of the closed and stable social hierarchy;³² though less cautious proponents of this view are (and long have been) open to the criticism that they confound the natural with the hereditary aristocracy.

But our pursuit of the Machiavellian consequences of the republican principle that virtue is active has led us through realms of consciousness in which deference was not passive and the republic was not a hierarchy. We have grown used to thinking of virtue as active in a world of proportionately equal citizens, and the republic as expanding beyond the confines of that world through the exercise of virtù. In the Polybian and Machiavellian tradition, the republic was not simply and naturally finite, and the injunction to remain small must not be misread. It faced the dilemma, born of its finitude, that it could escape neither expansion nor the corruption that followed expansion. The American republic proposed from its inception to offer a fresh solution to this ancient problem; the terms of this solution were in some respects dramatically new, but in others a restatement of old. We have further grown used to the existence in British thought of an alternative or “Court” ideology, which emphasized that men were guided by interest and passion, that factions and parties were necessary rather than illegitimate, and that government must be carried on by a sovereign power, ultimately unchecked but capable of subdivision into self-balancing powers, which ruled men partly by direct authority, partly by appeal to those passions, and partly by conversion of those passions into perception of a common interest. It should be clear by now that important elements of this ideology reappear in Federalist theory at just the points where the latter moves away from virtue and toward interest.

There are, however, some major and obvious differences. Where the Court thesis locates sovereignty in a parliamentary monarchy, self-balanced by the distinction between executive and legislative but held together by the influence which the former wields in the latter, the Federalist thesis locates it in the represented people and maintains the separation of powers with a rigor which is republican rather than merely Country. Once again we are at the point where the full rhetoric of republicanism was entirely appropriate to Federalist purposes, and the extent to which virtue was being abandoned could be masked to speakers as well as audiences. Where the Court thesis appealed to a version of history in which there were pragmatic adjustments and no fundamental principles, the Federalists could and did claim to be founding a republic in an extra-historical and legislative moment—one of occasione—in which the principles of nature, including balance and even virtue, were being reaffirmed. Their kinetic and expansive vision was of the future, and carried with it no Machiavellian sense of being part of an already disorderly saeculum. Finally, the Court thesis, originating as we have seen in the collisions of war and credit finance with the presumed stability of landed property, entailed a high degree of recognition that credit and commerce formed the expansive principle, the blend of Machiavellian virtù and fortuna, which doomed men to follow their passions and government to acknowledge and utilize corruption. Whether or not the failure of natural aristocracy in revolutionary America can be attributed to the competition of new merchant and artisan elements with the older patrician elites, there seems little evidence that the thought of the 1780s was responding to a traumatic intrusion of the “monied interest” like that which so dramatically altered English thinking ninety years before. There was no American Court—as yet; the confrontation between virtue and commerce was not absolute, and once again this furnishes reason to believe that the founders of Federalism were not fully aware of the extent to which their thinking involved an abandonment of the paradigm of virtue. In what follows, it will be argued that Wood’s “end of classical politics” was an end of one guiding thread in a complex tissue, but not a disappearance of the whole web.

[III]

Wood shows how it came about that John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, a vindication of the federal republic as a strict classical blend of natural aristocracy and democracy, was rejected as already a historical freak: partly misunderstood as a defense of the aristocratic principle, partly diagnosed correctly, by more acute minds such as John Taylor of Caroline, as a defense of the republic upon principles which the republic itself had abandoned.33 Such was the ironic—but, given its author’s personality, appropriate—fate of perhaps the last major work of political theory written within the unmodified tradition of classical republicanism. Wood also brings to light two Federalists at least, of the middle to late eighties—Noah Webster in 1785, William Vans Murray in 1787—who declared specifically (as did Hamilton and Taylor) that the virtue of the individual was no longer a necessary foundation of free government; and Murray at least declared, following a line laid down by Montesquieu but going beyond him, that the imperative of subjecting private to public good had been invented in a rude and precommercial society and need not be upheld now that the true secret of republican liberty was known.³⁴ Liberty, then, could dispense with virtue and would not be corrupted by affluence; but whether Murray was pronouncing a conservative or a revolutionary creed, it would be impossible to say without some modification of language.

But even after the wealth of detail with which Wood’s, Pole’s, and other analyses have explored the thesis of an implicit abandonment of virtue in Federalist theory, we are not faced with a generation who unanimously made this abandonment explicit. In the last few paragraphs reason has been found for suggesting that the rhetoric of balance and separation of powers operated to keep the language of republican tradition alive; and it can now be further argued that the vocabulary of virtue and corruption persisted in American thought, not merely as a survival slowly dying after its tap-root was cut, but with a reality and relevance to elements in American experience that kept it alive and in tension with the consequences that followed its partial abandonment in so crucial a field as constitutional theory and rhetoric. If Americans had been compelled to abandon a theory of constitutional humanism which related the personality to government directly and according to its diversities, they had not thereby given up the pursuit of a form of political society in which the individual might be free and know himself in his relation to society. The insistent claim that the American is a natural man and America founded on the principles of nature is enough to demonstrate that, and the pursuit of nature and its disappointments can readily be expressed in the rhetoric of virtue and corruption; for this is the rhetoric of citizenship, and a cardinal assertion of Western thought has been that man is naturally a citizen—kata phusin zōon politikon. However, American social thought has long employed a paradigm, supposedly Locke’s, of government emerging from and highly continuous with a state of natural sociability; and it has been seriously contended that no other paradigm than Locke’s has thriven or could have thriven in the unique conditions of American society.35 In this book we have been concerned with another tradition, reducible to the sequence of Aristotle’s thesis that human nature is civic and Machiavelli’s thesis that, in the world of secular time where alone the polis can exist, this nature of man may never be more than partially and contradictorily realized. Virtue can develop only in time, but is always threatened with corruption by time. In the special form taken when time and change were identified with commerce, this tradition has been found to have been operative over wide areas of thought in the eighteenth century, and to have provided a powerful impulse to the American Revolution. But so great is the strength of the “Lockean” paradigm among modern scholars that there is a real likelihood that Wood’s demonstration of a shift away from classical humanist premises in the making of the Federal Constitution will be interpreted as an “end of classical politics” and a wholesale adoption of the “Lockean” style. It is therefore of some importance, as we conclude this study of the Machiavellian tradition, to review the evidence which suggests that the theses and antitheses of virtue and corruption continued to be of great importance in shaping American thought.

The episode of the Order of the Cincinnati is relevant here. When we read that officers of the former revolutionary army formed themselves into a society, which took its name from that Roman hero who was called from the plough to take the consulship and thankfully returned to it afterwards, but that this society was suspected of a design to constitute itself as a hereditary aristocracy, there is not much question about the conceptual universe in which the incident occurred. In a similar way, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, apparently drafted to reassure men’s minds against the fact that the federal government would maintain something in the nature of a professional army, affirms the relation between a popular militia and popular freedom in language directly descended from that of Machiavelli, which remains a potent ritual utterance in the United States to this day. The new republic feared corruption by a professional army, even while—like England a century before—it saw no alternative to establishing one; and the implications of the rhetoric employed in this context were to be fully worked out in the debates and journalism of the first great conflict between American parties.

Two recent studies 36 have underlined the extent to which Alexander Hamilton appeared to his Republican and Jeffersonian adversaries a figure defined in ominous outline by every tradition in which corruption threatened the republic. He desired to establish a Bank of the United States, and a class of fundholding public creditors who would be directly interested in upholding the government of the republic and the influence of its executive in Congress; and every reader of Cato’s Letters, Bolingbroke or James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions—all widely distributed in America—must recognize him as pursuing the tradition of the Junto Whigs, Walpole and George III, which had contributed so powerfully to the belief that Britain was irredeemably corrupt. To the extent—not inconsiderable—to which Hamilton saw government as conducted by a strong executive which could get its way in the legislature, the means he was seen as promoting seemed to make for a reversion to the style of parliamentary monarchy, which all agreed could not get its way without influence, but which Madisonian Federalism—to say nothing of more radically republican schools of thought—had insisted on abandoning as corrupt and unnatural. This was what was meant by the repeated charge that the Federalist party of the nineties desired to restore the English constitution, and the cry that Hamilton’s fundholders would in due time become a hereditary aristocracy is simply an index to the American reversion to the style of the Good Old Cause. Lastly, Hamilton’s known desire to build up the republic’s permanent military strength, and the widespread suspicion that he hoped to head that strength himself, were all that was needed to confirm his critics in their inherited belief that rule by a strong executive, wielding influence and supported by a monied interest, led logically to rule, at once corruptive and dictatorial, by a standing army.

This aspect of the Federalist-Republican controversy is therefore to a quite startling extent a replay of the debates of Court and Country as much as a hundred years before. The Jeffersonians spoke the language of the Country and knew that they spoke it; it is less clear that Hamilton consciously repeated the arguments of Defoe or the Walpoleans, a rhetoric never so highly developed in Britain and ill adapted to an American context. But Gerald Stourzh’s exploration of Hamilton’s thought against the background of republican humanism has left no doubt that he considered himself a “modern Whig” in the context of the neo-Machiavellian contrast between virtuous antiquity and commercial modernity. We have quoted his remark that “Cato was the Tory, Caesar the Whig of his day … the former perished with the republic, the latter destroyed it.”37 The tone is clearly one of preference for success over deservingness, virtù over virtue; and it was language of this kind which persuaded Jefferson that Hamilton admired Caesar and wished to emulate him. But when Hamilton became convinced of a threat to his own role from Aaron Burr, he denounced Burr as an “embryo Caesar”³⁸ and a Catiline—a figure one shade darker than Caesar’s in the spectrum of republican demonology. Burr was to Hamilton what Hamilton was to Jefferson, and even the sentence about Cato and Caesar was written in the course of a warning against Burr’s ambitions; what makes Burr a Catiline rather than a Caesar, it is interesting to note, is that his ambition is devoid of “the love of glory”³⁹—virtus in a very classical sense indeed. Hamilton’s feelings about Caesar, then, are rich in Machiavellian moral ambiguity; but to Machiavelli himself, Caesar had been a thoroughly execrable figure and no hero at all. It is the use of the words “Tory” and “Whig” which gives us the clue to Hamilton’s meaning. The connotations are not contemporary, but Augustan; the imperator Caesar can be a “Whig” only in the context of Queen Anne’s reign, when the Whigs had been the party of war, of Marlborough, and the monied interest. The triumph of Caesar over Cato is the triumph of commerce over virtue, and of empire over republic. It is this historical role which transforms Caesar into an archetype of ambiguous virtù.

Stourzh proceeds⁴⁰ to show that Hamilton saw America as predestined to become a commercial and military empire, of a sort to which the figure of Caesar was indeed appropriate, but in which his role must be played by “modern Whig” structures of government if it was not to be played by demagogues like Burr. The whole argument is based on the ascendancy of commerce over frugality, empire over virtue; Hamilton can be said to have added a fourth term to the triads of Montesquieu, showing that if virtue is the principle of republics, interest is that of empires, so that a nonclassical federalism is necessary if the republic is to be also an empire. A West Indian turned New Yorker, he saw America as a manufacturing and mercantile economy, trading into the Atlantic in competition with other trading societies, and he placed himself in the company of the great theorists of specialization by affirming—in the tradition of Fletcher of Saltoun—that as societies had become increasingly commercial, they had become increasingly capable of paying soldiers and sailors to defend and extend their trade. It was this process of specialization—rather than any Hobson-Lenin theory of investment—which ensured that competition for trade became a competition for power, empire, and survival; for once military power was committed to the expansion of trade, military power itself must be fought for. Commerce and specialization were the causes of dynamic virtù. Government must now become an engine for the protection and expansion of external power; and in the internal relations between citizens, where liberty and justice were its rightful and necessary ends, it could not any longer base itself on the assumption of virtue in the individual citizen, for

as riches increase and accumulate in few hands; as luxury prevails in society; virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature.… It is a common misfortune, that awaits our state constitution as well as all others.41

Parliamentary monarchy in Britain, representative democracy in the United States, had alike presented themselves as modes of government appropriate to societies at the commercial stage of development, which was post-virtuous if it was not actually corrupt. Madison, when a colleague of Hamilton’s, had helped build up an image of the federal representative structure as one which might go on expanding, with interest being added to interest, and yet never become corrupt. If Madison separated himself passionately from Hamilton within a very few years of constitutional ratification, one reason for his doing so may have been that Hamilton’s argument clearly presupposes a higher degree of corruption, and a more brutally open recognition of its existence by government, than Madison thought could possibly be accepted. The central issue came to be Hamilton’s banking proposals, which looked unpalatably like a return to parliamentary monarchy in the form denounced by adversaries of Walpole and George III; but Hamilton’s stress on empire and military power may well have been an additional cause of Madison’s opposition.42 The passage from virtue to commerce was not, in Hamilton’s mind, a serene withdrawal into liberal complacency, into a world where separate interests balanced one another. He was opting for dominion and expansion, not for free trade, and emphatically rejected any argument that the interests of trading nations were peacefully complementary. There would be war, and there must be strong government; and on the other side of the ledger, he suspected that Madison’s theory of balancing interests made too little of the dangers of sectional conflict within a union of states.⁴³ Hamilton’s empire was thus a challenge to Madison’s federalism, the more so because it was based on the same premise—the movement from virtue to interest—and drew more drastically Machiavellian conclusions. Could the republic shift its base from virtue without becoming in the full sense an empire? Could America be republic and empire at the same time? Hamilton did not answer these questions in the negative; but the terms in which he proposed to construct affirmative answers were unacceptably strong. They were accordingly denounced as corruption.⁴⁴

The Federalist party of the 1790s is not, of course, to be thought of as made up of Hamiltons suspect of Caesarism; far more of its leading members probably saw themselves as Catos rather than Caesars, upholders of the stern unbending virtue of the natural aristocracy. John Adams, whose republicanism has seemed classical to the point of archaism, was of course a Federalist; and John Taylor of Caroline, who had harshly criticized Adams’s Defence as obsolescent, was a Republican and wrote anti-Hamiltonian polemic in which the ghosts of Swift and Bolingbroke stalk on every page.⁴⁵ Nor should the Republicans be thought of as committed to the postclassical liberalism of the Madisonian synthesis. Some of them walked in the footsteps of old-guard Antifederalists like Patrick Henry, whose austere sense of virtue had led them to criticize the Constitution itself as making too many concessions to self-interest and empire;⁴⁶ but once again, there were Antifederalists whose concern for virtue carried them into the posture of Catonian Federalism. The ideological spectrum which ran from republic to federal union to empire was like that of debate in Augustan England, which ran from land to trade to credit; there were no fixed partitions, and the same contradictions and perplexities were shared by men at all points. The commitment to virtue, to the Machiavellian moment, had a way of producing this result; it made men aware that they were centaurs.

For many—and the conditions of the early United States left this option open to many—the solution was to admit that they were centaurs, and immerse themselves in the caucusing and brokerage of professional politics.47 But given the premise that American values were those of men engaged in the search for virtue under conditions admitted to be partly unfavorable, it is interesting to have Tuveson’s opinion that Federalists were more likely than Republicans to adopt the perspective of millennialist apocalyptic as one in which the triumph of American virtue might be envisaged.⁴⁸ We have grown used to finding that virtue sometimes demands a millennium in which to behold itself as affirmed and justified by grace; but on the face of it, the Republicans should be the party of virtue, the Federalists that of virtù. If we suppose, however, that Federalists included men who believed that in them natural aristocracy was making its last stand, as well as men who believed that “the real disposition of human nature” was toward luxury and empire, we shall have defined them as the party which saw virtue as exposed to the greatest threats and pressures, and it will be the less surprising—since this was, after all, an American party—to find millennialists as well as Machiavellians in its ranks. The Jeffersonian persuasion, as we shall next see, had its own ways of affirming the durability of virtue.

The passage just quoted, in which Hamilton affirms that “the real disposition of human nature” is “to depart from the republican standard,” must of course be set beside some even more striking and far more fully discussed writings of Thomas Jefferson. Students of American agrarianism have many times explored the meaning, and the ultimate ambiguities, of:

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those who, not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstance: but, generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption.… The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its constitution.49

“The natural progress and consequence of the arts … sometimes … retarded by accidental circumstance.” Jefferson is placing himself, and America, at a Rousseauan moment; man can avoid neither becoming civilized nor being corrupted by the process; but the language further reveals that the process is political and the moment Machiavellian. There is even a glimpse of the continuity of commerce and fortuna; the words “casualties and caprice” might without much distortion be replaced by “fortune and fantasy”; but it is typical of the eighteenth-century debate that “manners,” which had once, in the form of custom and tradition, served to retard the wheel of fortune, have now become progressive and corrupting. We also know by this time in what shapes corruption may be expected to occur. Dependent, subversive, and venal men in a commercial society are “fit tools for the designs,” not only of classical demagogues like Burr, but also of architects of military-financial empire like Hamilton. Jefferson wrote this passage in 1785, but it prefigures the rhetoric of the next decade. He was, then, as committed as any classical republican to the ideal of virtue, but saw the preconditions of virtue as agrarian rather than natural; he was not a Cato, seeing the relation of natural aristocracy to natural democracy as the thing essential—unless this thought was in his mind as founder of the University of Virginia—so much as a Tiberius Gracchus, seeing the preservation of a yeoman commonwealth as the secret of virtue’s maintenance. At the same time, we see, he doubted whether agrarian virtue could be preserved forever; but neither his faith nor his doubts separate him from the tradition of classical politics, or from the new liberalism of Madisonian Federalism.

A clue to this paradox is found when we note that Noah Webster, cited by Wood as affirming that the republic was no longer directly based on the virtue of the individual, wrote as follows:

The system of the great Montesquieu will ever be erroneous, till the words property or lands in fee simple are substituted for virtue, throughout his Spirit of Laws.

Virtue, patriotism, or love of country, never was and never will be, till men’s natures are changed, a fixed, permanent principle and support of government. But in an agricultural country, a general possession of land in fee simple may be rendered perpetual, and the inequalities introduced by commerce are too fluctuating to endanger government. An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic.50

Webster was reverting to a directly Harringtonian position and arguing that a material foundation was necessary to ensure virtue and equality, that freehold land was a more stable foundation than commerce, but that a predominantly agrarian society could absorb commerce without essential loss of virtue. If he indeed recognized that the Constitution rested upon a foundation other than virtue, that will have seemed to him a concession to the nonagrarian elements in the American system, a compromise in fact with commerce; but America could still remain a society rather agricultural than commercial. This, however, would shift emphasis away from the Constitution itself. The institutions of virtue would now lie, not in the political ordini where classical theory would have seen the legislative intellect at work, but in the agrarian laws—or rather, as we shall see, in the unlegislated social forces and human energies—which secured the perpetuation of freehold equality. We are on the verge of a theory in which frontier, not constitution, is the “soul of the republic,” unless the latter can be restored to centrality as the perfect resolution of the kinetic struggle between commerce and virtue.

Henry Nash Smith⁵¹ has isolated the phrase “the fee-simple empire,” as emblematic of the geopolitical and millennialist rhetoric of the farming West which was rife in nineteenth-century America; and, with its echoes of what Webster had to say in 1787, the phrase may explain for us why a purely agrarian republic had to be a commonwealth for expansion. The Revolutionary generation had made profession of virtue and committed their republic to the escape from corruption, yet had not fully detached it from that universe of interest and faction which was taken to be the sign of the corruption that commerce engendered. Harrington, as Webster seems to have recalled, had laid it down that commerce did not corrupt so long as it did not overbalance land; but since his day, commerce had become recognized as a dynamic principle, progressive and at the same time corrupting. A republic which desired to reconcile virtue with commerce must be equally dynamic and expansive in the search for land. “The growth of Oceana” could “give laws to the sea,” and escape the fates of both Venice and Rome, only if the sea led to empty or depopulated lands for settlement; but in America the oceanic crossing had been made, and the land awaited occupation by simple popular expansion. Daniel Boone need not be Lycurgus or Romulus and make laws, and part of the hatred later felt for Mormons probably arose because their prophets insisted on being legislators. An infinite supply of land, ready for occupation by an armed and self-directing yeomanry, meant an infinite supply of virtue, and it could even be argued that no agrarian law was necessary; the safety valve was open, and all pressures making for dependence and corruption would right themselves.

In these conditions virtue might seem to be self-guaranteeing, and the kind of intelligence displayed by the legislator as demiurge superfluous. A romanticization of popular energies, akin to the romanticism which Wood detects in Madisonian liberalism, makes its appearance in frontier rhetoric; but, following the paradigms laid down by Machiavelli, virtue in this sense must be as dynamic as popular virtù. A dynamism of virtue was being invoked to counter and contain the dynamism of commerce, and must partake of the latter’s passionate and fantastic qualities. The primitive and half-comic heroes of frontier legend, however, were insufficiently political to embody virtue in its republican form—Davy Crockett was not imaginable as the congressman he was in real life—and the myth found its personification in Andrew Jackson.52 Frontier warrior turned patriot statesman, successful adversary of the second attempt to charter the United States Bank, the Jackson of legend has a good claim to be considered the last of the Machiavellian Romans and the warlike, expanding, agrarian democracy he symbolized a Fourth Rome, perpetuating republican virtus as the Third Rome of Moscow perpetuated sacred empire.

Jefferson is recorded as commenting on the ill-conceived War of 1812:

Our enemy has indeed the consolation of Satan on removing our first parents from Paradise: from a peaceable and agricultural nation, he makes us a military and manufacturing one.53

But after that rather meaningless conflict had been officially brought to a settlement, it was suddenly escalated into the domain of myth, and transformed from a corrupting and progressive war into a virtuous and archaic one, by the crowning mercy of the Battle of New Orleans, in which frontier riflemen, the legendary “Hunters of Kentucky,” in the role of rustic citizen warriors, were supposed to have triumphed over the veterans of a great professional army. John William Ward, in his study of the Jackson myth which grew up over the next two decades, brings out clearly how much of it was based on allusion to the heroes of early Rome—familiar figures of every schoolbook and patriotic oration—and on the traditional contrast between virtuous militia and corrupt standing army. At the same time that Clausewitz was formulating a great idealist theory of war as the instrument of the democratic and bureaucratic state, Americans were propounding a view of it which was civic and archaic, Machiavellian and at the same moment romantic. Ward further shows how significant were the elements of primitivism and dynamism—of democratic anti-intellectualism—which the myth contained. A mysterious and incalculable force was supposed to have flashed from the warriors of Kentucky and confounded the mere skill, experience, and reliance on material power—what Cromwell might have called the mere “carnal reason”—of their foes at New Orleans; and it was much insisted on that this spirit was that of patriotism, and that patriotism was a spirit. Ward rightly stresses that romanticism of this sort is part of an ethos of egalitarianism; the force which places natural and popular energy on a par with training, experience, and intellect must be of the order of spirit as opposed to reason. But at the same time there is an unmistakable kinship with the dynamic and military virtù of the Machiavellian popolo. The spirit animating the riflemen, when seen as embodied in the person of Jackson himself, is many times termed virtue; but when Jackson is regularly praised as a general who won victories without attending to the formalities of international law, a president who made laws and decisions without attending to constitutional niceties, it is clear that we are dealing with a leader of virtù in a highly Machiavellian sense. “Jackson made law,” remarked an admirer; “Adams quoted it.” He was commenting on a reputed outburst by the hero which ran: “Damn Grotius! damn Pufendorf! damn Vattel! This is a mere matter between Jim Monroe and myself!”54 Or again: “John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it.”

Machiavelli might indeed have been appreciative; but he might also have pointed out that this sort of impetuosity was proper in a legislator founding a republic, or a prince operating where there was none, but in a magistrate supposed to uphold the public authority could prove extremely corrupting. Given that classical history was still every man’s textbook of politics, one can see that Jackson’s adversaries had reason to dread in him the military adventurer turned tyrant, and one may even feel that his virtue must have been real to withstand so much intoxicating praise of its superhuman qualities; he must have been a Furius Camillus, since he did not become a Manlius Capitolinus. But it is anomalous in Machiavellian terms that a republic should have generated, and benefited from, an almost anarchic hero such as this, when it was not new or declining, but in its second generation of normal functioning. A contemporary explanation, of which Ward rightly makes much, was that the Constitution, being founded on the principles of nature, had released the energies of man as he naturally was; Jackson was nature’s child, and the republic of the wilderness had nothing to fear from him.⁵⁵ Ward, however, draws the orthodox conclusion that the American myth was one of Lockean primitivism—the revolt of nature against history, which is to say against the traditions, conventions, and intellectualisms of an Old World. Expressions of this view were and are exceedingly common; we are concerned, however, to ask whether this escape into nature is to be properly understood outside the complexities and ambiguities of virtue.

Jackson’s America was also the America observed by Tocqueville. While the aggressive virtù of agrarian warriors throve on the frontiers, there was visible further east the culmination of that popular revolt against the natural aristocracies which we have learned to call the “decline of virtue” and the “end of classical politics”; and we may ask if there was any relation between the two. Tocqueville charted the transition from equality in its Machiavellian or Montesquieuan sense—isonomia or equality of subjection to the res publica—which had been part of the ideal of virtue, to that égalité des conditions which he saw as marking the triumph of democracy in its modern sense, superseding the values of the classical republic. He went altogether beyond the simply republican fear that a Jackson might turn out a Manlius or a Caesar, and pointed out that the real danger of tyranny in the postvirtuous society lay in the dictatorship of majority opinion. When men had been differentiated and had expressed their virtue in the act of deferring to one another’s virtues, the individual had known himself through the respect shown by his fellows for the qualities publicly recognized in him; but once men were, or it was held that they ought to be, all alike, his only means of self-discovery lay in conforming to everybody else’s notions of what he ought to be and was. This produced a despotism of opinion, since nothing but diffused general opinion now defined the ego or its standards of judgment. Madison had feared that the individual might lose all sense of his own significance;56 and Tocqueville could have observed that Tom Paine, after escaping the English law of treason and the French reign of terror, had been destroyed by the disapproval of his American neighbors.

This critique of égalité des conditions is basically Aristotelian: it is pointed out in the Politics that when men are treated as all alike, we fail to take account of them in those respects in which they are not alike; and it could have been pointed out further that a society in which every man is subservient to every other man, because dependent on him for any means of judging his own existence, is corrupt within the accepted meaning of the word, in a very special way and to a very high degree. The cult of Jacksonian will and natural energy may turn out to be part of this society, because virtù in the romantic sense is a means of undermining the virtue of the natural aristocracies; but it is a characteristic of the Tocquevillian world that false images of men are very easy to produce and exchange, since men have nothing to live by except each other’s images. Here it would be proper to reflect that the myths of Jackson and the other frontier heroes were in part consciously manufactured by not invisible image-makers; that Jackson was a planter and not a frontiersman, who won his victory at New Orleans by artillery and not rifle fire; that if he successfully presented himself as hero and Adams as intellectual in 1828, his image met its ape in 1840, when the Whigs succeeded in manufacturing a hero of their own in Harrison, who signalized his essentially unreal character by catching cold at his own inauguration and dying in a month. It was a severe display of the ironies of history, though his admirers might have reflected that Andrew Jackson was not mocked; and it raises once again the question whether the moment of nature is not a means of escape from a conflict between virtue and corruption, felt as inherent in America since its beginnings.

Let us resume exegesis of the text cited from Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia. Commerce—the progress of the arts—corrupts the virtue of agrarian man; but, Webster had added and Jefferson had agreed, an agrarian society can absorb commerce, and an expanding agrarian society can absorb an expanding commerce. America is the world’s garden; there is an all but infinite reservoir of free land, and expansion to fill it is the all but infinite expansion of virtue. The rhetoric of Smith’s Virgin Land, filling the century after Jefferson and Webster, is the rhetoric of this expansion of arms-bearing and liberty-loving husbandmen; the rhetoric, it may be added, of Berkeley’s “westward course,” helping to explain the archetypal status assumed by that poem in American thought. The justification of frontier expansion is thus Machiavellian, and in the myth of Jackson it is seen to entail a Machiavellian virtù which will extend virtue without corrupting it—a process possible in the fee-simple empire. The serpent has entered Eden—once more necessitating virtù—in the sense that commerce has formed part of the American scene since before the republic began. But on the premise that expanding land is uncorrupted by expanding commerce, the latter can add its dynamic and progressive qualities to the dynamic expansiveness of agrarian virtù, and be seen as contributory to the image of a farmer’s empire, at once progressive and pastoral. The synthesis of virtue and virtù, achieved by Polybius and Machiavelli in their more sanguine moments, is recreated in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition at a far higher level of sociological complexity and hence of optimism. The extent to which the Constitution entailed an abandonment of virtue is more than compensated for by the virtù of the frontier.

The rhetoric of the yeoman—America as the new Gothic empire—has always room in it for the rhetoric of the steam-engine; we may recall the “march of mind” and the “Steam Intellect Society” satirized by Thomas Love Peacock in contemporary Britain. Since frontier and industry, land and commerce, are both expansive forces, they can both be described in terms of passion and dynamism: the patriotic virtù of the warrior yeoman for the former, the passionate and restless pursuit of interest for the latter. So long as the partnership of expansion lasts, the plunge into nature can be described simultaneously in pastoral and industrial terms; for what the American is in search of is not the nature to be contemplated in Arcadian scenery—though this option is never finally closed off—but his own nature as a man, which is civic, military, commercial, and in a word active. If he invokes Lockean paradigms at this point, it is the complex history of the vita activa which has defined this as the point at which to do so.57

The wilderness, furthermore, is matter to be shaped into form; his nature as yeoman, warrior, and citizen is not fulfilled until after he has formed it. The intention of the frontiersman is ideally to become a yeoman, although this is one point at which a romantic tension is possible; and the intimation we found in Jefferson that virtue is possible only at a Rousseauan moment in the progress of civilization is carried further in the numerous panoramas—pictorial and verbal—at which the agrarian and civic ideal is presented as occupying a “middle landscape” between the extremes of wilderness savagery and metropolitan corruption.58 The image of the polis is therefore always in part Arcadian, though in markedly lesser part contemplative. A further corollary is that since the moving frontier is at any moment an intermediate zone between savagery and virtue, there is always the problem of those whose virtù impels them to go beyond it, preferring unshaped matter to shaped form, potentiality to actuality, until their own natures are left incomplete and may degenerate. Fenimore Cooper depicted the aging Leatherstocking in such a dilemma, hesitant between the worlds of the hunter and the farmer, natural virtue and settled law;⁵⁹ and Burke must have had something of the sort in mind when he imagined settlers beyond the Appalachians degenerating into a nomad cavalry and raiding the farming frontier.⁶⁰ Experience on the ground, besides, provided as early as Crevecoeur’s Letters⁶¹ occasion for seeing the frontier squatter as an ignoble savage, squalidly degenerate rather than barbarously natural; the poor white began his career in the conceptual context of eighteenth-century sociology.

But these problems appeared ideally only as offering reasons why the frontier should not cease to expand. So long as the settlement of new land was possible, the partnership between agrarian virtue and commercial industry could be maintained and could perpetuate the illusion that the American “new man” had reentered Eden. The national apocalyptic could be affirmed at this primary level of optimism. There remained, however, the problem prophetically discerned by Berkeley: that of the closed and cyclical nature of world history. America must be the fifth and last act in the translatio imperii, because once the “westward course” was complete it was not conceivable in merely agrarian terms that it should begin again. The quest for agrarian virtue was the quest for a static utopia, imaginable only as a rinnovazione, a renewal of virtue for those who could find lands on which to renew it. In these terms, Machiavelli had been prophetically (but not Christianly) right: the amount of virtue there could be in the world at any one time was finite, and when it was used up there must be catastrophe before renewal—a Stoic conflagration rather than a Christian apocalypse. If the Republicans were, as Tuveson suggests, less millennially minded than the Federalists, this could have been because, with Jefferson, they hoped for an almost infinite renewal of virtue in the fee-simple empire; but beyond this expanding utopia could be discerned only a Machiavellian, not a Christian eschatology. And the end of utopia must be reached. There are passages in Jefferson’s writings where he admits that sooner or later the reservoir of land must be exhausted and the expansion of virtue will no longer keep ahead of the progress of commerce.62 When that point is reached, the process of corruption must be resumed; men will become dependent upon each other in a market economy and dependent on government in great cities. The serpent will have overtaken Adam and Eve, and the dark forces symbolized by Hamilton and Burr, or the more subtle processes described by Tocqueville, will be unchecked by the expansion of husbandry. When manners are corrupt, not even the Constitution can be counted upon. Even in America, the republic faces the problem of its own ultimate finitude, and that of its virtue, in space and time.

There is thus a dimension of historical pessimism in American thought at its most utopian, which stems from the confrontation of virtue and commerce and threatens to reduce all American history to a Machiavellian or Rousseauan moment.⁶³ It is because Jefferson’s husbandmen, when all is said and done, occupy only a moment in the dialectic of progress and corruption that he has no alternative to describing them as the “chosen people” and “peculiar deposit” of God. They are not, after all, guaranteed by nature, and their moment of virtue can be prolonged and sustained only by grace or providence. Jefferson was capable of appealing to providence, but not to millennial prophecy; both his deism and his agrarianism assured that; for civic virtue, as we have repeatedly seen, while occasionally requiring an apocalyptic framework for its self-assertion, has an equally strong tendency to substitute its own moment for any but an immediately expected millennium. It is therefore of interest to take up Tuveson’s generalization concerning the association between millennialism and the Federalists. On the one hand, this may have obtained because Federalists, regarding the decline of virtue with Catonian severity, saw men as subject to greater temptations and fewer secular guarantees, and therefore as standing in greater need of grace, than did those of Jefferson’s persuasion; but on the other, Tuveson significantly stresses the prominence accorded to Commerce in the millennial poetry of the Federalist Timothy Dwight.64 Commerce is the dynamic power, the virtù, which ensures that nature will not sustain the agrarian utopia forever and that the aid of grace must be invoked; but given the partnership of virtue and commerce in westward expansion, it can also be a means of thrusting toward the millennium which grace will afford and taking it by storm. There was even a mood in which it was seen as breaking out of the reservoir of western land, overcoming its finitude, transcending the closed cycle of virtue, and attaining a truly American millennium.

Among the constants in the literature of American mythology brought to light by Henry Nash Smith is the repetition of prophecies that the fee-simple empire would not only perpetuate the virtue of a farming yeomanry, but generate a commerce designed to exceed continental limits and, by opening up the markets of Asia, bring about the liberation of the most ancient of human societies.⁶⁵ “There is the east; there is India,” declared Thomas Hart Benton, pointing due west before an audience in St. Louis,⁶⁶ and the enlightenment of Japan and China through commerce was foretold more frequently still. It was in the context of the fee-simple union of virtue and commerce that America’s global role was prophesied; and the global role, it was maintained, would assure the perpetuation of that union even after the Pacific shores had been reached. The liberation of Asia (Whitman’s “venerable priestly Asia”), furthermore, is part of the vision of America as “redeemer nation”; and the reason is plainly that it would break the closed circle in which Berkeley had confined America and would transform the closing fifth act of his translatio into a truly millennial Fifth Monarchy. “In the beginning,” Locke had written—inadvertently earning his place as a prophet of the new apocalypse—“all the world was America”;⁶⁷ and if in the end all the world should be America again, the mission of a chosen people would have been fulfilled. Virtue and commerce, liberty and culture, republic and history would have rendered their partnership perpetual by the only possible means—that of engaging all mankind perpetually in it; and in so doing would have attained to that blend of millennium and utopia which was the outcome of the early modern secularization of biblical prophecy.

The American apocalypse is not inherently more absurd than those entertained in other cultures, which present themselves as embodying the last stage of some unified scheme of human history and as about to attain utopia through the working out of that scheme’s final dialectic. But because the movement of American history has been spatial rather than dialectical, its apocalypse has been early modern rather than historicist; it has been envisaged in the form of a movement out of history, followed by a regenerative return to it, so that there have been perpetuated in American thinking those patterns of messianic and cyclical thought with which this book has been concerned. For if the liberation of Asia should not come about, the partnership of virtue and commerce would have failed and the cycle of history would be closed again. The chosen people would be imprisoned in time for lack of a theater for further expansion and the pursuing forces of commerce would once more turn corruptive, imposing upon them the imperial government desired by Hamilton in the eighteenth century and described as the “military-industrial complex” by Eisenhower in the twentieth, or the condition of universal dependence feared by Jefferson and analyzed by Tocqueville. When the chosen people failed of their mission, they were by definition apostate, and the jeremiad note so recurrent in American history would be sounded again. It would call for the internal cleansing and regeneration of the “city on a hill,” since the politics of sectarian withdrawal and communal renewal form a standing alternative to those of millennial leadership; “come out of her, my people” might be heard again in the form of George McGovern’s “come home, America”; but there would simultaneously be heard a variety of neo-Machiavellian voices offering counsel on the proper blend of prudence and audacity to display in a world where virtue was indeed finite. The fate of Rome began to be invoked by the anti-imperialists of 1898, and has been invoked since.

The twentieth-century intellect distrusts metahistory for many reasons, nearly all of them good, but American culture has been sufficiently pervaded by metahistorical ways of thinking to make the ability to reconstruct eschatological scenarios a useful tool in interpreting it. We can see, in the light of the scheme provided here, why it was necessary, both at the beginnings of the Jeffersonian perspective and as it took further shape, to reject Alexander Hamilton as a false prophet and even a kind of Antichrist; he looked east, not west,68 saw America as commercial empire rather than agrarian republic, and proclaimed that corruption was inescapable, that the cycle was closed and the end had come, before the covenant was fairly sealed or the experiment in escaping corruption had begun. We can further see why it was that Frederick Jackson Turner adopted the tones of an American Isaiah when proclaiming the closing of the frontier in 1890; one phase in the prophetic scheme, one revolution of the wheel in the struggle between virtue and corruption, was drawing to an end. It is also intelligible that there is now an interpretation of American history since that era, which proposes that after 1890 the choice lay between internal reformation on the one hand and oceanic empire on the other, leading to the liberation of Asia by trade through an Open Door;69 and that the apparent rejection of America by Asia in the third quarter of the twentieth century is seen as leading to a profound crisis in self-perception, in which the hope of renewed innocence and recovered virtue is felt (once again) to have gone forever and the national jeremiad is sounded in peculiarly anguished terms. The Machiavellian note is audible when Americans reproach themselves, as they have at intervals since at latest 1898, with exercising the “tyranny of a free people” and imposing the empire of virtue on those who are not to receive full citizenship within it.⁷⁰ But it is also significant that the jeremiad has at times taken the form of a quarrel with the Constitution itself, and more recently of a quarrel with a “Lockean consensus,” a politics of pragmatic adjustment and a political science of the empirical study of behavior, all of which are seen—however exaggeratedly—as underlying the edifice of the republic since its beginnings and as contributing to that state of affairs which it is the object of the jeremiad to denounce as corruption. The tensions between political practice and the values to which it must answer sometimes grow so great that Americans lose that delight in both the practice and the contemplation of politics in the Madisonian manner which normally characterizes them. The language of practice has not been republican in the classical sense, but the language of myth and metahistory has ensured the repetition of dilemmas first perceived in the eighteenth century; and what is often stated as a quarrel with Locke is in reality a quarrel with Madison’s solution to these dilemmas. American political scientists currently see themselves as passing through a “post-behavioral revolution,”71 but much of the language of that movement is recognizable as the language of jeremiad; and a postjeremiad revolution in the field of ideology would in some respects be more drastic still. It would signal the end of the Machiavellian moment in America—the end, that is, of the quarrel with history in its distinctively American form. But what would succeed that perspective is hard to imagine—the indications of the present point inconclusively toward various kinds of conservative anarchism—and its end does not seem to have arrived.

[IV]

It is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it. The conventional wisdom among scholars who have studied their growth has been that the Puritan covenant was reborn in the Lockean contract, so that Locke himself has been elevated to the station of a patron saint of American values and the quarrel with history has been seen in terms of a constant attempt to escape into the wilderness and repeat a Lockean experiment in the foundation of a natural society.⁷² The interpretation put forward here stresses Machiavelli at the expense of Locke; it suggests that the republic—a concept derived from Renaissance humanism—was the true heir of the covenant and the dread of corruption the true heir of the jeremiad. It suggests that the foundation of independent America was seen, and stated, as taking place at a Machiavellian—even a Rousseauan—moment, at which the fragility of the experiment, and the ambiguity of the republic’s position in secular time, was more vividly appreciated than it could have been from a Lockean perspective.

The foundation of the republic, this interpretation suggests, was not seen in terms of a simple return to nature—Crevecoeur to the contrary notwithstanding—but as constituting an ambivalent and contradictory moment within a dialectic of virtue and corruption, familiar to most sophisticated minds of the eighteenth century. There was indeed a flight from history into nature, conceived by many Americans of the revolutionary and early national periods—and with less excuse by a succession of historians lasting to this day—in terms of a flight from the Old World, from the burden of a priestly and feudal past (Adams’s “canon and feudal laws”); but the analysis of corruption makes it clear that what was involved was a flight from modernity and a future no less than from antiquity and a past, from commercial and Whiggish Britain—the most aggressively “modern” society of the mid-eighteenth century—no less than from feudal and popish Europe; just as the nature into which Americans precipitated themselves was not simply a Puritan, Lockean, or Arcadian wilderness, but that vita activa in which the zōon politikon fulfilled his nature, but which since Machiavelli had grown steadily harder to reconcile with existence in secular time. Because the neo-Harringtonian version of the Machiavellian moment was one from which superstition, vassalage, and paper-money speculation could be beheld and condemned at a single glance, the old and new versions of corruption could be telescoped into one; and because the American republic could be seen in terms of rinnovazione in a New World, it was natural to see the departure from corruption as a single gesture of departure from a past—which encouraged the illusion that it led toward a nature which was unhistorical because its future was unproblematical. But this entailed much distortion of history, surviving in the determination of American historians writing in this vein, even today, to equate Britain with Europe and the Whig empire with the ancien régime.73 The dialectic of virtue and commerce was a quarrel with modernity, most fully articulated—at least until the advent of Rousseau—within the humanist and neo-Harringtonian vocabularies employed by the English-speaking cultures of the North Atlantic; and it was in those vocabularies and within the ambivalences of those cultures that American self-consciousness originated and acquired its terminology.

The civil war and revolution which disrupted the English-speaking Atlantic after 1774 can be seen as involving a continuation, larger and more irreconcilable, of that Augustan debate which accompanied the Financial Revolution in England and Scotland after 1688 and issued after 1714 in the parliamentary oligarchy of Great Britain. The fear of encroaching corruption helped drive the Americans to the renewal of virtue in a republic and the rejection of the parliamentary monarchy from which, all agreed, some measure of corruption was inseparable; and the confrontation of virtue with corruption constitutes the Machiavellian moment. Britain, on the other hand, adhered to the course marked out by all but the radical dissentients within the Whig tradition. Under the North, Rockingham, and Shelburne ministries, the political classes were in no doubt that parliamentary monarchy was a form of government to be retained; the issue was whether, in order to retain it, the better course was to fight the colonies or let them go.74 Loud and threatening though the Country voices were in the crisis of 1780-1781,⁷⁵ the Court thesis concerning the character of British government was not in real jeopardy. Unlike the Americans, dominated by neo-Harringtonian conceptual structures, the British, inured by the Court ideology to seeing themselves as less committed to the profession of virtue, attempted no revolutionary rinnovazione, did not see the loss of an empire as pointing to irretrievable decline, and were able within a few years to embark on another long period of European war, military professionalism, and inflationary banking. If the younger Pitt resembles Hamilton, there is no British Jefferson. Democratization, when it came, arrived by the medieval technique of expanding the king-in-parliament to include new categories of counselors and representatives.

American independence was therefore followed by a fairly rapid divergence of the political languages spoken in the two principal cultures of the now sundered Atlantic. Christopher Wyvill, Richard Price, and John Cartwright, it is true, employed a vocabulary of corruption and renovation little different from that of their American contemporaries,⁷⁶ and “Old Corruption” continued to be the target of radical reformers until perhaps the days of the Chartists. But Jeremy Bentham’s Fragment on Government—conceived, as its assault on Blackstone shows, as a radical rejection of the language of Court and Country alike—was written, as was the Declaration of Independence, in the year when The Wealth of Nations was first published and Hume died; and by 1780 Edmund Burke had perceived that eighteenth-century thought about manners and customs could be restated in the seventeenth-century language of prescriptive antiquity and the Ancient Constitution, and used to attack the notion of Machiavellian ridurre, as later that of the Rights of Man.77 Prescriptive conservatism and radical utilitarianism—whose antecedents are Court more than they are Country—could both be employed to diminish the influence of the Crown; but both were as far as they could be from the ideal of republican virtue perpetuated by the Americans.

A history could therefore be written—though it cannot be attempted here—of how British thought diverged from American, and from Augustan neoclassicism, in the half-century following the American Revolution. An ironic feature of such a history would surely be the high degree of success with which Victorian parliamentary legislation set about eliminating that corruption and its image which had been to all men, and to Americans remained, such an obsession. In this respect the British could and did feel well rewarded for their adherence, at the price of a disrupted Atlantic and an Anglo-Irish union, to the paradigm of parliamentary sovereignty over that of republican balance; the Americans, having made the republican commitment to the renovation of virtue, remained obsessively concerned by the threat of corruption—with, it must be added, good and increasing reason. Their political drama continues, in ways both crude and subtle, to endorse the judgment of Polybius, Guicciardini, Machiavelli, and Montesquieu in identifying corruption as the disease peculiar to republics: one not to be cured by virtue alone. In the melodrama of 1973, the venality of an Agnew makes this point in one way; an Ehrlichman’s more complex and disinterested misunderstanding of the relation between the reality and the morality of power makes it in another.

The Americans, then, inherited rhetorical and conceptual structures which ensured that venality in public officials, the growth of a military-industrial complex in government, other-directedness and one-dimensionality in individuals, could all be identified in terms continuous with those used in the classical analysis of corruption, the successive civichumanist denunciations of Caesar and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Marlborough, Walpole, and Hamilton. This language remains in many ways well suited to the purposes for which it is used; the case against the modern hypertrophy of Madisonian adjustive politics can be, and is, admirably made in terms of the Guicciardinian paradigm of corruption; but the historian notes that it serves at the same time to perpetuate the singular persistence of early modern values and assumptions in American culture. While the cult of Spartan and Roman antiquity among French revolutionaries was helping to generate the vision of a despotism of virtue through terror,⁷⁸ while German idealism was restating the quarrel between value and history in terms of a vision of reason as the working out of history’s contradictions within the self,79 and while the British were developing an ideology of administrative reform which claimed—in the face of a generally triumphant Burkean counterpoint—to reduce history to a science,⁸⁰ the unique conditions of the continental republic and its growth were perpetuating the Augustan tension between virtue and commerce, the Puritan tension between election and apostasy, the Machiavellian tension between virtue and expansion, and in general the humanist tension between the active civic life and the secular time-continuum in which it must be lived. Hence the persistence in America of messianic and jeremiad attitudes toward history; hence also, in part, the curious extent to which the most postmodern and post-industrial of societies continues to venerate pre-modern and anti-industrial values, symbols, and constitutional forms, and to suffer from its awareness of the tensions between practice and morality.

Hegel is on record as commenting upon the United States of his time that though a vital and growing political culture, it as yet lacked anything which he could recognize as a “state.” He resorted, however, to the proto-Turnerian explanation that the safety valve of the frontier accounted for the absence of class conflicts, and the prognosis that when the land was filled urbanization, a standing army, and class conflicts would begin, a true “state” would be necessitated, and the dialectic of history as he understood it would begin to operate.⁸¹ This prophecy can be very readily transposed into a Marxist key; but it is notorious that it has vet to be fulfilled. Classical Marxist class conflict has been even slower to develop in America than in other advanced industrial societies, and if Herbert Marcuse be accepted as the most significant Marxist theoretician to operate out of an American context, his Marxism is post-industrial, romantic, and pessimistic. The fact is not, as we have seen, that a complacent Lockean liberalism has led American thought to state too narrowly the quarrel of the self with history; it is that this quarrel has been, and has continued to be, expressed in a premodern and pre-industrial form, and has never taken the shape of a rigorous Hegelian or Marxian commitment to a dialectic of historical conflict. The St. Louis Hegelians, it has recently been shown, were romantic ideologues of a consciousness-expanding urban frontier, inheritors of the geopolitical messianism described by Tuveson and Smith;82 and the more academic Hegelian philosophers who succeeded them were never ideologues at all. American metahistory has remained the rhetoric of a spatial escape and return, and has never been that of a dialectical process.

In terms borrowed from or suggested by the language of Hannah Arendt,⁸³ this book has told part of the story of the revival in the early modern West of the ancient ideal of homo politicus (the zōon politikon of Aristotle), who affirms his being and his virtue by the medium of political action, whose closest kinsman is homo rhetor and whose antithesis is the homo credens of Christian faith. Following this debate into the beginnings of modern historicist sociology, we have been led to study the complex eighteenth-century controversy between homo politicus and homo mercator, whom we saw to be an offshoot and not a progenitor—at least as regards the history of social perception—of homo creditor. The latter figure was defined and to a large degree discredited by his failure to meet the standards set by homo politicus, and eighteenth-century attempts to construct a bourgeois ideology contended none too successfully with the primacy already enjoyed by a civic ideology; even in America a liberal work ethic has historically suffered from the guilt imposed on it by its inability to define for itself a virtue that saves it from corruption; the descent from Daniel Boone to Willy Loman is seen as steady and uninterrupted. But one figure from the Arendtian gallery is missing, curiously enough, from the history even of the American work ethic: the homo faber of the European idealist and socialist traditions, who served to bridge the gap between the myths of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It is not yet as clear as it might be how the emergence of this figure is related to the European debate between virtue and commerce; but because industrial labor in America conquered a wilderness rather than transforming an ancient agrarian landscape, homo faber in this continent is seen as conquering space rather than transforming history, and the American work force has been even less willing than the European to see itself as a true proletariat. The ethos of historicist socialism has consequently been an importation of transplanted intellectuals (even the martyr Joe Hill left word that he “had lived as an artist and would die as an artist”), and has remained in many ways subject to the messianic populisms of the westward movement.

The quarrel between civic virtue and secular time has been one of the main sources of the Western awareness of human historicity; but at the same time, the continued conduct of this quarrel—largely because it is anchored in a concern for the moral stability of the human personality—has perpetuated a pre-modern view of history as a movement away from the norms defining that stability, and so as essentially uncreative and entropic where it does not attain to millennium or utopia. When we speak of historicism we mean both an attempt to engage the personality and its integrity in the movement of history, and an attempt to depict history as generating new norms and values. The underlying strength of historicism is—or has been, since the astronauts and ecologists are working to close the circle once more—this sense of the secular creativity of history, its linear capacity to bring about incessant qualitative transformations of human life; but the paradox of American thought—on the other hand, the essence of socialist thought—has been a constant moral polemic against the way in which this happens. On one side of the paradox, the civic ideal of the virtuous personality, uncorrupted by specialization and committed to the social whole in all its diversity, has formed an important ingredient of the Marxian ideal of the same personality as awaiting redemption from the alienating effects of specialization.84 On another side, however, the socialist and revolutionary thrust has often ended in failure for the reason—one among others—that it threatens to “force men to be free,” to involve them in history, or in political and historical action, to a degree beyond their capacity for consent. Conservatism involves a denial of activism, a denial that the sphere of the vita activa is coterminous with the sphere of societal life. At this point our study of the quarrel between virtue and commerce has a contribution to offer on the conservative side of the ledger, with which a history being completed at a profoundly counter-revolutionary point in time may be permitted, without prejudice, to conclude.

In the final analysis, the ideal of virtue is highly compulsive; it demands of the individual, under threat to his moral being, that he participate in the res publica and, when the republic’s existence in time is seen to have grown crucial, in history. We have found areas of eighteenth-century thought in which the partial withdrawal from citizenship to pursue commerce appeared as a rebellion against virtue and its repressive demands; the republic asked too much of the individual in the form of austerity and autonomy, participation and virtue, and the diversification of life by commerce and the arts offered him the world of Pericles in place of that of Lycurgus, a choice worth paying for with a little corruption. The “liberalism” which some now find an impoverishment did not appear so then. It was already known, however, that what was diversification to some was specialization to others, and the socialist tradition has continued to grapple with the confrontation of riches and poverty in this form.

Further back still in time, it is apparent that the primacy of politics—the ideal of virtue, already bearing with it the ancient ambivalences of justice and war, virtue and virtù—reappeared in early modern thought in the form of a Christian heresy. In a cosmos shaped by the thought of the Augustinian civitas Dei, it affirmed that man’s nature was political and could be perfected in a finite historical frame of action; and the ambiguities of the saeculum, which it thus revived, are with us still as the ambiguities of action in history. To a Christian it would appear that the primacy of politics was possible only on the blasphemous supposition that some civitas saecularis could be the civitas Dei. To a Greek it would appear, more simply still, that every human virtue had its excess, and that civic or political virtue was no exception. There is a freedom to decline moral absolutes; even those of the polis and history, even that of freedom when proposed as an absolute.

1 In addition to those of Caroline Robbins and Bernard Bailyn, cited above, ch. XII, n. 52 and ch. XIV, n. 7, see Richard M. Gummere, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Comparative Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Beginnings of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966), and those of Gordon S. Wood and Gerald Stourzh, cited extensively below. For an earlier essay on this theme, see my “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3, no. 1 (1972), 119-34.

² For the growth of conspiracy theory, see Bailyn, Ideological Origins, pp. 85-93, 95-102, 119-43; American Politics, pp. 11-14, 35-38, 136-49; Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, pp. 16, 22-23, 30-36, 40-43.

³ Paul Lucas, “A Note on the Comparative Study of the Structure of Politics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and its American Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 28 (1971), 301-309.

⁴ Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1953) and The Americans: the Colonial Experience (New York: Random House, 1958); Louis B. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).

⁵ The climax of such rhetoric is to be found in the debates over Fox’s India Bill of 1783, and in the impeachment of Warren Hastings.

⁶ Wood, pp. 34-36.

⁷ Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago University Press, 1968), pp. 92-94.

⁸ Millennium and Utopia; see above, ch. II, n. 21.

⁹ Redeemer Nation, pp. 20-25; Wood, pp. 116-18.

¹⁰ Bailyn, Ideological Origins, ch. V, “Transformation”; Political Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1965), pp. 3-202 (“The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution”); Pole, Political Representation, pp. 531-32 (“the decline of virtue”); Wood, ch. XV, #5, pp. 606-18 (“The End of Classical Politics”).

¹¹ Wood, pp. 210-12.

¹² Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States and Territories Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), vol. V, has texts of all these.

¹³ For Harrington see Toland, Works, pp. 40-41.

¹⁴ Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practice in Washington’s Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), republished as American Revolutionaries in the Making (New York: Free Press, 1965); Pole, Political Representation, pp. 148-65.

¹⁵ Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), should be read on this point.

¹⁶ Wood, passim, but particularly pp. 391-425.

¹⁷ Wood, pp. 613-14.

¹⁸ For Hobbes on personation, see Leviathan, chs. 16 and 17.

¹⁹ Rousseau, The Social Contract, ch. 15; C. E. Vaughan, ed., The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1962), II, 95-98.

²⁰ Burke, Works, II, 95-97.

²¹ Wood, p. 505.

²² Wood, pp. 474-75, 507-18, 543-47, 562-64.

²³ Paul M. Sperlin, Rousseau in America, 1760-1809 (University of Alabama Press, 1969), indicates that The Social Contract was not much read or quoted. Noah Webster—for whom see below, pp. 526, 533-35—is an interesting exception.

²⁴ See, e.g., Wood, pp. 446-53.

²⁵ Wood, pp. 532-36, 599-600, 613-14.

²⁶ There is much semantic confusion on this point. Given that in classical theory each major institution “represented” a distinct “order” in society—e.g., the one, the few, and the many—it was by this time possible to speak of these “orders” as “interests”; and radical democrats, speaking still from within the classical tradition, could argue that in the popular assembly individuals, not relatively elitist interests, were what should be “represented.” But in true interest-group theory, which may be the child of radical individualism, the individual needs to perceive only his interests and the group with which they associate him, and need not practice the “virtue” of looking beyond them.

²⁷ Pole, pp. 374-75; Wood, pp. 501-506, 576.

²⁸ Wood, pp. 535-47, 559-60.

²⁹ Wood, pp. 605-10, relying largely on The Federalist, no. 51.

³⁰ Wood, pp. 562, 606-15.

³¹ William N. Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation: the American Experience, 1776-1809 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).

³² E.g., Wood, p. 606; Chambers, pp. 122-24; Pole, pp. 528-31. Wood in particular presents the republic as an ideal essentially hierarchical and at the same time essentially mobile; pp. 478-79.

³³ Wood, ch. XIV, “The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams,” pp. 567-92. For other studies of Adams as among the last great classical theorists, see Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952); John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton University Press, 1966).

³⁴ Wood, pp. 610-11; for Taylor, pp. 591-92.

³⁵ Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America; n. 4, above.

³⁶ Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford University Press, 1970); Lance G. Banning, Ph.D. dissertation, “The Quarrel with Federalism; a study in the origins and character of Republican thought,” Washington University, 1972.

³⁷ Stourzh, p. 99 and n. 85; p. 239.

³⁸ Stourzh, p. 98.

³⁹ Stourzh, pp. 98-102.

⁴⁰ Chs. IV and V, passim.

⁴¹ Stourzh, p. 71; and generally, pp. 70-75.

⁴² Banning, op.cit.

⁴³ Stourzh, pp. 158-62.

⁴⁴ Banning, chs. IV-VI.

⁴⁵ Banning, pp. 299-311.

⁴⁶ Stourzh, pp. 128-29; Wood, p. 526.

⁴⁷ Chambers, op.cit., studies this development. See also David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Age of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).

⁴⁸ Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, p. 120.

⁴⁹ Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, “Query XIX”; quoted and discussed at length in Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, repr. 1970), pp. 124-25 and 116-44.

⁵⁰ Quoted by Stourzh, p. 230, n. 104.

⁵¹ Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage Books, n.d., repr. of 1950 ed., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), ch. XII.

⁵² John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); see also Marx, op.cit., pp. 219-20.

⁵³ Quoted by Marx, p. 144.

⁵⁴ Ward, p. 63.

⁵⁵ Ward, pp. 30-45.

⁵⁶ Wood, p. 612.

⁵⁷ Marx, op.cit., passim, is an excellent statement of this theme.

⁵⁸ The “middle landscape” is discussed by Marx, pp. 121-22 and passim.

⁵⁹ Smith, Virgin Land, pp. 64-76.

⁶⁰ Burke, Works, II, 131-32; Smith, pp. 201-208.

⁶¹ Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Everyman’s Library edition (London: J. M. Dent, 1912-62), pp. 46-47, 51-55.

⁶² Smith, pp. 241-44.

⁶³ Cf. Politics, Language and Time, pp. 100-105.

⁶⁴ Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, pp. 103-12.

⁶⁵ Smith, Book I, “Passage to India,” pp. 16-53.

⁶⁶ William N. Chambers, Old Bullion Benton: Senator from the New West (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1956), p. 353. Strictly speaking, Benton imagined a statue of Columbus pointing west, but we may feel sure that he pointed too. It is a historical irony that a statue of him in the act was erected in a part of St. Louis which urban decay has made somewhat rarely visited. See also Smith, pp. 23-35.

⁶⁷ Locke, Two Treatises of Government, II, 49.

⁶⁸ He spoke of Canada as on “our left,” Florida on “our right” (Stourzh, p. 195). See also Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 1961, 1970).

⁶⁹ E.g., Max Silberschmidt, The United States and Europe: Rivals and Partners (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972). Is it worth remarking that the “open door” of China policy in the West recalls words on the plinth of the Statue of Liberty in the East?

⁷⁰ See, for example, William Graham Sumner in 1896: “Our system is unfit for the government of subject provinces. They have no place in it. They would become seats of corruption, which would react on our own body politic. If we admitted the island [Cuba] as a state or a group of states, we should have to let it help govern us.” Cited in Lloyd C. Gardner (ed.), A Different Frontier: selected readings in the foundations of American economic expansion (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966), p. 87. Also Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: the Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968).

⁷¹ David C. Easton, “The New Revolution in Political Science” (presidential address to the American Political Science Association), American Political Science Review 73, no. 4 (1969), 1051-61. See also Graham and Carey (eds.), The Post-Behavioral Era: Perspectives on Political Science (New York: David McKay, 1972).

⁷² David W. Noble, Historians Against History: The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing since 1830 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965).

⁷³ Hartz, op.cit., regrettably passim, and R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 1959), chs. 2, 3, 6, 10.

⁷⁴ The most trenchant statements of the latter view came from Josiah Tucker; see his Four Tracts on Political and Commercial Subjects (1774), A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq. (1775), The True Interest of Britain (1776), A Treatise Concerning Civil Government (1781).

⁷⁵ H. Butterfield, George III, Lord North and the People, 1779-80 (London: G. Bell, 1949).

⁷⁶ Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Movement in British Politics, 1760-1785 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1962) and Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); F. D. Cartwright, The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright (London, 1826).

⁷⁷ See Politics, Language and Time, ch. 6, “Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas.”

⁷⁸ Harold T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (Chicago University Press, 1937).

⁷⁹ George Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics and History: Sources of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1969).

⁸⁰ Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

⁸¹ G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (New York: Colonial Press, 1900), pp. 85-87.

⁸² William H. Goetzmann, ed., The American Hegelians: An Intellectual Episode in the History of Western America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973).

⁸³ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (New York: Viking, 1958), and Peter Fuss, “Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Political Community,” Idealistic Studies 3, no. 3 (1973), 252-65.

⁸⁴ Politics, Language and Time, p. 103.