Limits of the Atlantic Republican Tradition

Was the Eighteenth-Century Republican Essentially Anticapitalist?

Andres Moreno — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:55:48 -0700

In 1975, writing within the intellectual ambiance created by the Cold War and the fashionable Marxism of scholars such as C. B. Macpherson, John Pocock brilliantly and successfully interrogated the Atlantic republican tradition in his now classic The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Among many of its interventions into the history of political and economic thought in the early modern period, the book proclaimed that after 1688–89 country Whig theorists such as Charles Davenant, John Toland, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon display a noticeable “ambivalence [in] . . . their attitudes toward the Machiavellian problem of war and the Augustan problem of commerce.”[1]

Eschewing the Marxist attitude “that the conflict between real and mobile property is a sole and sufficient explanation of the philosophers’ concern with reason and passion,” Pocock portrays what he engagingly calls the left of the Whig party as denouncing “credit . . . as corruption.”[2] Far from being creatures of capitalism, that is, liberal defenders of a new bourgeois order, these early eighteenth-century republicans “were looking to a past, and seeking to defend virtue against innovative forces, symbolized as trading empire, standing armies, and credit.”[3]

From Lukács through to Horkheimer and Adorno, the Marxist approach to the progenitors of the early Enlightenment had consistently portrayed enlightened reformers as apologists for bourgeois interests. While Marxists were largely interested in Continental thinkers, Macpherson easily transferred the model to Hobbes and Locke, as well as by implication to a host of political thinkers who came after them. Pocock’s intervention challenged the new Marxist orthodoxy in unprecedented ways.[4]

With Macpherson’s intervention the thesis (first articulated in the historiography by Christopher Hill) that the English Revolution had served bourgeois interests now swept up the most seminal political thinkers in the Anglo-American universe. Hobbes’s science became “a science of bourgeois society,” while Locke and the early eighteenth-century heirs of the revolutionary tradition solidified in 1688–89 further consolidated bourgeois rule. Thus while Marxists saw Whigs and Commonwealthmen as looking forward to the triumph of capitalism, Pocock read them as looking backwards, as deeply ambivalent toward the increasingly dominant commercial order. When Pocock sought to apply the same language of ambivalence about virtue and commerce to the American intellectual landscape of the late eighteenth century, he met first with considerable approval, and only gradually with disagreement, symbolized most readily by the writings of Joyce Appleby. And, as we are about to see, the ambivalence about the possibility of virtuous commerce also does not work for the Dutch republic.

American intellectual life of the eighteenth century seemed strangely unresponsive to the European models developed by the Frankfurt school or Macpherson. Likewise their critics, in particular Pocock, met resistance from American historians who saw liberalism “with its cultivation of expectations of sustained improvement” as a force offsetting the resistance to commerce associated by Pocock with republicanism. In Appleby’s words, “an exploration of eighteenth-century Anglo-American thought limited to the classical paradigm” misses the more optimistic liberal paradigm, so “subversive to traditional authority.”[5] In her writings she has consistently laid emphasis on the “secular enthusiasm for economic development.”[6]

On the whole Pocock’s analysis of the English neo-Harringtonians of the early eighteenth century, unlike his treatment of the American response to commerce, has received far fewer challenges. Steven Pincus has accepted Pocock’s characterization of Harrington and Milton as anticommercial, although Pincus rightly points out that even in the mid-seventeenth century there were republicans who valued money and wealth, if for no other reason than it paid for armies. By contrast, Alan Cromartie has disputed Pocock’s account of Harrington and argues that “Harrington actually favoured the growth of a commercial civilization.”[7]

I will leave that mid-seventeenth-century dispute to others. Here my sights are set on the early eighteenth century and on both English and Dutch republican discourse. When speaking about country Whigs in the period after 1688–89, I will confine myself to those capable of using largely secular terms and exclude the many country voices associated with the Societies for the Reformation of Manners.[8] Their definitions of corruption, vice, and decay—their general ambivalence toward worldly matters—had essentially religious roots that display little affinity with what Pocock defines as the classical republican tradition. Yet the country Whigs of secular orientation were quite capable of discussing virtue, and those nuanced discussions can withstand a new and different reading, one that privileges their more immediate setting without effacing their classical and Renaissance sources.

In the case of Trenchard and Gordon, when discussing virtue—simply stated, good and evil—the influence of one indigenous thinker, Thomas Hobbes, seems overwhelmingly dominant. Their Cato tells readers that “in order to persuade and govern men you must know what will please or frighten them. The good they do to one another, they do not because it is just or commanded; nor do they forbear mutual evil, because it is unjust or forbid: But these things they do out of choice or fear, and both these center in themselves; for choice is pleasure, and fear is the apprehension of pain. . . . Self-love is the parent of moral good and evil.”[9] Goodness or virtue spring from a dark, self-interested place in the human psyche, but this does not make them any less real. Pocock is surely right that because of their unrelenting secularism, their mechanical and naturalist understanding of human motives, the country Whigs deserve the label of being “the first intellectuals of the Left.”[10]

Their Hobbesian vision of human nature accepted self-love as the source of virtue. Men will pursue commerce, credit, and capital when interest propels them; that is simply the way of the world. But to imagine Cato as blindly enamored of the past ignores the consistent appeal to the moderns over the ancients in matters of learning and science, and hardly qualifies Trenchard and Gordon as “enemies of modernity,” as Pocock would have it.[11] To characterize them as disenchanted dreamers, as “closer to the romantics than to the philosophes who read them” misses their feet-on-the-ground approach to commercial life. Whig theorists from oppositional Trenchard and Gordon, later to the complacent Josiah Tucker, were eager to embrace worldliness. They could not detach their emotional life from the quotidian; Hobbesian psychology required them to be observers and participants. For Trenchard and Gordon, men govern the world, but men are governed by their passions.[12] Only magistrates must check their passions and be jealous for their people, unlike princes who in their self-interest seek to destroy the liberty of their subjects. In this assessment of princely intentions, Renaissance antecedents are plainly visible. Indeed Cato admits at one point that “many of these observations are taken from Amelot de la Houssaye,” Machiavelli’s great translator and critic, as Jacob Soll has recently described him.[13]

My first task is to examine Augustan texts in an effort to modify Pocock’s highly nuanced account of the language employed by Whig and country commentators. Then I will cross the Channel and venture where the English detractors of commerce and money saw, with envy, a charnel house of exchange and greed, the Dutch republic. Because we are intent upon examining republicanism in a variety of European settings, I want to see if there is any comparable language of ambivalence, a tension between virtue and commerce, to be found among Dutch republicans of reformist persuasion.

The moment I have chosen finds both English and Dutch commentators facing the crisis of 1720 when markets in Paris, London, and then Amsterdam crashed under the weight of speculation, preyed upon by those whom Trenchard and Gordon identify as “stockjobbers.” They assure us that the restoration of “honesty and industry can never be hoped for, while this sort of vermin is suffered to crawl about, tainting our air, and putting every thing out of course. . . .”[14] Although the crashes of 1720 were worse in Paris and London than they were in Amsterdam, in the Dutch and English cases anger manifested itself in print and image. As Pocock rightly notes, Cato’s Letters and the London Journal arose in direct response to the financial crisis. When re-issued in 1724 by Gordon (writing after the death of Trenchard), the preface labored to dispel any taint of republicanism: “his majesty never had a better subject than Cato.” Perhaps the disclaimer was less than genuine since in other places the text claims that the Hanoverian state possesses “the stile and spirit” of a republic.[15]

To read Cato’s Letters as classically republican requires that other discourses woven throughout the text go unnoticed. Recall that the letters begin with a defense of empire and rail against the possible loss of Gibraltar, something George I had contemplated and Parliament opposed. Having established their imperialist credentials, the journalists then quickly turn to the security of public good and private property, “the law is the great rule in every country at least in every free country, by which private property is ascertained, and the public good . . . is secured.”[16] Every man is entitled to his share of property, and the villains are identified as “that class of ravens, whose wealth has cost the nation its all . . . they are a conspiracy of stock jobbers.” They, in the opinion of Cato, should be hung. All the eloquence and passion of the text resides in its depiction of their rapacity: “I have before my eyes a wise beneficent Prince, a generous and public spirited Parliament, an able disinterested ministry; all contending with each other for the wealth, the glory, the liberty of their country: And I have before my eyes a brave and honest people, lovers of trade and industry, free of their money, and well-deserving of the legislature, passionate for liberty, and haters of chains; but deluded, drained of their money, and abused beyond patience, beyond expression, by mean sharpers that swagger in the plunder of their country.”[17] As in the Dutch case, as we shall see, Cato displays an unwillingness to grapple with the possibility that in the right set of circumstances, good merchants might become rapacious stockjobbers.

By comparison to the passion against stockjobbers, the text spends little emotion on issues of economic equality, and as the quotations here offered affirm, Trenchard and Gordon have no animus against money per se, or even the moneyed interest. Rather they are against “the cannibals of credit.”[18] When they reference “an Agrarian Law, or something like it” they do so explicitly in a discussion of what can happen to a society where some “men’s riches” become so engorged that they are “a danger to the Publick.”[19] There is no hint in the text that such riches will be or must be in the land; rather the enemy is big money acting against the public interest. (Recall the response early in 2009 to the bonus takers at American International Group or, in the aftermath of that crash, the animus against all Wall Street bankers.)

To address this miserable state of public affairs Cato proceeds to define the public credit of the nation and places it in commodities that may be readily sold and creditors promptly paid, lands and houses readily purchased, “money borrowed at low interest” so that trade and manufacture may be readily pursued, and stocks in large quantities can be bought and sold so that people “do not lock up their money in chests, or hide it underground.” Excessive taxation placed on labor, manufacturing, trade, and navigation are further debilitating. Cato has nothing bad to say about trade; it is monopolies and wild speculation that vex.[20]

No one knew the dangers of the South Sea bubble better than John Toland. With the assistance of Molesworth, Toland had invested and lost.[21] He had solely desired to be made “easy and independent . . . without ever stock jobbing more.” As befit his Irish roots, he had hoped to purchase land, and he readily admitted that he was “not acquainted enough with mercantile companies.” When things took a downturn, we find Toland writing to a director in the attempt to find out what had gone wrong. As his last letter to Molesworth makes clear, Toland met his end in such penury that he could not pay his doctor.[22] The papers left among his possessions indicate that he followed the bubble’s unfolding closely and appears, like Trenchard, to have favored using the Bank of England as the means of retiring the debt.[23] Toland, like Trenchard and Gordon, had nothing against wealth; indeed, they just wanted to get some of it and thought no less of themselves for trying to do so.

What better moment than our own era of global capitalist upheaval to assess how elsewhere scribbling citizens with republican aspirations might respond to greed then (and now) blamed for the public’s misfortune. We have seen Cato’s diagnosis about the cannibals of credit; now let us cross the North Sea and venture to the republic that arguably gave northern and western Europe its most intense experience of early modern capitalism. The bursting of the bubble in the fall of 1720 sent Dutch scribblers into high gear, and many of these mostly anonymous voices took to prose, verse, and stage, and even engraved images, to express their outrage, or to investigate the causes of the crash and the appropriate remedies for the future.

In the Dutch setting outrage took many forms, but a few themes tend to predominate. The good Batavian merchant had been hoodwinked by a cunning crowd of actionists, many of whom were in some sense foreigners. They could be English or French, or closer to home but still strangely foreign, Jews living in the republic and sometimes described by the derogatory slang term smousen. From every direction the naïve Dutchman is conned out of his capital.[24] The self-pity displayed in 1720 rested on the perception that the paper being peddled by the actionists (or stockjobbers) took the hard-earned money of the merchant and rendered it useless, in the process threatening to wreck the kingdom.[25] Never are Dutch entrepreneurs attacked for their lack of virtue per se or commerce viewed with suspicion. Indeed, so elevated was the status of the Dutch merchant that serious efforts were made to scapegoat the non-Dutch speculators. Once again no one was quite ready to speculate about speculation, about its actual relationship to capitalist impulses.

Popular plays performed in the winter of 1720–21 proclaimed that the country lay in the grip of insanity (gekheit) and foolishness (dwaasheit), but depicted the art of commerce (koopmanschap) trying to rally its compatriots by assuring them that the god Mercury would come to their rescue.[26] Another anonymous poet (of sorts) assured his readers that the insane guilt for all of these misfortunes lay with the Jew.[27] Other hints of social scorn that appear in this literature tell us that merchants—hence commerce, legitimate buying and selling of goods—are not on the whole the problem, rather the patrician gentlemen aping French mores are the ones who have a role to play in the folly. The plays on the Amsterdam stage of 1720 began less harshly by blaming the reckless traders for dishonesty, for spreading misinformation, and evolved into denouncing the speculators as leading the nation into hell or the mad-house, and as fomenting plaque and disease.[28]

In Amsterdam, and to a far lesser extent, in London, Jews got a goodly share of the blame for the collapse. Even though Jews constituted only a small minority of those trading shares in the new companies (probably less than 10 percent in the Dutch market), their presence, so much more visible in Amsterdam than in London, aroused malicious commentary. “Actionist” and “stockjobber” became associated with them, although in no sense exclusively. In English slang of the period, “stockjobbing” described “a sharp, cunning, cheating trade of buying and selling shares of stock in East-India, Guinea and other companies, also in the Bank, Exchequer, etc.”[29] In a large folio-size Dutch volume on the crash that included seventy prints (one by Bernard Picart), poems, satirical plays, pamphlets, and even copies of the stock subscription agreements, The Great Picture of Folly left indelible images of the impact of bankruptcy and its causes. The engravings in this collection circulated, often crudely copied, throughout England, France, Holland, and the German states.

Some engravings (like the one by Picart) made no connection between the collapse and the trading activities of Jews. Yet included in the collection, among other items, were previously published anonymous letters violently attacking the role of “Jews and smousen” and attributing the entire bubble to their sharp practices. One of the many engravings in the collection that includes Jewish figures shows a smous using his staff to pry money from his victim’s pockets before the unfortunate fellow can escape to Vianen, one of the so-called free towns where the Dutch authorities could not prosecute debtors. Yet another adaptation of the hunch-backed Jew has him taking pliers to a man’s testicles or prying worthless stones out of his anus.[30]

Contemporaries seemed obsessed with a new, negative stereotypical figure, Bombario (sometimes Bambario), a sinister hunchback sometimes depicted in prints carrying a spectacle case. Bombario might seem to be a fool or harlequin, straight out of the popular Italian and French farces, but he was always shown lurking wherever stocks were being traded, sometimes manipulating the outcome. In one of the prints of The Great Picture of Folly, “Actie Roth” has his harlequin bring him money, which he stores in his money box, “Bambario’s Gold chest.” The name Bambario or Bombario might have come from the Dutch word bombarie, which meant noise, tumult, or fuss, or it might have been a play on a well-known Jewish name, that of the poet Miguel de Barrios (alias Daniel Levi).[31]

Although Bombario is not specifically labeled as Jewish in the prints in The Great Picture of Folly, contemporaries would not have missed the meaning. In one engraving the central figure holds a banner inscribed with the name “Bambario” and wears a cap frequently seen in anti-Jewish imagery from the period. He is accompanied by the devil. An especially explicit engraving, a reworking of an older one satirizing women, converts the shrew of the original into a hunchbacked usurer. Labeled “Bambario,” the figure twists at the private parts of his victim. Legends on some engravings made the target even clearer:

There see the Walloon, the English, Hebrews, a Hans from Bremen: Hear what noise! Lean Dutch snooks make on the great European Market.

Another engraving offered an even more focused legend:

Smous Levi calls, come to me with your life. I will choose to take it or leave it.[32]

These characterizations fell short of the relentless malignity of the anti-Semitic literature coming out of the German states and eastern Europe and often reflected a general xenophobia about the ways foreign traders might take advantage of the naive Dutch, yet there can be no doubt that they often specifically targeted Jews. Originally used to belittle Ashkenazi Jews (when provincial Dutch cities tried to restrict the entry of German Jews they specifically referred to them as smousen), by 1720 smous could refer as well to Sephardic Jews (“Levi” being a Sephardic name), even though the two groups rarely intermarried or even had much contact with each other. Sephardic Jews were much more likely to trade on the emergent stock markets.[33]

In the year of the market crash, Amsterdam’s licensed theater presented to packed audiences Pieter Langendyk’s Quincampoix, a satire on the crisis named after the street in Paris where stocks were traditionally traded (also the nickname of the coffeehouse in the Kalverstraat where much of the speculative frenzy in 1720 took place). The main character, a naive Dutchman, exclaimed that if he wanted to know what was happening to particular acties or stocks he would ask “a swarm of Smousen.” “A following of Jews and others” accompanies “Monsieur Windbuil,” the deceiving speculator. When seen on their own, the Jews keep outbidding one another, chanting “the Bubble, the Bubble.” They are followed by their Bambario, now harlequin of the Jews. Frequently the Dutch they speak is heavily accented and ungrammatical. In the end, money is made and lost, and Windbuil must flee to Vianen. The play, and others like it, depicts the Jews as trading on, blithely unconcerned with the mayhem around them.[34]

The denigration of Jews as smousen and money-grubbers lived on for years afterward. In the 1720s the label even appeared in a learned journal in the course of a discussion of the supposed ethical difference between a Jewish trader, who is interested only in money, and a Christian one, who has a real conscience. An article published in the 1730s claimed that Jews were natural “actionists,” an assertion that continued to appear into the 1760s and 1770s. “‘Actie’ [stock trading] and ‘Windhandel’ [wind-trade or speculation] should be shut down; too many people have been ruined. The Jews should also find a new kind of commerce.”[35] Some stereotypes die hard. Their continuing relevance to the issue of virtue and credit suggests that the Dutch knew in their hearts that commercial men could violate the rules of civility, the ethics of trade; they just did not want to believe that the everyday merchant, however rich, could be inherently unscrupulous.

By 1780 one myth in particular, of the innocent, now patriotic Dutchman, being hoodwinked by foreigners, grew in stature. Frenchified gentlemen have also risen in stature and importance, even sometimes peddling foreign stocks on the unsuspecting burger who finally has the presence of mind to see through his game and come to the defense of the republic.[36] In a few years’ time, the defense will include the exiling of the stadholder and a Prussian invasion intended to quell republican revolution. At its height the Patriotten argued that they too were restoring an ancient liberty, the birth-right of Batavians. Dutch republicans were perfectly capable of speaking as classical republicans. Devoted to their civilian militias or opposed to foreign war, which they reckoned was bad for business and trade, they imagined themselves as possessed of a republican birthright. And from the seventeenth century onward, the wealthiest merchants (who were invariably unregulated wholesalers) had come to see themselves as the personification of virtue. As Clé Leger puts it, “Amsterdam merchants had created a city in which commerce was paramount and where merchants reigned like kings.”[37]

In both the Dutch and English cases, the evidence suggests that in the republican imagination economic turmoil requires the apportioning of blame. Blind economic forces so beloved by economists, Marxist or not, cannot be allowed to stand in the stead of human agency. By the mid-seventeenth century, as Catherine Secretan’s study of Caspar Barlaeus has shown— and ironically as Macpherson’s analysis of how and why Hobbes was able to imagine his state of nature— the market, commerce, capital, and money had become so naturalized as to be inescapable. All were by definition mysterious and uncertain, fraught with dangers as well as rewards, and when they failed, the loss of wealth or simply prosperity could be devastating.

With considerable insight in chapter thirteen of The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock interrogated the many Augustan responses to the reality of markets and credit. Where we have parted ways concerns the assertion that “civic humanist values . . . virtually defined rentier and entrepreneur as corrupt.”[38] The rage against stockjobbers or actionists was so intense on both sides of the Channel, I would suggest, precisely because the republican imagination had come to accept the mercantile entrepreneur as a model citizen characterized by caution and probity, by cooperation in social relations, an exemplar of stability.[39] In the Dutch mind that republican identification had become so strong that it admitted xenophobia and anti-Semitism as part of the explanation for how and when evil had been practiced in the market. Whether English or Dutch the socialized citizen and merchant, to be emulated by cultivating the virtue associated with wealth, would in turn ensure stability in the polity, a political goal in any year, including 1720.

[1] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 437.

[2] Ibid., 454.

[3] Ibid., 458.

[4] Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 257–67. For Macpherson, see his The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), and not least his introduction to the paperback Penguin edition of Leviathan (1968), 12, and still in classroom use. For where this discussion stood at the time when the debate was most intense, see Daniel Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (1992): 11–38. Debate continues in D. N. DeLuna, ed., with assistance from Perry Anderson and Glenn Burgess, The Political Imagination in History: Essays Concerning J. G. A. Pocock (Baltimore: Owlworks, 2006).

[5] Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 29, 139.

[6] Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 104.

[7] Alan Cromartie, “Harringtonian Virtue: Harrington, Machiavelli, and the Method of the Moment,” Historical Journal 41, no. 4 (1998): 999.

[8] See David Hayton, “Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons,” Past and Present 128 (1990): 48–91.

[9] Cato’s Letters (London: W. Wilkins, 1724), 2:267; see also 4:5.

[10] Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 477.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Cato’s Letters, 1:266.

[13] Ibid., 1:272, cf. Jacob Soll, Publishing ‘The Prince’: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

[14] Cato’s Letters, 1:8–9.

[15] Ibid., 1:296.

[16] Ibid., 1:10.

[17] Ibid., 1:14.

[18] Ibid., 1:20.

[19] Ibid., 1:283–84.

[20] Ibid., 1:46–47.

[21] [Desmaiseaux, ed.,] A Collection of Several Pieces of John Toland, Now Published from His Original Manuscripts (London: J. Peele, 1726), 2:464–65.

[22] Ibid., 2:494–95.

[23] Ibid., 1:404–74.

[24] [Anon.,] Quinquenpeaux Bombario, of Roskam voor de Dolle Actionisten. Landgezang door Philadelphus, {Knuttel #16509 (n.p., n.d., but listed as 1720 and found at the Koninkijke Bibliotheek, The Hague): “Bataafze Damon, van zijn haave en goed ontstooken;/ Zat, voor de zuider Zon gedooken….Bataafze Damon, schoon beneepen,/ Van harte, wyl’t hem allezins de nek….Na de Amsterdamsche zwier, en stelde my staag schrap,/ om yvrig, en met vlyt, de brave Koopmanschap,/ Te diene ryn van hart, het Amsterdamsche leeven….Waar wil ‘t helaas noch heen, de DAM word vol en voller:/ de meenigte groeyt aan, men word'er dol en doller:/ De Smousjes vliegen met geraas, getier, gebaar/ Ou, Jong en wie ‘t mag zyn, schuymbeckend als in ‘t haar./ He rappig Frans gebroed zoo luchtig in ‘er lappen/Is dapper in de weer met koch'ren, snappen, klappen/ En vraagd eenvoudigheyd, van ‘t schreeuw en doof en blind/Wat dat’er werd gedaan men maakt en breekt ‘erwind….Brengt als expresse brief en quas[?]tyding mee:/ Straks roezemoest en Smous/ en Jood, en Mof, en Fransje…. En ‘t Capitaal nogtans te houden in zyn stand?”
All the pamphlets discussed in this section can be looked up on Picarta and seen online by those who have membership in the Royal Library.

[25] [Anon.,] De Rasende actionisten in de blinde wareld van Quinquampoix (n.p., n.d): “zo zyn de Acties Heers, daar van heel weg gewaait;/ Vervloeken Quinquampoix [the street in Paris where the crash began], en doenen niet als zugten,/ O! Zuid Zee, ag! Helaas! Waar zal ik heene vlugten?/ Myn Gout veranderts is in Papier al zonder mund,/ En werd as Razeloos, en grypt de stalle pund,/ En wil zyn arme Ziel na ‘t Ryk van Stix toe stieren.”
For recent work on Dutch republicanism, a good place to start is Arjan van Dixhoorn, “‘Voorstanden van de vrije wetten,’ Burgerbewegingen in Arnhem en de Republiek tussen 1702 en 1707,” Tijdschrift voor Social Geschiedenis 1 (1999): 25–54, and Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism. A Shared European Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

[26] Jacob Clyburg, Nederland in Gekheit, staat en zinnespel op de Wind Negotie (printed by the author, n.d.), 19: “Merkuur zal u wel haast ondoen van al uw zorgen,/ Ligt brengt hy u geluck voor deez aanstaande morgen.”

[27] [Anon.,] Merkurius onder de actionisten. Of Quinquenpoix in alarm, over t’daalen van die Zuidzee Acties (n.p., n.d.), 6: “Fluks roept enn Jood: dien Vent zyn harszens staan verkeerd,/Het is zyn Gekehid schuld da thy ons dus durft hoonen.”

[28] [Anon.,] Klagt En Raadsvergadering der Goden, Over ‘t Wiszelvallig Actie Jaar 1720. Of Jupiters besluit en vonnis Over 't werk van Quinquenpoix (n.p., n.d.), 5: “Uit Vrankryk is die dolligheid,/ Op laauwe en zoele Zuide winden,/ Heel tot en Engeland verspreid;/ Straks was hy daar by al de vrinden,/ Die heet op winst en voordeel zyn,/ Heel welkom, zonder eens te denken/ Dat schyn bedriegt, en smart en pyn/ Voor winst en schatten weet te schenken;/ Neen, daad’lyk moest de Gentielman../ Na fransse mode naar gaan aapen,/ De wysheid moest daar in den ban.”
I owe this point about nuancing to Inger Leemans’s careful reading of my text and to her own essay, “Verse Weavers and Paper Traders: Speculation in the Theater,” in The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720, ed. William N. Goetzmann, Catherine Labio, K. Geert Rouwenhorst, and Timothy Young (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, forthcoming).

[29] See “stockjobber” in the Oxford English Dictionary; for background see Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), epilogue. On reaction in England, see Dianne Dugaw, “High Change in ‘Change Alley’: Popular Ballads and Emergent Capitalism in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 43–58, esp. 50–51.

[30] Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid : vertoonende de opkomst, voortgang en ondergang der actie, bubbel en windnegotie, in Vrankryk, Engeland, en de Nederlanden, gepleegt in den jaare MDCCXX : zynde een verzameling van alle de conditien en projecten van de opgeregte compagnien van assurantie, navigatie, commercie, &c. in Nederland, zo wel die in gebruik zyn gebragt, als die door de h. staten van eenige provintien zyn verworpen : als meede konst-plaaten, comedien en gedigten ... : gedrukt tot waarshouwinge voor de nakomelingen, in ‘t noodlottige jaar, voor veel zotte en wyze (n.p., 1720). Frans De Bruyn, “Reading Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid: An Emblem Book of the Folly of Speculation in the Bubble Year 1720,” Eighteenth-Century Life 24 (2000): 1–42; Frans De Bruyn, “Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid and the Speculative Bubble of 1720: A Bibliographical Enigma and an Economic Force,” Eighteenth-Century Life 24 (2000): 62–88. The anonymous engraving referring to Vianen is “De Stervende Bubbel-Heer in den Schoot van Madame Compagnie.” We found two different versions of this print in the Getty Research Institute holdings, one without the legend referring to smous and one with the legend that appears as well in The Great Picture of Folly vol. 1D. P850001* Box 2, VI-35 has the legend; P85001* Box 1, VI-36 does not (they are both boxed with engravings by Romeyn de Hooghe). Inger Leemans brought many of these sources to our attention.

[31] On Bombario, see De Bruyn, “Reading Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid,” 23–24. De Bruyn does not make the connection to the Jews or to de Barrios. See also H. den Boer and Jonathan Israel, “William III and the Glorious Revolution in the Eyes of Amsterdam Sephardi Writers: The Reactions of Miguel de Barrios, Joseph Penso de la Vega, and Manuel de Leao,” in The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact, ed. Jonathan I. Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 439–61. The 1780 fourth edition of Het groote tafereel does not provide any more information about the figure Bombario. Plate 19 in the first edition has become its title page. In April 2008, a colloquium on the book was held at Yale University, School of Management; its participants provided helpful background information. See also [Anon.,] De Windhandel, of Bubbles Compagnien. Blyspel [Gedrukt in Quinquenpoix by Bombario] [Amsterdam, 1720–21].

[32]

Ey ziet de Waal, de Staart, Hebreeuw
En Breemer Hans: Hoor welk geschreeuw!
Dat hier reel nederlandsche Snaaken
Op’t groot Europisch koophof maaken….
Smous Levi roept kom my je leeven, Ik stel te nemen of te geeven

[33] For the cap, see Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History (New York: Continuum, 1996). See also Thomas Wright, A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 418. A similar cap can be seen in Image and Impression: Rare Prints from the Collection of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (New York: The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America), 43 (the engraving of Jonathan Eybeschuetz [ca. 1690–1764]), 107 (the engraving dating from 1680). For the original source engraving of the shrew by Hugo Allardt, see Cornelis Veth, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche caricatuur en van de scherts in de nederlandsche beeldende kunst (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1921), 95. In reference to another engraving, Veth (154–55) claims that Bombario is the Scottish financier John Law; in fact Bombario is his accomplice. See also Yosef Kaplan, “De joden in de Republiek tot omstreeks 1750,” in Geschiedenis van de Joden in Nederland, ed. J. C. H. Blom et al. (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 1995), 172–73; and Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History (New York: Continuum), 1996. A “Hamburger Judas” appears as well in The Great Picture of Folly in an engraving entitled “De Malle Actionisten naar Vianen of t’Peperland.” Another example of anti-Jewish caricature can be found in Roeland van Leuve's Waerelds koopslot of de Amsteldamse beurs, bestaande in drie boeken met zeer veele verbeeldingen...(Amsterdam: Jacobus Verheyden, 1723), 56–58. For the usurer as a hunchback, see Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the ‘Bible moralisée’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 35. The first legend is found at the bottom of the engraving (unnumbered) “De Wind Koopers met Wind Betaald, of de lasste zal blyven hangen.” “Smous Levi” comes from the bottom caption for the engraving, “De Windverkopers of Windvangers, die door wind, verliezen Geld en Goed: bederven Vrouw en Kind.” For the viciousness of German anti-Semitic prints, see Johann Jacob Schudt, Judischer Merckwurdigkeiten vorstellende was sich curieuses und denckwürdiges in den neuern Zeiten bey einigen Jahrhunderten mit denen in alle IV. Theile der Welt, sonderlich durch Teutschland, zerstreuten Juden zugetragen : sammt einer vollständigen Franckfurter Juden-Chronick, darinnen der zu Franckfurt am Mayn wohnenden Juden, von einigen Jahr-hunderten, biss auff unsere Zeiten, merckwürdigste Begebenheiten enthalten : benebst einigen, zur Erläuterung beygefügten Kupffern und Figuren (Frankfurt, 1714), pt. 2, print opposite 256. For a useful comparison, see Richard H. Popkin, “The Jews of the Netherlands in the Early Modern Period,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 311–16; on Schudt as a Jew-baiter, see 141. On the relations of the two Jewish communities, see Kenneth R. Scholberg, “Miguel de Barrios and the Amsterdam Sephardic Community,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 53 (Oct. 1962): 120–59, and Yosef Kaplan, “The Jews in the Republic until about 1750: Religious, Cultural, and Social Life,” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, ed. J. C. H. Blom et al., trans. Arnold J. and Erica Pomerans (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 116–31. See also Dorothée Sturkenboom, “Staging the Merchant: Commercial Vices and the Politics of Stereotyping in Early Modern Dutch Theatre,” Dutch Crossing: A Journal of Low Countries Studies 30 (2006): 216–28. For the decree by officials in Utrecht, see Publicatie tegens het inkomen en vernachten van Hoogduytsche Joden of smousen, derselver wyven or kinderen, binnen de stadt Utrecht: By provisie in de vroidschap gearresteert den 8 october, 1736 (Utrecht: Jac. Van Poolsum, 1736).

[34] A copy of the play is available at http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/Dutch/Ceneton/Quincampoix1720.html. For a useful discussion of Dutch toleration, see John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 4.

[35] William Swannenburg, De vervrolykende Momus, Amsterdam, 7 July 1727, no. 30, 234–38; De Hollandsche Spectator, 18 January 1734, no. 233, 322–23; De koopman, of bijdragen ten opbouw van Neêrlands koophandel en zeevaard, Amsterdam, vol. 2, 1769, 438.

[36] Dorothée Sturkenboom, “Merchants on the Defensive: National Self-Images in the Dutch Republic of the Late Eighteenth Century,” in The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 99–124.

[37] Clé Leger, “Merchants in Charge: The Self-Perception of Amsterdam Merchants, ca. 1550–1700,” in Jacob and Secretan, Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, 75–97.

[38] Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 461.

[39] For recent research that suggests a similar socialization, see Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, eds., Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). The image is further reinforced by many of the essays found in Jacob and Secretan, Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists.

Anti-Trinitarianism and the Republican Tradition in Enlightenment Britain

Zach Chandler — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:10:14 -0800

Writing in the opening months of the French Revolution and in response to the accusation of anti-monarchical republicanism, Joseph Priestley explained in self-defense that if he was a “unitarian in religion” he remained “a trinitarian in politics.”[1] The republican-leaning Priestley was making a subtle distinction, but if the image of a political Trinitarian who held faith in Commons, Lords, and monarch could concisely illustrate what was surprising, if not paradoxical, about the political outlook of a religious Unitarian, it was because the link between republicanism and anti-Trinitarianism was so common.[2] Milton had embodied it in the mid-seventeenth century; so had the classicist John Biddle, the “father of English Unitarianism,” who crossed over with Harringtonian republicanism, as Nigel Smith has recently written, in his disdain of priestcraft, his “vision of an exemplary Son and a life of virtuous action.”[3] Probably more active in late eighteenth-century memories was the anti-Trinitarian moment of the late 1680s and 1690s. A “Unitarian controversy,” triggered by a relaxation of censorship at the end of James II’s reign and by the publication of Stephen Nye’s Brief History of the Unitarians (1689), raged amid a revolutionary settlement with republican implications.[4] These same implications could be drawn from the revolution’s anti-Trinitarian ideologues, Locke and Newton.[5] And as Restoration Tories seemed to foresee when they linked Whig-republicanism and Socinianism, what would the reduction of monarchical power suggest—a reduction like that the Glorious Revolution brought about—if not a diminution of some degree of the monarch’s divinity?[6] This may not have been Priestley’s idiosyncratic view in 1790, but it was implied by the mix of anti-Trinitarianism, republicanism, and appreciation for the Glorious Revolution that could be found in a group of his contemporaries: Richard Price, John Jebb, Theophilus Lindsey, Samuel Rogers, Charles James Fox, one-time subjects of the crown like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and so on.[7]

But if there was an elective affinity between republicanism and anti-Trinitarianism, it was all the more striking to find it where the Toleration Act of 1689 so explicitly criminalized, for what would be the next 124 years, any denial “in preaching or writing [of] the doctrine of the blessed Trinity.”[8] By the time the Unitarian Relief Bill was passed in 1813 (not before the passage of the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791), serious opposition to anti-Trinitarianism in Britain may have evaporated. But that opposition had taken expression throughout the century after 1689. The last execution for blasphemy in the British Isles, of the anti-Trinitarian Thomas Aikenhead in 1696, occurred in Scotland, where the English Toleration Act did not yet apply; but as appalled as Locke was by the episode, some Scottish clergy—future Britons—thought “God was glorified by such ane awful & exemplary punishment.”[9] By the terms of England’s Blasphemy Act of 1698 anti-Trinitarians could face up to three years in prison and deprivation of civil rights.[10] Demoting Jesus’ divinity cost William Whiston his Lucasian chair in the 1710s; that scandal in turn made Samuel Clarke equivocate trying to protect his career and reputation.[11] Even amid increasing de facto acceptance of anti-Trinitarians in the second half of the century John Wilkes suffered a longer sentence under the Blasphemy Act for the anti-Trinitarianism expressed in his Essay on Women (1763) than for his mockery of George III in North Briton—“ridicule of divine majesty,” writes John Marshall, “remained a more serious crime in England than ridicule of human majesty.”[12] By the end of the century, in the paranoid 1790s—when, whatever his subtle outlook, “Gunpowder Joe” Priestley could be construed as a Guy Fawkes style terrorist—Edmund Burke helped defeat the Unitarian Relief Bill of 1792 in the Commons by comparing Unitarians to “insect reptiles” that “fill us with disgust” and “if they go above their natural size . . . become objects of the greatest terror.”[13] And all this is to say nothing about the popular prejudices that fed the church and king mobs of the 1790s or the regular and inimical association between anti-Trinitarianism and Islam.[14]

Given the republican implications in the Glorious Revolution and the century of Enlightenment it helped set in motion, anti-Trinitarianism therefore presents something of a paradox: republicans were drawn to it in great enough numbers to make it an unofficial religious outlook of the republican tradition, but it was explicitly criminalized in the state that was more republican, at least up to 1776, than any other major Atlantic state apart from the Dutch Republic.[15] In only slightly different form, this was the tragicomic irony Voltaire found in the 1730s. Arianism, he lamented before commencing his celebration of British constitutionalism, chose “a very improper season to make its appearance.” “Wretched authors” like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli could claim successful religious movements; “the greatest philosophers”—Newton, Locke, Clark, and Le Clerc—have barely “been able to raise a little flock.”[16]

Much in the history of eighteenth-century religious intolerance supports Voltaire’s cynicism and along with it the view that persistent anti-anti-Trinitarianism represents the limits of the republican tradition in Britain, especially at the revolutionary moments around 1688 and 1789 when anxiety about political experimentation made a religious philosophy that reconfigured the meaning of God especially dangerous. But there is more than this to the story. If we turn our attention away from the big names and revolutionary moments and toward the few decades that separate Voltaire’s comments from the beginning of denominational Unitarianism in the 1770s, we can see a more complex relationship between anti-Trinitarianism and republican interests developing at the congregational level. In English Presbyterian chapels, in particular, a mixture of self-governance, the repudiation of Calvinist theology, the embrace of the criminal doctrine of anti-Trinitarianism, and the increasing prosperity of parishioners encouraged the expression in printed works, private letters, and congregational behavior of the major tenets of the Atlantic republican tradition.[17] The heterodox occupants of the pews and pulpits of these chapels were not as radical as Unitarians often were at the end of the century: nowhere here is there advocacy for social leveling, abolition, or dramatically extending the franchise; women are invisible except for the occasional benefactor; if these men were trying to get to the root of their religion to recover a “primitive Christianity,” so were the magisterial reformers of the early 1500s.[18] But the language of any political “-ism” may in any case be limiting. The articulation of attitudes and approaches evident here—the pursuit of religious tolerance, the right to private judgment, political and religious liberty, the separation of church and state; suspicion of military power; a commercial ethos—derived from a republican tradition influenced by a range of thinkers and experiences broader than what can be captured by “liberal republicanism,” “radicalism,” “classical republicanism,” or any of the other narrower categorical options.[19]

It is also not simply the case that the denial of the Trinity by itself had the cancerous effect Jonathan Clark has attributed to it. If Jesus were not part of the Trinity, Clark has argued, then the doctrine of the atonement was meaningless; without that doctrine, redemption was unnecessary and humans were not born with the sins of Adam. Denying Christ’s divinity further undermined “a priesthood descending by apostolic succession and exercising its mediatory powers by virtue of that divine right. . . . If even the Church could not claim divine institution, the State was still more obviously secular.”[20] This line of reasoning distills what conservatives like Edmund Burke found alarming in anti-Trinitarian doctrine by the 1790s.[21] But the idea that Jesus was not wholly divine might as easily follow as precondition the idea that humans were not wholly depraved. Suspicion of the Trinity in midcentury Presbyterian chapels was typically part of a more general program of Arminian reform imported into England from Dutch Remonstrants via Locke.[22] By the 1730s, the primary concern of Presbyterian Arminianism was to bring reason and revelation into a theology truer to their vision of original Christianity, and it was as part of this broader project, which also undertook to rescue human nature from Calvin’s notion of inherited sin, that the doctrine of the Trinity, in the words of an orthodox critic, became “a matter of jest and ridicule.”[23]

It may in fact be that much of the linkage between republicanism and theology could also be made with reference to midcentury Presbyterian Arminianism, or to what J. G. A. Pocock has suggestively called the “Arminian Enlightenment.”[24] But anti-Trinitarianism is nevertheless a thread worth following specifically. If it was not necessarily the starting point for heterodoxy, it still, unlike Arminianism, incurred stiff penalties (official persecution, the risk of exclusion from the congregation, the potential spiritual penalties that could follow embracing one of Christianity’s great heresies); and it was the persistence of those punishments, which went beyond those meted out to Trinitarian Dissent, that made heterodox Presbyterians acutely aware of religious intolerance and especially committed to securing religious liberties. In much the same way that, as Tim Harris has shown, the persecution of Dissent galvanized Restoration Whigs whether they were actual Dissenters or simply defenders of religious rights, the persecution of anti-Trinitarians led even Trinitarian Presbyterians to defend the right to worship freely.[25]

What may be most interesting about the anti-Trinitarian-republican connection, at least in the eighteenth century, is its commercial facet. Here I want to follow a lead that historians as diverse as E. P. Thompson and R. G. Wilson suggested several decades ago and that more recently and specifically has been pursued after the 1770s, when Unitarianism became an official denomination.[26] John Seed, for one, has shown that rational Dissenters made inroads into the circles of Whig power because they possessed the necessary economic power.[27] With an eye for the importance of cultural motives and the dynamic relationship between the worldly and spiritual, Margaret Jacob has recently explored the Unitarianism of industrialists in the late eighteenth-century Midlands, “the epicentre of the Industrial Revolution.” In the diaries and personal papers of the Watts and in Priestley’s sermons, Jacob finds industrious hearers in the 1780s in agreement with Priestley’s insistence both on the primacy of religious doctrine and on the more novel notion that there was nothing wrong with “riches, honors, and pleasures.”[28] In his massive study of Dissenters, Michael Watts has also noted that if “Dissent as a whole produced fewer wealthy men than their strength in the total population would have predicted”—mainly because working-class Methodists bring the overall number down—it was also the case that for England and Wales by 1851 “there were nearly ten times the proportion of Unitarians among the millionaires and half-millionaires as in the general population.”[29]

For historians of such varied interests to have recognized the same thing means Unitarian congregations were probably not wealthy by chance. But it is also the case that the more detailed studies of this economic connection have examined the moment after both Unitarianism and material acquisitiveness were better established, much as the studies of the link between heterodoxy and politics have focused on the three decades before 1789, if not the three after 1688. In the middle third of the century this mode of heterodoxy shaped and reflected the needs of congregations that were filled with prosperous merchants, proto-industrialists, and an emerging middle class, as well as ministers who wanted to be unencumbered in their practice of religion. They may have been the direct ideological ancestors of the Dissenter radicals of the 1770s and beyond, but for these more moderate republicans the divide between the divinity of Christ and the depravity of humanity was shrinking in inverse proportion to their growing material ambition.

Anti-Trinitarians did not embrace heterodoxy by any single consideration, and it is useful even when trying to hone in on the affinity with secular needs and motives to note first what else was involved.[30] So many early modern English anti-Trinitarians, who were often classicists or more informally knew ancient languages, came to their belief by critically examining a Bible they also regarded as authoritative.[31] When John Biddle found the “Holy Trinity was not well grounded in Revelation, much less in reason,” he still took the Revelation seriously.[32] According to Stephen Nye it was Scripture that plainly said Christ was subservient to God—“My father is greater than I” (John 14:28); “The Head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. 11:3), and so on. In addition, Nye explained, the list of biblical scholars both Catholic and Reformed who through the Christian centuries had apparently noticed the scriptural problems associated with the Trinity was long; it was little known only because holding anti-Trinitarian beliefs required secrecy to avoid “exception, envy, or legal prosecution.”[33] It was suggestive to Nye, for example, that Erasmus emphasized that God “always signified the father” or that the French Jesuit Denis Pétau (Petavius) argued, in Nye’s words, “the doctrine of the Trinity, and the divinity of the Son and Spirit, cannot be proved by scripture only.”[34] Newton and Locke, the latter of whom read Nye with interest, said much the same thing on the basis of textual criticism, and said it to each other.[35] And this was the collective refrain of midcentury Presbyterian ministers, so many of whom had vast knowledge of ancient languages: reason plus revelation gives no evidence that Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Father were one and the same.

Authors from whom anti-Trinitarian implications could be drawn were also staple reading in Dissenter academies.[36] By itself this did not lead to shifts in belief, but David Wykes has shown that students at the academies could be encouraged to pick up heterodox opinions, or at least acquire an open-mindedness about doctrine, since tutors often stressed the need for free inquiry when investigating differences of opinion about doctrine.[37] Ministers could just as easily arrive at heterodox opinions as they continued to read works on doctrine well into their ministries.[38] A mid-eighteenth-century diary describes a Dissenter preacher who after eleven years of agreement with his church was ejected “by a superior number of one vote” because he “had changed his method of preaching, and by reading other works had changed his sentiments on articles of faith to the great Dissatisfaction of a many of ye members of the Society.”[39] The deciding vote by one is curious and suggests yet another basis for shifting belief: parishioners could be persuaded to change their religious outlook by engagement with their ministers.

Accident also largely explains why, at least in the first instance, so many anti-Trinitarians ended up in Presbyterian chapels. Before 1719, “Presbyterian” and “Independent” typically referred to ecclesiastical structure. This began to change after 150 leading Dissenters met in 1719 in Salters Hall in London in order to address the question of how to pursue subscription to belief in the Trinity. By a slight margin Presbyterians clustered among the “Nonsubscribers,” namely those put off by a clause stating that denying the Trinity ran counter to Scripture and the spirit of the Reformed churches. Independents generally voted to require subscription to the orthodox position. But many who voted on opposite sides of the issue saw the importance of the Trinity itself in more or less the same way. The Independent Isaac Watts and the Presbyterian Edmund Calamy, for example, both later argued that the real question in 1719 concerned doctrinal freedom. It was mainly over the course of the next few decades that the Presbyterians—the Calvinist line-toers of the previous generation whose founder had burned Michael Servetus at the stake in Geneva for anti-Trinitarian heresy—became a haven for the heterodox. The Independents, despite the connotations of their name, came to be known for the next few decades for their orthodoxy.[40]

The political and economic links to heterodoxy become visible in the correspondence network built around the London minister and classicist George Benson (1699–1762), the unofficial leader of the heterodox Presbyterians.[41] Benson’s network tied together ministers throughout England (so many of whom, by virtue of being excluded from the ancient universities, earned degrees in Glasgow). Some of these ministers wrote to Benson looking for advice or intellectual support at a time when all liberal Protestants had to walk a thin line between enthusiasm and deism. But from 1740 until 1762 Benson was also the manager of the Presbyterian Fund, a trust established in 1689 and presided over by ministers, big donors, and elected lay representatives of contributing congregations with the intention of supporting Dissenter ministers and the academies.[42] Benson may have offered sage advice, but his financial position made him a magnet for ministers looking for money.

Benson had been an Arian at least as early as the 1720s and probably a Lockean for even longer.[43] His major early work in biblical criticism from the 1730s was modeled on Locke’s commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Romans,[44] while his Reasonableness of the Christian religion (1743) made favorable mention of Newton, Samuel Clarke, and John Tillotson as it relied on some four thousand quoted words of “that judicious and free inquirer, the excellent Mr. Locke” to challenge Henry Dodwell’s deistic Christianity not founded on Argument (1741).[45]

Benson did not confine his scholarship to theology. Along with other Presbyterian opponents of subscription in the Salters Hall controversy, he was one of the major regular contributors to the anticlerical—anti-Catholic but just as deeply anti-High Church—The Old Whig: Or, Consistent Protestant, a weekly newspaper that ran anonymously written essays in 160 issues between March 1735 and March 1738.[46] The paper’s origins in an anti-Trinitarian moment provoked by the “Rundle Crisis” of 1733–35 speaks to the interdependency of religion and politics for these ministers. The Arian divine Thomas Rundle had been the chaplain of the Latitudinarian bishop William Talbot in the 1710s, and years later in 1733 Talbot’s son Charles, who had recently been made lord chancellor, attempted to use his influence to appoint Rundle to a vacant see in Gloucester. Edmund Gibson, the staunchly Trinitarian bishop of London, blocked the move; Walpole, in need of clerical support following the Excise Bill, sided with Gibson and the orthodox Anglican establishment; and what followed was an “unholy row,” as Christine Gerrard describes it, in which Gibson’s defenders smeared Rundle as a Socinian, freethinker, deist, and atheist while Talbot’s (and Rundle’s) defenders subjected Gibson, in the words of a contemporary diarist, to “all the opprobrious language that envy and malice ever threw at eminence and power.”[47]

The Dissenters behind the Old Whig took it as their major task to defend freedom of conscience amid Gibson’s defeat of the Rundle appointment and found their intellectual justification in the figure of an “old Whig,” the sort of political creature who had been present at the party’s making during the Exclusion Crisis. As Andrew Thompson has shown, the paper vehemently defended civil and religious liberties and the right to private judgment as it also expressed an equally Exclusion-era anti-Catholicism. Benson, interestingly, was not so rabidly anti-Catholic: he extended the right to private judgment to Catholics, as long as Catholic judgment did not translate into the sort of action that put the pope above the state.[48] The Old Whig also borrowed freely from republican traditions.[49] Alongside its Lockean arguments for greater liberties, it made recourse to classical authors and praised seventeenth-century republicans who took their cue from antiquity. The author of one essay, for example, laments that “the spirits of a Sidney, a Milton, or an Harrington” are missing from discussions of coffeehouse politicians who, in the absence of full rights for Dissenters, mistakenly think English liberty is secure.[50] The paper’s verdict on the value of the capitalist ethos similarly reads as neither Smithian nor Harringtonian but rather as something in between. It defined “Undue” credit as “the Parent of Luxury, and Ruin of Liberty.”[51] But what was wrong with trade corporations, on the other hand, was not their erosion of virtue. In an analogy meant to illustrate the problems of regulating religion, but which also reveals a favorable view of the free market, one contributor writes that “corporations in trade and religious establishments, are neither of them calculated for the good of the community, and the publick welfare of mankind. The one destroys all free liberal commerce, the other cramps mens understandings, and checks all free liberal inquiries into truth.”[52] Just as idiosyncratically republican, although clearly defensive of Dissent, was the Old Whig’s suspicion of the military. Standing armies were problematic, but only when deprived of religious diversity (as they were by the Test and Corporations Acts), at which point it was better to have no army at all.[53]

Benson’s private letters confirm much of what appears in the Old Whig and his other printed works. To one correspondent he vigorously defended his views on the separation of church and state that the right to private judgment demanded—a right he claimed he would rather die for than lose.[54] To another he stood up for his anti-Trinitarianism against the accusation that it was “repugnant both to Reason & Scripture.”[55] Much in these letters is also admittedly obscure.[56] But overall they suggest a pattern that fits even with David Wykes’s very cautious notion that if the Presbyterian Fund “did not seek to influence the religious principles of those they assisted, some of the policies they adopted did help encourage the growth of heterodoxy.”[57] Similarly, if Benson did not tell fellow ministers exactly what to profess, he still seems to have given plenty of financial support to those who shared his more adventurous beliefs. One thing these letters therefore illustrate is a cause of the changing meaning of Presbyterianism in the wake of the Salters Hall controversy. If the connection between anti-Trinitarianism and Presbyterianism could easily be accidental in the years immediately following 1719, Benson’s patronage gave heterodox ministers a more stable place in the denomination; this patronage, which was much more intentionally anti-Trinitarian than the vote in 1719, must in turn have reinforced the perception of the relative radicalness of Presbyterianism.

The Benson letters further indicate that the unorthodox ministers who received funding were meeting the spiritual needs of wealthy parishioners and prosperous parishes. Thomas Milway, a minister from Haverhill, explained in a letter to Benson (6 March 1748) that a recently deceased “old woman” from Norwich had left the interest on £1500 to be applied to the congregations of Norfolk and Suffolk.[58] The next we hear from Milway is his response to Benson, written 20 June 1748, in which Milway expresses gratitude for having been sent some of Benson’s sermons before explaining that while in school Benson’s Paraphrases “was a means of keeping me from the enthusiasm of one of my Tutors.”[59] Was Benson sending his Arian sermons to Milway as a sort of heterodox litmus test?

If so, it was a test Milway appears to have passed. Between Milway’s two letters, Benson received a note of assurance from the Norwich anti-Trinitarian minister, John Taylor (1694–1761), another classicist (one of the century’s leading Hebraists) and another self-proclaimed Lockean:

You need not doubt but your application on Behalf of Mr T. Milway will have its weight with Mrs Loughor’s Trustees; but as it is, not any present sum, by the coming interest of £1500 South-Sea Stock, that is to be apply’d to ye support of dissenting ministers in Norfolk & Suffolk[.] [It] will be near a twelve-month before the first distribution is made, and then, if Life be continu’d, you may be sure your expectations will not be disappointed.[60]

Benson and Taylor were clearly aware that material support for the ministers depended on financial devices as worldly as stock holdings in overseas ventures. (One of the founding contributors to the Old Whig, Samuel Chandler, had lost his wife’s savings in the South Sea Bubble.[61]) If like twenty-first-century academics hustling for grants, these ministers had to angle for whatever money was made available by the generosity of the wealthy, it is tempting to imagine that in the process they connected their theological distinctiveness to the wealth that distinguished their benefactors from the bulk of society. More undeniably, this letter reads as further evidence of a heterodox network supported by wealthy donors. Taylor, an anti-Trinitarian, was assuring Benson, another anti-Trinitarian, that Milway was in line for the money because he met with the approval of Mrs. Loughor’s trustees.

Loughor’s actual beliefs can be only guessed at, but her trustees must have felt some affinity with heterodoxy by virtue of their connection to Taylor. One historian of Dissent claims Taylor’s Original Sin “did more than any other [book] to emancipate the English Presbyterian Dissenters from Calvinism.”[62] Like Benson, the deeply anti-Trinitarian Taylor radically defended private judgment.[63] While students at the Independent Dissenter Academies were learning lists of Calvinist tenets by repetition, Taylor prefaced his lecture on theology with the admonition to be “open to the evidence,” to banish “all prejudices, prepossession, party zeal,” to “study to live in peace and love with all your fellow Christians . . . and freely allow to others the inalienable rights of judgment and conscience.”[64] Old Dissenters found his repudiation of Calvin’s doctrine of human depravity destructive to Christianity—so, in print and on more than one occasion, did the Methodist leader John Wesley. Adam Smith, on the other hand, found Taylor compelling enough to support publicly his doctorate in divinity at Glasgow in 1756.[65] This leading administrator and opinion maker of Presbyterianism, was, in other words, the sort of person in whom worldliness, tolerance, and heterodoxy seem seamlessly to have coexisted.

Milway is more obscure. A nineteenth-century church history makes brief mention of his ordination (on 8 December 1737), the certificate of which noted his disputation of “a question in divinity” in the presence of his certifiers.[66] Two printed sermons Milway gave also survive. Both are relatively formulaic glosses on biblical passages, although in the first, written in the 1750s, Milway distills the Gospel to the lesson that “no privilege of descent or birth, no external advantages whatever will avail, where purity of heart and life are wanting.”[67] In the second, written a decade later, he repudiates orthodox Calvinism with the argument that “it is abusing the scriptures to tell men . . . that good works are of no avail to their final acceptance with God.”[68] If nothing else Milway had a meritocratic view of salvation and some kind of willingness to go against the grain in expressing his beliefs. But his final letter to Benson gives us both better evidence of his outlook and another glimpse of the state of his heterodox coreligionists in the 1740s. On 18 September 1748, Milway wrote to Benson to offer his thanks for having received the support that he had sought the previous March:

We are not upon ye whole I think a Declining Interest, which I sometimes wonder at since I almost stand alone, & tho I think my self of middling orthodoxy yet am represented by my more Orthodox Bretheren as ye arch heretick of ye corner. But I reckon ye testimony of a good conscience an[d] ample support against such insinuations, this I hope I would value above all ye world.[69]

The signifiers here are telling: “middling orthodoxy” was likely a reference either to Milway’s Arianism (between strict orthodoxy at one end of the continuum and Socinianism at the other) or his Arminianism; “Interest,” which has an additional layer of economic meaning given that it is a return on Loughor’s principal that gives Milway his paycheck, suggests more directly his congregation or likeminded ministers (or both), but in whatever case “not . . . Declining” points to ongoing support for his unorthodox views; “arch heretick of ye corner”—even if the exaggeration of “more Orthodox Bretheren”—is a stronger suggestion of anti-Trinitarianism. And then Milway finally explains what keeps up his hope: “good conscience” and “ample support.” Read in a Lockean tradition according to which religious conscience should not and could not, salvifically, be regulated by the state, Milway’s articulation of these words resonates with the push for religious liberty.[70] That “ample support” could easily refer both to financial support from Loughor via Benson (and Taylor) and the theological support of heterodox brethren shows how thin the line separating commerce and religion could be.

The hints of anti-Trinitarianism in Milway’s case come into sharper relief in the correspondence between Benson and Samuel Bourn (1689–1754). Priestley once called his own Birmingham New Meeting congregation “the most liberal, I believe of any in England,” and then followed the thought with: “and to this freedom the unwearied labours of Mr Bourn eminently contributed.”[71] Bourn, who preached the opening sermon at New Meeting in 1732, had become an Arian in the wake of the Salters Hall controversy.[72] This alienated him from orthodox Presbyterians, many of whom refused to attend his ordination, although amid this rebuke Bourn found support, one contemporary source tells us, in “a worthy family with which he contracted a very honourable and an happy Alliance.”[73] It may have been this support that empowered him to go so strenuously after Calvinist orthodoxy. In 1736 he wrote a short attack on the standard Presbyterian catechism, the main problem of which, he argued, was its acceptance of the Trinity—“There are not three Persons, but one Person only in our Idea of God. For, what is a Person, but an individual, intelligent, free, active Being or Substance.”[74] Bourn then went on to publish a revised and expanded anti-Trinitarian catechism that won the support of Benson and Samuel Chandler, among others.[75] This was the “first manifesto” of heterodox Presbyterianism, in a mid-nineteenth-century historian’s description.[76] It offered Jesus’s life as mere “example” of how to be saved—a reading of Christ’s significance that hints at Socinianism—and by the 1750s its multiple editions were largely responsible for a shift away from the Calvinist catechism in the Presbyterian schools and toward “the principles of common Christianity.”[77]

This is not to give the impression that the laity passively accepted heterodoxy. On the contrary, the Bourn-Benson letters also give us an image of activist lay support for the most doctrinally radical of these Presbyterian ministers. In the early 1750s, Bourn wrote to Benson for advice:

I have a fair opportunity of conveyance, and an affair of moment to communicate. On Monday last 100 Gentlemen, deputed from the Protestant Dissenters in Bolton, came to me with an Invitation to remove there and settle among them; assuring me it was unanimous . . . They are good people & growing the offspring of my Father’s flock, consisting very much of young thriving tradesmen, the old generation of my acquaintance being almost all gone. The situation is, I think, as agreeable as any I know in the kingdom; a house convenient . . . over a river, a pleasant little town, a weekly lecture, where several ministers usually attend, a sett of worthy friendly bretheren round about free from bigotry.[78]

When the letter was sent, Bourn was preaching in Coseley, ten miles outside of Birmingham; Bolton, where Bourn’s father had been minister and where Bourn had been taught classics, was nearly a hundred miles north. That so many men made this far from trivial journey to deliver the invitation—the sight by itself would have been dramatic—speaks to just how much this congregation of young tradesmen wanted Bourn; and Bourn intimates that it was by virtue of their youth that the congregation’s support for an anti-Trinitarian would be unanimous. Less than three weeks later Bourn still had not gotten a response from Benson and wrote again, in the process supplying additional information. The formal invitation had come from “177 heads of families in Bolton” who were willing to pay more than Coseley, although Bourn took the congregation he would be leaving behind “to be three times as rich.”[79]

Bourn declined the offer, but in any case what is significant is the invitation’s illustration of the nexus of the threads we have been following. As further evidence of an elective affinity between commerce and heterodoxy, here were two wealthy congregations on the eve of industrialization—one from outside Manchester, the other outside Birmingham—fighting for the spiritual services of a minister whose anti-Trinitarianism was widely known. The invitation was additionally invested with symbolic political meaning. The case has been made that the Reformed churches were inherently more democratic than other early modern forms of Christianity, with their diffuse power structure and their lay oversight of discipline, poor relief, and economic administration. Any such view should be qualified by Calvin’s own aristocratic political theory and the fact that state-sponsored Presbyterian churches like those in Scotland gave less of an economic role for the laity to play.[80] But in this decentralized English Presbyterianism, with Locke as its figurehead, it was a group of prosperous laymen the size of a legislative assembly, and not a handful of its elders, speaking on behalf of Bolton’s congregation and actively looking for an anti-Trinitarian minister.

North of Coseley and east of Bolton, in the proto-industrial West Riding, interests were similarly joined in Leeds’s Mill Hill chapel.[81] Mill Hill had been orthodox Presbyterian throughout the first third of the century, but it took a dramatic turn in the direction of heterodoxy with the appointment of Thomas Walker (d. 1763) in 1748. Priestley, who would also preach at Mill Hill from 1767 to 1773, fleetingly referred to Walker in his memoirs as one of the two “most heretical ministers” who frequented his aunt Sarah Keighley’s house, a “resort,” Priestley called it, for Dissenter ministers throughout the north of England.[82] Walker, just as tellingly, was also the legal guardian of his much better known nephew, George Walker (d. 1809), whose republicanism, abolitionism, and remarkably broad learning suggest the outlook of the uncle the nephew cited as a major influence.[83]

Walker’s anti-Trinitarianism would nonetheless be mostly invisible to us were it not for the diary of the Leeds clothier Joseph Ryder (1695–1768), a comparatively orthodox eighteenth-century Dissenter and diligent recorder of around five thousand sermons he attended throughout Yorkshire.[84] No one Ryder frequently heard was as heterodox as Walker, who aroused controversy almost on arrival at Mill Hill. In late 1749, Ryder made a note of a meeting of coreligionists following Walker’s first noticeably Arian sermon “where we had a good many argument of a religious nature.”[85] Like many of Leeds’s Dissenters, Ryder was troubled by what was coming from Mill Hill’s pulpit. But however diligently Ryder kept information on his ministers, much that came from the pulpit did not make it into his diary. We get an interesting piece of evidence of this as Ryder happened to be traveling through Wakefield in the fall of 1752 when Walker preached his one sermon that was ever published. Walker had been brought in to consecrate Wakefield’s new chapel at Westgate—a chapel whose congregation John Seed has described as one of the wealthiest in Yorkshire[86]—and Ryder sat among the congregation, later that night summarizing the event in his diary. Walker, Ryder noted, had showed “worship in spirit . . . as differing from all bodily worship,” although Ryder seemed slightly miffed that Walker did not “pretend to a Consecration” of the new chapel, instead using the occasion to argue that “ye Canopy over our heads, or ye Starry Vault for our covering” were the house of God and gate of heaven. And yet, as Ryder concluded with a sense of assurance, Walker still “did not discommend a Decent place for the worship of God, and Gave ye Contributers a fine Encomium of praise for their Generosity in supporting ye ministry, as well as building the place.”[87]

These themes Ryder noted do in fact run through the published sermon, but assuming that little changed before Walker sent his text to the printer it is striking to notice what else the minister said—and how in contrast to Ryder’s Bunyan-esque prose he said it. Walker sounds like a Newtonian aesthete in an analogy he makes early in the lecture:

Pure religion . . . is founded in the nature and truth of things, and when exhibited to the world in this light is an amiable and a grand thing; as far superior to what is commonly professed, as the original paintings of some of the greatest artists to the vulgar pieces of low performers. In the former, you see simplicity, proportion and truth; every thing calculated to instruct and please. In the other, so many unmeaning strokes, and unnatural attitudes, and such a vast quantity of whimsical and ill-judged drapery, as unavoidably occasion disgust or ridicule.[88]

Walker goes on, with a likely intent in the order he gives the characteristics of worship: “no worship but what is intelligent and rational, spiritual or moral, can be acceptable or pleasing to him.”[89] (Nowhere do “intelligent” or “rational” appear in Ryder’s summary.) Worshiping God in spirit varies by method across time and place “and some [methods], it must be allowed, as absurd, ridiculous, and dishonourable to God, as could well have been devised. But still as in all ages and in all parts of the world something like the face of religion has been kept up.”[90] You can do as you wish with your body during worship, he continued, kneel, look to heaven, fall on your face, just as Jesus did, “but the worship of the body without the mind is none.”[91] Walker then closed by finding in the new structure’s completion the essence of a multivalent liberty. “In an age in which a taste for elegance in almost all things prevails I see not why a discreet and moderate degree of the same taste may not be allowed in this. . . . This house, not inelegantly finished, is an evidence and will be a monument of a pious munificence.”[92] It was, finally, “in the use of this liberty we both erect and support our places of worship.”[93] “You, my fellow Christians, are still steady. This house is proof of it. It shows you are yet the friends of liberty, piety and the rights of conscience.”[94]

Liberty, piety, and the rights of conscience—the closest thing to a Trinity for these anti-Trinitarians—were here built symbolically into the new church. But in the liberty, in particular, Walker was also locating the confluence of political, economic, and religious interests. To put his logic baldly, the value of political freedom was that it allowed for prosperous—including, if not especially, newly prosperous—members of society to support a rational religiosity that doctrinally met their needs and, as the elegant interior space of the new church attested, materially suited their tastes.

If Walker’s line of reasoning seems theologically radical, at least from the perspective of what Presbyterianism had been even at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was just as supportive of an emerging middling sort and commercial elite. A Yorkshire version of Samuel Bourn, Walker was likewise helping to draw Leeds’s proto-industrialists and cloth merchants to his anti-Trinitarian chapel. Even Ryder admitted by the 1750s that confrontation with anti-Trinitarianism had left him unable to furnish a counterargument.[95] Leeds’s younger generation of Dissenters, on the other hand, more actively embraced Walker’s message. At the moment that the Bolton contingent of tradesmen invited Bourn to become their minister and Milway went fishing for money from Benson, Ryder fretted in his diary that his younger cousin David Ryder, who had just baptized his daughter, “denies the Trinity.”[96] All that we know about David is that he was a clothier whose daughter, Olive, besides eventually inheriting her older cousin’s massive spiritual diary, would go on to marry Arthur Lupton (1748–1807), one of the town’s most successful cloth merchants.[97] Paltry as it is, this bit of information gels with the general trajectory of Mill Hill in the late eighteenth century. By the 1780s, after Joseph Priestley had presided over the church’s transition to Unitarianism, a quarter of the woolen cloth in Leeds’s booming industry, and in a town still overwhelmingly Anglican, was passing through families tied to a rational Dissenter community of which the Presbyterian Mill Hill, and not the Independent Call Lane, had become the focus.[98]

What can we conclude about the republican outlook of English Presbyterians? In one sense it played out as a type of oppositional politics. If there was a republican tradition in early modern England, as Mark Goldie has recently written, in which the essence of a good polity was the active involvement of citizens, then really all Dissenters were limited, by virtue of the Test and Corporation Acts, in their self-expression as political beings.[99] The group examined here nevertheless must have acutely felt this limitation. Their religious history was, for one, largely defined by self-governance and personal liberty: elected officials and trustees played an active role in the selection or ejection of ministers; ministers, even at the risk of civil disobedience, pursued the limits of their theological imaginations; writing about politics in the Old Whig was itself a political act. For another, because heterodox Presbyterians were almost invariably anti-Trinitarians, their violation of the Toleration Act exposed them to the state’s continued criminalization of their belief.

But the republican tradition discoverable in this milieu did not solely exist in opposition to the state or within a closed universe. Their very modes of opposition were forms of public participation, no different in essence from the sort of associational political involvement of pressure groups or political campaigns. The democratic administrative structure of the churches was also not just evidence that institutionalized intolerance must have been acutely felt; it was an expression of the political form from which they were denied participation at the official state level. It is telling, after all, that for their many deviations from convention, the heterodox left the political structure of their church untouched. Finally, the economic activity of the congregations was a mode of participation, although here we come to what may be both most distinctive and most difficult to explain about this anti-Trinitarian moment. Dissenters tout court may not have made better capitalists, but anti-Trinitarians undeniably did. In part, the evidence presented here is consistent with Michael Watts’s suggestion that the prosperous sort who were drawn to a more rational religion (as so many more Dissenters and Anglicans embraced the “heart religion” of Methodism) likely gained from it some social distance from the lower orders.[100] But if by virtue of coming from Calvinist backgrounds, Presbyterians also needed psychological relief from the sinfulness long associated with the dramatic financial successes relatively common by midcentury in places like Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, then they may have found it in chapels that were making Jesus more human and better able to understand the needs and desires commercial people have to mix with the world.[101] “Rational religion” was certainly rational, but if it helped solve the psychological and moral dilemma that arose when neo-Calvinist “Old Dissent” ran up against the unprecedented economic activity of eighteenth-century Britain, there may have been as much emotion as reason in the motives that shaped its elective affinity with the free market.

Exactly what causal role social distancing and psychological and emotional need played here deserves further investigation. What we should notice, in any case, is that already by the 1730s and 1740s, and at the very moment that they were promoting human dignity and demoting Jesus’s divinity, heterodox chapels found a way to make the pursuit of wealth and commonwealth part of the same enterprise. If it solved one of the great dilemmas of eighteenth-century political and economic thought—how to preserve republican principles, in Donald Winch’s phrase, amid commercial realities—then this anti-Trinitarian and republican moment is a reminder that innovations within the broader culture of republicanism owe as much to lived experience as to the theoretical tradition.[102]

I would like to thank Dan Singal, Colby Ristow, Claire Lesemann, Lou Kadane and the participants of the conference for their critical comments on this paper.

[1] Joseph Priestley, Familiar Letters, Addressed to the Inhabitants of Birmingham in Refutation of Several Charges, Advanced Against the Dissenters and Unitarians (Birmingham, 1790), 89. The italicization is Priestley’s. Citing the same dictum that his father “used frequently to say,” Priestley’s son added that when his father “came to America he found reason to change his opinions.” Memoirs of the Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley, to the year 1795, written by himself; with a continuation, to the time of his decease by his son, Joseph Priestley (London, 1809), 108.

[2] On Priestley’s politics, see Martin Fitzpatrick, “Joseph Priestley, Political Philosopher,” in Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian, ed. Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Much depends on whether or not he wrote the thoroughly republican A Political Dialogue on the General Principles of Government, published in 1791. Fitzpatrick entertains the possibility; cf. Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773–1804 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 282n43.

[3] Nigel Smith, “‘And if God was one of us’: Paul Best, John Biddle, and anti-Trinitarian Heresy in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 174–75; also relevant here is Henry Stubbe, see James R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 71.

[4] John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 389–98.

[5] On the overlap between Locke’s theology and Socinianism, see John Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, ‘Socinianism,’ and Unitarianism,” in English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). On the political meaning of Newtonianism, see J. R. Jacob and M. C. Jacob, “The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution,” Isis 71 (1980): 251–67. On Newton’s religion, which was anti-Trinitarian even if hard to define with specificity, see Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); cf. Thomas C Pfizenmaier, “Was Isaac Newton an Arian?” Journal of the History of Ideas 58, no. 1 (1997): 57–80.

[6] Smith, “‘And if God was one of us,’” 175; Justin Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

[7] Stuart Andrews, Unitarian Radicalism: Political Rhetoric, 1770–1814 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 43–53.

[8] Article XVII of the Toleration Act, quoted in E. N. Williams, ed., The Eighteenth-Century Constitution 1688–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

[9] Michael Hunter, “Aikenhead, Thomas (bap. 1676, d. 1697),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) (hereafter cited as ODNB). The last person to be burned as a heretic in England was also an anti-Trinitarian. See David Como and Ian Atherton, “The Burning of Edward Wightman: Puritanism, Prelacy, and the Politics of Heresy in Early Modern England,” English Historical Review 120, (2005): 1215–50.

[10] If the number of persecutions was relatively low, the Blasphemy Act was still symbolically loaded for Unitarians. See John Seed, “‘A Set of Men Powerful Enough in Many Things’: Rational Dissent and Political Opposition, 1770–1790,” in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and “Gentlemen Dissenters: The Social and Political Meanings of Rational Dissent in the 1770s and 1780s,” Historical Journal 28, no. 2 (1985): 299–325.

[11] James A. Force, William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

[12] John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and “Early Enlightenment” Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 128.

[13] Schofield, Enlightened Joseph Priestley, chap. 8. Burke quoted in Andrews, Unitarian Radicalism, vi.

[14] Justin Champion and Nabil Matar have shown that in the few years surrounding 1688, association with Islam made Socinianism and Arianism seem particularly dangerous. See Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, and Matar, Islam in Britain 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In fact this prejudice seems to be one of the eighteenth century’s continuities. A broadside circulating in Birmingham as late as 1790 claimed the belief of anti-Trinitarians had “no more foundation in Divine Revelation than Mohomet’s”; ten years later the Anti-Jacobin Review claimed that Priestley was actuated by the same spirit of proselytizing that led “Mahomet … to raise a party against the Christian World.” Jan Albers, “‘Papist Traitors’ and ‘Presbyterian Rogues’: Religious Identities in Eighteenth-Century Lancashire,” in The Church of England, c. 1689 – c. 1833, ed. John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 323; Andrews, Unitarian Radicalism, 158.

[15] On what was (and wasn’t) revolutionary about the “Glorious Revolution,” at least for the years 1690 to 1720, see the final chapter in Tim Harris, The Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Penguin, 2007). The case could also be made that England had been republican for much longer. See Mark Goldie, “The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England,” in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 153–94.

[16] Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London, 1733), 49–50.

[17] The big names and revolutionary moments have been well covered in other studies. Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, examines the connection between deism and political radicalism in the first third of the century; James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Andrews, Unitarian Radicalism, shed light on the last third, although Bradley gives more attention to the earlier part of the century; on Priestley, see Fitzpatrick, “Joseph Priestley, Political Philosopher”; on the political implications of Newtonianism and the anti-Trinitarianism of the latitudinarians, see M. C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); on Locke, see Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility; J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), drew attention to the political implications of Arianism, Socianianism, and deism.

[18] On the late century radicals, see Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism.

[19] For a recent overview of the vast historiography of eighteenth-century political thought, see Lee Ward, The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); still relevant is Daniel T. Rogers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 11–38.

[20] Clark, English Society. The point has been elaborated on by A. C. M. Waterman, “The Nexus between Theology and Political Doctrine,” in Haakonssen, Enlightenment and Religion.

[21] J. G. A. Pocock summarizes Clark’s argument with respect to the 1790s and where it works best. See his introduction to Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), xvii–xviii.

[22] On Locke’s role here, see Marshall, John Locke:, Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, 331–33.

[23] C. G. Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short, Roger Thomas, The English Presbyterians (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968), 22.

[24] J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol .1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 2.

[25] For a concise summary of Whigs and Dissent, see Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London: Penguin, 2005), 300–309.

[26] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), 30; Richard G. Wilson, Gentlemen Merchants: The Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), 189–90; Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, vol. 1, From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 380; D. L. Ouren, “Some Major Unitarian Chapels in Great Britain” (unpublished MS in 2 vols., Andover School of Divinity, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1984), 1.

[27] Seed, “Rational Dissent and Political Opposition.”

[28] Margaret C. Jacob, “Commerce, Industry, and the Laws of Newtonian Science: Weber Revisited and Revised,” Canadian Journal of History 35 (August 2000), 288–90.

[29] Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, vol. 2, The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 332.

[30] Although Stephen Nye used the word “Unitarian” in 1689, what the word would come to mean for most denominational Unitarians who applied it to themselves after the 1770s was typically covered in the midcentury by the abusive terms “Arian” and “Socinian.” “Arian” was applied to those who believed Jesus had some sort of divine status even though it was not as great as God’s. “Socinian” tended to be applied to anyone who reasoned Jesus was merely human. The precise meaning of these terms is never fixed in early modernity. For a fuller view, see Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), passim.

[31] For one of the earliest early modern English anti-Trinitarins on record, who also promoted the joint criteria of reason and revelation, see John Assheton, Lillian Hromiko, ed., “Words of John Assheton,” Journal of Unitarian Universalist History 28, no. 2 (2001–2): 22–27.

[32] Biddle’s arguments and writings were printed by John Farrington in The Faith of One God, Who is Only the Father; and of One Mediator Between God and Man, who is only the Man Christ Jesus; and of one Holy Spirit, the Gift (and sent) of God... (London, 1691).

[33] Stephen Nye, A Brief History of the Unitarians called also Socinians, in Four Letters (London, 1691), 11.

[34] Ibid., 12.

[35] Herbert McLachlan, The Unitarian Movement in the Religious Life of England, vol. 1, Its Contribution to Thought and Learning, 1700–1900 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933), 24. On Locke reading Nye, see Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility, 404–5.

[36] McLachlan, Unitarian Movement in England; David L. Wykes, “The Dissenting Academy and Rational Dissent,” in Haakonssen, Enlightenment and Religion.

[37] Wykes, “Dissenting Academy and Rational Dissent,” 128.

[38] Ibid., 129.

[39] “Diary of Joseph Ryder,” Unitarian MSS, Q/6, John Rylands Library, Manchester (hereafter cited as JRD), 20 April 1761.

[40] Bolam et al., English Presbyterians, 160–74.

[41] Ibid., 182.

[42] W. D. Jeremy, The Presbyterian Fund and Dr Daniel Williams’s Trust (London, 1885).

[43] G. Fothergill to G. Benson, 28 December 1728, JRL, Benson Collection, General, B116/26.

[44] George Benson, A Paraphrase and notes on six of the epistles of St. Paul (1734); also see G. Benson to Macro, 1 September 1748, British Library, Add. MS 32, 557, Letter 142.

[45] George Benson, The reasonablenesse of the Christian religion, as delivered in the Scriptures…in three parts (London, 1743), 246; Bolam et al., English Presbyterians, 189.

[46] On the origins of The Old Whig, see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Andrew C. Thompson, “Popery, Politics, and Private Judgement in Early Hanoverian Britain,” Historical Journal 34, no. 2 (2002): 333–56. Two bound volumes of the first 103 issues of the paper were published in 1739. Subsequent citations refer to these editions.

[47] Gerrard, Patriot Opposition to Walpole, 27–29.

[48] George Benson, In commemoration of the happy accession of the illustrious house of Hanover to the throne of Great-Britain. A sermon preached at Little St. Helens, August 2, M DCC XLII (London, 1742), 8.

[49] Thompson, “Popery, Politics, and Private Judgement,” 336, 351–56.

[50] The Old Whig: Or, the Consistent Protestant (London, 1739), 2:428.

[51] Old Whig, vol. 1, in the un-paginated Index.

[52] Old Whig, 2:109.

[53] Old Whig, 1:206.

[54] G. Fothergill to G. Benson, 28 December 1728, JRL, Benson Collection, General, B116/26.

[55] J. Dolland to G. Benson, 20 May 1748, JRL, Benson Collection, General, B116/21.

[56] The theological views of two ministers who did get support, John Hodgson (Lincoln) and John Bent (Chorley), remain unclear. With another, Joseph Carpenter (Warwick), the evidence is more suggestive if this is the Carpenter family that can be traced back to the Unitarian Lant Carpenter (1780–1840). See Alexander Gordon, “Carpenter, Lant (1780–1840),” rev. G. M. Ditchfield, in ODNB.

[57] Wykes, “Dissenting Academy and Rational Dissent,” 125.

[58] T. Milway to G. Benson, 6 March 1747–48, JRL, Benson Collection, 7, B115.

[59] T. Milway to G. Benson, 20 June 1748, JRL, Benson Collection, 7, B115.

[60] J. Taylor to G. Benson, 29 March 1748, JRL, Benson Collection, 3, B111.

[61] John Stephens, “Chandler, Samuel (1693–1766),” in ODNB.

[62] Alan P. F. Sell, “Taylor, John (1694–1761),” in ODNB.

[63] Both Taylor and Benson studied at Whitehaven Academy under Thomas Dixon (1679–80 to 1729) and presumably knew each other at least as early as their late teenage years. Alexander Gordon, “Dixon, Thomas (1679/80–1729),” rev. Aidan C. J. Jones and B. Anne M. Dick, in ODNB. Taylor was also heavily influenced by Samuel Clarke’s Scripture-doctrine of the Trinity (1712), which in 1735 encouraged Taylor to write his Scripture-doctrine of Original Sin (1740). Edward Haywood also remarked in a sermon preached at Taylor’s funeral that “if ever [Taylor] expressed an uncommon warmth and honest indignation against anything, it was against Athanasianism [the Trinitarian position that Arius refuted], which he thought one of the greatest corruptions of pure and genuine Christianity, as this doctrine entirely subverts the unity of God.” E. Harwood, A sermon occasioned by the death of the Rev John Taylor, DD (London, 1761), 40.

[64] Quote in Jeremy, Presbyterian Fund, 58.

[65] Sell, “Taylor, John,” ODNB.

[66] John Browne, History of Congregationalism and Memorials of the Churches in Norfolk and Suffolk (London, 1877), 505n§.

[67] Thomas Milway, The righteousness of faith explained, in a sermon preached at Stanborn in Essex, July 19, 1750 (London, 1751), 29–30.

[68] Thomas Milway, Salvation without works, in St. Paul’s sense of it, considered, in a sermon preached at Haveril, December 14, 1760 (London, 1761).

[69] J. Milway to G. Benson 18 September 1748, JRL, Benson Collection, vii, B115.

[70] For a fuller discussion of the role of private judgment in the Old Whig, see Thompson, “Popery, Politics, and Private Judgement.”

[71] Alexander Gordon, “Bourn, Samuel (1689–1754),” rev. Alan P. F. Sell, in ODNB.

[72] Wykes, “Dissenting Academy and Rational Dissent,” 129.

[73] Samuel Blyth, The good soldier of Jesus Christ characterized. In a sermon preached at Birmingham, March 31, and at Coseley, April 7. occasioned by the sudden and much-lamented death of the Reverend Mr. S. Bourn, who died March 22, 1754, in the 66th year of his age (London, 1754), 12–13.

[74] Samuel Bourn, An Address to Protestant Dissenters. Or an Inquiry into the Grounds of the Attachment to the Assemblies Catechism; Whether they Act upon Bigotry or Reason… (London, 1736), 7. On the general types of philosophical arguments anti-Trinitarians might use—here Bourn points to the problem of individuation—see Udo Thiel, “The Trinity and Human Personal Identity,” in English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 217–43.

[75] Bourn modified the catechism written by James Strong of Ilminster. T. S. James, The History of the Litigation and Legislation Respecting Presbyterian Chapels and Charities in England and Ireland Between 1816 and 1849 (London, 1867), 35.

[76] Ibid. Any characterization made in this text, the work of a Birmingham lawyer and conservative congregationalist, should not be accepted uncritically. James’s learned but tendentious history focused on the Wolverhampton Chapel (1817) and Hewley Fund (1830) cases, which ruled against anti-Trinitarians’ property rights to certain chapels, and the Dissenters’ Chapels Act (1844), by which the Wolverhampton and Hewley rulings were overturned. In many ways the crux of Trinitarians’ argument in the first two cases was that anti-Trinitarians had staged a hostile doctrinal takeover of Dissent, and with a sense of paranoia James’s one-thousand-page history pursued this theme. For James, early eighteenth-century Presbyterianism before 1719 was, for example, filled with crypto-anti-Trinitarians who saw Salters Hall as an occasion to go public, after which they aggressively spread their views. Arianism, for James, had been “the convenient disguise by which to conceal a denial of all that is super-natural in Christianity and carry on war with it to the best advantage. For there is a freemasonry in unbelief, those regularly entered can soon make themselves known to each other, initiate any willing to join their camp or take part in their orgies, and pass each other through the degrees of illumination.”

[77] Bolam et al., English Presbyterians, 216, 148.

[78] S. Bourn to G. Benson 22 June 1751, Benson Collection, vi, B114/4.

[79] S. Bourn to G. Benson 7 July 1751, Benson Collection, vi, B114/14.

[80] For the relevant historiography and the qualifications that need to be made, see Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 536–38.

[81] On proto-industrial Leeds, see Pat Hudson, The Genesis of Industrial Capital: A Study of the West Riding Wool Textile Industry, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[82] Memoirs of the Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley, 4, 11.

[83] Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, 132–33.

[84] On Ryder, see Matthew Kadane, “Success and Self-Loathing in the Life of an Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur,” in The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 253–71.

[85] JRD, 13 April 1749.

[86] Seed, “Rational Dissent and Political Opposition,” 149.

[87] JRD, 1 November 1752.

[88] Thomas Walker, The true Christian Worship Explained and Recommended: a Sermon Preached at the Opening of the New Chapel in Wakefield, Yorkshire. Wednesday, Nov. 1. 1752 (London, 1753), 1.

[89] Ibid., 7.

[90] Ibid., 14.

[91] Ibid., 30–31 (emphasis is Walker’s).

[92] Ibid., 32 (emphasis is Walker’s).

[93] Ibid., 37

[94] Ibid., 38.

[95] Ryder’s attitudes on the Trinity are considered at greater length in Matthew Kadane, “The Watchful Clothier: The Diary of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist” (PhD thesis, Brown University, 2005), chap. 6.

[96] JRD, 18 May 1753.

[97] “The Register of the Parish Church of Leeds,” Publication of the Thoresby Society 25 (1917, 1918, 1920, 1922): 262. On Lupton, see Wilson, Gentlemen Merchants, 245.

[98] Seed, “Rational Dissent and Political Opposition,” 150.

[99] Goldie, “Unacknowledged Republic,” 154.

[100] Watts, Dissenters, 1:379–80. For the very different Methodist experience of religion at this same moment, see Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

[101] Jacob, “Commerce, Industry, and the Laws of Newtonian Science,” 288–90; Margaret C. Jacob and Matthew Kadane, “Missing, Now Found in the Eighteenth Century: Weber’s Protestant Capitalist,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 20–49.

[102] Donald Winch, “Commercial Realities, Republican Principles,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 2, The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 293–310.

Governing a Republic: Rousseau’s General Will and the Problem of Government

Zach Chandler — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 09:43:11 -0800

Rousseau revealed how the political relationship on which a republic is founded is typically different from the religious, economic, ethnic, and domestic links that connect men and women in society to one another, but he did so by exacerbating the contrast between commerce and virtue. In his sharp critique of political representation, he utters some of the harshest words ever pronounced against commerce and finance: “Give money and you soon will have chains. That word finance is a slave’s word; it is unknown among citizens. In a country that is really free, the citizens do everything with their hands and nothing with their money.”[1] In the tradition begun by Rousseau and illustrated by French republicanism, Republican politics is thus opposed to commerce: the citizen’s dependence on all citizens is opposed to dependence on particular men and women who are linked by commercial exchange. That opposition, amongst others, would have fully justified Rousseau’s inclusion in Pocock’s Atlantic Republican tradition.[2]

Not surprisingly, that opposition and the political exclusion of commerce it entails were the main targets of Rousseau’s liberal critics: it was all too tempting for them to assert that the contractual relationship that creates Rousseau’s citizen does not actually exist and that the only things that exist in reality are the personal relationships that turn the abstract citizen into a socialized person. From the perspective of a theory of government, central to the present paper, a classic liberal critique of Rousseau might add that republicanism’s failure lies in the fact that, since Rousseau’s de-socialized citizen is an abstraction and abstract beings cannot be governed, Rousseau was insufficiently, if at all, aware of the dangers of a government implementing an absolute sovereignty.[3] If it is man in society, and not the citizen in the republic, who is to be governed, then the very idea of a republican government seems compromised. Nevertheless, those wishing to take French republicanism to task for incoherence should first carefully examine the implications of Rousseau’s idea of a government according to the general will.

What does governing according to the general will mean? It means, first, that political institutions should serve the community of citizens and not the most powerful social minority; it means, second, that the government’s mission, if it is republican, is not to amass state power and wealth for itself, but to ensure that this economic and social power is best suited to the desire for equality expressed by the general will.

In contrast with the widespread notion of the abstract nature of Rousseau’s republic, I would like to stress in the first part of my article that the general will—that is, the sense of the general interest—needs to be forged, shaped, and strengthened by specific institutions that are always linked to a concrete society, to a particular history and to determinate places. This particularization of the general will is both a condition for the very possibility of a republican government and a first response to the accusation of abstraction put forward against Rousseau by his liberal critics.[4] However, that first approach also constitutes a source of theoretical difficulties that I would like to contemplate, in the second part of my article, by analyzing what I call the anarchistic objection to the idea of a republican government. Finally, in response to the argument that Rousseau’s general will would be ungovernable, because he didn’t understand the techniques of government available in his time, I shall try to show that Rousseau actually appropriated concepts that originated in the anti-republican theories of reason of state and used them in his own theory of government.

Why did Rousseau need to particularize the general will?

In order to maintain a sense of common interest, or public good, among citizens, Rousseau believed that the general will needed to be supported by specific institutions. But in order to understand why specific institutions were needed, one must first understand how Rousseau connects the general will with the particular interests of citizens. His stance is not politically naïve: he knows very well that obeying a general rule, especially when it directly contravenes our interests, goes against the crooked timber of humanity. But he also knows that the basis of our obligation to obey the general will, and the laws that proceed from it, is the idea that doing our duty as citizens is also in our best interest: “The engagements which bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we cannot work for others without also working for ourselves.”[5] Thus, the “notion of justice”[6] is nothing contrary to man’s nature since it is derived from the political condition of a mutual agreement—“equality of rights”[7]—that is itself “derived from the preference which each gives to himself, and consequently from man’s nature.”[8] Accordingly, if men prefer equality to inequality, and therefore social life to the state of nature, it is because they know for sure that equal rights are in their best individual interests, that is, are the best political conditions for hoping to achieve their particular interests. But therein lies a great difficulty, since the general will can be accepted by all only if they are absolutely certain that it is not derived from particular interests or prejudiced toward particular interests. That condition is very hard to meet, even in political regimes that call themselves democracies, as Rousseau tells us:

When the people of Athens, for instance, elected or deposed their chiefs, decreed honours to one, imposed penalties on another, and by multitudes of particular decrees exercised indiscriminately all the functions of government, the people no longer had any general will properly so called; they no longer acted as a sovereign power, but as magistrates.[9]

What is striking here is the radical opposition drawn by Rousseau between the political requisites of the general will and the “functions of government”[10]: whenever citizens want to use their general will to make particular decisions in the name of the social body, they are condemned to make mistakes and commit injustices toward their fellow citizens. The general will is not the aggregate will of a majority of citizens, but the common interest that unites them all. The conclusion of that reflection on the generality of the general will is that it only remains such as long as it applies to all the citizens belonging to the social body. Since governing a social body implies making particular decisions concerning some groups or particular individuals, there is a legitimate fear that it can never be properly governed or, if it is, that it would cease to be properly general.

Rousseau’s solution to that predicament is to institutionalize the general will, that is, to use “political institutions”[11] to give to “the deliberations of the community a spirit of equity that seems to disappear in the discussion of any private affair.”[12] Rousseau’s attachment to the republican way of doing things explains why he preferred institutionalizing the general will to turning it into an art of governing, that is, why he created a theory of law and education rather than a theory of reason of state. That point is crucial because it explains why Constant’s critique of Rousseau partly fails to hit its mark when it makes Rousseau’s ideas responsible for the revolutionary politics of terror.[13] The danger for individual liberty does not rest in the generality of the general will, but in its inadequate particularization; that is to say, it does not rest in the sovereign power, however “absolute,” “sacred,” and “inviolable”[14] it is, but in the way that sovereign power is governed.

Since Rousseau approaches the institutionalization of the general will through a theory of law and morals, we shall begin there. The institutional primacy of law serves to overcome what may be called the paradox of political freedom, that is, the paradox of private property in the reign of the general will: “. . . how to force men to defend the freedom of one of them without impinging upon that of the others? And how to meet public needs without altering the particular ownership of those who are forced to contribute?”[15] If it is easy for a republican to proclaim her attachment to the general will, it is often more difficult for her to follow it through to the end at the cost of renouncing part of her ownership. The solution to this problem requires “the most sublime of all human institutions,”[16] namely, the institution of the law. In an ideal republic, public commandments are not, thanks to the legislation in force, perceived to be the expression of the arbitrary nature of the civil authorities but, rather, the manifestation of the general will.

In order for the influence of the general will to be felt down to the smallest cogs of state machinery, the administration of the law must also conform to the spirit and letter of that law. From the general will itself to its application in the tiniest details of public administration, there must be a direct link. There is nothing worse in a state than a gap between the law and the application of the law: all in all, a bad law applied well is preferable to a good law applied badly, or worse still, not applied at all. Indeed, the arbitrariness for which bureaucracy is sometimes criticized demonstrates that the application of the law is almost as important as the law itself: giving oneself over to the good will of the administration means giving oneself over to the particular will of its agents and, as a result, disregarding the universality of the law. In order to avoid this bureaucratic drifting of the general will—which could be described as an incorrect particularization of the law—the state must be provided with particular institutions that serve the general will.

His search for this correct particularization was what led Rousseau to state that the legislator’s role is to “discover the rules of association that are most suitable to nations.”[17] This is a formidably difficult task that involves adjusting the problem of the universal—that is, giving priority to the general will—to the idiosyncratic characteristics of different peoples: the fact that each of those peoples has different morals, demographics, territory, and history. It is to this problem of adjustment that Rousseau refers when he says that a people must be “instituted.” What does it mean to be “instituted”? It means that he “who dares undertake to institute a people ought to feel himself capable, as it were, of changing human nature; of transforming every individual, who in himself is a complete and independent whole, into part of a greater whole from which he receives in some manner his life and his being.”[18] “Changing human nature” is a vast and somewhat disturbing ambition, especially if we reinterpret Rousseau in the light of twentieth-century history. However, such an anachronistic reading could cause us to make a mistake here: Rousseau does not mean to uproot men from the particularity of their social existence; on the contrary, he means to define the rules that suit their particular morals. Thus, confronted with the task of advising legislators in Poland and Corsica, Rousseau stressed that it was not possible to “institute a people” without accentuating its particular characteristics. In his Discours sur l’économie politique, he sets this problem out in terms of government: both for magistrates and for citizens, good government implies always endeavoring to make their particular will conform to what is dictated by the general will. The need for the legislator to write laws bearing in mind particular knowledge of the characteristics of a people should be understood in relation to this injunction to govern according to the general will.

This brings us to a paradox that needs to be emphasized since, despite its generality, the general will requires particular institutions in order to render a people governable. This particularity can be understood as the particularity of every institution in general, which is always linked to a history and a place. This platitude is not, of course, what Rousseau means: the sense of general interest can make a people exist politically only if it makes that people exist as singular. Its singularity lies, therefore, not only in the fact that one people is notoriously different from all others, but in the fact that this difference, coupled with the sense of the people’s interest, is likely to make a nation out of that people. For Rousseau, there can be no people without a nation, no general will without national will, no national history without making heroes of the players of that history or without making its territory sacred. If political institutions can help to express a shared sense of general interest, it is because those institutions are particularizing institutions that “form the essence, character, tastes and morals of a people, which make it itself and no other, which inspire in it that fervent love for the motherland based on habits that are impossible to uproot, which cause it to die of weariness among other peoples although surrounded by delights of which it is deprived in its own land.”[19] In other words, the will of a people can be general only if it is formed by particular national institutions. In contrast with what his counterrevolutionary critics said, Rousseau, therefore, was greatly concerned with the history of nations and national customs since it is only within a particular history that the general will is realized. But it is also true that this very concern implied that he gave more value to the art of legislation than to the art of governing: “But if it is true that a great prince is a rare man, what will a great legislator be? The first has only to follow the model which the other has to frame. The latter is the mechanician who invents the machine, the former is only the workman who puts it in readiness and works it.”[20]

No doubt that, in Rousseau’s view, the governing prince plays a lesser role than the legislator. But what makes the latter’s part so important? The legislator’s role is, more specifically, to transform the eventualities of history and geography into as many moments and forms as a nation needs: Rousseau thus instructed the Poles to “engrave” the era of the Confederation of Bar,[21] which saved the Poles from the Russian invaders, “in letters that are sacred in every Polish heart”; a monument in its honor must be erected; a regular holiday must be instituted to keep its memory alive “with a pomp that is not shining and frivolous but simple, proud and republican,”[22] and the families of those who had distinguished themselves must be honored. This is where the general will finds itself “caught up,” so to speak, in the particular circumstances of history that lend it its specific national character. On this condition alone can it give rise to a republican government. Modern-day Europeans could ponder—with certain confusion, admittedly—the meaning of Rousseau’s lament: “Today there are no more French, Germans, Spanish, even English, whatever people might say; there are only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same morals, because none has received a national form from a particular institution.” [23] In contrast with what the Fathers of the European Union have taught European citizens since the Treaty of Rome, Rousseau’s Europeans come before the citizens of the individual nation-states and must aspire to no longer exist as such. Yet, is it sufficient to particularize the general will through law and mores in order to solve the republican problem of government?

The republican government and the anarchistic objection

A major objection targets directly the possibility of a republican government, contesting in absolute terms the idea that the general will can be governed. This objection can be described as anarchistic insofar as it claims to challenge all civil authority on the grounds that the general will, once instituted, can only degenerate into a particular will. Given that particular agents implement it, the civil authorities will systematically be suspected of bypassing the general will to the sole benefit of those governing. There can, therefore, be no trust in a political administration which is inevitably corrupt; only a direct appeal to the people would be apt to discover the correct path in politics. By stating that the people’s sovereignty would not be represented, Rousseau paved the way, let us say, for that brand of anarchism that considers any authority, whether or not it is elected, to be a negation of the general will. In other words, if popular sovereignty must not be represented,[24] it cannot be governed. We either accept the principle of representation—which is a promise of obedience to the civil authorities—and we are governed by a particular will, or else we refuse such a principle and the general will instantly becomes ungovernable. In order to respond to this criticism, one must accept the following two propositions, as Rousseau encourages us to do: first, “unless there were some point in which all interests agree, no society could exist,” since “it is solely with regard to this common interest that the society should be governed”;[25] second, “it is at least impossible that this agreement should be lasting and constant; for the particular will naturally tends to preferences, and the general will to equality.”[26] With regard to the first idea, it is conceivable that, for a limited period of time, civil authorities would endeavor to respect the general will and to implement laws; as for the second idea, one must come to the conclusion that those same authorities should hold themselves accountable on a regular basis and, in the event of a conflict with the general will, allow their particular will to give way. A good constitution is, therefore, one that remains open to both the possibility of an expression of the general will and the possibility of a government, with the latter thus being judged against the former. The clearest sign that anarchism, which claims to be faithful to the general will and the public spirit, is sophistic by nature lies in the fact that those who criticize instituted powers often intend to take their place. One must, therefore, accept the idea that the leaders’ orders can pass for general wills, “so long as the sovereign, free to oppose them, refrains from doing so.”[27] On this point, Rousseau considers the saying, “He who says nothing consents,” to be an indicator of the possible concurrence between the leaders’ wills and the general will. The anarchist, in his desire to show that governing a republic is impossible per se, concludes too hastily that such agreement is non-existent rather than rare. In order to correct that anarchistic mistake, Rousseau did borrow some concepts from the anti-republican tradition of reason of state. We’ll now try to show how he could do so without compromising his commitment towards republicanism.

The republican art of governing and reason of state

Rousseau’s position on government is summarized in a two-part thesis, formulated for the first time in the Discours sur l’économie politique. The first thesis recognizes that there is a difference between sovereignty and government;[28] the second maintains that government must be strictly subordinated to the general will.[29] The distinction between sovereignty and government is not in itself new: we find it in Bodin as early as 1576,[30] but Rousseau gives this opposition a new valence insofar as the emphasis is now on the difference between the sovereignty of the people and government for the people. This shift in emphasis arises from Rousseau’s engagement with theories of reason of state, a tradition of which Bodin could not have been aware since it took shape only after the first edition of his Six livres de la république.[31] Sovereignty is expressed through laws, which apply equally to all citizens; government, Rousseau makes clear, is more specifically concerned with individuals as they are subject to the power of the state.[32] One could object that this account is limited since Rousseau’s most constant concern seems, as we will soon see, to be with rigorously confining the use of techniques of governance within the boundaries of the law. This limitation of the scope of theories of government presupposes, however, recognition and knowledge of what it intends to limit.

This recognition originates, as in the majority of theories of government since the appearance of Botero’s Della ragion di stato in 1589, in a critique of “bad” reason of state. This is, of course, the case with the critique of Machiavelli made by anti-Machiavellian theorists of reason of state, but it is also the case with the critique of reason of state itself in one or another of its forms. In fact, Rousseau refuses to take his theory of government down the path of anti-Machiavellianism, for he holds the view that Machiavelli only pretends to give lessons to princes in order to better educate their subjects about virtue.[33] Whether they were inspired by the Florentine or criticized him, the real targets of Rousseau’s polemic are those theorists of state secrets who follow the example of Gabriel Naudé and his theory of coups d’État. If we apply Rousseau’s interpretative grind to Naudé’s theory, coups d’État have their only legitimate basis in the corruption of the people, that is, the disappearance of the sense of the general will. In other words, to reintroduce into the hearts of men a sense of justice which has deserted them rulers deem it necessary to resort to extraordinary means and are therefore apt either to terrorize their people or seduce them by appealing to their base instincts [34]

Despairing of the virtue of their fellow citizens, rulers believe themselves obligated to use techniques of government that cannot be publicly justified. It is in this manner that Naudé justifies both the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the secrecy surrounding its preparation.[35] Keen to distinguish his theory of government from a theory of coups d’État and, more generally, from the tradition of arcana imperii,[36] Rousseau therefore condemns “the small and despicable ruses they call maxims of state, and mysteries of the cabinet.”[37] Practices of government in which the bulk of the rulers’ energy is spent protecting particular interests through ruses, sterile competition, and blind loyalties to the detriment of the general interest are here roundly criticized.[38] But it is also a certain conception of the politician that is targeted: a virtuous people has no need of those enterprising spirits, those great ministers—so dangerous and so admired—whose glory is to persuade the people that they are working for the general interest when they are contributing to their leaders’ best interest.[39] One could cite in this regard the maxims of state found in the Testament politique of Cardinal Richelieu, but Rousseau’s critique is here more general: it is aimed at the political virtuosity called forth by the degradation of civic morality.

However, this bad reason of state does not exhaust the use Rousseau makes of theories of government, as indicated by the distinction he proposes in the article “Économie politique” of the Encyclopédie between what he calls “tyrannical” public economy and “popular” public economy. Tyrannical public economy exists where the people and the rulers have different interests; its “maxims . . . are written at length in the archives of history, and in the satires of Machiavelli.” [40] One recognizes here again the tradition of bad reason of state, which takes seriously what Machiavelli intends, according to Rousseau, as satire, and sets itself the task of describing secret techniques by which tyrants maintain dominion over their subjects. Conversely, popular public economy—the “good” theory of government—“is that of every State, in which there reigns between the people and the rulers unity of interest and will”;[41] such a state is what Rousseau calls, in Du contrat social, a “republic,” that is, “any State . . . which is governed by laws, under whatever form of administration it may be”;[42] the government to which it refers is deemed in the Social Contract “legitimate” or “republican.”[43]

Yet it is clear that Rousseau’s republican ideal does not represent a complete break with the arts of government present in the practices of European states since their early formation. Here, it will suffice to cite three particularly revealing pieces of evidence. The first concerns the use of the concept of political economy with respect to the government of the State; the second concerns the use of the notion of rapport to analyze the relationship between sovereignty and government; and the third concerns the function of population and census-taking as criteria for evaluating the activity of governments.

The first piece of evidence is furnished by Michel Foucault, in his course at the Collège de France on 1 February 1978, when he points out that Rousseau’s problem is to discern how the wise government of the family by the father can be introduced into the realm of the state, even though the two domains are of a different nature.[44] While Rousseau’s solution to the problem of economic governance—that is, political economy—can appear to us extremely weak since it falls squarely within the horizon of mercantilist thought, which subordinates the development of the wealth of the nation to the needs of the State, this takes nothing away from the fact that the question posed by Rousseau was analogous to those asked by specialists and technicians of government.

This problem, which exceeds the strict framework of a theory of sovereignty, even if conceived from the perspective of the general will, was faced directly by the administrators of European kingdoms when they found themselves confronted with the need to measure the relative power of their respective states. The birth of statistics and the development of mercantilism attest to state efforts at rationalization through pathways other than law and political economy.[45] And Rousseau is certainly not mistaken when he opposes the maxims of state inscribed in the “archives of history” to those which “are found only in the writings of those philosophers who dare to proclaim the rights of humanity,”[46] for it is true that one finds the maxims of the art of government writ large in the history of modern state formation. Despite his claims to the contrary, Rousseau also draws upon this idea when he attempts to state what republican government could be. The rights of man are of only secondary importance since he sees fit to make room for the knowledge government has produced about itself before arguing that the arts of government and economics need to seek justification in the humanitarian and philosophical order.

This is precisely what Rousseau does, though in an indirect manner, in the first chapter of book III of Du contrat social. Seeking to define the position of government as that of an intermediary body between the sovereign and the state, he is led to reflect, using a kind of “constitutional mathematics,” upon the relationships—in French, rapport—that bind these various bodies. To be rigorous, he attempts to theorize the different relationships that can exist between the government and the other two bodies, taking population as his point of departure for simplicity’s sake.[47] The purpose of the exercise is to show how a variation in the size of a population has a calculable impact, so to speak, on the form its government should have. We see here how the idea of a science of government insinuated itself into the arguments of those—the political philosophers—who were the least amenable to accepting it. Aware that the mathematical form of his argument could be off-putting to readers, Rousseau foresees the objection of those who would like to “turn this system to ridicule” by claiming “that in order to find the mean proportional and form the body of the Government, it is . . . only necessary to take the square root of the number of the people.”[48] His response expresses a deep understanding of the complexity of the problems addressed by theorists and practitioners of government: it is not, he writes, only population that must be taken into account when calculating the government suitable for a state, but “in general . . . the quantity of action, which results from the combination of multitudes of causes.”[49] The contention that geometrical precision has no place in moral questions does not do justice to the intuition expressed here; namely, that government can be made an object of exact knowledge only insofar as it must take into account the different variables that compose a state, variables the nascent discipline of statistics is just beginning to measure. If it is true that a country’s population figures do not give a sufficient account of its resources, the census nevertheless provides an indication of the “quantity of action” and work a population is capable of performing, soon to be integrated by economists into a gross national product.

This is also why Rousseau returns to the concept of population in the chapter where he attempts to determine the “signs of good government.” Dismissing the perennial debate about the “best” system as an indeterminate question mal posée, he substitutes the more precise question of “signs” of good government. While here he is referring specifically to qualitative and moral signs, the belief that there is a sign incapable of deceiving is one Rousseau shares with other contemporary theoreticians and administrators of government: this sign is a nation’s population. With the goal of political association being the preservation and prosperity of its members, the surest sign that they are preserving themselves and prospering is that they reproduce. Doubtlessly this is an anti-Malthusian riposte avant la lettre, but it will always be possible to add other objective indicators to measure the well-being of a people. What is important for our purposes is that Rousseau thinks of government as an adjustment variable in an equation used to calculate a nation’s wealth.

If he sets himself apart from theoreticians of reason of state, it is less through his analysis of government, which he also considers as the function of the quantity of action of a nation, than by the manner in which he integrates the specifically political dimension of the general interest into this calculation. In distinguishing between sovereignty and government, and strictly subordinating the latter to the former, he intends to reaffirm the subordination of the modern economy to the sovereignty of the state; but as Foucault pointed out, he does this while relying upon modes of calculation developed by state statisticians themselves. The idea that we can subordinate the economic life of the nation to the principles of justice established by the general will is not an idea widely echoed in the classical liberal tradition.[50] But it is a solution that will leave a lasting impression upon the tradition of French republicanism.

A first version of this article was published as “Gouverner selon la volonté générale: la souveraineté selon Rousseau et les théories de la raison d’État,” Les Études philosophiques 3 (2007): 463–79. The present version, partially translated by Aron Freeman, whom I would like to thank, has been much transformed after the discussion that followed its presentation at the Clark Memorial Library on April 10, 2009. For their stimulating suggestions and questions, my thanks also go to Margaret Jacob, Wijnand Mijnhardt, and Catherine Secretan. When the title of a book is only given in French, the translations of the quotes are mine.

[1] The Social Contract, bk. 3, chap. 15, trans. H. J. Tozer (Ware: Wordsworth, 1998), 95 (hereafter cited as Social Contract); Du Contrat social, in Œuvres complètes, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 3:429 (hereafter cited as Contrat social): “Ce mot de finance est un mot d’esclave; il est inconnu dans la Cité. Dans un Etat vraiment libre les citoyens font tout avec leurs bras et rien avec de l’argent.”

[2] See Jean-Fabien Spitz’s comment at the end of his preface to the French translation of The Machiavellian Moment: “La France du XVIIIe siècle est indéniablement la grande absente de la synthèse opérée par Le moment machiavélien. Rousseau et Mably paraissaient pourtant bien placés pour prendre place dans la cohorte des penseurs républicains égrenée par Pocock, sans parler de Tocqueville, dont l’un de ses commentateurs les plus pertinents a récemment qualifié l’œuvre de ‘dernière grande expression théorique de l’humanisme civique’ [i.e., J.-C. Lamberti]” (J. G. A. Pocock, Le moment machiavélien [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997], xliii–xliv).

[3] A liberal critique of Rousseau, such as Constant’s in his Principles of Politics, defends the general will as the only legitimate basis for civil laws, but contests that it could justify an absolute government. See Benjamin Constant, Principes de politiques, Préface de T. Todorov (Paris: Hachette, 1997), 41: “L’on ne peut donc reconnaître à la société que des droits qui puissent être exercés par le gouvernement sans devenir dangereux. La souveraineté étant une chose abstraite et la chose réelle, l’exercice de la souveraineté, c’est-à-dire le gouvernement, étant nécessairement remis à des êtres d’une autre nature que le souverain, puisqu’ils ne sont pas des êtres abstraits, il faut prendre des précautions contre le pouvoir souverain, à cause de la nature de ceux qui l’exercent, comme l’on en prendrait contre une arme trop puissante qui pourrait tomber entre des mains peu sûres.”

[4] The abstract nature of the republican citizen would also be a major theme of counterrevolutionary thought—Burke, Joseph de Maistre, etc.—which considered the revolutionary leaning to abstract thinking to have been the cause of the Terror’s reign during the French Revolution. But I prefer to stress here the liberal critiques of Rousseau.

[5] Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 4, p. 32; Contrat social, 3:373: “Les engagemens qui nous lient au corps social ne sont obligatoires que parce qu’ils sont mutuels, et leur nature est telle qu’en les remplissant on ne peut travailler pour autrui sans travailler aussi pour soi.”

[6]Ibid.: “la notion de justice.”

[7] Ibid.: “l’égalité de droit.”

[8] Ibid.: “dérive de la préférence que chacun se donne et par conséquent de la nature de l’homme.”

[9] Ibid.; Contrat social, 3:374: “Quand le peuple d’Athenes, par exemple, nommoit ou cassoit ses chefs, décernoit des honneurs à l’un, imposoit des peines à l’autre, et par des multitudes de décrets particuliers exerçoit indistinctement tous les actes du gouvernement, le peuple alors n’avait plus de volonté générale proprement dite; il n’agissoit plus comme Souverain mais comme magistrat.”

[10] Ibid.: “actes du gouvernement.”

[11] Rousseau gave up writing a work that was to be called Institutions politiques in order to undertake a more limited project known as Du contrat social. Cf. Confessions, bk. 1, chap. 10, in Œuvres complètes, 1:516.

[12] Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 4, p. 33; Contrat social, 3:374: “donne aux délibérations communes un caractère d’équité qu’on voit s’évanouir dans la discussion de toute affaire particulière.”

[13] Constant, Principes de politiques, bk. 1, chap. 6, p. 44: “Il serait facile de démontrer, par des citations sans nombre, que les sophismes les plus grossiers des plus fougueux apôtres de la Terreur, dans les circonstances les plus révoltantes, n’étaient que des conséquences parfaitement justes des principes de Rousseau.”

[14] Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 4, p. 33: “Thus we see that the sovereign power, wholly absolute, wholly sacred, and wholly inviolable as it is, does not, and cannot, pass the limits of general conventions, and that every man can fully dispose of what is left to him of his property and liberty by these conventions; so that the sovereign never has a right to burden one subject more than another, because then the matter becomes particular and his power is no longer competent”; Contrat social, 3, 375: “On voit par-là que le pouvoir Souverain, tout absolu, tout sacré, tout inviolable qu’il est, ne passe ni ne peut passer les bornes des conventions générales, et que tout homme peut disposer pleinement de ce qui lui a été laissé de ses biens et de sa liberté par ces conventions; de sorte que le Souverain n’est jamais en droit de charger un sujet plus qu’un autre, parce qu’alors l’affaire devenant particuliere, son pouvoir n’est plus competent.”

[15] Discours sur l’économie politique, in Œuvres complètes, 3:248 (hereafter cited as Sur l’économie politique): “. . . comment forcer des hommes à défendre la liberté de l’un d’entre eux, sans porter atteinte à celle des autres? Et comment pourvoir aux besoins publics sans altérer la propriété particuliere de ceux qu’on force d’y contribuer?”

[16] Ibid: “plus sublime de toutes les institutions humaines.”

[17] Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 7, 40; Contrat social, 3:381: “découvrir les meilleures regles de societé qui conviennent aux Nations.”

[18] Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 7, 40, modified; Contrat social, 3:381: “Celui qui ose entreprendre d’instituer un peuple doit se sentir en état de changer, pour ainsi dire, la nature humaine, de transformer chaque individu, qui par lui-même est un tout parfait et solitaire, en partie d’un plus grand tout dont cet individu reçoive en quelque sorte sa vie et son être.”

[19] Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée, in Œuvres complète, 3:960 (hereafter cited as Sur le gouvernement de Pologne).

[20] Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 7, 40; Contrat social, 3:381: “mais s’il est vrai qu’un grand Prince est un homme rare, que sera-ce d’un grand Législateur? Le premier n’a qu’à suivre le modèle que l’autre doit proposer. Celui-ci est le méchanicien qui invente la machine, celui-là n’est que l’ouvrier qui la monte et la fait marcher.”

[21] The confederation of Bar “is a famous confederation of the Polish nobles and gentry formed at the little fortress of Bar in Podolia in 1768 to defend the internal and external independence of Poland against the aggressions of the Russian government as represented by her representative at Warsaw, Prince Nicholas Repnin” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911 ed., s.v. “Bar, Confederation of”).

[22] Sur le gouvernement de Pologne, 3:961.

[23] Ibid., 3:960.

[24] Cf. Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 1, 25: “I say, then, that sovereignty, being nothing but the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and that the sovereign power, which is only a collective being, can be represented by itself alone; power indeed can be transmitted, but not will”; Contrat social, 3:368: “Je dis donc que la souveraineté n’étant que l’exercice de la volonté générale ne peut jamais s’aliéner, et que le souverain, qui n’est qu’un être collectif, ne peut être représenté que par lui-même; le pouvoir peut bien se transmettre, mais non pas la volonté.”

[25] Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 1, 25; Contrat social, 3:368: “. . . s’il n’y avoit pas quelque point dans lequel tous les intérêts s’accordent, nulle société ne saurait exister. Or, c’est uniquement sur cet intérêt commun que la société doit être gouvernée.”

[26] Ibid.: “il est impossible au moins que cet accord soit durable et constant; car la volonté particulière tend par sa nature aux préférences, et la volonté générale à l’égalité.”

[27] Ibid.: “. . . tant que le Souverain libre de s’y opposer ne le fait pas.”

[28] Sur l’économie politique, 3:244: “Je prie mes lecteurs de bien distinguer encore l’économie publique dont j’ai à parler, et que j’appelle gouvernement, de l’autorité suprême que j’appelle souveraineté.”

[29] Ibid., 3:247: “La premiere et la plus importante maxime du gouvernement légitime ou populaire, c’est-à-dire de celui qui a pour objet le bien du peuple, est donc . . . de suivre en tout la volonté générale.”

[30] Bodin, Les six livres de la république, bk. 2, chap. 2 (Lyon, 1593; Paris: Fayard, 1986), 34: “Car il y a bien de la difference de l’estat, et du gouvernement: qui est une reigle de police qui n’a point esté touchée de personne: car l’estat peut estre en Monarchie, et neantmoins il sera gouverné populairement si le Prince fait part des estats, Magistrats, offices, et loyers egalement à tous sans avoir esgard à la noblesse, ni aux richesses, ni à la vertu.”

[31] On the influence of Bodin on Botero, see D. Quaglioni, “‘Imperandi ratio’: l’édition latine de la République (1586) et la raison d'État,” in Y. Ch. Zarka, ed., Jean Bodin. Nature, histoire, droit et politique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996), 160–74.

[32] Sur l’économie politique, 3:244: “. . . distinction [de la souveraineté et du gouvernement] qui consiste en ce que l’une a le droit législatif, et oblige en certain cas le corps même de la nation, tandis que l’autre n’a que la puissance exécutrice, et ne peut obliger que les particuliers.”

[33] Contrat social, bk. 3, chap. 6, 3:409: “En feignant de donner des leçons aux Rois, il [Machiavel] en a donné de grandes aux peuples. Le Prince de Machiavel est le livre des républicains.”

[34] Sur l’économie politique, 3:253: “C’est alors qu’à la voix du devoir qui ne parle plus dans les cœurs, les chefs sont forcés de substituer le cri de la terreur ou le leurre d’un intérêt apparent dont ils trompent leurs créatures.”

[35] G. Naudé, Considérations politiques sur les coups d’État (Rome, 1639), ed. L. Marin (Paris: Les Éditions de Paris, 1988), 122: “Il y aura assez de quoi s’étonner parmi tant de barbaries, et de croire aussi que celle de la Saint-Barthélemy n’a pas été des plus grandes, quoiqu’elle fût une des plus justes et nécessaires.”

[36] Some authors prefer to speak of arcana imperii rather than of reason of state (in French: raison d’État). On the use of the former expression, see Christoph Besold in M. Stolleis, Staat und Staatsräson in der frühen Neuzeit. Studien zur Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 39 et seq. Rousseau might be thinking of the arcana imperii – or secrets of state – when he speaks of “mystères du cabinet.”

[37] Sur l’économie politique, 3:253: “. . . les petites et méprisables ruses qu’ils appellent maximes d’état, et mystères du cabinet. . . .”

[38] Ibid.: “Tout ce qui reste de vigueur au gouvernement est employé par ses membres à se perdre et supplanter l’un l’autre, tandis que les affaires demeurent abandonnées, ou ne se font qu’à mesure que l’intérêt personnel le demande, et selon qu’il les dirige.”

[39] Ibid.: “Enfin toute l’habilité de ces grands politiques est de fasciner tellement les yeux de ceux dont ils ont besoin, que chacun croye travailler pour son intérêt en travaillant pour le leur; je dis le leur, si tant est qu’en effet le véritable intérêt des chefs soit d’anéantir les peuples pour les soumettre, et de ruiner leur propre bien pour s’en assûrer la possession.”

[40] Ibid., 247.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 6, 38: “. . . any state . . . which is governed by laws, under whatever form of administration it may be”; Contrat social, 3:379: “. . . tout Etat régi par des loix, sous quelque forme d’administration que ce puisse être.”

[43] Cf. Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 6, 39: “Every legitimate government is republican; I will explain hereafter what government is”; Contrat social, 3:379: “Tout gouvernement légitime est républicain: j’expliquerai ci-après ce que c’est que gouvernement.”

[44] M. Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France. 1977–1978, éd. M. Senellart (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2004), 98: “Gouverner un État sera donc mettre en œuvre l’économie, une économie au niveau de l’État tout entier, c’est-à-dire [exercer] à l’égard des habitants, des richesses, de la conduite de tout un chacun, une forme de surveillance, de contrôle, non moins attentive que celle du père de famille sur la maisonnée et ses biens” (“Governing a state will therefore mean establishing the economy, an economy that functions at the level of the entire state; in other words, exercising a kind of surveillance or control over citizens, wealth and the behaviour of everybody, no less attentive than that of a father over his household and possessions”).

[45] Cf. Ibid., 104.

[46] Sur l’économie politique, 3:247.

[47] Cf. Social Contract, bk. 3, chap. 1, 59: “To try and give an idea of the different relations that may exist between those two extremes, I will take for an example the number of the people, as a relation most easy to express”; Contrat social, 3:397: “Pour tâcher de donner une idée des divers rapports qui peuvent régner entre ces deux extrêmes, je prendrai pour exemple le nombre du peuple, comme un rapport plus facile à exprimer.”

[48] Social Contract, bk. 3, chap. 1, 60; Contrat social, 3:397: “Si, tournant ce système en ridicule, on disoit que, pour trouver cette moyenne proportionnelle et former le corps du gouvernement, il ne faut, selon moi, que tirer la racine carrée du nombre du peuple, je répondrois que je ne prends ici ce nombre que pour un exemple.”

[49] Social Contract, bk. 3, chap. 1, 60; Contrat social, 3:398: “. . . les rapports dont je parle ne se mesurent pas seulement par le nombre des hommes, mais en général par la quantité d’action, laquelle se combine par des multitudes de causes.”

[50] Naturally, I am not referring to a Rawlsian-type liberalism here.

The Atlantic Republican Tradition: The Republic of the Seven Provinces

Zach Chandler — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 11:35:03 -0800

A conference was held at the Clark Memorial Library in April 2009, under the title “The Limits of the Atlantic Republican Tradition.” This inescapably carried some normative implications. It was assumed that participants in general agreed on what this “tradition” was and aimed to look at its “limits,” though it was less clear whether the aim was to fix them, to look beyond them, or to dissolve them. There further hung over the conference the implication—though this was affirmed by nobody—that there existed an entity, alternatively a concept, of “republicanism,” which might be better defined, whether as a theoretical category or as a historical phenomenon, in some ways than in others. The conference avoided sterile disputations, but—as is common and indeed healthy on such occasions—the subject with which it had dealt was rather discovered in retrospect than agreed upon in advance. This article offers such a retrospective view and argues that the conference dealt on the whole with two historical narratives, different to the point where they might almost invite the metaphor of the elephant and the whale; but that these organisms (to continue the metaphor) shared a common evolutionary history with some comparable outcomes.

“The Atlantic republican tradition” continued—perhaps in consequence of the impulse to set “limits” to it—to be defined much as it was in The Machiavellian Moment, published in 1975 with the subtitle “Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition.”[1] The writer of this essay, as author of the original title, reports that he has in some ways re-narrated the history it offered in a more recent study entitled The First Decline and Fall,[2] elements of which are taken up and employed here. Common to both volumes, however, is the thesis whose “limits” were to be explored at the conference: how certain narratives about Roman history, entailing an ideal of “republican”[3] government and the historic causes of its transformation into a principate, were formulated (not originated) in Florence during the last century of its “republican” history; taken up in England during its brief experiment with “republican” government and elaborated into a history of west European landed property and free citizenship; restated in England and Scotland after the revolution of 1688 as a critique of the military-fiscal state and commercial civil society that “Britain” now became; and imported into the English colonies beyond the Atlantic, where they helped to engender a debate between “ancient” and “modern” concepts of liberty important in the foundation and history of the American federal republic. This narrative—which by the way supplied the word “Atlantic” with such meaning as it bears in the title of The Machiavellian Moment—has been and still is debated in American historiography. The conference in 2009, however, did not continue that debate so much as set up and explore another narrative of republican history, which sets “limits” to the “Atlantic tradition” simply by presenting itself as the latter’s other.

This alternative “republican” tradition (or “republicanism”)—elephant, it might be suggested, to the Atlantic whale—takes shape on the borders of the Hohenstaufen-to-Hapsburg medieval “empire,” as certain cities and groups of cities—Swiss, Hanseatic, and especially Dutch—claim sovereignty for themselves within or without empire. These cities encounter one of the classical problems of the city state, ancient and medieval: that of the relations between the “few” and the “many” within the citizen body; and their lay and clerical elites, steeped in the obsessive neoclassicism of Latin Europe, are well aware that they share a history with Greco-Roman antiquity and draw upon it. It is of far-reaching importance in the history of the European vocabulary that the majority of these independent cities are ruled by merchant patriciates, and that these denote their sovereignty, liberty, and social power by using a set of synonyms of the French bourgeoisie. This is the source of the pre-Marxist, Marxist and post-Marxist usage that denotes mercantile, capitalist and industrial social practices as “bourgeois,” with the implication that the triumph of the economic in defining the polity is the work of the freemen of corporate towns, a thesis a little difficult to present in English where there is no collective noun equivalent to bourgeoisie and the growth of capitalism is not originally the work of such a class’s rise to power. This has to do with the problematic of “the Atlantic republican tradition”; but it was not clear, at the Clark Library conference, just how far there remained a persistent desire to represent “republicanism,” “liberty,” and “enlightenment” as “bourgeois” in origin, thus setting “limits” to the “Atlantic” alternative.

Of these leagues of post- or ex-imperial cities and their regimes a unique place belongs to that which became the quasi-federated republic of the Protestant Netherlands. Not a city-state but a confederacy of cities aware of their municipal and imperial origins, it had perhaps less need of the image of the Roman republic than we shall see was the case with Florence. More immediately to the history of republics in Europe, it grew, through its alliance with the Princes of Orange, into a powerful military actor in the wars of religion and the growth of a European states system; and through the mercantile energies of Holland and Zeeland, into a maritime empire on an oceanic scale, with slave-worked colonies in the Caribbean, a small but momentous colony of settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, and an empire in Indonesia equal in extent to that the British acquired in India. None of these seems to have entered into dialogue and dialectic with the metropolis as did the English and Iberian colonies in America; the political thought of the Dutch Republic centered on its European self. In the history of “republicanism”—assuming there to be such an entity—the primary characteristic of its theory and discourse is that these are in the full sense of the word bourgeois: they assume the city to be a mercantile corporation and citizenship to be an engagement in trade.[4] For a “golden age” coinciding roughly with the seventeenth century c.e., the provinces forming the Union of Utrecht developed an urban consumer culture of extraordinary self-confidence, within which, however, they debated often bitterly the distribution of sovereignty among themselves and between themselves and the unique institution of the stadholderate identified with the Princes of Orange. They also debated Calvinist theology and culture in ways that became involved with the former debate. The presence at the Clark Library conference of a group of scholars skilled in Dutch intellectual history caused it to become the principal alternative presented to “the Atlantic republican tradition” in the history of republican thought.

At this point there arose the problem of the elephant and the whale. The two “traditions”—if that word is to be used—differed in context and ideology, if not always in vocabulary and content. In the Dutch (as in the Swiss and Hanseatic) “traditions,” there was to be heard the speech of actual republics endeavoring to explain themselves to themselves and to others; whereas in the “Atlantic tradition,” the republic was increasingly—until the American Articles of Confederation—a concept and historical construct, employed to criticize and ultimately reorder the structures of the early modern state. It followed that concepts of property, liberty, commerce, and arms were very differently deployed in the two (if there were not more than two) cases. The Clark Library conference successfully avoided the trap of setting up a sterile competition between incommensurables; but there remained the question of whether there could be found a history in which the two “traditions” diverged from shared positions and contexts.

It seems possible to establish such a scenario, part historiographical and part historical. Leonardo Bruni, writing the first book of his History of the Florentine People in the early years of the fifteenth century, articulates a major theme of European historiography.[5] With the expulsion of the kings, he says, the Roman people gave themselves liberty, and there followed the astonishing explosion of human energy that became known as virtus. This energy took a conquering form, and Roman liberty was the cause of its empire over others. Bruni, a naturalized Florentine from Arezzo, was not sure this had been beneficial; Etruscan culture had maintained many free cities and alliances, and it might have been better if these had continued to practice their several liberties, rather than the world’s becoming subject to the single virtus of Rome. It is not clear whether Bruni thought of the Etruscan cities as trading with one another, but he is presenting an early instance of the idea of a league or Bund, which Montesquieu was to rephrase as that of the république fédérative. He goes on to relate the story, already told by Roman historians, of how liberty acquired an empire greater than the institutions of liberty could control, how liberty was corrupted by empire, and how the republic fell under the rule of emperors. In destroying libertas, however, the Caesars destroyed the virtus needed to defend the empire it had acquired, and there followed Roman weakness in the face of the conquering barbarians. Bruni proceeds to outline the narrative Gibbon was to inherit as “the triumph of barbarism and religion.” In the barbarized western provinces of the former empire, the popes attained monarchy over the western church and were moved to set up a new empire with which they competed through the medieval centuries. The history moves to the point where the collapse of the Hohenstaufen and the captivity of the papacy at Avignon left the cities of Tuscany and northern Italy free to pursue the precarious and faction-ridden autonomy that is to be the theme of Bruni’s history and of Florentine historiography after him.

Three centuries after Bruni, Edward Gibbon, seeking a subject after his visit to Rome, took up the story from this point, relying on Lodovico Antonio Muratori for the narrative of how the Lombard and Tuscan cities had allied with papacy against empire in pursuit of independence from both. He did so, however, as part of a project of writing a history of liberty of the Swiss;[6] and we are at a point where the “republicanism” that grew out of independence from the medieval empire shares a history with the “Florentine political thought” that moved into “the Atlantic republican tradition.” Gibbon had little or nothing to say of the Dutch; but from this point we begin to enquire into the apparent divergence of Dutch thought from that of the “Machiavellian moment.” Among the Tuscan and Lombard cities, and especially in Florence, Bruni shows developing an intense concern with Roman history, that of the republic—as the regime of senatus populusque came to be called—and its mutation into the principate and the rule of the Caesars. This was a framework in which to present and perhaps explain the processes by which Italian cities were passing under the rule of signori and principi—among whom the Medici at Florence were a special case—though none of them duplicated the expansion of empire that had been fatal to the libertas of Rome. The interpretation of Florentine politics, from Bruni down to Machiavelli and Guicciardini at the end of the city’s libertà, came to involve an interpretation of ancient history so intense and passionate that those who wrote it identified themselves with the narrative they were relating, and Machiavelli can be seen as presenting politics as a series of problems attending action in history.[7] The thesis that the republic occupies a “Machiavellian moment” originates from this point.

Machiavelli looked behind the thesis that libertas had been destroyed by the empire it acquired to a further explanation of its destruction, also acquired from Roman and Greco-Roman historians: the narrative of the lex agraria, according to which Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus had failed to prevent the destruction of a landholding citizenry and the consequent degeneration of the Roman armies into landless mercenaries following warlord politicians.[8] This is one of a number of points at which the history of land tenure enters the vocabulary of European politics. Though Florence was a manufacturing and banking center and Venice a mercantile and maritime empire, the histories of politics developed by the leading intellectuals were not, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, histories of the growth of commerce in medieval Europe. They were histories of Rome in which Italians saw themselves, carried down to the point where Machiavellian understandings of repubbliche and principati gave way to Tacitist understanding of the politics of princely courts, in which the individual struggled to maintain his own integrity and counsel the prince against degenerating into a tyrant.[9] When the ducal Medici failed to repeat the pattern of Julio-Claudian history, Florentine political thought came effectively to an end. It is the Machiavellian-Tacitist sequence that we look for, but apparently do not find, in the history of Dutch political thought.

The Dutch republic that emerged in the course of the Eighty Years War was a league or confederacy, like that envisaged in Bruni’s Etruscan counterhistory, dominated by one province, Holland, and one city, Amsterdam. Its “republican” discourse, therefore, like that of the Swiss confederacy, was much concerned with the relations between sovereign and quasi-sovereign entities in what Montesquieu later called a république fédérative, a realm of discourse that does not arise in the “Atlantic tradition” until the English colonies in America declare themselves states. In another perspective, though Machiavelli was not much interested in cities of merchants, the mercantile character of Amsterdam tends to align it with his “commonwealth for preservation,” oligarchic, prudent, and likely to employ mercenary soldiers, of which the exemplary modern case is Venice; there is an authoritative study of the “myth of Venice” in Dutch republican thought.[10] It may further be suggested, however, that there is a way in which the Roman model might have, perhaps may have, been applied in Dutch political and historical thinking, though to do so is to flirt dangerously with the counterfactual. The republic possessed, this hypothesis proposes, an analogue of the Roman senate in the States of Holland and/or the States General; an analogue of the Roman imperator in the office of stadholder, hereditary though elective in the dynasty of the Princes of Orange, and commanding a powerful and largely mercenary army. The States commanded the power of the purse, and this no doubt explains why the relations between the two, while unstable, intermittently violent, and complicated by religious divisions, never reached the condition described by Tacitus, in which one subdues the other and both become corrupt. To say that it never became disastrous, however, is not to explain why it should not have been debated; and it is possible to ask whether, in the great Netherlands culture of classical and juristic scholarship, there was ever formulated a Dutch reading of Roman history or a Roman reading of Dutch.[11] Should the answer be negative—should it be established that no such literature exists—it might well be in vain to ask why not; historians are averse to explaining why something did not happen; but we should be in a position to say that Roman history, and the conflict of political values it entailed, were very differently formulated, and very differently related to the early modern political structure, in the republic of the Netherlands, from what was the case in the “Atlantic republican tradition”; and in the classically obsessed culture of early modern Europe, where the authority of Rome was as great and as problematic as we know it to have been, to say that is to raise some points of substance.

Let us reiterate the narrative of The Machiavellian Moment. In the English kingdom under the Stuart dynasty, the history of land tenure became important in, though it did not cause, the ideological disputes before and during the drift to civil war. After the catastrophes of armed conflict and regicide, there were brief but momentous experiments in kingless government; and it was during these that James Harrington was led to formulate his “Machiavellian meditation on feudalism.”[12] He took up Machiavelli’s account of the lex agraria and used it to suggest that the Romans lost both liberty and empire because they ceased to be an armed and landholding citizenry. The rule of the Caesars rested on a mercenary army; this became increasingly barbarized, and there followed the centuries of the “Gothic balance,” inherently unstable because neither king nor barons controlled enough land to outweigh the other. The Tudor kings had undermined the barons and themselves by emancipating the vassals from the control of the lords,[13] and England was now governed by a revolutionary army of freeholders, capable of becoming a republic. The failure of Harrington’s euchronic vision permitted his history of land, arms, and liberty to be restated on new foundations.

For the next step in the dual history we are tracing, we proceed to the “Anglo-Dutch moment” of 1688–89 and the decades following, so illuminatingly studied by historians from Jonathan Israel to Lisa Jardine.[14] The crucial figure here is that of William, third Prince of Orange by that name to hold the office of stadholder and third king of England to reign by that name since the Conquest. He is an extraordinary figure in both Dutch and British history, with whom the historians of both nations had difficulty in coming to terms. In Dutch historiography, of which this essay does not presume to say much, he is an ambiguous figure, seen perhaps as launching the republic on a career that proved more than it could handle; in British, as the latter has turned from its Whig and constitutionalist preoccupations to become a history of empire until its twentieth-century decline, he appears a revolutionary actor as well as an extraordinary gambler.[15] He obliged both states to take part in a major European war against the monarchy of Louis XIV, which became a series of wars for global empire between Britain and France in which the Dutch republic ceased to play a major role. Within this grand narrative a history of republicanisms can be seen going on.

William is a revolutionary actor in English history because, in compelling the regime founded in 1689 to fight a European war for its survival, he set England on the road to becoming “Britain,” a powerful military-fiscal state in European and global politics. A crucial step in this process was the creation of a “standing army,” a professional (rather than mercenary) force that became a permanent arm of the state and so transformed its nature. This brought to an end the era in the history of political thought of Hobbes and Locke (as well as Harrington) in which dissolution of government was a possibility and the individual might be obliged to take up arms in consequence of an appeal to heaven. It was made possible by the institution of a bank authorized by parliament and a national system of public credit, in which the individual was encouraged to invest capital, the return of which fluctuated in value according to the rise and fall of confidence in the future of the regime;[16] a confidence that the military-fiscal structure was intended to reinforce as the danger of civil war disappeared and that of foreign invasions lessened.

This was a revolutionary step in English and Anglo-British history, with profound consequences in the history of political thought. It would be valuable to have—or do we possess?—a comparative history contrasting it with that of the army financed by the States and commanded by the Princes, whose relation to the Dutch political structure, political thought, and writing of political history may or may not have been different. In the history of English and Scottish political thought it is next argued that the criticism of standing army and public credit provided a new history of what we term “republicanism.” A convenient moment from which to pursue that history has always been the publication in 1698 of the Scotsman Andrew Fletcher’s Discourse of Government in Relation to Militias, one of a number of tracts aimed at a reduction or disbandment of William’s army now that the European war was over.[17] Fletcher presented a post-Harringtonian or anti-Harringtonian history of arms in Europe, dating from both a Greco-Roman past of arms-bearing hoplite citizens and a Gothic past of landed warriors, who, whether or not the vassals of their lords, had kept arms and liberty in the hands of the subject. It was in that sense that the past had been republican; but with the advent of commerce, navigation, print, and learning—Fletcher drew on Bacon in a sense adverse to Harrington’s—the subject had acquired leisure and culture that distracted him from the maintenance of his liberty. To such arguments Daniel Defoe replied that he was better off under commerce and cultivation, when he could pay soldiers to defend him and elect representatives to defend his liberty. The debate had become one about a profound historical change in the meanings of European politics.

In the reign of Anne, which followed William’s in British history, the debate generated a thesis about the alleged growth of a new ruling class. This was said to include three possibly adverse components: a “landed interest” composed of the county gentry, a “trading interest” composed of the great investors in the London-based and parliament-guaranteed merchant companies, and a “monied interest” composed of those who had invested in government stock and were trading in it as an index to public confidence in the future of the regime.[18] The last of these were denounced as “stockjobbers,” creditors who commanded the state and used their power to promote the corruption of parliament by officeholders and a standing army engaged in expanding warfare, first in Europe and later in the Caribbean, America, and India.[19] The three “interests” stood for a progressive movement away from real property toward mobile, until a point was reached where property had been transformed into credit and material reality into paranoid fantasy. The climax of the analysis was reached in David Hume’s essay “Of Public Credit” (1754), when he imagined a society where the value of all property was the value of its indebtedness, and concluded that all social relationships would be subsumed into credit and imagination. In the critique of credit, the critique of commerce was never more than a middle term; it was admired as reinforcing reality on the one hand, denounced as subverting it on the other. Far too many readers of The Machiavellian Moment have supposed it to be a history of opposition to commerce, whereas it expressly concerned itself with an ambivalence in the response to investment, generating a new history and a new historicism. So do its successor volumes.[20] In this English-generated history of property, liberty, and culture—which may be pursued into the growth of Scottish stadial history and political economy—a crucial role was played by the image of the ancient Mediterranean republic. In that state of society the citizen knew himself as public being, free by virtue of his property and arms and equal in his relations with other citizens similarly qualified. As he (it was a separate story to relate how she) moved into the multiplicity of social relationships generated by commerce and culture, there were huge gains to liberty but a corresponding growth of dangers to it; as there were more and more ways of being free, it grew harder to maintain the autonomy of the self in whom liberty must reside if it was to be known and exercised. Hence the debate between ancient and modern liberty, to be found in Britain a century before it was taken up by Benjamin Constant. It was a debate by no means uniquely British, but in the form it took in Britain a class of free landholders, whose history could be traced back through Gothic to classic and Greco-Roman times, played a crucial role. The image of the republic, it needs repeating, was not presented as a norm to be imitated; it was a benchmark for the interpretation of history, for measuring the gains and losses of movement away from it. There was a tension in the meanings of virtue itself, very evident in the debates over the founding of the American federal republic.

It was a historical narrative containing a number of value judgments, rather than a normative project for the institution of a modern republicanism; but it raised the question of whether a republic was possible under modern conditions, and what its modern character might be. As history, however, it could not take shape without a narrative of how the Roman republic had failed for agrarian reasons and been replaced by the principate, how the failure of the latter had led to the establishment of barbarian kingdoms based on varying forms of land tenure, and how states so based had developed into military-fiscal powers capable of commerce and empire.[21] This narrative, shaped by a succession of historians from Bruni to Robertson, developed concurrently with a “philosophic” history of human (but European) society, based on the stadial sequence from hunter-gatherers to merchants and capitalists and culminating in the political economy of Adam Smith. In this complex historiography, the role of medieval leagues of merchant republics, Lombard, Hanseatic, and Dutch, was important but problematic; and it is here that the anglophone and Atlantic reader, rightly or wrongly, finds the key to the problem of Dutch republican thought.

A recent volume of essays by Wyger Velema[22] has continued the debate over the political and historical thought of the last century of the republic, vigorously conducted by Margaret Jacob, Wijnand Mijnhardt,[23] Nicolas van Sas, and others writing mainly in Dutch. From this it would seem that classical history was energetically employed in relating the corruption and decline of republics both ancient and modern. The ancient republic, that is, the Roman, was recognized as the birthplace of civic virtue as still recognized, but at the same time dismissed as founded on slavery rather than free labor, and so capable of conquest but not of commerce. This was to fall into line with Montesquieu, and after him with Gibbon and Smith (whatever the role of the two latter in Netherlandish historiography and philosophy). Dutch literature of the eighteenth century, however, is concerned with the decline of the modern republic, as the commercial supremacy of the “golden age” shrank and disappeared; the threatened virtue of the citizen was defined in burgher terms that were not those of antiquity; and the process of decline was perceived as replacing commerce by patronage, the republic of merchants by a corrupt oligarchy of officeholders and stockjobbers. Here is a striking similarity with the Tory and Commonwealthman indictment of the Whig military-fiscal order in England, and it is intriguing to find William III attacked for his expansion of patronage, just as Catherine Macaulay and Tobias Smollett were to single him out for enlarging the “influence” of the Crown at the same time as setting limits to its “prerogative.”[24] By 1776 it was possible for Whigs like Burke and Fox, and radicals like Thomas Paine, to suggest that George III had achieved despotic power by monopolizing patronage, and it seems that exactly the same charge was brought against William IV and V by Dutch Patriots. The problem of corruption was anything but absent from the mindset of the commerce-based anciens régimes.

From the recent historiography available in English, however, it would seem that the civic virtue threatened with corruption was conceived in exclusively burgher terms; it was the Weberian austerity and the public spirit of the participants of the golden age that was being undermined by stockholders and officeholders in a process for which staatsgezinden and prinsgezinden blamed each other. Here we encounter a possible point of divergence between the Atlantic and Netherlandish “traditions.” The narrative of virtue and corruption developed in the former was not possible without the images of ancient liberty possessed by the hoplites and quirites and Gothic liberty possessed by the free tenant, whether or not he had needed emancipation from a feudal lord. From this had developed a complex narrative of European history, showing how the liberty of real property had been the precondition of the growth of the trading cities; and an equally complex philosophical history of political economy, in which agriculture and commerce developed together, as sedentary cultivators entered into exchange relationships in an expanding geopolitical space.

All this was the common possession of Enlightened historians and philosophers, and was certainly as accessible in the Netherlands as elsewhere. We seem, however, to lack a study of how (whether?) it was reformulated by Dutch thinkers of the perrukentijd and patriottentijd to explicate the problems of the declining republic. In France and Britain, there was intensive debate as to how the history of Roman-Frankish and Anglo-Norman land tenure had figured in the relations between liberty and authority, property and commerce. What role, the reader wishes to enquire, was ascribed to the ancient liberty of the Batavians? Was their occupation of land, or that of their Frankish and Burgundian successors, related to the growth of the trading cities, or did these take shape in a water world shaped only by rivers giving access to the sea? And—the anglophone reader preoccupied with the relation of land to liberty is tempted to ask—what of the eastern Netherlands, where a landed minor nobility historically Orangist became in one or two cases Patriot enemies of regents and princes alike? It was the easterner Johan Derk van der Cappelen who had Fletcher’s Discourse translated into Dutch; did he think he was living in a history where burgher virtue had no historical preconditions?

The Anglo-American history of liberty is based on the gains and losses derived from the departure from a primeval concept of the “republic,” itself based on an occupation of land, of which history has been both the elaboration and the abandonment. In eighteenth-century thought, this history could not be stated without presenting ancient liberty as lingeringly barbaric and modern liberty as potentially corrupt. How and whether the revolutionary republic and its liberal successors went about escaping from this historicism is a question to which the Dutch passage from republic to parliamentary monarchy is evidently relevant. The question asked in this article is whether the eighteenth-century Dutch possessed a narrative of their own history or that of society that could be applied to these problems. If so, what was it? If not, what were the consequences?

This question is asked in the context of an ultimate paradox. In the Netherlands, the greatest of the burgher republics declined and died—largely, it would seem, of a loss of belief in itself—and after a Bonapartist interlude was replaced by a parliamentary monarchy. In the colonies of English America, revolt against the rule of a parliamentary monarchy led to the foundation of a republic combining deep roots in the past with a character altogether new, for which a recent symposium on “Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage”[25] finds no place. If there is to be a historiography of republicanism, its future seems to be one of increasing complexity.

[1] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975; reissued with a new afterword, 2003).

[2] J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[3] Recent literature has raised two questions respecting the changes of meaning from res publica denoting a governed society of any kind, to denote (a) the Roman regime that preceded the establishment of the Augustan principate, (b) a form of government specifically opposed to monarchy. These changes should be historically examined, but are presupposed in the present article. See James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[4] I pass over the distinction between the words “burgher” and “bourgeois,” in which the former implies a political capacity diminished in the latter. See Wyger R. E. Velema, Republicans: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 82–84.

[5] James Hankins, ed. and trans., Leonardo Bruni: History of the Florentine People, vol. 1, Books I–IV (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, chap. 8.

[6] Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 381–86.

[7] J. G. A. Pocock, “Machiavelli and Rome: The Republic as Ideal and as History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. John M. Najemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

[8] Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, chaps. 3 and 10.

[9] Ibid., chap. 2 and pp. 266–75.

[10] E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice in Dutch Republican Thought (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1980).

[11] There was (and is) an extensive literature of Dutch Tacitism, which should be better known to anglophone scholars.

[12] J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Harrington: “The Commonwealth of Oceana” and “A System of Politics” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, chap. 11; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, chap. 13.

[13] At this point Harrington is following Francis Bacon’s History of Henry VII.

[14] Jonathan Israel, ed., The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Lois G. Schwoerer, ed., The Revolution of 1688–89: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold, eds., The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

[15] J. G. A. Pocock: “The Fourth English Civil War: Dissolution, Desertion and Alternative Histories in the Glorious Revolution,” in Schwoerer, Revolution of 1688–89, 52–64; “The Significance of 1688: Some Reflections on Whig History,” in J. G. A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 114–32.

[16] It seems important to emphasize at this point that a commercially based regime was established in England by a parliamentary monarchy. That a commercial vision of republican government existed during the Commonwealth’s conduct of the First Dutch War has been reemphasized by Steven Pincus and Arthur H. Williamson; see the latter’s Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 98–99.

[17] John Robertson, ed., Andrew Fletche: Political Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

[18] Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, chaps. 12–15.

[19] In a paper presented to the Clark Library conference, Margaret Jacob described a Dutch invective against stockjobbers in which they were identified as Portuguese-Jewish petty speculators. If this is all, the rhetoric belongs in the history of anti-Judaism, not as in England to a history of change in property and power.

[20] J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Pocock, Discovery of Islands.

[21] Narratives of Civil Government, volume 2 of Barbarism and Religion, offers an account of this historiography.

[22] Velema, Republicans.

[23] Margaret Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt, eds., The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). For work in Dutch, Velema’s bibliography should be consulted. See also Leonard Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Republic: History and Politics in the Dutch Republic, 1747–1800 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977).

[24] J. G. A. Pocock, “Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 243–58.

[25] Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Why Did the Swiss Miss the Machiavellian Moment? History, Myth, Imperial and Constitutional Law in the Early Modern Swiss Confederation

Zach Chandler — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 11:51:19 -0800

Since the publication of J. G. A. Pocock’s masterpiece, Machiavelli has been the founding father of the Atlantic republican tradition. For obvious reasons, however, the Florentine chancellor barely mentioned the states bordering the Atlantic in his works. When he studied the actions of great men, his sources were “a continual study of ancient history” and “a long experience of modern affairs,” whose obvious focus was Italy and the neighboring powers waging war on the peninsula.[1] In a world still centered on the Mediterranean, neither the British nations nor the Dutch belonged. On the other hand, when Machiavelli wanted to introduce a successful model for republican government, he not only used the admired but distant classical models of Sparta and Rome and the somehow ambivalent Venetian case, but also the Swiss Confederation. The confederates were “armatissimi e liberissimi,” most free because most armed and ready to defend their liberty as masters of modern warfare (“maestri delle moderne guerre”) the way the Romans had done in antiquity: with an invincible militia army—and not, as Machiavelli’s fellow Italians did, with mercenary troops.[2] The Swiss were strong, victorious, and fearless warriors because they lived in egalitarian “libera libertà” and lacked princes and nobles; the poverty of uncivilized mountaineers (“uomini montanari . . . senza civiltà”) allowed them to stay far away from the corruption of the curia in Rome and to follow their original civic religion.[3] Hence Machiavelli considered the Swiss federative republic to have the best constitution, second only to the expansive republic of the Romans.[4]

What did the Swiss think about such praise? The first—Latin—translation of the Principe ever to be printed was published in Basel, in 1560. It was the work of Italian refugees, such as the translator Silvestro Tegli from Foligno; his colleague Pietro Perna from Lucca printed a second edition in 1580 prefaced by himself and Nicolaus Stupanus, who originated from Chiavenna. The foreword caused a scandal for several reasons. In the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which Protestants like Innocent Gentillet attributed to Catherine de Medici’s Machiavellian conspiracy, the Huguenot François Hotman, himself another refugee in Basel, was disgusted that the editors dared to praise Machiavelli’s “summum ingenium” and blame monarchomachs like himself as rebels. Although the Antistes of the Zwinglian church of Zurich, Rudolph Gwalther, backed Hotman, the debate remained essentially one among learned refugees.[5] That was typical for the Swiss reaction to Machiavelli, far into the eighteenth century. If he was mentioned at all, Catholic and Protestant authors alike referred to him, rather incidentally, as the exemplar of amoral secular political thought; he was a cipher for the godless, not the author of books one would read. From the late seventeenth century onwards, when religious criticism receded, the critique shifted to political reproach: Machiavelli became a synonym for absolutist “statists” who wanted to establish a despotic government without any regard for the ancient laws and the participative rights of citizens.[6]

The early modern Swiss were obviously not interested in the encomium Machiavelli had offered them. To religiously inspired authors and to more political thinkers, he was the notorious “bad guy” and remained the dangerous author of the Principe, not the republican of the Discorsi. Or could it be that the Swiss were not at all interested in Machiavelli’s republicanism? Did they not feel a need for the republican mentor that inspired James Harrington and other Englishmen who fought the house of Stuart during and after the Commonwealth? Didn’t the Swiss share the need that stimulated contemporary Dutch authors like the brothers de la Court, who discovered the Florentine republic as a model in order to conceive and legitimatize republican government against the house of Orange? Both federations originated in a revolt against the Habsburgs; both achieved formal independence from the Holy Roman Empire in 1648, through the Peace of Westphalia; and in spite of important Catholic minorities, both were bastions of the Reformed Church considered already then and even more by twentieth-century researchers to be a hotbed of republicanism.[7]

But Zwingli and Calvin were not republicans. What mattered for them was having the right faith, not a precise political constitution. Both expressed some reserve about nobles who abused their power. Nevertheless, they both wrote humble letters to princes such as Francis I, and neither would have ever questioned the legitimacy of the king of France, even less that of the German emperor. Actually, they agreed with all the Swiss in the sixteenth century that the Confederation was part of the Holy Roman Empire. They would not grant the emperor a say in their everyday decisions. But it was clear that the liberty and the legitimacy of the Swiss petty states, the cantons, stemmed from the Empire. When they had revolted in the fourteenth century, the Swiss had not fought the emperor but the Habsburg reeves whom they accused of alienating free imperial cities and valleys (Talschaften) from their only legitimate ruler, the emperor. He had granted the cantons liberty, lordship, and regalia, which were all seen as privileges accorded by the universal source of all secular power, the Empire.[8] This fact was symbolically represented by the double-headed eagle over the canton’s coat of arms or in the middle of all the cantons, as it could be seen, for example, on the frontispiece of the first printed History of the Confederation (Petermann Etterlin, 1507).[9] The same Etterlin’s chronicle contained the history of William Tell, invented a few decades previous, around 1470. In the meantime, his deeds and his comrades’ oath of federation against the tyrannical reeves had become part of national history and legitimacy. In his chronicle written in the 1530s, the humanist Aegidius Tschudi, considered to be the founder of Swiss historiography, combined the different elements of myth and history into a narrative that would become canonical, although it was not printed until 1734 (it later served Friedrich Schiller as the model for his drama William Tell).

However, when Tschudi interpreted revolt against the Habsburgs as the restitution of the original Swiss liberty, he had not only the privileges of emperors such as Frederic II in mind. By making the Helvetians the ancestors of the confederates, he added another important element to Swiss history: they stemmed from a people ennobled by Julius Caesar himself, who defeated, but did not conquer them; indeed, he praised their strength and courage in De bello gallico. Swiss identity and their sense of belonging together were hence explained historically: original liberty of the Helvetians; integration into the Empire of the Romans and later of the Germans, always as a highly privileged community; the Habsburg threat followed by the restoration of the former unconditioned liberty in the revolt against the reeves; autonomy as a German-speaking nation within Gallia (because they were to the left of the Rhine River). The plot was similar to many other humanist narratives, for example, Hugo Grotius’s discovery of the Batavians as Dutch ancestors. This kind of narrative had the one big advantage of making more of the Swiss than they had been so far. After all, the Confederation had been constituted, since the fourteenth century, as a defensive league of rather aristocratic cities and democratic valleys. Apart from the inclusion of the latter (that is, of peasant communities), this was not uncommon in the late medieval Empire; one can mention the Hanseatic and the Swabian Leagues or the Alsatian Décapole. But these remained towns without territorial connections. By referring the confederates to the Helvetians, a nation that had settled in the Swiss Central Plateau, Tschudi claimed not only privileges for his fellow Swiss, but also territorial and ethnic continuity going back to the revered times of antiquity. The league thus became a nation (in the early modern sense).[10]

It remained, however, a nation within the Holy Roman Empire. The humanist invention of tradition made the Swiss a nation on the same level as the Swabians, the Bavarians, or the Prussians. They were still part of the Germans as a whole and not a people opposed to them. This conservative reading is manifest in Josias Simler’s De republica Helvetiorum of 1576, a work that appeared the same year in German and a year later in French, was very often reprinted in the different languages, and would remain also internationally the classical reference for the Swiss constitution until the French Revolution. Simler was a very authoritative author, a minister from Zurich, married to the granddaughter of Zwingli and the daughter of the aforementioned Antistes Gwalther. Against those who accused the Swiss of rebellion, Simler maintained that they always had been loyal to the emperors and even to the nobility. Liberty did not mean liberation from the Empire, but liberty through and within the Empire. Simler showed as much by presenting the Swiss cantons and their allies in a descriptive way, relating their history and detailing their institutions. This was not a theoretical, philosophical approach, but a historical, empirical one. Simler considered the Confederation to be some kind of a mixed constitution (aristocratic towns and democratic country) where the individual cantons were almost independent, but nevertheless formed one single “state” (“gleych als wenns ein Statt wer, ein Commun und ein Regierung”; “una nihilominus est civitas, una Respublica”).[11]

This was the clear opposite of what Jean Bodin maintained in his Six livres de la République that were also published, by coincidence, in 1576. According to Bodin, the Swiss did not form one state (the appropriate translation of Bodin’s république/respublica), but thirteen separate petty states, or even twenty-two if one added the so-called allies (Zugewandte) to the cantons as well. Each of them had its own territory, public servants, treasury, coat of arms, and other regalia, in short “the soueraignty thereof diuided from the rest.”[12] In order not only to define, but also to impose, his new key concept of sovereignty, Bodin was very outspoken against the idea of a mixed constitution, in general as well as in the particular case of the Swiss. Each canton was either an aristocracy or a democracy of its own. And as they no longer respected the imperial laws and the emperor as their sovereign, they were not only not a monarchy, but also no longer belonged to the Empire: “civitates ab imperio Germanorum avulsae.”[13]

Bodin’s sharp French logic settled all the questions the Swiss preferred not to ask. After all, the Confederation was not a philosophical or legal construction, but a customary structure that one could only explain historically the way Simler had done: many cantons and still one state; not obedient to the emperor, but still adhering to the universal Empire; united not by one general law, but by a multitude of particular treaties that brought together thirteen fully entitled cantons, different categories of allies (Zugewandte, allied respectively with all or only some of these cantons), and finally joint dependencies (Gemeine Herrschaften, governed in common by some or almost all of the cantons). If one judged such a variety of established networks by the sole criterion of sovereignty, one inevitably simplified and wronged them. Bodin did something quite similar when discussing the Empire. To him, it was not a monarchy, but an aristocracy composed of secular and ecclesiastic princes, not to mention the counts and knights, imperial towns, even imperial villages, and so on. Legions of imperial jurists would not accept the glorious Empire being reduced to a mere aristocracy and would spend their ink to cope with Bodin’s categories, distinguishing essentially maiestas realis (of the Empire and its estates) and maiestas personalis (of the emperor) as if there could be two distinct aspects of sovereignty.[14]

For the confederates, Bodin’s concept of sovereignty was not a matter of honor as in the German case, but it still put into question the existence of the Confederation as a political entity. Hence the theoretical challenge for the Swiss in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not Machiavelli, but Bodin; and the political challenge was not Italy, but France, where from Henry IV onwards, absolutist kings drew the consequences of the doctrine of sovereignty. Switzerland shared this challenge not only with the Holy Roman Empire, but with most other European countries. The numerous conflicts opposing kings and estates in mid-seventeenth-century Europe were all over sovereignty: the Thirty Years' War, when the emperor first seemed to become the absolutist ruler of the whole Empire and ended by conceding the jus foederis to the imperial estates; the regional autonomy of Catalonia or Naples as defended against the centralizing unitarismo of the Spanish king; the fronde against Mazarin in defense of the nobles’ and parlements’ privileges; the English parliament’s defense of the “ancient constitution” against Charles I’s prerogatives, which led to the civil war and the commonwealth; the conflict between the house of Orange and Holland’s urban elites resulting in the ware vrijheid, when Johan de Witt and his merchant regents ruled without a stadholder. With such experiences in mind, James Harrington compared sovereignty to gunpowder, “being subject to take fire against you as for you,” blowing up in some cases the estates or “people,” and in others—he mentioned Holland and Switzerland—the (Habsburg) king.[15] The classical ideal of a harmonious mixed constitution (still present in Harrington’s “ancient prudence”)[16] gave way to a sharp either-or because the long negotiation process between ruler and estates was no longer in harmony with the growing modern state’s need for efficiency.

It was only in this situation, and only in the Netherlands, that the intellectual allies of Johan de Witt, especially Johann and Pieter de la Court and Spinoza, developed a distinct republican theory that could transcend the mixed constitution’s vagueness. They reacted, as did many others, to the Cartesian theory of passions and especially to Hobbes as a successor to Bodin in conceiving absolutist sovereignty. The Dutch accepted the concept itself, but not the monarchical bias of these authors, which they deemed more dangerous for liberty than useful for security.[17] Discussing the exigencies of a state that was no longer based on metaphysical pillars, the brothers de la Court could discover the author of the Discorsi as an alternative leading to republican instead of monarchic absolutism.[18] Machiavelli was no longer reduced to an immoral bogeyman who would scandalize the apologists of a politica Christiana. While the traditional moralists’ insistence on religious priorities had eventually led to confessional civil war, Machiavelli’s pragmatic and utilitarian reflections argued from much the same assumptions and fears as Bodin and other theorists of absolutist monarchy. However, the answer Machiavelli opposed to civil strife and anarchy was not the monopoly of force of an individual who always risked abusing it. The brothers de la Court adopted the Discorsi’s civic virtue of the many who would subordinate their potentially dangerous passions to a set of rational laws. Most of all, these laws had to control the religious passions and those who abused them: the churches and clerics. Such a collective sovereign would produce stability within a political constitution that became the more secular and temporal the farther it left behind the framework of monarchy as modeled after the one and only eternal Almighty, manifest both in the divine grace of the absolutist kings and in the Empire’s salvific mission.

In such a secular constitution, where the political order was no longer part of the metaphysical structure, decline became a major preoccupation. If the political order depended only on human beings who would behave better or worse depending on man-made laws, constitution mattered. If the sovereign was no longer God, but human (either one or many) and thus flawed, constitution mattered. If the quality of a sovereign depended no longer on his piety and confessional zeal, but on his ability to guarantee both security and freedom of citizens, constitution mattered. And Machiavelli had been the first to take constitution seriously, at least in the opening chapters of his two notorious works where he formulated in quite similar ways a clear distinction: “All the states, all the dominions that have held sway over men, have been either republics or principalities.”[19] However, in the Discorsi, Machiavelli rather traditionally confronted kingdoms and republics on the one side with tyranny on the other: vivere politico, the true life of a citizen in a political regime, as opposed to absolute power (“una potestà assoluta”), is possible by way of a republic or by way of a kingdom: “o per via di republica o di regno.”[20] France, for example, was not presented as a principato (principality), but as a regno (kingdom). The difference was that, according to Machiavelli, the French kings respected “numerous laws on which the security of all their people depends” and which, for their part, the parlements guaranteed.[21] Government under law made the French regno a free government and the antipode of the illegitimate, absolutist signori in the principalities of Renaissance Italy.[22] What Machiavelli admired was a moderate monarchy that fit into the Polybian scheme of a mixed constitution with corresponding obligations of the different estates.

For the same reasons, French authors of the sixteenth century, such as the influential Claude de Seyssel, agreed on labeling their country a tempered or mixed monarchy (“monarchie tempérée,” “mixte”).[23] The Venetian Paolo Paruta agreed as well that the French regno, but also England, Spain, Poland, and the Holy Roman Empire, were mixed constitutions only faintly distinct from the perfect one of Venice: all these states did not depend on one man’s arbitrary will, but on a clear legal framework that the kings promised to keep just as the Doge did.[24] Like Machiavelli, such thinkers of the mixed constitution generally considered the constitutional question itself (monarchy or republic) to be much less important than the moral one (tyranny or not) when they discussed the main purpose of political order. For them, the decisive criterion was justice; for Machiavelli, it was stability and security; and in the course of the century the true faith, as with Zwingli or Calvin, often became the one criterion to distinguish between bad and good government, whether a monarchy or an aristocracy. Only in 1576 did Bodin make sovereignty—and not the ruler’s justice nor his stability or faith—the touchstone of political order. Only then could monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements cease to be combined in a mixed constitution and give way to a clear alternative: sovereignty could reside either in the one or in the many—in a king, or a republic.

North of the Alps and before Bodin, a sharp opposition of republican and princely rule did not even exist in the ambivalent Machiavellian sense that had emerged especially in Bruni’s Florence and in Venice out of the confrontation between communes and signori. The Swiss political imagery could easily combine a Simlerian mixed constitution with the idea of a universal imperial monarchy. As a poor country, where the princely power had vanished already in the fourteenth century, the Confederation lacked the kind of internal conflicts between estates and king that provoked the Dutch reflections on an absolute republic in the seventeenth century. What stimulated perpetual friction and periodic confrontations was the religious divide between Catholic and Protestant cantons. As long as salvation was at stake and as long as nobody threatened the customary order, constitutional questions did not matter. In a society that secularized only slowly, it took some time and different contested fields until some protagonists took interest in the logic of modern political theory and started asking questions about who was the sovereign. In this process of learning, three areas of conflict became decisive: (1) the relation of the Confederation with the Empire and its exemption in 1648; (2) the dilemma during the wars opposing Louis XIV and the United Provinces; and (3) the internal struggle, within the cantons, to define the circle of those who belonged to or rather who were the sovereign body.

When Basel’s mayor, Johann Rudolf Wettstein, left for the Westphalian negotiations in late 1646, he barely knew what sovereignty was. His aim was to prevent litigants from appealing to the imperial chamber after a judge from Basel had given his verdict. During the Thirty Years' War that had happened, sometimes ending in the arrest of Basel merchandise in the Empire, and Wettstein planned to ask for the privilege of exemption from the imperial chamber. But French diplomats implored him not to use the language of imperial law and its privileges, but to follow the Dutch example and to cite the liberty acquired by the arms. That would be an argument of a sovereign within international law and implied that the Swiss did not belong to the Empire. Wettstein should refer only to the effective possession of rights and not to their historical origin, as the French did in those former provinces of the Empire that they had annexed. The French used the language of sovereignty in Westphalia not only in support of the Swiss, but also for other members of the Empire. Their hidden agenda followed Bodin’s logic: if estates of the Empire claimed sovereignty for themselves, they inevitably became emancipated from the grip of imperial power and left the Empire, where the emperor was the unique sovereign. The emperor’s negotiators anticipated these strategies and cautiously avoided the use of the word “sovereign” during the negotiations, as well as in the drafting of the treaty.[25]

Wettstein, however, insisted that the Confederation was a free and independent state that did not accept judges it had not appointed itself.[26] In his so-called Recharge, Wettstein no longer requested a mere confirmation or extension of privileges, but demanded that the Empire leave the Confederation undisturbed to pursue its “free, sovereign status.”[27] Being one of the first German-speaking persons at all to employ the word “sovereign,” Wettstein created a case of international law out of an issue that until then had belonged exclusively to imperial law. The emperor, who did not want to drive the Swiss into the French camp, found a solution in granting them the “exemption”—a title that remained within traditional imperial law and that, in spite of the French diplomats’ private lessons, even Wettstein himself did not clearly distinguish from sovereignty. He was right in the sense that in the international context of the time, not only the French but other nations as well rather quickly interpreted the exemption as sovereignty, agreeing that the Swiss had the necessary requirements in foreign policy, namely the unrestricted jus belli ac pacis and the jus foederis. By the end of the seventeenth century, German jurists and even the imperial diplomats treated the Confederation as a republic outside the Empire.

In Switzerland itself, however, there was rarely a deliberate shift from imperial symbols to those of republican sovereignty. One exception was when in 1698 Zurich built a new town hall according to a clear political and artistic conception, replacing all the imperial and hence monarchic emblems by republican symbols. Thus, on a triptych painted by Hans Asper in 1567, the imperial eagle with globe and scepter now made room for an altarpiece covered by a liberty hat and representing the Rütlischwur, the legendary oath of the first three confederates.[28]

Interestingly, those founding cantons themselves were much less interested in symbolizing sovereignty. The cantons of Nidwalden and Obwalden embellished their town halls with two-headed eagles until as late as 1714 and 1733, respectively, and Obwalden, Appenzell-Innerrhoden, and Schwyz minted two-headed eagle coins into the 1740s. To these Catholic petty states, the Empire and imperial law remained the metaphysical structure that guaranteed their privileges and hence their statehood. They had little to gain by switching to the Bodinian international and constitutional law that favored the strong sovereigns who were able to defend themselves and conquer others by military force—in this case, after another civil war in 1712, most likely the large Protestant cantons Berne and Zurich.[29]

After all, the Swiss cantons respected their fellows’ territory, even after a victory. The model for sovereign expansion was elsewhere. The French king Louis XIV not only rolled back the Habsburgs in several wars and conquered important territories from them, but he also appeared to be an antagonist of republican rule. The Sun King despised and humiliated the Netherlands, Venice, and Genoa by means both of military aggression and diplomatic protocol. Neither did Louis XIV spare the Swiss from such contempt, as demonstrated in 1663 when he denied Swiss ambassadors the sovereign’s right to keep their heads covered while they took the oath concealing their renewed alliance with France. The naïveté of the Swiss appalled the Dutch ambassador because it compromised republics in general. Nevertheless, he sounded out the possibility of a republican alliance with the Venetians and the Swiss. Although this endeavor did not meet with success, it proved that constitutional similarities gained momentum while religious allegiances slowly lost importance: a possible league would have brought together Catholic Venice, the mostly Calvinist United Provinces, and the biconfessional Confederation.

Of course, this was not a question of pure idealism, or even ideology—the renowned Swiss mercenaries were at stake. By far the biggest part of them traditionally was in the service of France. In the following conflicts, however, the Dutch started to contest the French claim. After Louis XIV had precipitated the Dutch War (1672–78), a pamphlet, L’affermissement des republiques de Hollande & de Suisse, made such an attempt in 1675. The anonymous author promoted an alliance between republics and especially between the Dutch and the Swiss because they shared a common past of defending themselves against the Habsburgs. Furthermore, the two countries had in common not only historical labors, but also religious similarities—even though religion, according to the anonymous author, no longer played a role in the building of alliances. So it was a secular alliance that the Affermissement opposed to the threat of royal absolutism: “Toute sorte de Couronnes absoluës & Ministres souverains doivent estre suspectes aux Republicains” (republicans may not trust any kind of absolutist crowns and sovereign ministers).[30] Through such colloquial pamphlets and their references to the popular heroes William Tell and William of Orange, republican feelings and loyalties started to spread among a nonacademic audience.

Although the Dutch did not make their way in 1675, they repeated a similar message even more intensely during the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97). This time, the Dutch spokesman was the extraordinary envoy to Switzerland, Petrus Valkenier. Valkenier blamed Louis XIV for dealing with sovereign republics as if they were his subjects and vassals, slights the Swiss admittedly had experienced. When addressing the Confederation as an “Absolute, Independente, Souveraine und zugleich auch Neutrale Republic” (an absolute, independent, sovereign, and equally neutral republic), Valkenier deliberately used the language of modern constitutional law with a republican imprint.[31] Such terms were exceptional, at least to Swiss ears, and expressed Valkenier’s claim that the Confederation, as a sovereign state, was not unilaterally bound by its earlier alliances to France. Of course the Swiss could follow the policy of neutrality that had become customary in the last decades. But they could also give it a different interpretation than the French did, who maintained that neutrality did not admit changes of the status quo in mercenary service. According to Valkenier, neutrality meant something different, namely hiring out mercenaries on equal terms, not only to the Sun King, but also to the United Provinces. The harmony and sympathy the two republics shared would naturally lead to a security pact and such an alliance would defend them not only against France but, as a matter of principle, against all monarchies. Kings resented republics in general and would overthrow them as soon as they could, if the free states did not protect themselves through prudent accords.[32] Valkenier thus developed a universal argument about naturally conflicting constitutions, and his rhetoric eventually won: on 15 May 1693, Zurich signed a treaty and sent a battalion of mercenaries to the Dutch—thereby breaking the French monopoly on mercenaries and leading other cantons to follow the example.

It was only in these last decades of the seventeenth century that the fundamental difference between monarchies and republics first became a major theme for Swiss statesmen. In 1706, Johann Ludwig Hirzel from Zurich apprehended that the Austrian envoys preferred submission to liberty when they realized their “monarchic principles.”[33] That same year, Zurich’s mayor Heinrich Escher, though a long-time pragmatic ally of France, told the Venetian ambassador that alliances between republics were always good and that they were even better when the monarchs despised them.[34] Similarly, the ambassador Peter von Salis, from the Grisons, was convinced that real brotherhood between states could be established only between republics.[35]

The foreign word “republic” itself was quite new in Switzerland and in German in general. The Swiss learned it before the Germans, through their contacts with France and their French-speaking allies. One of them, Geneva, was addressed for the first time as “Republique de Geneve” by Henry IV in 1602 in order to emancipate the town linguistically from the menacing Duke of Savoy who claimed to be the Genevans' lord.[36] Against such pretensions, the title “republic” expressed sovereignty. Therefore the Prince of Orléans-Longueville intervened in 1610 when the city of Neuchâtel, another Swiss ally, wanted to make the standard bearer swear to the “republic”—and no longer to the bien commun, the commonweal. The prince claimed sovereignty for himself and denied “ledict mot de republicque” to Neuchâtel because—unlike Berne, as he mentioned—this city was not sovereign.[37] “Republic” hence was a controversial title. When, in 1628, the communes of the Valais explicitly claimed sovereignty and deprived their lord, the prince-bishop of Sion, of his secular power, they immediately started to mint coins with the inscription “Respublica Vallesia.” The Catholic cantons of central Switzerland, usually their allies, maintained however that “republic” was the very opposite of the “democracy” practiced in these Alpine cantons, accepting this new title only reluctantly and late, in 1657.[38]

They were right: “republic” actually meant sovereign lordship of the few and quite often a narrow aristocratic regime. According to Samuel Henzi, who was executed after a failed conspiracy in 1750, Berne’s town councils had used “Machiavellian principles” to usurp their power from the entire citizenry. The former participation of the citizens in the commune had found its device on the medieval seal bearing the circumscription “Civitas et Communitas Bernensis” (city and community of Berne), but the urban patricians replaced it in 1716 by a new one with the inscription “Respublica Bernensis”—a transfer, according to Henzi, of sovereignty from the city to the councils.[39]

Accordingly, the discussion about the republic was a discussion about who did and did not still belong to the collective sovereign. As early as 1682, Berne’s city council (Kleiner Rat) and city parliament (Grosser Rat) had decided that they both were sovereign in the same way a prince was in a “well-policed state.”[40] This meant that the city council did not monopolize sovereignty to the disadvantage of the city parliament as some of the councilors had claimed. However, both institutions were composed by the same quasi-hereditary group of patrician families who alone were entitled to rule (regimentsfähig). Thus the regular citizens—not to mention the subjects in the countryside—were barred not only de facto, but also de jure from any participation in the republic, as Henzi rightly lamented. Around 1700, similar conflicts took place in other Swiss towns (for example, in Basel, Geneva, and Zurich). The question was always the same: which part of the citizenry still belonged to the sovereign republic and which part was outside? In Geneva, these debates would last throughout the eighteenth century and, involving the case of Rousseau in the 1760s, would make the city a “laboratory of the revolution.”

To sum up, one can say that the word “republic” was a core element of the French constitutional and international law that gradually substituted the idea of imperial law in the Confederation during the seventeenth century. The notion of sovereignty replaced imperial privileges as the basis of Swiss statehood and imposed the decision about who really constituted this republic and thus belonged to the collective absolute lord. This decision often led to the victory of an aristocratic (urban) elite against, respectively, a foreign prince (Geneva against Savoy), an ecclesiastical prince (the Valais magnates against the bishop of Sion), or the fellow citizens (the councils of Berne and elsewhere). However, there were cases—for example, in Zug and the Grisons—where the rural communes turned out to be the sovereign, in a “democratic” sense, to the disadvantage of the city (of Zug and Chur, respectively).[41]

The republican language and a republican identity resulted, in Switzerland, from the integration into the world of international diplomacy and scholarly learning. The case of Petrus Valkenier, the ambassador residing for many years in Zurich, shows that in the second half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch replaced the French as teachers of sovereignty at least for the Protestant cantons. While the French model became exclusively and insolently monarchical under Louis XIV, the Swiss came into contact with the republican and sometimes radical interpretation of modern constitutional law that existed in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, for example, the engraver Bernard Picart, a convert to Calvinism and a key figure of the Radical Enlightenment, employed a young Swiss from Zurich, David Herrliberger. Picart sketched the frontispiece for the two most important books on either federation’s national history: the republican allegories and symbols that surround Hollandia in Jean Le Clerc’s Histoire des Provinces-Unies des Pays Bas (1723) are very similar to those Picart used for a picture of a crowned Helvetia sitting on a throne.[42] The same Herrliberger engraved this picture so it could later become the frontispiece of the first printed edition of Aegidius Tschudi’s Chronicon Helveticum (1734), a crucial text for Swiss historiography that already has been touched on. Other intellectual models of the Swiss were Hugo Grotius, provoking, for example, the first Zurich thesis on constitutional law, written in 1667 by Christoph Werdmüller, or another scholarly analysis of the delicate relationship between church and state (Johann Ludwig Hirzel, 1695) that significantly did not go to press because of its Erastian position. In those years, the orthodox Zwinglian Church fiercely opposed the “disgusting” ideas of Grotius and especially Descartes, not to mention of Spinoza, which some students imported from the Netherlands.[43] A later mayor of Zurich, Johann Caspar Escher was also among those young members of the elite who visited Dutch universities such as Utrecht, where Escher wrote his thesis in 1697 with professor Gerard de Vries, whom he called a “fervent republican.” In the thesis De libertate populi, Escher condemned absolutism and defended the liberty of the people that originated in the state of nature and led to democracy, at least during the early stages of societal development.[44]

Escher’s friend was the famous natural scientist Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, who also received his doctorate from Utrecht, in medicine in 1694. In 1713, the physician became the leader of a civic uprising when Zurich’s craft guilds, according to the logics of sovereignty just described, claimed to be included in the sovereign body. Scheuchzer justified the bloodless revolt by invoking the principles of natural law such as natural equality by birth or the right of resistance if tyrants violated one’s fundamental rights. Most prominent among those was the backbone of sovereignty, legislation, since the “Jus ferendi leges et mutandi regiminis formam” belonged to the whole community and hence to all of its citizens.[45] With an explicit reference to Grotius, the guild delegates opposed two kinds of sovereigns. Either he was an absolute ruler or someone who acknowledged himself as being subject to the law, as it was and must be the case in Venice and Zurich: the sovereign was “singulis major,” but “universis minor,” more than the other individuals, but less than the universe.[46] With such arguments, Scheuchzer and the craft guilds were more successful than their Bernese homologues and obtained at least as a symbolic concession that the regular citizens henceforth were counted among the true possessors of sovereignty.

Looking back later on what had happened in 1713, Scheuchzer reflected upon the original contract of Zurich’s society and compared the present situation in his hometown to the freedom of the farmers in the democratic cantons, where sovereignty still resided in the people so that every poor farmer was interested in and knowledgeable about politics. Scheuchzer concluded that rebellions like the one in Zurich were necessary every now and then to awaken the people who had remained ignorant over the centuries. But after discovering their liberties, the common people now refused blind obedience and learned to domesticate the ruler’s designs and vices.[47] The reference of the urban Protestant Scheuchzer to the poor farmers was far from evident, as the Alpine democratic cantons mostly were Catholic. It was not so surprising in Scheuchzer, however, who was responsible, in natural science, for a new appreciation of the Alps, that the urban elites had abhorred hitherto almost as much as the foreign visitors bemoaning their primitiveness and fearing their dangers.

In the early eighteenth century, and thanks essentially to Scheuchzer, the image changed: the Alpine shepherd became an idealized model for original, true Swissness. It emerged out of the new natural science, the Physico-theologia, which gave the Alps a place in salvific history because Scheuchzer interpreted the fossils he found in the mountains as a proof of the diluvium.[48] Moreover, the Alpine landscape acquired moral and political value: the Swiss shepherds lived humbly in the true democracy of the state of nature because their austere Alpine environment resembled the state of nature as well. This was quite the opposite of the luxury and corruption that ruled the monarchical courts, and infiltrated the urban cantons as well. Thus the virtuous and free Alpine shepherd who lived according to the ancestor’s customs could become the positive model for a new Swiss identity. By addressing both Catholics and Protestants, this model promised to overcome religious strife and bring back the ancestors’ unity and purity.

The motif of the poor and pure shepherd seemingly revived a discourse of the sixteenth century, when some authors and artists had opposed the good “old Swiss” to the luxurious and decadent “young Swiss.”[49] But that had been a purely internal discourse of moral reform in a time when military defeats in Italy and the Zwinglian reformation crushed the temporary status of the Confederation as a European power. Scheuchzer discovered the Alps in a different international context. The Swiss shepherds were welcome in the political language of the early Enlightenment that criticized France on two levels: for its luxurious culture that expanded the effeminate manners of the court and for its aggressive absolutist politics that created “despotism” at home and abroad.

One of the first major contributions to this discourse were the Lettres sur les Anglais et les Français et sur les voyages, written in the 1690s, but printed only in 1725. The author, the Bernese Beat Ludwig von Muralt, contributed an original essay to the upcoming discussion of national characters. Von Muralt praised “l’ancien Caractére [sic] de notre nation” and opposed the true simplicity of poor freemen to the artificial behavior at court and especially in France where, for a long time already, one had been used to laughing about the “simplicité” of the uncivilized Swiss.[50] Like Scheuchzer, von Muralt wanted not only to rehabilitate his fellow countrymen's reputation in the face of French insinuations, but also to warn them of the degeneration that was menacing from the west. He was especially worried about the officers of the mercenary troops in France who aped the French mores.

The English ambassador Abraham Stanyan joined this critique and warned that those officer’s “Luxury and general Corruption of Manners” would change the Swiss and their “simplicity in their Manners, as well as in their Dress.”[51] Stanyan’s Account of Switzerland (1714) was translated into French and could thus influence the international debates of the early Enlightenment just as the minister Abraham Ruchat from the Vaud did in the same year when publishing in Leiden Les délices de la Suisse. According to Ruchat, the Swiss had lived for a long time hidden in their mountains, lacking commerce with the outside world almost completely; they were simple and a little bit rough, but open and warm. Even though the Swiss still remained relatively sane compared to other nations, there had been a major change in 1690, when they had undertaken commerce with the rest of Europe and the officers had brought back “la dissimulation, l’hypocrisie, & ce libertinage qu’on appelle galanterie” (the vices of dissimulation, hypocrisy, and the libertinage called gallantry).[52]

In the morally dangerous situation dated and analyzed by Ruchat and his fellows, the Alpine shepherd as opposed to the mercenary serving in France became a metaphor not only for the opposition of simplicity and luxury, but also for the contrast between (democratic or republican) freedom and monarchical servility. In his heavily influential poem Die Alpen, printed in 1729, Albrecht von Haller put this idea into poesy: “Dann, wo die Freiheit herrscht, wird alle Mühe minder / Die Felsen selbst beblümt und Boreas gelinder” (where freedom rules, every pain is softened, the rocks are flowered and dulcet the winds).[53] The German Enlightenment especially found in Haller’s Switzerland a model for freedom and reform in an absolutist world. Behind the appearance of moral ingenuity, what the admirers actually praised was a country lacking a dynasty and a strong state. That spared it from the endemic hereditary wars of the time and from sustaining an expensive court. These were the two main reasons why the relatively poor Swiss had to pay little or no taxes at all, which made a big difference in comparison with the situation of the Dutch, who accumulated a heavy public debt while trying in vain to keep up with the national monarchies.

Thanks especially to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the influence of this idyllic Swiss was not limited to the German-speaking world but became a version of the innocent and noble savage: the happiest people in the world, made of virtuous peasants always acting wisely and directing affairs of state after gathering under an oak.[54] However, the literary, mythical, and historical narratives of Swiss simplicity did not correspond with reality, as the “citoyen de Genève” was to realize in his own conflicts with the “République de Genève” to which he had once dedicated his Discours sur l’inégalité parmi les hommes. As explained above, in Geneva and its allied Swiss cantons, the word “Republic” meant the absolute, sovereign rule of a limited number of families, a de facto aristocracy that excluded the regular citizens from political participation, let alone the peasant subjects who were the object of the pastoral poetry.

Rousseau was the first Swiss, if we consider him Swiss, to discover and praise Machiavelli’s work as “the book of republicans.”[55] This reference recalls the original question: why was there no Machiavellian moment in Switzerland (or only very late)? For a considerable time, the Swiss did not participate in the “Atlantic” debates that originated in the opposition of (French) absolute monarchy and the (Anglo-Dutch) republican experiences. The Confederation was best explained historically (and not theoretically) within the traditional frame of the Empire, as an anachronistic league of imperial cities. This was a decidedly conservative explanation that did not legitimize a new or changed constitution, as the Dutch and English had to in the seventeenth century, but claimed on the contrary that the good old constitution remained unaltered. When debates over the republic were imported into Switzerland in the second half of the seventeenth century, this became a discourse about the new concept of sovereignty—and not about virtue. Virtue for the Swiss, then, was still essentially religious, not civic. In a confederation divided by confessional strife, only the secular concept of the virtuous Alpine shepherd as developed in the early eighteenth century could slowly overcome the lines of religious separation, forming a core element of the republican language and national identity that were fostered from the 1760s onwards in the Helvetische Gesellschaft, which brought together enlightened members of the elite, Catholics and Protestants, German speakers and Francophones, inhabitants of the capital and of smaller towns as well.[56]

As elsewhere, the republican language used in these circles had ambivalent implications in Switzerland. A kind of court/country antagonism enabled the biconfessional and bilingual nation to claim a particular national identity based on its republican liberty. This was a distinguishing mark, not least in the German-speaking world that was politically and culturally dominated by princes and not by the declining imperial cities. According to this republican logic, agricultural reforms were debated in the second half of the eighteenth century, which aimed at cultivating the virtue of free farmers who would serve in a militia army. This was an “Augustan” argument, to put it in Pocockian terms, because it went along with criticism of the proto-industrial putting-out system and the investments especially of the Bernese treasury in the Dutch and English public debt.[57] Following Johann Jakob Bodmer, some “patriotic” Swiss philosophes proposed a kind of “neo-Harringtonian” political reform in order to restore the virtue of their ancestors. However, there existed another alternative, the “Scottish” or “cosmopolitan” optimism of authors like Isaak Iselin who believed that commercial exchange would civilize the manners of the corrupt Swiss oligarchs.[58]

In both its forms, the patriotic, political version and the cosmopolitan, economic version, the Swiss Enlightenment’s appeal to virtue powerfully contested the Swiss oligarchs’ monopoly on power and their interpretation of the “Republic.” What they had had in mind when they adopted this nomenclature for their cantons was absolute dominion of a selected collective. When they spoke about liberty, it was their liberty from foreign interference and the negative liberty of citizens in a well-organized, inexpensive state. Albeit unintentionally, using the republican language and the symbols of liberty led further than that: inspired first by the Dutch and then as part of pan-European enlightened debates on natural rights and moral reform, Swiss authors came to understand the republican constitution of the cantons and their allies as a framework for emancipation and for liberty as political participation—a claim that Rousseau made into a universal argument that would change the world in 1789.

[1] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3 (Dedicatory letter). All English citations are to this edition and are cited as Prince.

[2] Niccolò Machiavelli, “Il Principe,” in Machiavelli, Opere, ed. Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi 1997), 1:115–92, quotation 151 (chap. 12); Prince, 44. Machiavelli, “Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio,” in Opere, 1:193–525, quotation 366 (2, 16); Machiavelli, Discourses, ed. Leslie J. Walker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 1:402 (hereafter cited as “Discorsi” and Discourses). For further quotations and the aftermath of Machiavelli’s judgment on the Swiss, see my forthcoming article “Frühneuzeitlicher Republikanismus und Machiavellismus. Zur Rezeption von Machiavelli in der Eidgenossenschaft,” in Machiavellismus in Deutschland. Chiffre von Kontingenz, Herrschaft und Empirismus in der Neuzeit (Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte, vol. 51), ed. Cornel Zwierlein and Annette Meyer (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2010) 109-30.

[3] For the quotations, see the letter to Francesco Vettori, August 26, 1513, in Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere, ed. Franco Gaeta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), 292, 296; Machiavelli, “Ritracto delle cose della Magna,” in Opere, 1:79–80.

[4] “Discorsi,” 337–41 (2, 4), 378 (2, 19); Discourses, 368–72, 416.

[5] Werner Kaegi, “Machiavelli in Basel,” Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 39 (1940): 5–52; reprinted in Kaegi, Historische Meditationen (Zurich: Fretz und Wasmuth, 1942), 1:119–82.

[6] Samuel Henzi, “Denkschrift über den politischen Zustand der Stadt und Republik Bern im Jahr 1749,” in Helvetia. Denkwürdigkeiten für die XXII Freistaaten der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft, ed. Josef Anton Balthasar (Aarau: J. J. Christen, 1823), 401–43, esp. 415–40.

[7] This reflects especially the French perspective on the Huguenots; see, e.g., Yves Durand, Les républiques au temps des monarchies (Paris: PUF, 1973), and Eric Gojosso, Le concept de république en France (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Thèse, 1998).

[8] For this argument and what follows, see Thomas Maissen, Die Geburt der Republik. Staatsverständnis und Repräsentation in der frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), esp. 165–296.

[9] Reproduced in Maissen, Geburt, 169.

[10] Thomas Maissen, “Weshalb die Eidgenossen Helvetier wurden. Die humanistische Definition einer natio,” in Diffusion des Humanismus. Studien zur nationalen Geschichtsschreibung europäischer Humanisten, ed. Johannes Helmrath, Ulrich Muhlack, and Gerrit Walther (Göttingen: Wallmann, 2002), 210–49.

[11] Josias Simler, Regiment gemeiner loblicher Eydgnoschafft (Zurich: Froschauer 1577), 10; De republica Helvetiorum libri duo (Zurich: Froschauer 1576), 1v.

[12] Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale (London: G. Bishop, 1606; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1979), 76 (1, 7); Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République (Paris: Fayard, [1576] 1986), 1:167, also 163–64 (1, 7).

[13] Jean Bodin, De republica libri sex (Paris: J. de Puys, 1586), 1:77 (1, 7); Bodin, République, 1:175 (1, 7): “qui ne tiennent rien de l’Empire, et moins encore de l’Empereur”; Bodin, Commonweale, 82: “the Swissers confesse not that the emperor hath any superioritie ouer them, and much lesse the emperour . . . having sometime bene part of the German empire.”

[14] For Bodin’s role for this group see Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland, vol. 1, Reichspublizistik und Policeywissenschaft 1600–1800 (München: C. H. Beck, 1988), 146–50.

[15] James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and a System of Politics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 99, 144.

[16] Arihiro Fukuda, Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

[17] Ernst Heinrich Kossmann, “The Course of Dutch Political Thought in the Seventeenth Century,” in Kossmann, Political Thought in the Dutch Republic: Three Studies (Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, afd. Letterkunde, Bd. 179) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 25–129.

[18] Eco Oste Gaspard Haitsma Mulier, “A Controversial Republican: Dutch Views on Machiavelli in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 247–63; see also Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1980), and Haitsma Mulier, “The Language of Seventeenth-Century Republicanism in the United Provinces: Dutch or European?” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony R. Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 179–95.

[19] Prince, 5 (chap. 1); Machiavelli, “Principe,” 119 (chap. 1): “Tutti gli stati, tutti e’ dominii che hanno avuto e hanno imperio sopra gli uomini, sono stati e sono o republiche o principati.” Similar Machiavelli, “Discorsi,” 202 (1,2).

[20] Discourses, 1:273 (1, 25); see also 236–38 (1, 10); id., “Discorsi,” 226 (1, 10) and 257 (1, 25).

[21] Discourses, 255 (1, 16); also 333–334 (1, 55) and 341–342 (1, 58); for the role of the parlements, see Prince, 66 (chap. 19).

[22] Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 266–68.

[23] Rudolf von Albertini, Das politische Denken in Frankreich zur Zeit Richelieus (Marburg: Simons, 1951), 44.

[24] Paolo Paruta, “Della perfezzione della vita politica,” in Storici e politici veneti del Cinquecento e Seicento (La letteratura italiana. Storia e testi, vol. 35/2), ed. Gino Benzoni and Tiziano Zanato (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1982), 492–642, quotation 635.

[25] For Wettstein’s mission, see Frieda Gallati, Die Eidgenossenschaft und der Kaiserhof zur Zeit Ferdinands II. und Ferdinands III (1619–1657). Geschichte der formellen Lostrennung der Schweiz vom Deutschen Reich im Westfälischen Frieden (Zurich: Leemann, 1932), 141–302; Julia Gauss and Alfred Stöcklin, Bürgermeister Wettstein. Der Mann – Das Werk – Die Zeit (Basel: Schwabe, 1953), 163–254; see also Maissen, Geburt, 187–98.

[26] For the documents of the mission, see Johann Rudolf Wettstein, Acta und Handlungen betreffend gemeiner Eydgnosschafft Exemption (Basel: Johann Jacob Genath, 1651), 17.

[27] Ibid., 28: “bey ihrem freyen, souverainen Stand und Herkommen fürbaß ruhig und ohnturbirt zu lassen.”

[28] Maissen, Geburt, 383–400, illustrations on 393.

[29] Ibid., 523–31, 557.

[30] L’affermissement des republiques de Hollande & de Suisse (s. l. 1675), 20–21, 35, 45.

[31] Petrus Valkenier, Ansprach an die Dreyzehen wie auch Zugewandete Ort der Lobl. Eydgnoßschafft in Baden versamlet, gethan den 31. Oct./10. Nov. 1690 (s. l., 1690), 4.

[32] Petrus Valkenier, Copia des Schreibens an Bürgermeister, Klein- und Grossräth, 19./29. April 1693, Staatsarchiv Zurich, B i 329, 147.

[33] Amtliche Sammlung der Eidgenössischen Abschiede (Lucerne, 1882), vol. 6/2, 1486 (9 November 1708).

[34] Quoted in Hans Camille Huber, Bürgermeister Johann Heinrich Escher von Zürich (1626–1710) und die eidgenössische Politik im Zeitalter Ludwig [sic] XIV (Zurich: Ph. D., 1936), 5n6.

[35] Quoted in Conradin von Mohr, Geschichte der bündnerischen Kriege und Unruhen, ed. Fortunat Sprecher von Bernegg (Chur: Leonhard Hitz, 1857), 82–83.

[36] Archives d’Etat de Genève, PH 2293.

[37] Archives d’Etat de Neuchâtel, Manuel du Conseil d’Etat, Chancellerie, CP 33/5, fol. 475v (27 October 1610), quoted in Maurice de Tribolet, “Modèle confédéré et monarchie absolue: La ville de Neuchâtel en quête de souveraineté, 1406–1628,” in Ägidius Tschudi und seine Zeit, ed. Katharina Koller-Weiss and Christian Sieber (Basel: Krebs, 2002) 337–46.

[38] Eidgenössische Abschiede, vol. 6/1, 365 (21–23 March 1657): “weil die Democratie der Republik schnurstraks entgegen läuft.”

[39] Henzi, “Denkschrift,” 403, 411–14; Emanuel Fueter, Observationen (Memorial), Burgerbibliothek Bern (BUB), Mss. Hh XI. 16 (10), 10; Adolf Fluri, “Die Siegel der Stadt Bern 1224–1924,” Blätter für bernische Geschichte, Kunst und Altertumskunde 20 (1924): 257–300.

[40] Hermann Rennefahrt, Das Stadtrecht von Bern: Verfassung und Verwaltung des Staates Bern (Die Rechtsquellen des Kantons Bern: Stadtrechte, vol. 5) (Aarau: Sauerländer 1959), 380 (3 May 1682).

[41] Maissen, Geburt, 498–515.

[42] Reproduced in André Holenstein, Thomas Maissen, and Maarten Prak, eds., The Republican Alternative: The Netherlands and Switzerland Compared (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 142–43.

[43] Christoph Werdmüller, Quaestiones politicae de imperio et subiectione (Zurich, 1668), C1; Claudio Soliva, “Der kleine Grotius von Zürich: Zum Studienbuch des Johann Heinrich Schweizer über des Hugo Grotius De Jure Belli ac Pacis,” in Festschrift für Ferdinand Elsener zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Louis Carlen, (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1977), 233–43, quotation 242.

[44] This important text has just now received a modern edition by Werner Widmer: Johann Kaspar Escher, “Exercitatio politica de libertate populi. Politologische Studie über die Freiheit des Volkes,” Daphnis - Zeitschrift für Mittlere Deutsche Literatur 37 (2009): 547–626.

[45] Zentralbibliothek Zurich, MS V 119, 62–64; see Ernst Saxer, Die zürcherische Verfassungsreform vom Jahre 1713 mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihres ideengeschichtlichen Inhalts (Zurich: Ph. D., 1938), 54n76.

[46] Staatsarchiv Zurich, B III 14f, 322–23; see also 298.

[47] Zentralbibliothek Zurich, MS V 119, 5v; see Michael Kempe and Thomas Maissen, Die Collegia der Insulaner, Vertraulichen und Wohlgesinnten in Zürich, 1679–1709. Die ersten deutschsprachigen Aufklärungsgesellschaften zwischen Naturwissenschaften, Bibelkritik, Geschichte und Politik (Zurich: NZZ 2002), 276–78.

[48] Michael Kempe, Wissenschaft, Theologie, Aufklärung. Johann Jakob Scheuchzer und die Sintfluttheorie (Frühneuzeit-Forschungen, vol. 10) (Epfendorf: Bibliotheca Academica, 2003).

[49] Guy P. Marchal, “Die ‘Alten Eidgenossen’ im Wandel der Zeiten. Das Bild der frühen Eidgenossen im Traditionsbewusstsein und in der Identitätsvorstellung der Schweizer vom 15. bis ins 20. Jahrhundert,” in Gesellschaft Alltag - Geschichtsbild (Innerschweiz und frühe Eidgenossenschaft. Jubiläumsschrift 700 Jahre Eidgenossenschaft) (Olten/Freiburg i. Brsg.: Walter, 1990), 2:307–403, esp. 317–19, 330–32; Katrin Gut, Das vaterländische Schauspiel der Schweiz. Geschichte und Erscheinungsformen (SEGES, N. F., vol. 16) (Fribourg: Universitätsverlag, 1996), 50–53.

[50] Beat Ludwig von Muralt, Lettres sur les Anglois et les François. Et sur les voiages ([London?], 1725), 306; see also Simone Zurbuchen, “Barbarei oder Zivilisation? Beat Ludwig von Muralts Lettres sur les Anglais et les Français et sur les Voyages und ihre Bedeutung für die Schweizer Aufklärung,” in Zurbuchen, Patriotismus und Kosmopolitismus. Die Schweizer Aufklärung zwischen Tradition und Moderne (Zurich: Chronos 2003), 525–48.

[51] Abraham Stanyan, An Account of Switzerland (London, 1714), 147–50; the French translation appeared the same year and allegedly in Amsterdam, “chez les frères Wetstein.”

[52] Abraham Ruchat, Les délices de la Suisse (Leiden, 1714), 4:777–79.

[53] Albrecht von Haller, “Die Alpen,” in von Haller, Gedichte, ed. Ludwig Hirzel (Frauenfeld: J. Huber, 1882), 20–42, quotation 23.

[54] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right, ed. Charles Frankel (New York: Hafner 1947), 92 (4, 1); Rousseau, “Contrat social; ou, Principes du droit politique,” in Rousseau, Ecrits politiques (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3), ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 349–470, 437 (4, 1).

[55] Rousseau, Social Contract 64 (3, 6); Rousseau, “Contrat social,” 409 (3, 6).

[56] Ulrich Im Hof and François de Capitani, Die helvetische Gesellschaft. Spätaufklärung und Vorrevolution in der Schweiz (Frauenfeld/Stuttgart: Huber 1983).

[57] Béla Kapossy, “Neo-Roman Republicanism and Commercial Society: The Example of Eighteenth-Century Berne,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2:227–47.

[58] Simone Zurbuchen, “Patriotismus und Nation: Der schweizerische Republikanismus des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Republikanische Tugend. Ausbildung eines Schweizer Nationalbewusstseins und Erziehung eines neuen Bürgers, ed. Michael Böhler, Etienne Hofmann, Peter H. Reill, and Simone Zurbuchen (Geneva: Slatkine 2000), 151–81.

Jefferson, Pocock, and the Temporality of Law in a Republic

Marissa Gemma — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 13:32:43 -0800

Recalling his work on the committee appointed for the revisal of Virginia laws between 1776 and 1779, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his colleague and former law professor George Wythe that his “researches” into colonial legal history had led him to discover the deplorable state of the manuscript copies of the laws. Jefferson describes combing the county clerk offices of the oldest counties along the James River looking for handwritten copies of legislative records that would have been given to every county by the General Assembly, expecting to find them buried in the offices of the clerks or “in the hands of careful and curious individuals.” Confronted with the negligence of Virginia’s antiquarian legal culture, Jefferson vowed to collect all that he could so that some day the public “should advert to the magnitude of their loss in these precious monuments of our property, and our history,” and could take consolation that a few fragments, which were worthy of “attention and preservation,” had been “saved from the wreck.”[1] The objects of these letters to Wythe were proposals for not only another round of revisal to the legal code, but a printed edition of the laws to be distributed at the public expense and for public use. Understanding Jefferson’s place in a larger history of jurisprudence and republicanism in the early modern Atlantic world can begin with the simple if surprising image of Jefferson himself, slave-owning planter, aristocrat, soon to be governor and already author of the Declaration of Independence, digging through the trash heap of a tavern in Charles City County, Virginia, looking for one more fragile piece of legal history.

In these efforts at preservation, Jefferson was not so much concerned with ensuring the continuity and authority of the history of land tenures underwriting property rights as he was in ensuring recourse to the assembled, historical, and thereby changeable character of that history. Set in the context of multiple traditions of law and political language, as well as uncertainty in the material and conceptual transmission of those traditions, the textual practices of Thomas Jefferson reflect an experience and usage of what I will call “fractured” constitutional time. Jefferson practiced a distinctly radical politics of reading, collecting, and working on authoritative texts of history, recognizing and teasing out discontinuity, rupture, and constituent moments where others sought solidity in the rationalization of authority. His efforts to resist the transformation of the conceptual bases and practices of political life into static traditions or systems of reconstituted authority grew out of a careful, virtuosic approach to reading and assembling histories of legal systems. This radical politics appears most clearly in his commonplace books, early legal arguments and drafts of constitutions, manuscript collections, and in the open, multidirectional, yet conflicted composition of the Notes on the State of Virginia. Contrary to the oft-depicted image of an almost inspirationally naïve political idealist, Jefferson was critically aware of the relationship between the design and practice of political institutions and the modes of historical understanding that underlay their continued authority. Rupture in the order of historical self-understanding informed the articulation of a fragmented, never fully ordered constitutional politics.

Jefferson’s engagement with history was jurisprudential rather than strictly legal or political: his various activities pointed at the situated, institutional framework within which everyday adjudicative and political processes took place. His education and reading life were rooted in the history of the law and constitutions, and his most creative and important interventions in the political struggles of his day focused on restructuring written constitutions to maintain revolutionary public spirit. As this particular concern for jurisprudence indicates, the subject configured in Jefferson’s republican constitutional thought was just as much if not more what French jurist Alain Supiot has called “homo juridicus,” as the zoon politikon of classical political philosophy or the rights-bearing individual producer of Lockean theory.[2] His sense of a rational self was instituted by its place in historically developed laws and institutions, both civil and natural. As Shannon Stimson has pointed out, Jefferson was unique among his founding cohort in that he retained a “British,” customary understanding of constitutions and the role of juries and legislatures in constitutional frameworks: rather than a singular fundamental text, constitutions were the accumulated mass of applicable laws.[3] From this historical definition, Jefferson drew radical consequences. Laws and institutions, inherited from the past, were as such rightfully subject to the interpretive powers of democratic bodies of legal actors in the present and future. This was part and parcel of a wider historical, jurisprudential awareness that guided much of Jefferson’s political thought and designs for the structure and practice of revolutionary, republican institutions. An experience of unraveling and fragmenting in the fixed lines of sovereignty and institutional authority gave Jefferson the intellectual equipment to consider the assemblage of histories out of which his own identity and that of his polity had grown.

In its concern for how both individuals and societies relate themselves to their place in historical time, this article takes no small amount of inspiration from the collective work of J. G. A. Pocock. More than any scholar of history, law, or politics in recent memory, Pocock has illuminated the embeddings of action, texts, and thought in deep histories of the transmission and articulation of political language. The awareness of a past, Pocock writes, is fundamentally a social awareness, and because of this inextricably historical linkage between subject and society, “we may suppose that the preservation of statements from the past has in various ways the function of ensuring continuity, and that awareness of the past is in fact society’s awareness of its continuity.”[4] So conceived, the historical study of awareness of the past commits Pocock to the delineating of images, mind-sets, or languages across time. Examples from his corpus include the development and long life of a “common-law mind” in English jurisprudence from the late sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries, the varied pathways of a neoclassical republican vocabulary of civic virtue, and more recently, a concordant and particularly neo-Roman historiographical tradition of a dialectic of liberty and empire set in the context of decline and fall.[5] It was in the assertion that such continuities and concerns for preservation extended across the Atlantic and characterized much of the intellectual world of the American founding that Pocock gained the dedicated attention of American scholars, engendering a now defunct debate between the relative merits of historical or natural, backward-looking or forward-looking, and republican or liberal characterizations of politics.[6] My aim in this article is to enjoin the work of Pocock on the history of historical consciousness not to find yet another tradition, or even collection of traditions, but to question the integrity of the linkage between an awareness of the past and the continuity of that awareness or that past, or in other words, to subvert the historiographical tendency to think in terms of a linear temporality made of continuities, paradigms, or traditions.

Traditions are histories organized to establish particular continuities, but like any histories, traditions are made and remade by their actors. This may not take place under conditions freely chosen, as Marx reminds us, but that does not change the condition of human beings as makers of histories, constantly enmeshed in seemingly endless processes inherited from the past and yet acting not only in the context of the past, but irrevocably on the past. Histories are written, which means they are read, which means they are rewritten. The past is always incomplete, always being acted out, and always subject to new reading. In his methodological work, particularly in his critique of the hermeneutic primacy of authorial intent, and in his concerns to retain a notion of sovereignty, understood as the capacity of a society to “narrate, re-narrate, and interpret its history,” Pocock has himself been aware of the indeterminacy of the use of inherited language.[7] However, historical practice might also be carried out to an extent that rather than accepting the task of narrating and adjusting an evolving history, the historically aware subject might discover cause for interrogating the very processes of narration and re-narration, as well as the politics of claiming for these processes a singular historical development, and this interrogation might arrive at alternative narrations that, in investigating the cracks in inherited historical frameworks, allow subjects to think historically outside of the bounds of sovereignty. Such investigation can begin with locating in history practices of thought that provide space for historians to reconsider their own investments in the definition of what constitutes historical thinking, of the cleanliness of the boundaries and procedures for delineating relations between the past, the present, and the future.

One of the leading men among the “Founding Fathers” may seem an odd subject through which to carry out quests for alternative modes of narrating the history of law and constitutionalism. Especially in light of the work of Pocock on awareness of the past in history, however, the figure of Thomas Jefferson deserves renewed attention. Jefferson, in an astonishing variety of forms and contexts, was an obsessive preserver of statements and images from the past. This fact warrants being brought to bear in reading Jefferson’s own texts, in configuring the wider history of intellectual transformation in the founding of the American Republic, as well as in considering the historical character of civil identity. Jefferson’s education in law and politics and his early drafts of legal and constitutional text are suggestive of the importance that ways of organizing knowledge have for the meaning and authority of authoritative narratives and foundational texts. What made Jefferson’s revolutionary republicanism so radical was his profound awareness of the historicity of law and politics, awareness enabled and purposefully explored through reading, selecting, deconstructing, and reactivating pieces of constituted, foundational histories. His experience of the period from the outbreak of the imperial crisis in Virginia around 1765 to the resolution of the War of Independence between 1781 and 1783 consisted of his education, career as an attorney, draftsman of the Declaration of Independence and proposals for legal and constitutional reform in his home state, as well as the writing of the Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson’s responses to this particular revolutionary moment dramatically illuminate the connections between historical awareness and law and political thought in ways that have not been fully appreciated by scholars.

Intellectual biographers of Jefferson have noted and studied the commonplace books and their contexts, but have understandably been reticent about using these and other collections of Jefferson’s notes from the period as tools for understanding the development of his political thought.[8] Yet Jefferson himself was very aware of the implications of reading and writing practices for meaning in law and politics, so we can approach this problem by paying attention to not only what he read but how he read and used it. Similarly, students of Jefferson’s historical thought, and of historical thought in the American Revolution more generally, have by and large restricted their analyses to an extended paradigm of an English Whig sense of history, but this traditional interpretation has failed to take much account of the complexity and diversity of not only the subjects of Jefferson’s historical interests, but the scenes of practice in which those interests were acted out.[9] Indeed, the example of Jefferson points to the insufficiency of a historiography of paradigms for writing histories of politics. Jefferson’s own radical efforts in making histories, and his concerns for the capacity of citizens to continue to do so, warrant closer study than has been done to date.

If it is true that he was able to seize on a crisis of historical subjectivity to explore new directions in comporting self and society in time, it is also true that Thomas Jefferson was less a fully independent actor-analyst than a register and conduit of the tensions involved in instituting the revolutionary opening of historical subjectivity in which he found himself. Just as he explored the multiplicity of histories of which he and his fellows were subjects, he was an instrumental force in ultimately reorganizing the histories of the peoples with whom he shared the North American continent in the service of a projected “empire of liberty,” of codification, national unification, and expansion over constituency and multiplicity, and of commercial political economy over jurisprudence. Thus the figure of Thomas Jefferson did not escape the desire to make appear natural and whole what had been revealed as assembled, open, and uncertain. But perhaps we can say that he remained sufficiently aware of the futility of such a desire to leave rhetorical, institutional, and aesthetic reflections of his inquiries into a fractured temporality. What we can learn from the study of these fragments is the radical potentiality inherent in historical being and its representations in historical practice. Jefferson theorized, politicized, played with, and in many ways tried to control the open quality that characterizes historical subjectivity, and did so to an extent that challenges our own historiographical preferences for reconstructing traditions, extended languages, and continuous paradigms. As Jefferson’s engagements with legal texts suggest, the history of republicanism in America is inseparable from its origins in the purposive amalgamation and disassembling of multiple conceptual, institutional, and social lines of experience, as well as the flight from open recognition of those very processes.

Pocock has referred to the American relationship with its revolutionary founding as not only a foundationalist but a fundamentalist one, which I take to mean a constitutional culture based on a return to the perceived authoritative purity of founding text, in many cases nothing less than a rejection of history.[10] Admittedly, this insight may carry with it a good deal of truth. But Pocock’s emphasis on continuity and tradition leads to a premature denigration and generalization about the supposedly and inherently fundamentalist legal epistemology of moments of revolt and founding, and inexorably, the project of interpreting and narrating these events in the present. The historicity and contingency of reading and writing text, particularly legal and constitutional text, get a short shrift as a result. Indeed, the traditions in which foundations are situated and taken up have been and always are sites of contestation. These histories can be subject to what is identified in the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben as counterpractice, an archaeological practice of recovering the contingency of origins, restoring the moments of emergence to these constituted histories, and reinterpreting and reactivating their constituent pieces in ways that are not bound by the sovereignty of those same foundational narratives, or even the history of interpreting them.[11] Jefferson’s experience and theorization of something akin to this radical historical sensibility, manifested most clearly in interpretive methods of reading and writing law, was the bedrock of his hopes for ensuring that a thoroughly modern and constitutional republic could remain a revolutionary one.

The textual practices of Thomas Jefferson took place in the context of the material culture of a free, semiprivate sphere of reading and writing that characterized the intellectual world of the Virginia gentry. Semiprivate, because while individuated practices of reading and note taking took place in the privacy of a gentleman’s library, an inner world of the appropriation of the law and history one read, the purpose governing these usages of books was the formation of a self conditioned and disciplined by customary education for the exercise of public, political authority. Leading Virginians were constantly in the process of balancing their desire for maintaining their identity as transplanted Englishmen while developing a collective consciousness rooted in the process of deciding just what that Atlantic transplantation really meant. Crucial to the balancing act that constituted Virginian efforts at self-definition was the extent to which not only the English common law but also the structuring rules of English constitutional culture applied in the colony.

This project in itself was fraught with uncertainty. It remained so up until and even beyond the outbreak of the American Revolution. Given this situation, attorneys, judges, and legislators in eighteenth-century colonial Virginia constructed their place in a continuum of British constitutionalism and legal precedent very carefully, declaring in both public and private their freedom to legislate beyond English common and statute law when compelled by the necessity of their differing condition, all the while participating in a legal culture heavily dependent on English legal treatises, case reports, and broader narratives of the philosophy of the common law.[12] To that end, property, in land, in slaves, and in books, was the fundamental mechanism of fixing and securing the legitimacy of the social and constitutional order in Virginia as well as the place of its political actors in the institutional history of English liberty. This order depended on the maintenance of an image of law that could respond to the novel demands of a provincial society with slaves while allowing for the building of a British-American identity rooted in the continuum of legal authority.

Sir Edward Coke’s 1628 commentary on Thomas Littleton’s fifteenth-century tract on Norman English land tenures, the first volume of his Institutes of the Laws of England, shaped the past of the law for Virginians; indeed, it was the most widely owned law book in the colony.[13] Coke was essential for legal practice in Virginia throughout the eighteenth century because his heroic narrative of the antiquity of English law provided a conceptual plane where legal actors could establish provincial continuity with the legal traditions of the mother country. Uniquely for Jefferson, what mattered most in the reading of Coke was the actual means of representing the legal history Coke performed in the constitution of his text. As John Aubrey recorded, “the world expected from [Coke] a Commentary on Littleton’s Tenures; and he left them with his Common-place book.”[14]

The form of the commonplace book registered the understanding of the law as an immense artifice, as a historical achievement that was built up layer upon layer over time. Jacob Soll has called the neo-Ciceronian practice of collecting rhetorical commonplaces for formation and argument in law, politics, and ethics one of “material rhetoric,” a kind of writing transparently constituted through the reassembling of other writings.[15] The commonplace book provided Jefferson with a plane of collecting, assembling, and taking apart narratives of the law that allowed for careful consideration of its palimpsest character, practicing reading as a kind of writing, or rewriting.[16] Thomas Jefferson’s legal commonplace book exhibits a process of gradual unraveling of the governing confines of a strictly legal research and an explosion of reading into the historical building blocks of the legal edifice and eventually a plethora of histories of law, government, and politics, particularly regarding the origins of constituted authority in collective assembly practices.[17] Jefferson’s reading began with notes from case reports and major legal treatises, including the third and fourth parts of Coke’s Institutes, alongside the King’s Bench case reports of William Salkeld and Sir Thomas Raymond on norms of legal remedies and court procedures as well as principles of common law adjudication.

The central themes of the earlier part of the legal commonplace book were English legal principles governing property transmission and disputes, and the application of English common law and the power of English courts in the American colonies. These were questions of direct relevance to Jefferson’s eventual legal practice as well as his broader thinking about the nature of legislative authority in the colony of Virginia. In entry #231 of the legal commonplace book, Jefferson recorded a line from the 1705 decision in Smith v. Brown & Cooper: “‘the laws of England do not extend to Virginia, which being a conquered country, their law is what the King pleases.’” In this case, Chief Justice Holt declared that a suit to recover debt for a slave transported through England needed to be amended by the plaintiff to reflect that the slave was in Virginia rather than London at the time of sale; as the reporters transcribed, “as soon as a Negro comes into England, he becomes free: one may be a villein in England, but not a slave.”[18] The brief entry is telling in a number of ways. It registers a large part of the socioeconomic context of slavery to the disjunction between the application of law in England and in its plantations abroad. It also signifies the emergence of Jefferson’s awareness, confirmed by contemporary historical analysts of the British American situation (Raynal, for instance), that the English common law applied in the legal practices of the colonies by the civil and common law logic of prescription, made authoritative only by long-established practice.[19]

Just as important as the imperial context was the development of a certain legal imagination in the colony that took root after the 1705 revisal of the slave code making tenured possession of slaves more secure by redefining slaves as real estate rather than chattel. The shift entailed a transference of the “feudal” laws of property holding and transmission described by Coke to the logic of maintaining a race-based slave regime in eighteenth-century Virginia. In his own collection of case reports from cases before the General Court of Virginia, Jefferson reported on an October 1768 case, Blackwell v. Wilkinson, in which the continuum from the early modern image of medieval English law to Virginia implied by this transference served as the basis for deciding specific issues relative to the problematic legal status of slaves. The court found for the defendant that slaves needed to be specifically annexed to the land to be subjects of entail; both arguments from attorneys took as given the parallel between feudalism and slavery. This was despite the legal disjunctions not only between contemporary English practice and that of Virginia, but between the feudal villein and the plantation slave. As a denizen of England, even as a peculiar kind of property, the villein had a legal personage before the eyes of the common law and enjoyed the protection of basic rights dating back to “time immemorial.”[20] The slave in Virginia, by and large recognized as naturally possessing the basic qualities of personhood, all the same had no legal personage at all. Indeed, as the Virginia slave codes indicated, the accidental killing of a slave that occurred during punishment for resistance would result in no punishment for the responsible master or overseer, “as if such accident had never happened.”[21] That slaves had the right to appear in court in disputes with their masters before 1705 only further emphasizes the conceptual work involved in appropriating a timeless image of the continuity of law to remove slaves from the plane of legal and thereby historical subjectivity.

One of Jefferson’s own cases provided a medium for him to begin probing not only the legal framework for Virginia’s slave system, but also the temporal continuity implied by the authority of any instituted legal framework. In an April 1770 case, Howell v. Netherland, Jefferson took a case on behalf of the grandchildren of a mulatto slave woman bound by the 1705 slave laws to serve until the age of thirty-one; her owner had claimed the same right over the lives of the offspring. Jefferson sought their freedom with the overarching logic that “under the law of nature, all men are born free.”[22] Pointing to the fact that the 1705 slave law formalizing a shift from patrimonial to matrimonial transmission of servitude was a pact between the legislature and churchwardens over ownership of descendents of slave relationships, Jefferson, citing Pufendorf, stipulated that, since servitude was a condition of compact rather than nature or conquest, the terms of the compact did not extend to the grandchildren of the slaves in 1705. The argument was ineffective at best; Jefferson was not allowed to finish his argument before the judges interrupted and decided the case for the opposing side. He could not have been surprised, for in his argument he had broached a number of fundamental components of the jurisprudence prevalent in eighteenth-century Virginia, engaging a language of natural jurisprudence and equity to admit the children of slaves to legal subjectivity, and historicizing the reach of laws and contracts, in this case relating to property in land and people. While over the course of his life Jefferson would become reluctant to express—much less act upon—antislavery sentiment, this tendency to focus on the constant making and remaking of legal authority through time would become increasingly central to Jefferson’s thought in his career as a lawyer and as a critic and draftsman of legal and constitutional text.

Like his legal commonplace book, Jefferson’s collections of reports of cases that had occurred before the General Court of Virginia, some his own and others much earlier, when taken in sum demonstrate an unfolding of legal reporting and research into primarily historical and political, critical approaches to the law. Laws concerning slavery and religion were the areas that most engaged Jefferson’s legal reading and writing. In an October 1771 case, Godwin v. Lunan, Jefferson reported on his own disagreement with Wythe over the nature of his advocacy for lay members suing under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the General Court for the forced dismissal or punishment of their priest. Wythe and Jefferson both represented the plaintiffs, but Jefferson was skeptical of the power of the court qua ecclesiastical court to decide on such matters, as “visitation and deprivation are no parts of the office of an ecclesiastical judge.” On these grounds, Jefferson launched into a historical investigation, for his own use, “into the first establishment of Christian churches in Great Britain, to develop their several kinds and constitutions, to see who is entrusted with their care and visitation; and to apply the principles which this inquiry would evolve to the parochial churches of our own country.”[23] In that vein, Jefferson carried out an inquiry into the origins and division of church structures in England, making use of his extensive collection of books concerning ecclesiastical law and church history, elucidating the growth of different legal types of parish. Donatives originated from the situation of churches on the manors of feudal lords; to these lords the tenants of the land would tithe, and from them they would receive support for land, buildings, and clerics. With Blackstone, Jefferson delineated two further classifications of churches that grew out of donatives over time: presentatives, where the bishop in charge of the parish claimed a right of review over the appointment of a cleric to the parish on the land of a lord, and collatives, in which a parish stood on land no longer owned by a lord, and control of it thereby naturally rested with the local bishop. In donatives, the patron of the church, whomever or whatever that might be, retained rights of visitation and removal beyond the sphere of ecclesiastical power assigned to the bishops by the development of ecclesiastical courts alongside the common law.

The law that governed donative patronage, reasoned Jefferson, did not therefore rest in ecclesiastical law, but in the particular set of customs and practices on the manor that the patron (and through him his tenants) recognized, as protected by the foundations of the common law on lex non scripta. “When any ecclesiastical Judge doth usurp the temporal law, . . . the interest or cause of the subject is drawn in aliud examen [from all review] (viz.) to be decided and determined by the ecclesiastical law; and this is truly said contra coronam et dignitatem regiam” (against the crown and royal prerogative).[24] Only with the immemorial custom of the bishop’s right of visitation recognized in presentatives, and following upon that the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts, would the General Court in its sometime capacity as an ecclesiastical court have power over the fate of the cleric. “But our parishes pretend to no immemorial existence, for that would make them older than our government itself: they have been created by acts of Assembly long within memory, to be found by any one who will recur to our records,” Jefferson concluded.[25]

For Jefferson, who was again arguing for the power to remove the priest, this removal was illegitimate if carried out under the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical law. Having launched into a historical essay on the origins of ecclesiastical law in order to undo its power over particular cases in Virginia, Jefferson reached a conclusion far outside the bounds that governed the responses of Wythe and Randolph, the attorney general arguing for the defendant: “the truth is, the parish is erected, the church and its soil given, and also the endowment, by the legislature, or in other words, the people they represent. Now that is a civil, not an ecclesiastical body. The churches are therefore of lay foundation.”[26] Absent native laws particularly granting the parish and the parishioners exclusive authority over the cleric, patronage of the parish rested in the figure of the King; the parish itself, under the constitutional structure of the British Atlantic empire, sat in the King’s dominion, and the laws were that of the local legislative power acting in his stead. Needless to say, suggesting the secular, legal, and democratic origins of the church and its legal authority, and seeking to restore those origins to political practice in Anglican Virginia, was a radical interpretation, and it relied on the further practical assumption that widespread and critically engaged recourse to the fundamental laws of the land was not only acceptable but necessary for the maintenance of jurisdictional dispute settlement in a republican polity.

In filling his legal commonplace book, Jefferson included another even more involved essay on the history of the law and the historicity of its intertwinement with religious authority, an essay that he later edited slightly and bound with his volume of case reports. The essay, “Whether Christianity Is a Part of the Common Law?,” began with an older particular English case in which a similar question arose as to the duty of the common law to respect the alternate ecclesiastical law. The defendant, Bishop of Lincoln, asserted that common law courts were bound to defer to his rights over a parish as recognized by ecclesiastical law because Christianity was a part of the common law. The reporter of the case interpreted the law-French of the argument that the necessary place of Christianity in the common law was made clear in “ancien scripture,” as “holy scripture,” “covient a nous a donner credence” (requiring us to give our assent).[27] But Jefferson hit upon the error in this transcription from the argument, for this phrase “can only mean the ancient laws of the church,” for while it was true that the ecclesiastical law drew its authority from its recognition by the common law, the common law did not thereby grant legal authority to the scriptures or admit of its grounding in sacred authority. Littleton and Bracton, Jefferson reasoned, recognized no such place of Christianity in the common law, for if the power of ecclesiastical law grew out of the common law, judges of common law courts comprehending both courts ecclesiastical and of admiralty, then ecclesiastical law itself was “not founded on the Law of God, but subject to the modification of the law-giver.”[28] If the law is subject to augmentation, it is a product and an affair of the temporal word and human hands, not the imposition of God, nor that of ecclesiastical power constituted in God’s name.

Asserting the supremacy of the common law over other branches of English jurisprudence, Jefferson then undermined the powerful image of the common law that this project required by stringing together the transmission of the above error in common law authorities. The assumption that Christianity is part of the common law had become a commonplace by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “thus we find a string of authorities, when, examined to the beginning, all hanging, on the same hook; a perverted expression, . . . or on nothing,” Jefferson wrote.[29] He went on to discuss the earlier ages of the law, the definition of the common law as lex non scripta, but agreed with Hale’s History of the Common Law that while the common law ends at the Magna Charta where statute law begins, nevertheless the evidence for the substance of the common law exists in records insofar as it is transmitted through the opinions of judges and cases, “for all these laws have their several monuments in writing, whereby they are transferred from one age to another, and without which they would soon lose all kind of certainty.”[30] The problem, for Jefferson, in reference to the immutable authority claimed by religious institutions, was that “our judges have piously avoided lifting the veil under which it was shrouded.” Having used the antiquarian scholarship of the earlier law reporters and David Houard’s Traites sur les coutumes Anglo-Normandes (1776) to illustrate the absence of the legal recognition of Christian authority in the early Anglo-Saxon period, he noted that editions of the Laws of King Alfred were subsequently copied with a preface of four chapters of Exodus and two verses from the Acts of Apostles. The summation of the essay called particular attention to the “fabrication” processes by which the divergent aspects of constitutional history are stitched together to form a singular, totalizing image of authority in the very composition of the texts that transmit the legal knowledge underpinning that very authority.

To return to the legal commonplace book, Jefferson’s reading and extraction patterns point us to the groundwork for a critical mode of historical practice carried out in full awareness of the stitched together character of legal knowledge constructed in the manner of continuity and tradition. As his reading began to include histories of English law, he turned particularly to those that challenged Coke’s antedating of what had become known as feudal tenures in the dissent of property to the pre-Conquest period, namely the works of the seventeenth-century royalist Sir Henry Spelman, Matthew Hale’s History of the Common Law, and John Dalrymple’s An Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain. This reflected Jefferson’s sense that in fact the positing of the continuity of the ancient constitution from the Anglo-Saxon period was a myth, and demonstrably so. His selections from more broadly framed legal treatises included Obadiah Hulme’s An Historical Essay on the English Constitution (1771), which was written to trace the concept of the “elective power of the people” to the Saxon period and consequently justify the power of Parliament in its representative capacity to tax the colonists; and Sir John Fortescue’s fifteenth-century De Laudibus Leges Angliae, a theoretical account of the long history and superiority of the English common law relative to alternative jurisdictions within England and the legal traditions of other constitutions of Europe. From these, Jefferson extracted the historical scholarship on the constituent assembly practices in which customary legal frameworks gained widespread legitimacy, focusing on origins, but again, not in any attempt to legitimate subsequent institutional development and codification He did so, rather, in the context of outspoken, sometimes riotous political activity on the part of increasing numbers of subjects during the imperial crisis, to realize and rethink customary legal frameworks, with renewed interest in the origins of political sovereignty and law.[31]

Especially crucial here are the references to Hulme or to the Anglo-Saxon witen (or the witena gemot), the institutional and theoretical basis for parliamentary sovereignty in the British Constitution, and “where their principal power was lodged, annually moveable, and entirely subject to the elective power of the people,” while giving a “more fixed state to executive authority, . . . confined within a certain sphere of action,” and “prescribed by law.”[32] Likewise, Fortescue’s delineation of the origins of political rule in the “Embrio” of the people would come to inform Jefferson’s legal and constitutional thought. From a manuscript compilation of Fortescue’s writings, eighteenth-century lawyer John Fortescue-Aland published a collection, The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy (1714). Its preface was the source of a great number of the entries on Fortescue in the legal commonplace book. In the preface, Fortescue-Aland summarizes Fortescue’s historical work on the origins of the common law as predating King Alfred’s compilation, generally presumed to be the original of the common law. As Fortescue-Aland demonstrates, Fortescue had sought to prove that the common law of England, in its antiquity and its independent continuity, was not only the equal but the superior of the European civil law inherited from Rome. For Fortescue, the foundations of this continuity were the sustained participation of people other than the King in the process of making law: “in the Body Politic, the first thing, which lives and moves, is the intention of the People, having in it the Blood, that is, the Prudential Care and Provision for the Public Good, which it transmits and communicates to the Head, as the Principal Part, and to all the rest of the Members of the said Body Politic, and whereby it subsists and is invigorated.”[33] This entailed a synchronic understanding of the temporality in which legislation and adjudication took place, for any laws that did not register with the “intention of the legislators” could “immediately be amended or repealed . . . with the same Consent and in the same Manner as they were first enacted into a Law,” that is to say, the original process of law making in an assembly was considered a constant presence in constitutional history, reenacted each time a law was made, either through representative institutions or the people themselves.[34]

Jefferson was coming to differ from Fortescue in his refusal to see historical moments of actually making law as solid threads in a longer continuum of legal development. In the eyes of the colonists, they were confronting a constitutional arrangement where legislative sovereignty had been forcibly removed to the locus of a nonrepresentational, alien political institution. Thus Jefferson’s isolation of the constituent process of law making at the (historically informed) theoretical origins of law and political society was part of a process of gathering past exemplary moments as a means of thinking outside inherited narratives of sovereignty.

By far Jefferson’s largest commonplace book, and perhaps consequently his least appreciated one, was his notebook on theory and precedent in chancery, or equity jurisprudence, and it is in this book that we can see most clearly the experience of rupture and fragmentation in the authority of law as a system of knowledge.[35] In turn, and as we will see, it is around the exploration and use of the concept of equity in the history of legal thought and institutions that the radicalism of Jefferson’s designs for a revolutionary constitution for Virginia would be built. In eighteenth-century English legal theory, equity as practiced in the Court of Chancery was a dangerous business. During the rise of chancery jurisdiction under the respective Tudor governments, equity had been considered the “King’s conscience,” and therefore the conscience or spirit of the law, a corrective to the rigidity of the common law. For Francis Bacon, a hero of Jefferson, his time as the chancellor saw the installation of chancery as a check on the supremacy of the law over royal prerogative and sovereignty articulated at the time by the chief justice of King’s Bench, Sir Edward Coke. By the eighteenth century, many jurists decried the potential for decision in equity cases to rest on little but the conscience of the particular judge. While chancery practice had played an important role in getting around the feudal constraints of common law rules regarding real property and inheritance, it was in part out of concern for the growing power of this alternative jurisdiction that Blackstone and Chief Justice Mansfield began defending the legitimacy of common law judges interpreting the law with the assistance of principles of equity as part of their projects for conservative law reform.[36] Indeed, for Blackstone, it was imperative for him to deemphasize the distinctions between equity and common law, at some length discussing the strict rules by which equity jurisprudence was bound and the liberality of interpretation that had always been a component of common law adjudication. As Fortescue-Aland put it, “to have no rule to decide controversies, but the rule of Equity, is to begin the World again, and make of a choice of that Rule, which out of mere necessity was made use of in the Infancy of the State, and Indigency of Laws, and to set up this Rule, after Laws are established, to relieve hard Cases, and leave the Matter at large, is it not rather to unravel, by Unperceived Degrees, the fine and close Texture of the Law, which has been so many hundred years in the making?”[37]

Given Jefferson’s ideological contempt for any supposed remnants of the Tudor or Stuart monarchs, and particularly given his later quite forceful critique of judicial power in confrontation with the Marshall Court, equity seems a bizarre place for Jefferson’s interest. And yet, in the passage from Fortescue-Aland just quoted, we can see an intellectual project that would have caught Jefferson’s eye: an opportunity to theorize the “unraveling” of the “Texture of the Law,” woven carefully and tightly over so many centuries. By far the largest number of entries in the equity commonplace book are from Scottish jurist Lord Kames’s Principles of Equity, and if taken with the passages from Kames’s Historical Law-Tracts in the legal commonplace book, Kames on law and legal history emerges as one of the most cited and copied sources in Jefferson’s reading life. While Blackstone nervously sought to check the near legislative power of equity adjudication, Kames was busy using his position as Scotland’s chief justice to openly carry out legal reform from the bench, bringing about significant reform surrounding his two pet projects: undoing feudal restraints on property, particularly landed property, and reformation of the criminal law.[38] Both of these aims would be pillars of Jefferson’s own proposals for a new constitution and law reform in the newly declared Commonwealth of Virginia.

The centerpiece of Jefferson’s inspiration from Kames was not merely practical legal reform goals, it was the methodology and language that conditioned the possibility for thinking anew about what the law had been, what was, what it would be. Indeed, Kames’s dictum, citing Bolingbroke, that one could not study the law without studying it historically, without comparing it to other systems of jurisprudence, and without understanding the social and governmental contexts in which law had developed, was perhaps the single most important idea shaping Jefferson’s approach to learning in the area of the law.[39] Likewise, Kames’s definition of equity as comprehending “every matter of law that by the common law is left without remedy” gave Jefferson language to think with in the crisis of legal legitimacy and legal suspension that characterized constitutional experience of the outbreak of revolution in the colonies.[40]

The project of tracing principles of jurisprudence to “human nature” was not a turn away from history to nature, but a historical project in and of itself, entailing a history of how social, economic, and political conditions had affected human ethics over time. Natural jurisprudence was not antithetical to history; in fact, natural law, like the human mind and human laws, developed and was to be studied historically. For Jefferson in particular, natural law would come to be part of a natural history that confronted and mixed with civil and legal history, blurring the distinction between nature and history, between physis and nomos: a way of thinking in history about the deep context and the historical fragility of law simultaneously, as a text such as the Notes on the State of Virginia demonstrates dramatically.[41] In terms of connecting Jefferson’s methods of reading in the area of the law to his collection, composition, and writing of legal and constitutional text for revolutionary Virginia, what matters principally is the configuration of equity as a caesura in the temporal continuity of the law, and precisely the all too direct calling up of the origins of law and sovereignty, the “unraveling,” fragmenting, or fracturing in the temporality underwriting law that critics of equity feared.

III

Blackstone defined equity as the “reason and spirit of the law,” guiding the judge, in the instance of uncertainty, to ascertain the intent of the original legislator as the key interpretive principle.[42] He wrote in contrast to Francis Bacon, who construed equity jurisdiction as taking over at the limits of common and statutory law and as being part of the royal prerogative, and to Kames, who construed equity as arising where the common law failed and as resting in the power of the judge. For Blackstone, this gesture was part of the larger philosophical and constitutional goals of his magisterial tome: to foreclose the legitimacy of alternative sources or traditions of law, particularly appeals to natural right and the ancient constitutionalism associated with radical and Whig politics since the English Civil War. That is not to say that Blackstone ignored or wrote off these traditions, but he configured them as more perfectly embodied in the gradual, continual development and perfection of the common law itself. In other words, the instituting, constitutional, founding moments of law, the actual creation of law, the historical moment anterior to its codification, its antifoundational origin, was circumscribed by interpretive rule to a past recoverable only through the mediation of law’s naturally authoritative continuity through time. It was precisely this solidity against which Jefferson’s textual practices and the constitutional vision such practices informed were ultimately directed.

That equity was a critical part of Jefferson’s republican and even democratic vision for constitutionalism is apparent not only from the sheer immensity of his engagement with it as a student, but also in the shaping of some of his most crucial political texts surrounding the emergence of the independence movement in the middle to late 1770s. The “Summary View,” after all, was a final appeal to the King’s conscience, “a humble and dutiful address presented to his majesty,” in the midst of a situation that would require the surrender of “not only the principles of common sense, but the common feelings of human nature,” and after the failure of legal and constitutional arguments grounded in the applicability of the common law rights of Englishmen to colonial subjects.[43] More radically, the Declaration of Independence made similar recourse to natural right and natural rights, laying out a list of grievances prefaced by a claim to the rights of the people to renegotiate or dissolve legal bonds which had become injurious to the ends for which those bonds were made in the first place. No doubt, the Declaration, like the founding era itself, bears the markers of “multiple traditions” of legal and political thought, including the translation of Locke’s “life, liberty, and estate,” into “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”[44] But the form of the argument Jefferson sought to make becomes clearer when seen not in the light of a grand, retrospectively conceived “liberal” and social contract tradition drawn from Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke, but in the practice of legal argumentation appropriate to the corrective use of principles of equity as applied to covenants and contracts between people and peoples.[45] That in Jefferson’s formulation, the people themselves are in the interpretive place of the chancellor, is a sign of the radical constitutional theory coming to play, one predicated on the sudden reemergence of the people in their capacity as critical components of the actual making and defining of law.[46]

In Jefferson’s case, it was not simply the ideas of law and sovereignty that come into question, but that the written, composed, textual character of law had ceased to appear whole. Indeed, Jefferson’s unique attention to the physicality of law and legal knowledge as writing was an essential aspect of the development of his revolutionary constitutional criticism and method, growing as it did out of his concern for the representation of historical and conceptual authority in the presentation of text in the form of the book. In the fourth volume of his commentaries, Blackstone hailed the composition of the Laws of King Alfred out of the disparate assemblage of local laws: Alfred’s codification had been “a most great and necessary work,” aiming at no less than to “new-model the constitution; to rebuild it on a plan that should endure for ages; and, out of its old discordant materials, which were heaped upon each other in a vast and rude irregularity, to form one unified and one connected whole.”[47] Whatever undesirable elements had been woven into the texture of the law by periodic conquests and abrupt revolutions, the feudal constraints introduced by the Norman Conquest, for example, were so “interwoven in the body of our legal polity, that they cannot now be taken out without a manifest injury to the substance.”[48] In a letter to an inquiring student sent sometime in the early 1770s, Jefferson advised a student on commonplace books of law, urging him to make use of Coke and the earlier legal treatises of Bracton and Glanville “when tracing the history of particular portions of the law,” warning against relying on more recent texts, such as the surveys of Matthew Bacon and Blackstone, which had been produced more out of a need to organize into a unified body the “voluminous” development of law in the eighteenth century than to provide a history.[49] Likewise, in the 1803 preface to his edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, Jefferson’s friend and ally, St. George Tucker, echoed Coke’s description of legal study in his critique of Blackstone: “with the appearance of the Commentaries, the Laws of England, from a rude chaos, instantly assumed the semblance of a regular system. . . . The crude and immethodical hours of Sir Edward Coke were laid aside, and that rich mine of learning, his Commentary upon Littleton, was thought to be no longer worthy of the labor requisite for extracting its precious ore.”[50] An attentiveness to the composition of text on the part of these elite Virginia legal minds existed not only in their approach to authoritative treatises that organized legal knowledge, but in the writing of law and constitutions themselves.

While the Second Continental Congress approached and made its decision to declare independence, Jefferson, its newest member, was just as concerned, if not more, with the writing of a new state constitution for Virginia. Since 1774, when Lord Dunmore, then the royal governor of the colony, had dissolved the House of Burgesses and in so doing closed the courts of law in response to the growing intensity of the imperial crisis, Virginia, like many of the other colonies, went without recognizable constitutional government for an extended period of time. It was not until Congress issued orders to all the colonies to form new state governments after the Crown had declared them illegitimate that political ground existed for constitutional conventions.[51] In Jefferson’s constitutional draft of 1776, which was passed over in favor of that of George Mason, the temporality of this foundational moment was built into the text itself. An extended preface anticipated the legal argument against the Crown that would later surface in the text of the Declaration, but in the case of the constitutional text the criticism led directly into the design and practice of new institutional structure. Declaring the illegitimacy of the royal governance in the colonies and performing a textual dethroning of the King’s rule, Jefferson further stated that this might not be enough, that it would “become further necessary to re-establish such ancient principles as are friendly to the rights of the people and to declare certain others which may cooperate with and fortify the same in the future.” He then proceeded to outline a model of state government in the name of “the authority of the people.”[52] As far as accessing a development of Jefferson’s legal and constitutional thought, there are a couple of things that stand out in the draft constitution of 1776: the separation of the judiciary and the upper house of the legislative power; an astonishingly weak executive; an “administrator,” who would be elected along with a deputy annually by the lower house of the legislative assembly; and a liberalization of property qualifications for voting, including all male (white) persons who owned land, a quarter of an acre in town or twenty-five acres in the country. This was not a terribly radical move until one read on to the fourth section on public and private rights, where it is provided that “every person . . . shall be entitled to an appropriation of 50 acres or to so much as shall make up what he owns or has owned 50 acres in full and absolute dominion.”[53] Furthermore, Jefferson tried to dramatically expand the importance of juries in state-level courts, expanding trial by jury to “all causes, whether of Chancery, Common, Ecclesiastical or Marine law,” and provided a provision for banning the importation of slaves and the status thereof, a plan of statewide public education, a ban on standing armies, a guarantee of the right to keep arms on one’s property, a generous naturalization process, a replacement of primogeniture and entail with laws of gavelkind, an extension of equal property rights to women, and total freedom of religious conscience.

The provisions for religious liberty, the immediate end of the slave trade, expanding the power and use of juries, and the socialized distribution of property were proposals unique to Jefferson’s constitutional draft, and were decisive factors in its defeat. But the project of restoring “such ancient principles as are friendly to the rights of the people,” in Jefferson’s eyes, entailed a grander series of reforms, reforms that he had the opportunity to propose when selected as a member of the special committee appointed by the General Assembly, at Jefferson’s urging, for the revisal of the Virginia legal code in October 1776, which included Edmund Pendleton, George Wythe, George Mason, and Thomas Ludwell Lee.[54] Their goal as stated by the assembly was to collect and read over the entire of body of law that had prevailed in the colony, including applicable English laws as well as laws passed in Virginia, and to make a report of what should be kept and what should not.

Well known for his deep reading and study of Virginian as well as English legal history, Jefferson was assigned the review of the application of the common law and statutory law through to the founding of the colony. Lee and Mason having dismissed themselves on account of not being qualified, Pendleton took subsequent Virginia law, and Wythe took subsequent British law. According to Jefferson’s autobiography, as he had been assigned the English origins of common law rules of descent and the criminal law, he sought the guidance and permission of the committee to develop bills of total reform in these as well as other areas of the law. Out of the final report submitted by the committee, which amounted to 90 pages of 126 individual bills reforming, eliminating, or condensing previous legal material and an even more substantial abbreviation, Jefferson later isolated four fundamental components of the revisal report that he deemed particularly important for “forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient [sic] or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican.”[55] These included the abolition of entail, or common law rules of descent written to preserve the integrity of elite landed estates over time; the similar abolition of the law of primogeniture; the freedom of religion and the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Virginia; the consequent outfitting of the College of William and Mary as a public university, which the chair of divinity of being converted into a chair of “law and police,” a seat occupied first by Wythe; and finally, the introduction of trial by jury into the chancery courts, the separation and independence of which was further provided for in the report of the revisers in 1779.[56] Out of these, only the abolitions of entail and primogeniture were entirely successful, and these with great controversy and heated debate. The total disestablishment bill failed and was not passed until 1786, and the idea for juries in equity cases failed outright. Jefferson’s other pet project, a reform of the criminal law, also met overwhelming resistance.

That these proposals were reflective of Jefferson’s perception of fracture in the temporality of constitutionalism and a subsequent prompting to creative engagement with legal history can be partly observed in the fears surrounding his proposals. Indeed, Edmund Pendleton remained skeptical of both the repeals of entail and primogeniture, fearing the consequences of a disbanding of the propertied bases or Virginia’s old political elite for the order and security of the new commonwealth. Carter Braxton, an heir of the wealthy Carter family and a signer of the Declaration, opposed both reforms vociferously in the assembly as well as in print. Anticipating the constitutional convention of 1776 in the spring of that year, Landon Carter, a justice of the peace for the county of Richmond, wrote in his personal diary that “if our form of Government is changed I hope some divine Inspiration will possess our rulers to establish the common Law of England amongst us. Otherwise, I cannot see what incouragement [sic] People of my age can have in America for improving our possessions since it is the Common Law of England alone that establishes the descent in our posterity.”[57] The linkage between the English common laws’ rules of descent and the identity of the elite landed colonist had remained solid throughout the colonial period in Virginia because of the sense of historical continuity provided by the transmission of status, rule, and responsibility through the continued inheritance of property. Men like Pendleton and the sons of the Carter family quite rightly feared that Jefferson’s constitutional project posed a serious threat to that linkage that was so important not only to the estates of Virginia’s ruling elite, but to the psychological grounding of such men in the temporality of landed property and its common law descent.

Jefferson has been justly accused, both in his day and in ours, of having at best an idealized image of the Anglo-Saxon ancient constitution, of succumbing all too easily to the golden age myth so prevalent not only in English Whig political discourse, but in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republican legal and political thought in general. All the same, it would be a mistake to dismiss at least Jefferson’s early interest in ancient Britain as merely a naïve uptake of ethnic mythology or a paradigmatic example of mainstream English Whig historical consciousness.[58] The context of jurisprudence and law making allows us to see another aspect of this interest, for what drove the constant referral to language of restoration or reestablishment, what appears to have interested Jefferson about these periods so much, was their represented character as founding, legitimating moments of law and its subsequent history. In his drafting of constitutional and legal text, as in his commonplace book attentiveness to the presentation of history in writing, what concerned Jefferson most was what was gained and what was lost at the moment when antifoundational constitutional experience became inscribed for posterity in the form of a singular, authoritative text. Like Blackstone in his historical summation of the laws of England, Jefferson took up as an exemplar the ninth-century codification of English laws under the efforts of Alfred the Great, but he did so not, as was typical of the period, as a primordial origin point beyond which historical memory could not venture with much legitimacy, but as a constituent building block of the history of the British Constitution as presented by Blackstone and others, and therefore as a fragment.

Indeed, in his correspondence with Edmund Pendleton and in his autobiography, when Jefferson spoke of restoration with regards to the ancient constitution, he referred to the eighth rather than the ninth century, to the collective historical experience behind the composition of the Laws of King Alfred, its being taken up as a legitimating document of subsequent constitutional authority, and the narrative of unbroken descent that legitimated this authoritative vision of legal history.[59] This moment of British constitutionalism struck Jefferson precisely when he confronted a fracturing and open moment for the constitutionalism of his own polity, the very identity and existence of which was unthinkable without an assemblage of transmitted histories of English law and empire, and yet at the same time found itself in a moment where those histories as assembled and practiced had ceased to be authoritative. When the committee for the revisal of the laws met for the first time, Jefferson would later report, the first question they tackled was whether to augment and revise applicable English and colonial principles and statutes, or to produce an entirely new and fully authoritative code, “a new Institute like those of Justinian and Bracton.” Interestingly enough, it was Pendleton, the conservative, who pushed for a new Institute, and Wythe, Mason, and above all Jefferson who favored a collaborative revisal of the laws as they had been practiced. Not only would the task of writing be “an arduous undertaking,” but, Jefferson reflected, the new code, “when reduced to a text, every word of that text, from the imperfection of human language, and its incompetence to express distinctly every shade of idea,” would become the object of questioning and endless turning over in adjudication of subsequent cases.[60] In other words, reducing the law to a singular text that aimed for systematic comprehensiveness was not only foolhardy, it was dangerous to liberty. Once the constitution and the law, in all of their textuality, had been reduced to a unified text, the conditions of possibility for the open reading and practicing of law and legal history in the antifoundational mode would fade from the memory of not only lawmakers and judges, but the people themselves.

Jefferson’s revolutionary drafting and design of laws and constitutions can be seen as a concerted effort to forestall the process of sealing off the law and constitutional history from alternative readings and the reactivation of forgotten or minor jurisprudences, existing as potentiality within the assemblage of texts from which the law was continually made. When read with this context in mind, previous aspects of Jefferson’s early constitutional thought that have been dismissed as merely frittering or sloppy thinking can begin to be understood as products of fracturing in constitutional time. The proposal for the reform of the criminal law, for example, was written with the main text of the law running down the center of the page while marginalia consisting of historical footnotes that referenced ancient precedents and developments in both civil and common law as well as political theory decorated all sides of the page. One legal scholar has dismissed the bill as “anachronistic, haphazard, incomplete, and altogether disappointing,” its writing “the contemporary equivalent of playing with fonts and margins and footnotes,” or as merely an imitation of Coke’s legal treatises.[61] The difference, of course, was that this was not a treatise; it was a bill, and a potential law that Jefferson submitted to the committee for reporting and publication as written. Sure enough, the crime bill preserves a surprising amount of corporal punishments for major theft and sexual crimes, as well as capital punishment for murder and treason alone. Later in life, Jefferson himself expressed disappointment in the bill, explaining that it had been his desire to completely abolish capital punishment and the lex talionis, but that the guidelines provided for the committee, for his task in particular, as well as the politics of the time, did not allow for such reforms. Inspired by the historically developed legal theories of Lord Kames and Cesare Beccaria, which tied legal change to wider shifts in the social and political conditions of society and the resulting changes in moral sentiment, Jefferson provided for this history in the marginal footnotes.[62] What that meant was that when the legislator, the judge, and the citizen read the law, they would encounter not simply a table of gradation matching crimes and punishments, but the multitude of theories and histories of law and the challenge of punishment to the law that both informed and could be used to criticize or undermine the law presented. This was law written to help ensure that law never be written in stone. What Jefferson intended in the eccentric composition of his document was for the process of critical reading of law and legal authority to continue after the founding of the new commonwealth.

Likewise, in the context of centuries of debates over the rise and power of chancery jurisdiction, Jefferson’s proposal to provide for juries in these cases can be seen as institutionalizing, inscribing in the fabric of the law, precisely the kind of unraveling and open interpretation of cases that critics of equity feared. Symbolically, the proposal augmented the tradition of the King’s conscience with the discretion of an expanded definition of the people actively present at the trial, and provided a deliberative check to the power of the single judge. The proposal died a soft death, as juries were allowed only by the consent of both parties and the judge (and as Jefferson explained, no party would start off a civil case by suggesting the incompetence of the bench).[63] However, this along with other seemingly minor aspects of Jefferson’s early thought point to the emergence of a radical jurisprudence and constitutionalism that to this day challenges our own narratives of the origins of American law and political thought. Jefferson’s draft of the bill for religious freedom, for example, concluded by acknowledging its limits and suggesting that the current assembly had no right to bind the actions of later assemblies, that while the repeal of the act would be an “infringement of natural right,” such a declaration on the part of the authors would have no effect in law. That law, in being communicated and transferred in texts, and therefore authorized, interpreted, reinterpreted, and reauthorized over time, was also the spirit guiding Jefferson’s infamous proposals of the regular convening of constitutional conventions for legal renewal, and the desirability of collaborative, popular participation in these processes. If the Revolution had seen the reemergence of the opportunity for founding, in the fragmenting of the foundations of British constitutionalism, law, and sovereignty in the colonies, then it was Jefferson’s concern, not simply to found well, but to safeguard against the solidification of founding texts into monuments of order and singular foundational authority by planning for the people, in juries, in conventions, in suffrage, and perhaps in democratic-revolutionary politics, to share in the interpretation, and thereby the renewal and new writing, or rewriting, of law.

When Jefferson wrote James Madison over the course of his time in Paris during the 1780s, he suggested limiting the legitimacy of not only constitutions but private debts to the period of twenty years, as no generation had the right to tie another to its laws and legal bindings. When Shays’s Rebellion broke out in western Massachusetts in 1786, Jefferson wrote to Madison and Abigail Adams that such reassertions of public right were an important corrective to constituted authority, and “as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical.”[64] Rather than the whimsical asides of a naïve idealist, these proposals were the products of a method of reading and practicing constitutional law and politics that originated in Jefferson the law student’s commonplace books. What lent such urgency to his efforts to collect and publish the laws at public expense and for public use was the fear of legal and constitutional text becoming removed from the eyes, ears, and hands of an informed, if in his day and in his mind restricted, citizenry.

Beginning after the Revolution, Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia, the country as a whole would be in trouble because “it will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support.” Not only would government forget the people, but “they will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights.” Such ossification of the legal and political order could continue unabated until “our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.”[65] Better to devise a constitutionalism that did its best to ensure that the people in their constituent power and the government in its rule never forgot one another. On economic inequality, Jefferson wrote Madison just two years before the federal constitutional convention that the consequences of growing inequality would be predictably bad, therefore “legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,” for “whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live in.” If politics did not see fit that there was equitable distribution of the fruits of appropriation, “the fundamental right to labor in the earth returns to the unemployed.”[66] This was part and parcel of a mode of constitutional analysis and criticism that sought always to keep the constituent processes, the makings of law, in mind. Upon receiving news of the constitutional convention from Madison, Jefferson voiced his concerns regarding the lack of a bill of rights and the general lack of public deliberation, noting that the fears sparked by Shays’s Rebellion and other rebellious events misunderstood the situation, for “the only way to prevent disorder is to render them uninteresting by frequent changes.” Perhaps ratification should await the text being “duly weighed & canvassed by the people,” and having the convention edit and rewrite in response to suggestions that arose from such a collaborative process, granting the people that their role “will be a great addition to the energy of the government.”[67] Founding and the making of fundamental law, for Jefferson, was at once a singularly open opportunity and an event to never be totally forgotten or circumscribed to a single moment in time. Out of his concerns for the richness and the dangers of politics carried out in a polity constituted “on words,” to use H. Jefferson Powell’s phrase,[68] Jefferson himself experienced and theorized a mode of practicing a constitutional subjectivity of fragments, of a kind of antifoundationalism, the promise and limits of which would wrap the mind of Thomas Jefferson for the rest of his life.

Decades after the events surrounding the American War of Independence, Jefferson found himself and his polity mired in contradiction. The proximity of the people as an active substance of politics to their government dissipated as an increasingly commercial republic spread across the continent, defined by Jefferson as an “empire of liberty” (supposedly breaking out of Montesquieu’s problematic of extensive republics), a republic not only expanded, but one that saw continual expansion as a necessary part of its national identity.[69] To this we can add the presence of Native Americans, the greatest victims of a shift from a diffuse confederacy of multiple temporalities to an aggressively linear, progressive national time. Likewise, there is the fundamental paradox of African Americans, enslaved or marginalized by force of law in the new republic, whom Jefferson, in the course of his Notes on the State of Virginia, would dismiss as barely human by way of mixed processes of nature and collective experience. At the same time he admitted of their right to revolution, as natural a “convulsion” as that of dispossessed white farmers or one of the storms he watched from his mountaintop plantation home.[70] All of these failures, tragedies, and contradictions, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, framed the context wherein Jefferson returned in retirement to his revolutionary-era idea of popular participation in politics through what he came to call the maintenance of “ward-republics” within the state.[71] It was only after the revolutionary pressures and presences of the people on politics faded that Jefferson and others could perhaps take stock of what was being forgotten, and in Jefferson’s view, constitutional reforms needed to be undertaken to institutionalize while still barely memorable “the direct action of the citizens” in the affairs of the government. “The elementary republics of the wards, the county republics, the States republics, and the republic of the Union would form a gradation of authorities, standing each on the basis of law,” Jefferson wrote in 1816, for when every man “feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day, when there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of its councils,” then it will be unlikely for the people themselves to allow for the emergence of tyrannical threats to liberty.[72]

Thomas Jefferson operated under the influence of a multiplicity of what contemporary historians of political thought recognize as observably distinct historical vocabularies of law and politics. These included, but were not limited to: a neoclassical concern for the independence and virtue of the citizen along with the fear of corruption in the state; a discourse of the natural character of revolutions within states and constitutions Polybian and Baconian in inspiration; English radicalisms of both Harringtonian and Lockean qualities; a Scottish concern with the history of customs, or increasingly manners and sentiments, cast in the frameworks of jurisprudence; and increasingly, political economy, a French attempt at a natural history of laws and institutions, which aimed at comprehensive theories of man and citizen, or “history, natural and civil,” in Jefferson’s terms. So too the ancient constitutionalism inherited from constitutional struggles in seventeenth-century England, and an idealistic language of the participation of the common people in politics to which many continue to attach the adjective “Jeffersonian.” Given this vast and (some would say) downright haphazard amalgamation, it is no wonder then that contemporary tracings of historically rooted traditions of republican politics from Europe to the American founding have tended take up John Adams as the exemplary figure,[73] cultivating the image of a distinction between Adams’s adherence to a conservative theory of freedom growing out of a neo-Tacitist, Machiavellian, and Harringtonian historical pessimism and Jefferson’s ahistorical, Pollyanna-like faith in the people and their progress, so prototypically American, and that in the worst way.

The goal of this essay has not been simply to rescue Jefferson from such an appraisal, but to reconstruct an experience and a theorization of temporality in the area of law and constitutionalism that challenges our own investments in thinking of the history of legal and political thought in the paradigm of traditions. This focus on historical consciousness takes up the vital insight of J. G. A. Pocock that as “what we call historical consciousness is social and subjective in its origins,” and “a developed form of man’s awareness of himself as existing and acting in a continuous context of social relationships,” it “must therefore begin with his awareness of a particular social continuity to which he himself belongs.”[74] But pointing to Jefferson’s experience of fragmentation and fracturing, of discontinuity, also points to the limits of conflating historical consciousness and historical practice with the assumption of continuity. That is not to say that continuities do not exist or should not be looked for in scholarship. It is to say that the lesson of drawing attention to the social, and thereby historical, character of our notions of time is not that the articulations of historical actors in the realm of the political can be shown to be shaped, and even bound, by prior traditions of framing civil history. Rather, that the spinning of continuities and traditions out of the textual materials of history is always a project retrospectively conceived and practiced: reading always implies writing and rewriting, and the indeterminacy of such processes demand a certain level of attentiveness. If the historical subject of a polity is constituted in precisely the (always unstable) transmission of these narratives of law and politics, it might also occur that the self-aware historical actor arrives at the sudden realization of the gaps separating the constituting narratives of their contemporary situation. He or she might then be thrown back into the constituent fragments and processes, particularly at the originating moment of these narratives and the conventions of institution and self that they shape. In this moment of fracture, perhaps of confusion and vertigo in the previous organization of social knowledge, forgotten or unseen connections and experiences can be rediscovered, remembered, and made in radical, unanticipated, and creative ways for law and politics. At his best, such was the case of Jefferson and his articulation of what I have called in this essay a sense “fractured” constitutional time.

A historiography critically aware of breaks and fissures in the institutions and narratives that underwrite modern sovereignty seems preferable as a tool for approaching the dramatic transformations in thought and society that occurred across the “age of democratic revolutions” than one organized around the reconstruction of lineage and pure conceptual categories out of the contingency and messiness of human attempts to describe their history to themselves. This description of Jefferson as theorizing a sense of fragmentation in the temporality of constitutionalism echoes the task of historically inflected democratic theory as described by Hannah Arendt. But in attending to law and legal theory, it does so against current trends in criticism of her work, and somewhat against her own concerns to maintain the specificity of the political as opposed to the social, the economic, or the legal. If in our own era we have lost the comfort of continuity and must confront what Arendt called a “fragmented past which has lost all certainty of evaluation,” then Jefferson emerges as an early interrogator of this condition, and one for whom a radical jurisprudence, a spirit of dynamism in the laws and institutions that nurture civic life, was a necessary component of thinking substantively about democracy.[75] As this paper has hopefully hinted at, the history of law and legal theory, of jurisprudence broadly conceived, provides a site in which a history and historiography of fragmentation in politics and political thought, broadly conceived, can be practiced most effectively.[76] The character of law as written culture, as inscribed in text, is constantly being deliberated upon and reinterpreted in light of new cases. Law challenges just as much as it establishes linearity, sovereignty, and foundationalism. A contemporary conceptual distinction, as that made by Pocock, between law and politics, between an “extracivic” tradition of jurisprudence concerned with the social and the administration of things and people’s rights in things, as opposed to a “purely political” and humanist concern with “personal relations entailed by equality and by ruling and being ruled,” breaks down in the case of Jefferson and the jurisprudential and constitutional origins of many of the tools with which he approached the problem of creating and maintaining the modern and democratic republic.[77] Neither the law nor politics as philosophical categories, nor for that matter those of nature and history, survives close inspection of the subjective and contingent realm of historical practice in the field of constitutionalism surveyed here.

“Some men,” Jefferson wrote in 1816, “look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.”[78] His efforts to ensure that institutions and the constitutional text from which they grew never be ensconced in the innermost sanctum of the Temple of the State can be seen to incarnate and contribute to what Arthur J. Jacobson has identified as the three writings of a dynamic jurisprudence: the inherited and authorizing inscription of the past; the present writing in the form of reading, engagement, and application; and the future writing encompassing the collaboration of the people and the legislator in the constant, never foreclosed project of making and remaking law.[79] An aristocrat unquestionably, Jefferson was nevertheless possessed of a hope described by Kafka in his brief story, “The Problem of Our Laws,” the creation of a moment in time when “the tradition and our research into it will jointly reach their conclusion, and as it were gain a breathing space,” a space for the widening and opening of the interpretive authority of law so long exercised by a select few, and a constitutionalism that prepares the people to assume their awesome responsibility.[80] As his massive collection of legal texts and his earnest plans to distribute them as widely as possible nicely crystallize, Jefferson, in his experience and theorization of fracture in the temporality of law, might be said to have been concerned above all with the temporal and spatial conditions of possibility for law never becoming too sacred to be seen or touched. This was a constitutional vision of as many people as possible getting to collectively, physically touch and hold the law, to engage in their own reading, and thus to collectively participate in the making of law’s changing meaning through time.

This paper consists of material from several early chapters of a dissertation under construction in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, entitled In the Course of Human Events: Jefferson, Text, and the Potentialities of Law. The author would like to thank Michael Meranze, Margaret Jacob, and Brian Steele for their comments, as well as the editors for their time and attention.

[1] Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe, 16 January 1796, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. John Catanzariti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 28:583.

[2] Alain Supiot, Homo Juridicus: On the Anthropological Function of the Law, trans. Saskia Brown (London: Verso Books, 2007).

[3] Shannon C. Stimson, The American Revolution in the Law: Anglo-American Jurisprudence before John Marshall (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 89.

[4] J. G. A. Pocock, “The Origins of the Study of the Past: A Comparative Approach,” in Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 148.

[5] J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, a Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Barbarism and Religion: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[6] On the question of historical consciousness in particular, see Joyce Appleby, “What Is Still American in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?” William and Mary Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1982): 287–309; Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts,” William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1986): 20–34; Appleby, Without Resolution: The Jeffersonian Tensions in American Nationalism: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at the University of Oxford, 25 April 1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and J. G. A. Pocock, “States, Republics, and Empires: The American Founding in Early Modern Perspective,” in Conceptual Change and the Constitution, ed. Terrence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 55–77.

[7] See J. G. A. Pocock, “Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought,” in Politics, Language, and Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3–41; preface to Pocock, Political Thought and History, x.

[8] Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 62–74, 169–79; Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 16–20, 56–68; Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 73–101. Peterson links Jefferson’s reading of English constitutional history to his political thought in the years preceding the Revolution, but finds this interest in “law as a form of history” to be prefatory to the development of a more mature commitment to the philosophy of natural rights; see Peterson, ibid., 56–57. On the commonplace books in general, see Douglas L. Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson’s Early Notebooks,” William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1985): 434–52; on legal notes and education in late colonial Virginia, see the pathbreaking work of Mary Sarah Bilder, “James Madison, Law-Student and Demi-Lawyer,” Law and History Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (May 2010), pp. 389-449.

[9] Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966); David N. Mayer, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994).

[10] J. G. A. Pocock, “America’s Foundations, Foundationalisms, and Fundamentalisms,” Orbis 49, no. 1 (2005): 37-44. This reading of the use of the term “fundamentalist” comes from Pocock’s descriptions of the “absolutist” or “fundamentalist” character of radical historical consciousness in contrast to the common law or civic humanist traditions. On the English Levellers in particular, see Pocock, Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, 124–27; “Origins of the Study of the Past,” 164.

[11] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1982); “Politics and the Study of Discourse” and “Questions of Method,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 53–86; Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); The Signature of All Things: On Method, ed. Kevin Atell, trans. Lucia D. Santo (New York: Zone Books, 2009).

[12] Perhaps the greatest exemplars are Sir John Randolph (1693–1737), William Byrd II (1674–1744), and Richard Bland (1710–76); manuscript material in all of their private libraries, including case reports and legislative records dating to the founding of the colony, came into Jefferson’s possession through the estate sales of Peyton Randolph and Bland, or the personal bequest of the other Randolph sons, Edmund and John. See Richard Beale Davis, Literature and Society in Early Virginia: 1608–1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA: Dominion Books, 1964); Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), chaps. 8, 10–11; Emory G. Evans, A Topping People: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Political Elite, 1690–1790 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).

[13] William Hamilton Bryson, Census of Law Books in Colonial Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978).

[14] John Aubrey, Aubrey’s Brief Lives (New York: Penguin, 1949), 163.

[15] Jacob Soll, Publishing the Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 13.

[16] As Kirstie McClure suggests, “the practice of commonplacing encouraged the decomposition of printed texts into fragments and their reassemblage,” in “Between the Castigation of Texts and the Excess of Words: Political Theory in the Margins of Tradition,” Areyh Botninick and William E. Connolly, ed. Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 199. On the importance of the commonplace book in early modern educational theory and practice, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory: 1500–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005), 70–73.

[17] Probably begun in 1763, concurrent with the start of his legal education under George Wythe; see Douglas L. Wilson, “Jefferson’s Early Notebooks,” William and Mary Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1985): 434–52.

[18] Thomas Jefferson, Legal Commonplace Book, Thomas Jefferson Papers, ser. 5, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington, DC, #231; Smith v. Brown & Cooper, in Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Court of King’s Bench . . ., by William Salkeld (London, 1721), 666. On this and other decisions as precursors to Justice Mansfield’s more famous Somerset’s Case decision of 1772, see Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 16.

[19] The application of common law constraints to property ownership and inheritance was a gradual, never fully completed product of the development of a relatively independent court structure in the colony, particularly after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1661. As Jefferson’s researches into the charters and legal origins of the colony would indicate within the decade, and as he would argue in his 1774 memo to the delegates of the Continental Congress (published without permission as “A Summary View of the Rights of British America”), land had been distributed to settlers by the Crown in the form of “allodial” holdings, or in absolute dominion, in the King’s realm. See “The Sentiments of a Foreigner on the Disputes of Great Britain with America” (Philadelphia, 1775), translated, extracted, and circulated from Raynal’s L’Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770); Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” (Philadelphia, 1774).

[20] Indeed, as Charles M. Gray has shown, chancery provided an increasing path of access to legal protection and action on the part of villeins and copyholders as the authority of manorial custom declined relative to courts of common law from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries (Copy-Hold, Equity, and the Common Law [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963]).

[21] “An Act Concerning Slaves and Servants” (a.d. 1705, XXXIV), in A Collection of all the Acts of Assembly, now in force, in the colony of Virginia . . . (Williamsburg, 1733), 226. On the distinction between natural and legal personage in colonial Virginian legal practice and its influence on the U.S. Constitution, see Malick W. Ghachem, “The Slave’s Two Bodies: The Life of an American Legal Fiction,” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2003): 809–42. For larger background on the failures of Wythe and Jefferson regarding the question of slavery in revolutionary era legal reforms, see John T. Noonan, Persons and Masks of the Law: Cardozo, Holmes, Jefferson, and Wythe as Makers of the Masks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 29–65. While Noonan points to the political and constitutional possibilities for greater action on slavery and the failures of Wythe and Jefferson to tackle the issue, even after admitting of the possibilities and expressing the desirability of major reform, his depiction of especially Jefferson as a crafter of a masked, magisterial image of law, power, and rule overlooks important parts of Jefferson’s jurisprudence and constitutionalism. Indeed, Jefferson’s actions with regard to the status of African Americans in the new nation stem not from his submitting them to the rule of law, but in his racist inability to fully extend to them the complex field of legal subjectivity of which he was otherwise such a careful as well as radical student and practitioner.

[22] Thomas Jefferson, Reports of Cases Determined in the General Court of Virginia, 1730–1740, 1768–1772 (Charlottesville, VA: Carr, 1829), 92.

[23] Ibid., 97.

[24] Ibid., 102; Edward Coke, “Premunire,” The Reports of Sir Edward Coke (London, 1727) 12:38; William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1766), 2:22–25.

[25] Ibid., 103.

[26] Ibid., 105.

[27] Thomas Jefferson, “Whether Christianity Is a Part of the Common Law?,” appendix to Reports of Cases, 137. See also Jefferson, Legal Commonplace Book, #873, later included in letter of Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 10 February 1814, in Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1321–29.

[28] Jefferson, “Whether Christianity Is a Part,” 140.

[29] Ibid., 138. See Sir Matthew Hale, The History of the Common Law of England, ed. Charles M. Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), chaps. 1–2.

[30] Jefferson, “Whether Christianity Is a Part,” 139.

[31] Michael A. McDonnell, “Class War? Class Struggles during the American Revolution in Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2006): 305–44.

[32] Jefferson, Legal Commonplace Book, #803; Obadiah Hulme, An Historical Essay on the English Constitution (London, 1771). See also William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1769), 4:405–6.

[33] Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae, . . . translated into English, illustrated with the notes of Mr. Selden (London, 1737), 22. On Fortescue, his context, and his place in subsequent history, see Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1-32; Thomas Garden Barnes, Shaping the Common Law: From Glanvill to Hale, 1188–1688 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 61–78.

[34] Ibid., 35.

[35] The only specific treatment of Jefferson's Equity Commonplace Book is a descriptive outline of the text by Judge Edward Dumbauld, “Thomas Jefferson’s Equity Commonplace Book,” Washington and Lee Law Review 48 (1991): 1257–83. On the influence of the juridical concept of equity on Jefferson and the wider history of American law and constitutionalism, see Peter Charles Hoffer, Law's Conscience: Equitable Constitutionalism in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

[36] William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1768), 3:428–42. See Thomas Jefferson to Philip Mazzei, November 1785, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 9:67–72; David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chaps. 3, 6–7. On earlier debates over developments in equity, see G. W. Keeton, An Introduction to Equity (London: Pitman, 1961); The Concept of Equity: An Interdisciplinary Assessment, ed. Daniela Carpi (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 7–20, 83–168, 185–208; Bradin Cormack, A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of the Common Law, 1509–1625 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chap. 2.

[37] John Fortescue-Aland, preface to The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy . . . , by Sir John Fortescue (London, 1714), xii.

[38] Projects informing and informed by his historical work, “Of the Introduction of the Feudal Law into Scotland,” in Essays upon Several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities (Edinburgh, 1757); “History of the Criminal Law,” in Historical Law-Tracts (Edinburgh, 1758). See David Lieberman, “The Legal Needs of a Commercial Society: The Jurisprudence of Lord Kames,” Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. István Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 203–34.

[39] Henry Home, preface to Historical Law-Tracts, by Lord Kames (Edinburgh, 1758).

[40] Thomas Jefferson, Equity Commonplace Book, Huntington Library Special Collections, Manuscripts Division, San Marino, CA, #1077; Lord Kames, Principles of Equity (Edinburgh, 1767), 1:38–55.

[41] On the fundamental character of the divide between these categories, see Donald R. Kelley, The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). For a challenge to how absolute this division has been in Western legal philosophy, see Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).

[42] Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 3:III, p. 429.

[43] Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” in Writings, 105, 111.

[44] John Locke, “Second Treatise on Government,” in Locke: Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 323; Thomas Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Writings, 19.

[45] The “multiple traditions approach” is meant to encompass the range of different traditions to which scholars have attributed the origins of the American Revolution and the founding of the republic. See Alan Gibson, Interpreting the Founding (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2006), chap. 6. On the “liberal” interpretation in its confrontation with the “republican synthesis,” in reference to the Declaration, see Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Vintage, 1922); James T. Kloppenberg, “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 74, no. 1 (1987): 9–33; Appleby, Without Resolution.

[46] On popular pressures in elite politics during the Revolution in Virginia, see Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). On the cultural assumption of “popular constitutionalism” in the common law and American Revolution, see Larry D. Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[47] Blackstone, Commentaries, 4:403–4.

[48] Ibid., 410–11.

[49] Thomas Jefferson to Bernard Moore, date unknown, later enclosed to John Minor, 30 August 1814, in Writings, 1558–59. See Julia S. Waterman, “Jefferson and Blackstone’s Commentaries,” Illinois Law Review 27 (1932–33): 629–59.

[50] St. George Tucker, preface to Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (Philadelphia, 1803).

[51] On the ideologies of state constitution making, see Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era, trans. Rita and Robert Kimber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). On the role of the concept of popular sovereignty, see Christian G. Fritz, American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition before the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

[52] Thomas Jefferson, “Third Draft Constitution for Virginia, 1776,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950),1:357.

[53] Ibid., 362–63.

[54] See Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 251–85; Edward Dumbauld, Thomas Jefferson and the Law (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), chap. 7.

[55] Jefferson, “Autobiography,” 44.

[56] On republican constitutionalism and the concept of the police as public supervisory power in Jeffersonian thought, see Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 43–59, 81–89.

[57] The Diary of Landon Carter, vol. 2, 13 April 1776, ed. Jack P. Greene (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1965), 1017.

[58] On Anglo-Saxon interest as a racial myth, see Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Peter Thompson, “Judicious Neology: The Imperative of Paternalism in Thomas Jefferson’s Linguistic Studies,” Early American Studies, Fall 2003, 187–224. The classic thesis on the predominance of English Whig historiography among the founders is Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); for a critique of Colbourn along similar lines, see Jessica Lorraine Walker, ‘Our Anglo-Saxon Ancestors’: Thomas Jefferson and the role of English History in the Building of the American Nation (University of Western Australia, Ph.D. Thesis, 2007).

[59] Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Pendleton, 13 August 1776, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:492.

[60] Jefferson, “Autobiography,” 38.

[61] Markus D. Dubber, “‘An Extraordinarily Beautiful Document’: Jefferson’s Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments and the Challenge of Republican Punishment,” Modern Histories of Crime and Punishment, ed. Markus D. Dubber and Lindsay Farmer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 115–50.

[62] “Report of the Committee for the Revisal of the Laws, Bill No. 64,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 2:492–507.

[63] “Report of the Committee for the Revisal of the Laws, Bill No. 90,” in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:566–69; Jefferson, “Autobiography,” 33, 45. On Jefferson’s conceptions of the boundaries of jury powers, see Jefferson to Arnoux, 19 July 1789, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 15:282-83. While Jefferson retains a distinction between the law-finding powers of the judge and the fact-finding powers of the jury, he further stipulates the power of the jury to overcome this division of labor should it find the judgment the product of any “bias.” As Shannon Stimson argues, Jefferson saw juries as one among many avenues for a wider, political and educational relationship between law and the citizenry, to be distinguished from a strictly legal vision that would circumscribe this relationship to jury participation, The American Revolution in the Law, 87-89.

[64] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 6 September 1789, 30 January and 5 February 1787, in The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Jefferson and Madison, 1776–1820, ed. James Morton Smith (New York: Norton, 1995), 631–33, 461. See also Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 22 February 1787, in Writings, 889–90; Herbert A. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001). As David Konig points out, stating that the earth belonged by usufruct to the living was a direct departure from the common law dictum, grounded in a legal fiction, that “the body politick is a body in fiction of law that endureth in perpetual succession,” and is best understood in this jurisprudential context; Sir Henry Finch, Law or a Discourse Thereof in Four Books (London, 1759), 87, quoted in David Thomas Konig, “Legal Fictions and the Rule(s) of Law: The Jeffersonian Critique of Common Law Adjudication,” in The Many Legalities of Early America, ed. Bruce H. Mann and Christopher Tomlins (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 97–117.

[65] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), ed. William H. Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 161.

[66] Jefferson to Madison, 28 October 1785, in Correspondence between Jefferson and Madison, 390. See Jennifer Nedelsky, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and here Jefferson goes beyond Locke, “Second Treatise,” ibid., 291.

[67] Jefferson to Madison, 20 December 1787, in Correspondence between Jefferson and Madison, 513–14.

[68] H. Jefferson Powell, A Community Built on Words: The Constitution in History and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). See also Robert L. Tsai, Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

[69] Jefferson to Madison, 27 April 1809, in Correspondence between Jefferson and Madison, 1586. On Jefferson and the critique of Montesquieu by Destutt de Tracy, see Thomas Jefferson to William Duane, 12 August 1810, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3:5–25.

[70] Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 163. See Jonathan Elmer, “The Archive, the Indian, and Jefferson’s Convulsions,” Diacritics 28, no. 4 (1998): 5–24; Hannah Spahn, Thomas Jefferson und die Sklaverei: Verrat an der Aufklärung? (Berlin: JFK Institut, 2002); William G. Merkel, “To See Oneself as a Target of a Justified Revolution: Thomas Jefferson and Gabriel’s Uprising,” American Nineteenth Century History 4, no. 2 (2003): 1–31.

[71] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 233–36.

[72] Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 28 May 1816, in Writings, 1392; Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 2 February 1816, ibid., 1380.

[73] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 507, 512, 526–57; Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 8; see also Jacob Soll’s excellent contribution to Patterson’s volume. On this portrayal of Jefferson, see Gordon S. Wood, “The Trials and Tribulations of Thomas Jefferson,” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 395–417; Jack N. Rakove, “Our Jefferson,” in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 210–35. On the Jeffersonian origins of subsequent metanarratives of American history, particularly surrounding expansion, see John M. Murrin, “The Jeffersonian Triumph and American Exceptionalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (Spring 2000): 1–25.

[74] J. G. A. Pocock, “Time, Institutions, and Action,” in Politics, Language, and Time, 236.

[75] Hannah Arendt, The Life of The Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 212. On further discussion of fragments, or “pearls” of the past, see her introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt, ed., (New York; Schocken Books, 1968), 1–58; on problematics of Arendt’s discussion of the American Revolution and the powers (and paradoxes) of constituent moments and events as opposed to constituted politics, see Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” Salmagundi 60 (1983): 3-19; Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), chap. 2; and Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Post-Revolutionary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), chap. 1.

[76] On this point, see Peter Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990).

[77] J. G. A. Pocock, “Virtue, Rights, and Manners,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 43–44.

[78] Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816, in Writings, 1401.

[79] Arthur J. Jacobson, “The Idolatry of Rules: Writing Law According to Moses, with Reference to Other Jurisprudences,” in Deconstruction and the Possibilities of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992), 95–141.

[80] Franz Kafka, “The Problem of Our Laws,” in The Basic Kafka (New York: Pocket Books, 1979), 156.

“True Freedom” and the Dutch Tradition of Republicanism

Marissa Gemma — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 13:37:12 -0800

Political debate filled a broad space in Dutch intellectual life throughout the seventeenth century. In perhaps no other European country did discussing political issues become such common practice. From learned circles to schuitpraatje (“barge talk”), through Cort bewijs (“short demonstrations”) or single sheets of Warachtighe waerschouwinghe (“true warning”), the proofs of political passions expressed verbally are countless. Due to high literacy levels, many ordinary people were able to take part in written debates, and the numerous printers and booksellers in Dutch cities like Amsterdam, Leiden, or Utrecht took full commercial advantage of the favorable situation.[1] Hence, the number of texts written in the vernacular instead of Latin grew rapidly—an alarming phenomenon in the eyes of those who thought it unwise to present the common people with controversies that had not been “smoothed over” by scholars.[2] With this wealth of printed material, the Dutch were laying the foundation of a public sphere that contributed late in the century to the emergence of the Radical Enlightenment. At the same time, this passion for political debate illustrates one of the striking features of Dutch politics throughout the seventeenth century: the constant reinvention of the newly formed state as it rose to become an independent republic.

Obviously, such an atypical situation—a commercial Republic made up of seven independent provinces—was an intellectual challenge for nearly everyone. From the standpoint of novelty especially, it is simplistic to consider the Dutch to be thoroughgoing pragmatists.[3] Their lack of overarching theories—if indeed Dutch political debate even lacked theories—does not necessary indicate a purely pragmatic mentality. Moreover, this intellectual trend was similar to one of a few decades earlier, at the time of the Revolt against Spain. In renouncing King Philip II and disseminating a justification of their act (which was, incidentally, translated into French), the Dutch rebels invented a new political configuration. In both cases, the process, strictly speaking, consisted not in creating new formulas but in taking over the available political language and adapting it to the particular case of the Dutch political state. Whatever the newness of the situation, people had to select among a limited range of ideas, provided by antiquity, humanism, or Calvinist theories. Spinoza had rightly noticed that “experientiam omnia Civitatum genera, quae concipi possunt . . . ostendisse” (experience has shown all types of State that can be conceived).[4] In striving for an appropriate definition of their sui generis Republic, the Dutch were led to focus mainly on the idea of “liberty.” But what did liberty mean and what did it imply in context? These are the questions that this article will try to answer.[5]

Political debate in the Netherlands was dominated by the question of the stadholderate and its role within the Union. If one plunges into these discussions of legitimate sovereignty, one irregularity is conspicuous: to be republican meant to be opposed to the stadholderate (which was not exactly the same thing as to be opposed to monarchy), yet republicanism was equated with a range of precise liberties. The specificity of Dutch republicanism must be grasped through these two somewhat contradictory ideas.

Since its separation from Spain, the Dutch state’s political structure was comprised of Provincial and General States assemblies governing together with the stadholder. Holland’s land advocate became the Grand Pensionary, while the stadholder assumed military leadership and the assemblies, political leadership. At first, the cohabitation ran smoothly. The theoretical propaganda also generally claimed that the best form of state had power shared equally between a prince and the States assembly, the political and the military.[6] But the conclusion of the Truce with Spain in 1609 upset the balance and raised the question of competition between political and ecclesiastical authority, as did the theological conflict between Arminians and Gomarists. The situation deteriorated, ending, as we well know, with the beheading of Holland’s land advocate, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt.[7] From that time onward, tensions never ceased between these two branches of political life, the prinsgezinden being in favor of the Prince of Orange as stadholder and the staatsgezinden, in favor of the provincial states’ supremacy and the Grand Pensionary. Although the intellectual and political differences between these two parties were not always clear-cut and the boundaries shifted, we may see in this opposition something like the birth of the antagonism between republican and monarchical conceptions of the state. The wealthy “regents” (as the members of the governing bodies were called) constituted the main component (particularly in Holland) of the States assemblies and as such could be seen as embodying the republican element, while on the other side, the stadholder and his personal decision-making represented the monarchical element, a state of affairs all the more evident because this function had always been fulfilled by the Princes of Orange.

But this is only a bird’s-eye view. The stadholder was not an institution that might be equated with virtual monarchy, in fact or in aspiration. Long ago Herbert Rowen convincingly showed what prevents comparison of the figure of the stadholder with a virtual monarch: the necessary assent of the States assemblies to any decision granting funds, as well as the fact that the stadholderate was not properly hereditary, but instead bestowed upon the Princes of Orange by the provincial states.[8] Moreover—and this may be the strongest argument—the stadholders never showed themselves very eager to become true monarchs. The case of Maurice of Nassau is the most revealing from this point of view: when his courtiers urged him to accept the countship, he appeared rather reluctant to engage in a process that would, in the end, lead to a monarchical status.[9] The next stadholders, Frederick Henry (1625–47) and William II (1647–50), also remained stadholders and never really thought of changing the form of the state (nor did the staatsgezinden for their part). Lastly, the praise of central power was in most cases not a true monarchical tendency but rather the survival of Erasmian praise of monarchy that was still in the air.[10] In any case, this monarchical tendency expressed an urgent need for effective power, as when the States of Holland and Zeeland declared in 1581: “Every community and good Republic should be kept in good unity and its founding firmly held, which cannot be realized if there exists too great a variety of wills and opinions. It is then necessary that the government of any Republic be entrusted and recommended to a single head and a single authority.”[11] During the seventeenth century, much of the popular affection for monarchy should be interpreted as veneration for the memory of William the Silent.[12]

But if the stadholderate wasn’t a monarchy, it wasn’t republican either. We cannot conclude that the so-called State party’s mode of argumentation fits with what we usually define as republicanism—either in the way in which its members defended their authority or the way they were regarded by the common people. The very specific constitution of the Dutch republic—a federation of seven independent provinces loosely united by a rather vague constitution, the Union of Utrecht (1579)—did not really encourage the defense of a national common good by the whole community of citizens; on the contrary, it gave birth to strong provincial sovereignties, which was one of the main characteristics of the Dutch political structure during the golden age. Thus, in this period, the lasting antagonism within the Dutch state was not a classical opposition between advocates of monarchy and advocates of a republican form of government but a conflict over how the hierarchical distribution of power could favor, or impair, very specific interests.

The political administration during what is known as the “Ten Years” [1588–98], established after the failure of Leicester’s government, was a sort of ad hoc government, a makeshift replacement for the Spanish administration. Neither a conscious and deliberate republican state, nor a reaction against monarchic policy, the Republic was first of all a reaction against Spanish tyranny.[13] The political and military chiefs in charge of the country were improvising what they thought to be the most appropriate way of coping with events. In so doing, they were particularizing their state from the first years of their independence, in a way consonant with typical aspects of Dutch intellectual history. One enlightening example comes from Oldenbarnevelt’s response to the French King Henry IV in 1598:

As we were talking about the constitution of our State, the king declared that popular states were prone to greater dangers than monarchies and he asked me if I wouldn’t favor appointing a Prince. I answered that people here were much more inclined towards a good republic; that our state was not popular but aristocratic and entirely governed according to the laws and liberties, by the principals, either nobles or magistrates, of the cities.[14]

From this letter—which provides clear evidence of this process of political self-particularizing—we learn that the Dutch perceived their government as a true republic, a mixture of aristocracy and a pure republic, founded on the specific constitutional situation of the country. Another example can be drawn from Francis Vranck’s Corte verthoninghe where he advocates the power of the existing vroedschappen (the town councils) as the only form of government really suited to the Dutch country: “For this is clear that these boards of town magistrates and counsellors, together with the corporation of nobles, undoubtedly represent the whole body of the inhabitants, and no form of government could be imagined in which decisions could be taken with a better knowledge of the situation of the country or carried out with greater unanimity, authority or effect.”[15] Close to Italian authors who claimed, as did Francesco Guicciardini, that “the best government that can be established in whatsoever city is the one which is natural to it,” Dutch political thought has often argued that the only suitable form of government for the Dutch state should be drawn from the “nature” of the country and the people.[16] C. P. Hooft, for example, asserted that no good government could be settled without a fair knowledge of these facts.[17] Because of the particular circumstances of its birth, the Dutch Republic seemed to require a specific type of government, a form never before imagined.

Liberty was the key word of Dutch republicanism. As soon as relations between the Prince of Orange and the Grand Pensionary began to deteriorate (that is, at the moment of the Ten Years Truce, 1609–20), the question of liberty revealed itself as the ground of the question of sovereignty: in what form of government (single-headed government or republic?) would citizens enjoy the greatest liberty? The question was neither just a form of rhetoric nor propaganda, but the expression of a real concern. Since the Union was composed of seven provinces, each one being sovereign in all that concerned its internal affairs, a true problem of competition would arise between the provincial administration and the federal government, conducted by the States General and the stadholder, each partner being afraid to see its liberty threatened by the other’s ambitions.[18] Thus the main political concern seems to have been as much a practical question as a theoretical one about the political structure of the state: was a single-headed form of government of any usefulness (nutbaerheyt)? Not till the middle of the century, when the Republic without a stadholder came into being, did the Dutch feel the need to theorize their system. And even then, the issue of sovereignty was not raised for itself but mainly with regard to “inutility” and the dangers of the stadholderate.[19] The reflections of men like Johan de Witt or the brothers de la Court produced strong critiques of personal power—echoing the warnings of Machiavelli interpreted in a republican sense—while praising the sovereignty of provincial states mostly composed of wealthy burghers.[20] These writings help reveal what “republicanism” meant for them.[21]

Johan de Witt supplied one formula to summarize the republican government as he saw it: ware vrijheid (“true liberty”).[22] The expression is developed at length in the de Witt’s Deductie (“Demonstration”), written to justify the Act of Exclusion that barred the Princes of Orange from the stadholderate and captaincy-general. Actually, it was a defence against the attacks of the other provinces that denounced the Act passed by the States of Holland as a violation of the Union of Utrecht.[23] But in a country whose trademark in the eyes of all its contemporaries was liberty, such a formula might also have appeared to be the motto of the state. At the same time, the stress put on ware (“true”) suggested a polemic: the staatsgezinden were defending their position against something that appeared in their eyes to be an “incorrect” liberty. Admittedly, this way of arguing was not unusual among Dutch people at this time. Consider another case: Gisbert Voetius, the uncompromising Calvinist theologian of Utrecht (and enemy of Descartes) who strove to demonstrate that a “true Christian liberty” did not consist in liberty of philosophizing (libertas philosophandi) but in subordinating philosophy to theology. In order to grasp what the Dutch meant by ware vryheid when discussing political issues, two levels should be taken into account: the concrete situation and the proper philosophical meaning, which carries the weight of an ideological program.

The outstanding liberty for which the Dutch Republic was praised in seventeenth-century Europe was due to specific conditions. The Deductie of Johan de Witt and the Interest of Holland of de la Court are among the best apologies produced out of this situation and are generally considered to be the first expressions of republicanism, together with Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.[24] In these writings the concrete meaning of vrijheid appears in several registers: provincial sovereignty, freedom of religion, free trade. Provincial sovereignty was the first maxim of the regent class’s (staatsgezinden) political doctrine. Since the Union of Utrecht, vrijheid was considered the foundation of the Dutch state. Attachment to this tradition of particularism dating from the Burgundian state was still very intense in these provinces. “It must be taken into consideration above all that the firm foundation of the relations among all the provinces is beyond controversy the complete and absolute sovereignty of the respective provinces. . . .”[25] The Deductie of Johan de Witt declared this principle to be “indisputable,” although it should be remembered that such a principle meant the supremacy of the province of Holland, which assumed the leading economic and political role within the Union. From this point of view, provincial liberty was considered to depend on a very specific clause: the rule of majority in voting, instead of unanimity. Fierce controversies erupted on this seemingly restricted issue, opposing staatsgezinden to prinsgezinden, as reflected in pamphlets published around the 1650s.[26] Holland wished to have all decisions in the provincial states taken by majority vote (meerderheid der stemme) so as to deflate opposition from the church or the nobles. On the contrary, the defense of provincial sovereignty entailed that the States General would strictly observe the rule of unanimity (eenstemming) in order not to have some provinces oppressed by a group of others.[27] When discussing this specifically Dutch reality—closely connected, in the eyes of the contemporaries, to the conditions of the ware vrijheid— Dutch political thought met with a much wider issue that was systematically dealt with, at the same time, by philosophers like Hobbes; to be taken over by Locke, a little later, in 1690. Both asserted that no state could function without agreeing that the rule of majority would be authoritative: “We must consider that every one of the multitude, by whose means there may be a beginning to make up the city, must agree with the rest, that in those matters which shall be propounded by any one in the assembly, that be received for the will of all, which the major part shall approve of.”[28]

Next to provincial liberty, ware vrijheid implied religious freedom, “freedom of all sorts of Religions differing from the Reformed.”[29] It went back to the Union of Utrecht, which had assumed two crucial principles for the future of the republic: the recognition of the Reformed Church as a public church and the freedom of conscience. The two principles were closely interdependent: the fact that the Reformed Church was not established as state church but only as a “privileged” church ensured religious freedom to non-Reformed religious groups (Catholics, Lutherans, and Mennonites) and formed the basis for Dutch tolerance. This religious dimension of the concept of vrijheid met with wide agreement in the Dutch Republic throughout the seventeenth century, from radical republicans like Franciscus van den Ende to ambiguous conservatives like Lieuwe van Aitzema.[30] In the minds of such authors, freedom of religion was an integral part of the tolerance they all supported. Not only was it essential to commercial activity of men and the movement of goods, but it also laid the foundation for a country giving refuge to religious dissidents as did the Netherlands from the end of the sixteenth century. In his Politike Discoursen, Pieter de la Court explicitly praised the superiority of countries hosting foreigners or refugees coming from war-torn places:

Some countries have such a nice government that they can let foreigners live in full liberty among them and by this way, they increase their cities, because foreigners always take their goods with them when moving and are not prone to swallow up their fortune and become destitute. As soon as they reach a foreign country, people zealously get down to work in order to support themselves through commerce or any art they have previously practised in another country. Since unceasing wars continuously expel some inhabitants from their country, these latter always try to flee towards a country that grants freedom of citizenship, of conscience and of commerce. Therefore, new inhabitants continuously come and increase real estate, land estate and houses and thus, the former inhabitants, till then largely apathetic, grow richer.[31]

Apart from recalling a history that had been his own family’s past (the de la Court family had come from the southern Netherlands and had settled in Leiden at the time of Johan and Pieter’s father, and they soon became wealthy burghers in the textile industry), de la Court clearly stated the various practical advantages of a tolerant social system. But the question of religious liberty became mixed up with the issue of the civil authority’s right to decide ecclesiastical matters, thanks to the Synod of Dordrecht (1618–19) and the bitter polemics between strict and liberal Calvinist theologians over predestination; it thus extended its scope.

Liberty of trade meant “commerce, navigation and manufactures established and continued.”[32] Dutch merchants like the brothers de La Court strongly advocated freedom of enterprise and were opposed to guilds and monopolies, but also to various regulations, ones that forbade industries to settle in rural areas or maintained the guild system of industrial control: “Our Fishermen, Dealers in Manufactures, Owners of Freight-Ships, and Traders, being so burdened with all manner of Imposts, to oppress them yet more in their necessity by these Monopolies of Guilds, and to believe that it redounds to the good of the Land . . . is to me incomprehensible.”[33] Although the de la Courts were not unanimously accepted by the Amsterdam merchant class, many of these merchants agreed that “in no other place can industry better flourish than in places where freedom exists” (Nergens can de neringe beter bloeyen als daer liberteyt blijft).[34]

To what extent did these various liberties, each of them reflecting an aspect of “true liberty” and fulfilling some crucial requirements of civil and economic life, maintain the tradition of “rights and privileges” that was at the forefront of the revolt against the Spanish monarchy? Could the Dutch republican “liberty” of the mid-seventeenth century have also been the ware vrijheyt of the rebels? The question is worth raising since republicans frequently made reference to the recent past. When constructing the country’s historical identity, someone like Grotius, in his De Antiquitate Reipublicae Batavicae (1610), compared the Dutch “ancient liberty” to privileges and used this argument to justify the political government of the Union.[35] But, at the time of the Exclusion Act against the Princes of Orange, the rhetorical context had become complicated since opposing the stadholderate could also appear to be a betrayal of the hero of Dutch liberty, William the Silent. The abundant pamphlet literature published around 1650 was proof of this constant affection among the population.[36] However, unlike Grotius, some authors like de La Court would also argue against the privileges, as did some critics during the Revolt when they protested that “privileges are intended to provide freedom to do what right and virtue command and not to prevent us from having our property at our disposal.”[37] The restatement of history throughout the seventeenth century led to new interpretations of history because individual liberty was now at stake. Besides its concrete implications, grounded in historical circumstances, the meaning of “true liberty” also took on a philosophical dimension. Drawing from Cartesian psychology and Spinozist philosophy, it became equated with rational knowledge and the possibility, for everyone, to achieve his “conatus” as self-conservation required: it ranged from economic activity to freedom of speech, but was in no sense embedded in the meaning of “privileges.”[38]

Yet, authors like de la Court and Spinoza put real limitations—as we well know—on this socio-juridical liberty: the former, close to the classical philosophy, excluded servants and, generally speaking, all dependent people; the latter reserved this liberty to sui juris individuals, that is, the juridically and economically autonomous.[39] Nevertheless, a crucial stage was reached thanks to such authors, who—relying on new science and philosophy—conceived and defined a kind of individual liberty of which the coming generations would make the most with the help of new social causalities.

Because the Dutch Republic was not the product of a theory but the fruit of practical reflections, it gave birth to specific understandings of some key words of the political language of the time.[40] This is the case with absolutism and its Dutch interpretation, which combined the new anthropology drawn from Cartesian psychology under the influence of Hobbes’s political theory and Spinoza’s philosophy. From the Cartesian theory of passions, Dutch republicans learned how to justify a political “balance” able to neutralize the effect of human passions and convert them into a beneficial harmony for the civil society.[41] From Hobbes, the conception of indivisible sovereignty helped the staatsgezinden to dismiss a constitutional form of government and to justify the danger of sharing political authority with a stadholder: “Since in a civil state, it is necessary that there exists an absolute power able to drive out any danger, otherwise the state would immediately be annihilated, it follows from this that the absolute power to lay down the law cannot belong to one man and the power to have it executed to another, regardless of the former.”[42] Therefore, undivided sovereignty meant peace and stability because, in the hands of “good Rulers,” there could be no offensive war but only “effectual provision for good Fortifications on the Frontiers of our Provinces. . . . We who are naturally Merchants, cannot be turned into Soldiers.”[43] Such an interpretation implied two crucial ideas. First, absolutism did not mean thirst for power as in a monarchy or single-headed government, but desire for independence, for self-sufficiency. It corresponded to the sui juris status of the individuals, which is another definition of freedom in Spinoza’s philosophy.[44] Second, war was radically incompatible with freedom: “Any war is an obstacle to freedom,” declared Johan de Witt in his Deductie.[45] The strong pacifism of the Dutch republicans was expressed at length in their critiques of the political ambitions of the stadholders. The only war that could be admitted was a maritime one because it aimed at protecting Dutch freedom of trade.

Dutch republicanism in the seventeenth century was inspired by a strong practical claim on liberty rather than matters of principle. In a country where “shipping and trade [were] the soul and the inward subsistence of the state,”[46] the ideal of liberty referred to very concrete conditions (provincial sovereignty, religious toleration, free trade) resulting from the specific circumstances in which the Dutch state had emerged and been founded. If seventeenth-century philosophers (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza) helped both justify and conceive the political system that seemed to best suit the “true interest of Holland,” the tradition of particularism and the needs of commercial activity had shaped the republican mind of the Dutch from the beginning; it explained this new type of republicanism founded on negotium, urbanization, and peace. In such an ideological framework, the main feature retained from civic humanism was not participation in governing the Republic (the traditional virtu) but the idea of “pious Rulers” (vrome Regenten)[47] whose private interests coincided with the common good.[48] While condemning any “supreme head,” de la Court defined the virtue of a Republic as this intrinsic solidarity between individual and common good, and he gave it the name of a constitutional mechanism: politike weegschaal (“political balance”). In the Dutch language of the time, republican virtue resided in contribution to a lasting political “balance.”

Despite these realist views, republicanism came to be endowed with philosophical value. By associating the seemingly contradictory idea of absolutism with their republicanism, Dutch authors defined the republican state as the place par excellence where man can cultivate his own intellectual and moral development and ensure his well-being.[49] According to Pieter de la Court, “All politicians generally know that the highest perfection of politics and human society consists in that sole thing, i.e. that the greatest possible natural freedom be left to the citizen,” and he adds: “because having the right to own and control one’s own body and properties according to what will be considered the most useful to one’s self-conservation and self-perfecting makes a paradise on earth.”[50] The emphasis put on the relationship between rational human liberation and civil society is a typical feature of Dutch republicanism. Following the religious conflicts of the sixteenth century and their contribution to the articulation of an abstract idea of liberty, the joint influence of economic conditions and intellectual history led the Dutch to see the aim of the republican state as congruent with human freedom.

[1] Editions of a thousand or more of what are usually called “pamphlets” were not an exception; see Maarten Prak, The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 187–88, 225.

[2] As in a reproach made to Lambert van Velthuysen, who was blamed for having created propaganda pressing his own opinion in the vernacular: “Wat aengaat het boeckje van de Afgoderye, dat is (mijns oordeels) door d. Velthuysen onvoorsichtelyck . . . in’t Nederduyts ende niet in’t Latijn geschreven heeft, want sulcke materien willen wel onder de geleerden eerst was ghekout zijn, eer men die de gemeene man te eten geeft,” quoted in Arnoldus Cornelius Duker, Gisbertus Voetius (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1914), 3:264.

[3] I agree on this point with Wyger R. E. Welema in his essay: “‘That a Republic is better than a Monarchy’: Anti-monarchism in Early Modern Dutch Political Thought,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1:9–10.

[4] Tractatus politicus, chap. 1, § 3, ed. J. van Vloten and J. P. N. Land (The Hague: Hagae Comitum, apud Martinum Nijhoff, 1882).

[5] On this aspect of the Dutch history of political ideas, see, among others, E. H. Kossmann, “Dutch Republicanism,” in Political Thought in the Dutch Republic, Three Studies (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie Van Wetenschappen, 2000); E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier, “The Language of Seventeenth-Century Republicanism in the United Provinces: Dutch or European?” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); W. W. Mijnhardt, “Over de moderniteit van de Nederlandse Republiek,” Openingscollege 4 September 2001, Universiteit Utrecht, Faculteit der Letteren; id., “The Limits of Present-Day Historiography of Republicanism,” De Achttiende Eeuw 37 (2005): 1.

[6] See my Les privilèges, berceau de la liberté. La Révolte des Pays-Bas: aux sources de la pensée politique moderne (1566–1619) (Paris: Vrin, 1990), 64–68.

[7] Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,, 1995), 458–59.

[8] Herbert H. Rowen, “Neither Fish nor Fowl: The Stadholderate in the Dutch Republic,” in Political Ideas and Institutions in the Dutch Republic (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985), 19–23.

[9] Ibid., 12.

[10] “Philosophorum omnium ferme consensus est, saluberrimam esse Monarchiam, nimirum ad exemplar Dei, ut rerum summa penes unum sit.” (Institutio Principis, chap. 1, col. 576, quoted in P. M. Geurts, Overzicht van Nederlandsche Politieke Geschriften tot in de eerste helft der XVIIe eeuw [Maastricht, 1942], 131).

[11] Pieter Christiaenszoon Bor, Nederlandsche Oorlogen (Amsterdam, 1679), 2:17 (appendix).

[12] Cf. A. Th. van Deursen, Mensen van klein vermogen. Het kopergeld van de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam: Ooievaar, 1996), 181–95.

[13] See Ernst H. Kossmann, Texts Concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

[14] Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, Bescheiden betreffende zijn staatkundig beleid en zijn familie, ed. Sikko Popta Haak and A. J. Veenendaal, Groote ser. (The Hague: Rijks Geschiedkundige Publication, 1962–67), 2:246.

[15] Corte verthoninge van het recht by den ridderschap, eedelen ende steden van Hollandt ende Westvrieslant . . . , in W. P. C. Knuttel, Catalogus van de pamflettenverzameling berustende in de Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Utrecht: HES, 1978), 1:n°790.

[16] Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, vol. 2, Political Philosophy, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 200 et seq.

[17] See, for example, C. P. Hooft: “In alle regiering een voorneme poinct is de nature ende aerdt der landen ende luyden wel te kennen,” Memoriën en Adviezen, ed. H. A. E. van Gelder (Utrecht, 1925), 2:42.

[18] Willem Frijhoff en Marijke Spies, 1650. Bevochten eendracht (The Hague: SDU Uitgevers, 1999), chap. 2, 94–105.

[19] Cf. G. O. van de Klashorst, “Metten schijn van monarchie getempert. De verdediging van het stadhouderschap in de partijliteratuur, 1650–1686,” in Pieter de la Court in zijn tijd (1618–1685), ed. H. W. Blom and I. W. Wildenberg (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1986), 134.

[20] See E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1980), 126–30; 138–42.

[21] Johan and Pieter de la Court were cloth manufacturers and tradesmen in Leiden. They composed many texts, almost all of which were published by Pieter between 1660–63. The Interest van Holland ofte Gronden van Hollands Welvaren was published anonymously in 1662. It was attributed to Johan de Witt in its translation into French and English. The book enjoyed a wide audience inside and outside the republic. On the brothers Johan and Pieter de la Court, see Ivo W. Wildenberg, Johan en Pieter de la Court (1622–1660 & 1618–1685). Bibliographie en receptiegeschiedenis (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Presss, 1986).

[22] Ernst H. Kossmann, “Freedom in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Thought and Practice,” in The Anglo-Dutch Moment, ed. Jonathan I. Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 282–98; see also W. Frijhoff en M. Spies, Bevochten eendracht, 322–42.

[23] Israel, Dutch Republic, 718–19; Herbert H. Rowen, The Low Countries in Early Modern Times: A Documentary History (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 197–200.

[24] Deductie, ofte declaratie van de Staten van Hollandt ende West-Frieslandt; Behelsende een waerachtich, ende grondich Bericht van de fondamenten der Regieringe van de vrye Vereenichde Nederlanden; . . . (The Hague, 1654); cf. Herbert H. Rowen, John de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, 1625–1672 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 383–84; Haitsma Mulier, “Language of Seventeenth-Century Republicanism,” 179–96.

[25] “Soo dient voor al wel in achtinge genomen het vast fondament tusschen alle de Provincien buyten controversie, dat namentlijck by de Staten van de respective Provincien, yeder in den sijnen, is de volle, ende absolute Souveraineteyt, mitsgaders het indisputabel recht, ende d’onbepaelde macht, omme over alle saecken . . . by hun selven te resolveren,” Deductie, ofte . . . , 12.

[26] See, for example, Knuttel pamphlets n°6740, 6843, 7544.

[27] Pieter de la Court, in his Politike Discoursen (Leyden: P. Hackius, 1662), is perfectly clear on this point and equated the rule of majority to the authority of the law instead of the authority of a single person or the arbitrary will of a group of men: “Welke Staat de Grieken en Latinen hebben genoemd vryheid: also niemand aldaar verbonden is, te leeven naar den wil en zin van een mensch (daar zeer wel op te letten staat), maar naar de zin van de ordre en Wet, aan welke alle Ingezeetenen van dien Staat, gelijk als aan de Reeden, eenpariglik onderworpen zijn” (310–11).

[28] Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen, ed. with an intro. by Bernard Gert (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1972), chap. 6, 2. See also John Locke: “And thus every man, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one government, puts himself under an obligation, to every one of that society, to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it,” Two Treatises of Government (London, 1764), bk. 2, chap. 8, “On the Beginning of the Societies,” § 97.

[29] [Pieter de la Court,] The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Holland and West Friesland…, quoted in Herbert H. Rowen, The Low Countries in Early Modern Times, 208.

[30] The case of Aitzema is enlightening insofar as it provides a good example of how complex adherence to definite opinions could be. Although hostile to the staatsgezinden on the question of the stadholderate, he could join them on the question of tolerance and, like them, oppose the rigorous attitude of the "predicants"; see, for example, in his Saken van Staet en Oorlogh, in, ende omtrent de Vereenighde Nederlanden (The Hague, 1669–72), 4:1009–10; Gees van der Plaat, Eendracht als opdracht. Lieuwe van Aitzeman’s brijdrage aan het publieke debat in de zeventiende-eeuwse Republiek (Hilversum: Verloren, 2003), 216–24. Franciscus van den Ende, on the contrary, was an unambiguous champion of democratic republicanism; see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 175–81.

[31] Politike discoursen, 2nd “Discourse.”

[32] [Pieter de la Court,] The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Holland and West-Friesland . . . (London, 1702), 375.

[33] Quoted in Rowen, Texts Concerning, 210; see also J. G. van Dillen, Van rijkdom en regenten. Handboek tot de economische en sociale geschiedenis van Nederland tijdens de Republiek (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), 180–82; Violet Barbour, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the 17th century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 70–71.

[34] Quoted in van Dillen, Van rijkdom en regenten, 180.

[35] G. O. van de Klashorst, “De ‘ware vrijheid,’ 1650–1672,” in Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van de vijftiende tot de twintigste eeuw, ed. E .O. G. Haitsma Mulier and W. R. E. Welema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 157–82.

[36] P. Geyl, “Het Stadhouderschap in the partij-literatuur onder de Witt”, in: Mededeelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, afdeeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks 10, 1947, 17–84.

[37] Brief discours sur la negotiation de la paix, qui se traicte présentement à Cologne entre le Roy d’Espaigne et les Estatz du Pays bas . . . , 1579 (Knuttel n°492).

[38] Cf. Les privilèges, berceau de la liberté, 156–64.

[39] See my “La démocratie absolue, ou le défi politique des Lumières radicales,” in Qu’est-ce que les lumières “radicales”? Libertinage, athéisme et spinozisme dans le tournant philosophique de l’âge classique, ed. Catherine Secretan, Tristan Dagron, and Laurent Bove (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2007), 350–52.

[40] On several points, the Dutch conception of republicanism is comparable to the case of tolerance or freedom of the press: it did not stem from a systematic theory or any philosophical ideal but mainly from practice and immediate needs; see, among others: J. L. Price, “‘By their fruits, shall ye know them’: The Cultural Legacy of the Revolt,” Zeventiende Eeuw 10, no. 1 (1994): 49. For the current discussions on this matter, see R. Po-Chia Hsia and Henk van Nierop, eds., Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

[41] Rowen, John de Witt, 401–12.

[42] [Pieter de la Court,] Consideratien van staat ofte polityke weeg-schaal (Amsterdam, 1661), 27–28; Kossmann, Political Thought, 38–40; Haitsma Mulier, Myth of Venice, 127–29.

[43] [Pieter de la Court,] The True Interest, quoted in Rowen, Low Countries, 213.

[44] Paolo Cristofolini, “Esse sui juris e scienza politica,” Studia Spinozana 1 (1985): 53–72.

[45] “. . . soo moeten de voornoemde Provincien oock wederom naer waerheyt bekennen, dat alle oorlogh is een beletsel vande exercitie vande vryheyt” (Deductie, ofte . . . , 36).

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid., 47.

[48] As conceived by Gaspar Barlaeus in his Mercator Sapiens (1632).

[49] The Dutch interest in absolutism within the republican circles started in fact as soon as the political discussions began after the fail of Leicester’s government (1589). In Grotius’s De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra of 1614, references to Jean Bodin can be found, therefore much earlier than attention to Hobbes’s political doctrine around 1650. For a reference to the important historiographical debate on absolutism, see Franco Venturi, Utopia e riforma nell’illuminismo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969; Torino: Einaudi, 2001), 32–33.

[50] Het Welvaren van Leiden, quoted in H. A. Enno van Gelder, Getemperde vriheid (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff nv, 1972), 251.

J. G. A. Pocock’s Atlantic Republicanism Thesis Revisited: The Case of John Adams’s Tacitism

Zach Chandler — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:42:30 -0800

In a now classic 1992 article entitled “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Daniel Rodgers examined the scholarly field that had grown around the history of American republicanism.[1] Rodgers focused on J. G. A. Pocock’s notion that Italian humanist languages of republicanism and virtue had served as the linguistic building blocks for English and American revolutionaries alike. If Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood had shown that ideas such as “civic virtue” and the “common good” were the intellectual underpinnings of modern republican polities, Pocock saw the origins of these terms in the Italian Renaissance.[2] Tracing the intellectual genealogy of Anglo-Atlantic political theorists such as Thomas Gordon, Trenchard, and Bollingbroke to Machiavellian and Tacitean traditions of studying political corruption and its remedies in classical virtues and political pragmatism, Pocock declared, “The American Revolution, which to an older school of historians seemed a rationalist or naturalist breach with an old world [of Aristotelianism and Machiavellism] and its history, now appears to have been involved in a complex relation with both English and Renaissance cultural history. . . .”[3] This connection, Pocock implied, was rooted in a shared conceptual language of politics.

In response to Pocock’s claims, Rodgers countered that republicanism was “neither an ideological map to more than a small piece of experience, nor a paradigmatic language in the strong sense of Pocock’s early work.”[4] He called its key conceptual terms—virtue, the republic, and the commonweal—“slippery.” He cited John Adams’s 1807 complaint that “there is not a more unintelligible word in the English language than republicanism.” At the same time, Rodgers conceded that the discussion of the idea of republicanism had enriched the debate on the origins of American constitutional originality. Rodgers’s concern about the American classical republican thesis was the danger of restrictions inherent in its methodological paradigms. He thus called for a study of republicanism in the wider contexts of “process and culture.”[5] Rodgers claimed that the limitation of pure linguistic history of ideology and discourse could be enriched by political, social, and cultural history, and for this Rodgers cited the early social and cultural works of Linda Kerber, Rhys Isaac, and Sean Wilentz.[6]

As historical methodology has become more complicated and many fields have faced evolution and hybridization—the sort of rich complexity called for by Rodgers—historians of “ideas in context” have sought to keep their context simple. Paradoxically, a movement that had sought to historicize philosophical texts has become quite textual itself, sticking to the discourse history of the 1970s and limiting its view to purely high-minded conversations between great authors using the medium of grand ideas in monumental, ever-constant classic texts. While Pocock himself has expanded his historiographical methods, historians of philosophical discourse such as Quentin Skinner, Richard Tuck, and others have not responded to Rodgers and other American historians’ critiques of Pocock’s Atlantic classical republican thesis, nor have they looked beyond discourse to understand the high cultural mechanics of republicanism.[7]

What have emerged are essentially two camps of historiography, each deaf to the other’s claims. While the history of political discourse has not taken into account new methodology or foundational works on the European Enlightenment, the field of early American history has generally moved toward a social and cultural history of politics, excluding the study of the high political culture of the founding fathers. The collection of essays edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the American Republic, represents this new trend, which looks for the origins of the republic in everything but the works of the founding fathers or in the elite intellectual and social traditions Peter Gay and Margaret Jacob first traced in the European context.[8] These historians have expanded the scope of American political history, focusing on political and cultural democratization, gender, race, identity, colonialism, and comparative slavery. At the same time, these innovators have left the founding fathers to commercial trade book historians such as Joseph Ellis and David McCollough.[9] This expansion of the field of American history has enriched what had certainly been a one-dimensional narrative of the origins of American democratic republicanism, yet we still lack a social and cultural history of the republican tradition based on the examination of practices within a changing tradition.[10]

To be sure, the republicanism of quattrocento Florence was not the republicanism of colonial America, and yet, as John Pocock showed, significant traces of philosophical republicanism passed from the Tacitean, Livian, and Machiavellian traditions into seventeenth-century political thought, and into the more radical neoclassicism of figures such as Thomas Gordon and William Davenant. Eighteenth-century North American political thinkers, such as Thomas Jefferson, were particularly influential, as they wrote not simply theory, but a real Declaration of Independence and a working constitution, beyond what English thinkers during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had achieved. The American political philosophers read the books of classical republicanism to look for their model. Caroline Winterer has given a strong basis for us to continue pursuing the Pocockian thesis with her study of the important role of classics in late-eighteenth-century North American pedagogical and intellectual culture.[11] While this history can be seen as a broken lineage, filled with appropriations and discontinuities, there is no question it was there. Whether it was the primary moving force or simply a major element of early American republicanism seems a point of semantics.

However, readers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not simply appropriate the ideas of humanist political culture, such as republicanism. Like natural philosophers, they also appropriated practices of reading and interpretation that they consciously associated with a critical and skeptical political spirit associated with the accountability ideally inherent in republicanism.[12] In their seminal article, Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine showed that the practices of reading and interpretation from the Tacitist and Livian traditions were a major element of political culture.[13] If Machiavelli, Justus Lipsius, Gabriel Harvey, Amelot de La Houssaye, Queen Christina of Sweden, Montesquieu, and Thomas Gordon read political theory with the works of Tacitus and Livy at their sides, they were part of a conscious tradition that evolved over time and was not always republican, but it had the potential to be so. While it is possible to trace a number of practical traditions, such as accounting, from Florentine and Venetian republicanism to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century traditions of political liberty and republicanism, what this article shows is that John Adams consciously used this practice of reading in formulating his own practice of political criticism. Thus John Adams’s method of reading for political exempla can be seen as the persistence of a tradition first developed in Florence, Venice, Rome, France, and Holland, and connected to republicanism and the critique of tyranny.

Pocock’s archaeology of politics and history

John Pocock has posited the republican tradition as part of an “American mixture” that brought with it “tensions and self-doubt.”[14] Consistent with this recognition, Pocock’s own work has sometimes gone beyond the rigid confines of his own writings on methodology and reached into the messier worlds of the social and cultural history of knowledge. Indeed, it is not always easy to reconcile the densely packed Machiavellian Moment with Pocock’s more straightforward methodological tracts, “Verbalizing a Political Act: Towards a Politics of Language” and “The State of the Art.” Pocock’s dual existence as a maker of paradigms who, at the same time, questions them—as he does in his “Political Ideas as Historical Events: Political Philosophers as Historical Actors,”—makes him difficult to understand and define. As Rodgers points out, “notoriously few” American historians actually read Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment in its entirety, mostly focusing on the final American chapter or on Pocock’s earlier work, “Virtues, Rights, and Manners.” Thus Americanists have never confronted Pocock’s rich set of historical references and his debt to the history of scholarship and historiography, a vibrant and rejuvenated field.[15]

The first to point out the rather open character of Pocock’s method was Peter Miller. In his own work of intellectual biography, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century, Miller combined the history of pure ideas with a social history of scholarship in the context of the history of antiquarianism and political thought. Situating his own project in relation to those of both Momigliano and Pocock, Miller stated,

Forty years ago, John Pocock published The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, a study of the political uses of medieval English history in the seventeenth century. By locating the antiquarian heroes of his book, such as Henry Spelman and John Selden, in the history of history that had been sketched out a few years earlier by [Arnaldo] Momigliano in “Ancient History and the Antiquarian” Pocock implied that seventeenth-century political thought ought to be understood as antiquarian practice. And if political thought in the seventeenth century was argued by means of historical scholarship, then an adequate history of seventeenth century political thought needed to be a history of that scholarship. Pocock’s book helped create a new way of studying the history of political thought. But this central claim seems to have gone unnoticed, or at least uncommented upon.[16]

Momigliano was a key northern Italian figure in the history of historical scholarship who became a leading member of the philological Warburg Institute in London, the stronghold of the study of ancient history and Renaissance humanist learned culture.[17] Momigliano’s critique of intellectual history insisted on long genealogies that attached modern traditions of scholarship to ancient history.[18] Momigliano studied Gibbon’s debts to ancient history and the evolution of Tacitism from antiquity to the humanist tradition.[19] Few Americanists noted that, like Skinner’s Foundations of Modern Political Thought, the European chapters of the Machiavellian Moment mixed the history of scholarship and historiography along with politics. In this, both Pocock and Skinner revealed a debt not only to Momigliano, but also to Felix Gilbert and Donald Kelley, who had shown that humanist political theory was deeply rooted in the practices as well as the ideas of historical and legal culture.[20] Historians were thus seen as ideologues and forms of early modern political philosophy a branch of erudite learning.[21] In his Foundations of Modern Political Philosophy, a work with debts to Donald Kelley, Skinner remarked that humanist political theory was a historical enterprise. Yet Skinner failed to build on the ramifications of his own statement, leaving the question of historical scholarship to footnotes to Kelley.[22] Indeed, the very notion that political theory is part of a historical practice leads not only to the history of humanist scholarship, but also to the complex and often ignored world of ecclesiastical history.[23] Loyal to their strict definition of political discourse, Skinnerian historians of political philosophy have not gone far down the winding path of the history of scholarship, science, and religious culture, in spite of acknowledging that Gilbert and Kelley had shown that political philosophy was rooted in these cultures.

Yet now, Pocock himself has distinctly turned to the history of scholarship and religion to contextualize Edward Gibbon’s ideas.[24] In Barbarism and Religion, Pocock not only declares that “the capacity to read texts critically, vital . . . to the writing of Enlightenment history, was also a great part of what the age meant by ‘philosophy.’”[25] Pocock examines the concept of decline and fall, yet he does so in the context of the vast tableau of Gibbon’s scholarship: his education and early readings; the intellectual traditions of which he was a part; and the practices of reading, scholarship, travel, collecting, and sociability that constituted his intellectual world. Volume 2 considers the history of antiquarianism and the archival, scholarly practices inherent to it. It is here that Pocock enunciates his new, complex approach to the study of philosophy. Philosophy, he warned,

did not always indicate a body of systematic thought about nature and knowledge. It was often said to denote a method rather than a system, and this was not all. It could indicate no more than a civil attitude of mind, an openness to reason, a desire to control the passions of which fanaticism was one; but this apparently eirenic sense, it became the basis of a militant program of ideology.[26]

In The First Decline and Fall, volume 3 of Barbarism and Religion, Pocock paints a grand portrait of the history of empire and the most comprehensive reading to date of the influence of Tacitus on eighteenth-century thought. Thus Pocock returns to his antiquarian roots and shows the great influence of historical tradition, and archival, antiquarian, and ecclesiastical diplomatics in the world of Enlightenment historiography. He fires a powerful volley at the entrenched notion that scholarship, erudition, and religion had faded in the enlightened world of the philosophes, and in citing Momigliano, he shatters any notion of methodological purity that might be attached to his name.[27]

Thus Enlightenment politics was in part the product of a Tacitist, Livian, and Machiavellian historical narrative of “decline and fall” and of “corruption and virtue.” This new philosophy of morals was the product of historical inquiry, antiquarianism, and even erudition.[28] The philosophes might have been opposed to the antiquarianism and civil history of figures such as Dom Mabillon and Jean-Jacob Moreau, yet ecclesiastical and legal scholars were still major intellectual players in the eighteenth century, as Lionel Gossman, Dieter Gembicki, Blandine Barret-Kriegel, and Keith Baker have shown.[29] There were elements of this antiquarian fascination with facts and objects in the Encyclopédie project. Indeed, there are more references to classical knowledge in the Encyclopédie than any other source.

Gibbon’s philosophy, as well as his scholarly practices and readings, reveal the cultural connections between humanist erudition, historicism, and Enlightenment philosophies of the mind. It was here at the crossroads of the tradition of Tacitism that Bodin, Lipsius, Grotius, Sarpi, Boccalini, Amelot de La Houssaye, and Montesquieu met Rousseau, d’Alembert, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Thomas Gordon, James Logan, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Tacitus set the example that morality and psychology could be understood through civil history. Considering the almost theological debates that Pocock’s writings have inspired, it is surprising that eight years after his Narratives of Civil Government, volume 2 of Barbarism and Religion, his new historical approach has neither brought a reconsideration of his Atlantic republicanism thesis nor his linguistic approach to the study of philosophy.

Machiavelli, Tacitus, and the culture of reading for action

The Florentine tradition was not simply ideological. It was deeply rooted in historiographical and legal culture. Guicciardini and Machiavelli managed the state through its archives and paperwork; they also used these archives to write their histories and formulate their republican ideology. What produced Florentine and Venetian republicanism was not simply their ideologies, but also the fact that their constitutions and legal foundations were set in archives, and managed by skilled state humanists and secretaries. The birth of new Renaissance government—republican, monarchical, and imperial—grew in the secret charter rooms and formal archives of the Vatican, Salutati’s Florentine chancellery; the Sforza’s Milan under the Simonetta secretariats; in Venice’s ancient library and archive; Austria’s and Spain’s massive imperial archives; and in the growing legal humanism of France.[30] It was in these laboratories of history, law, diplomacy, and ideology that both early modern republicanism and absolutism emerged. They were the source of the modern state.

Guicciardini and Machiavelli’s own increasing sense that “true” history was necessary reveals a link between scholarship, philology, political science, and republicanism. The idea expressed in the introduction to Machiavelli’s Discourses—that examples from civil history are the basis of sound prudential politics—leads back toward erudition and philology. Machiavelli stated that in his own work he had arrived at his conclusions by “comparing ancient and modern events,” and in doing so had “drawn practical lessons” from the study of history.[31] Written at the very moment he was writing The Prince in 1513, Machiavelli’s “Letter to Francesco Vettori” illustrates that the act of reading and comparing histories is the basis for his own study of “what a princedom is, of what kinds they are, how they are gained, how they are kept, why they are lost.” Political science was not just born of reading the ancients, but also the reading of history in general, and noting long series of examples.

Political science was a historical pursuit. For examples from history to be useful, they had to be true, and thus from verified, established texts, Machiavelli and Guicciardini increasingly sought to write accurate history over propaganda. If one could master history, it just might be possible to influence fortuna.[32] Hence Justus Lipsius’s great quest to establish the text of Tacitus and then to use it for practical politics.[33] In the end, Machiavelli and Lipsius were scholars before being ideologues. Although their political ideals might not have been the same, their historical methods and their definitions of prudence were quite similar.

In any case, the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries saw the emergence of a deep culture of the use of history to create political science. As Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine have illustrated, historical reading techniques, pioneered by Machiavelli and Lipsius, became the basis of political philosophy. Following Machiavelli’s recommendation, princes and those interested in politics would have to read, annotate, extract and take notes. These notes would form commonplace books that could be organized into collections of examples such as The Prince or Lipsius’s Politica. By the 1570s, Sir Philip Sidney’s circle was involved with a collective enterprise of reading both classical and modern authors to extract political wisdom, which Gabriel Harvey described in his annotations in the margins of the Works of Livy. Here was Machiavelli’s historical source, used not simply for historical examples, but also for the method outlined in the first pages of the Discourses. Admittedly inspired by Machiavelli’s Discourses, which he cites, Harvey wrote in the margins of Livy’s History:

Each decade is fine, but this one should be studied by the best actors. The quality of the content, and its great power; where the virtue of the Romans suffers so much. Certainly some light can be shed by Louis le Roy’s Commentaries on Aristotle’s Politics; Bodin’s Republic and Methodus; du Poncet’s Turkish Secrets in the Gallic Court; Sansovino’s Political Maxims; the recent works by Althusius and Lipsius; a few others. And it is fitting for prudent men to make strenuous efforts to use whatever sheds light on politics: and to increase it as much as they can. Two outstanding courtiers thanked me for this political and historical inquiry: Sir Edward Dyer and Sir Edward Denny. But let the project itself—once fully tried—be my reward. All I want is a lively and effective political analysis of the chief histories: especially when Hannibal and Scipio, Marius and Sylla, Pompey and Caesar flourished.[34]

Harvey read, annotated, and extracted from the text envisaging concrete political action or to give political advice.[35] He did this in order to copy the “Method in Machiavel’s discourses,” in which he also described reading and extracting maxims, while also taking inspiration from Bodin.[36]

The practices described by Harvey had become a pan-European culture of historical political reading. Jean Bodin had shown how to extract commonplaces from natural philosophy, law, economics, history, and political philosophy.[37] Scholars such as Lipsius and Bacon filled their commonplace books with the fruits of their readings, medical, natural, historical, and political.[38] The one thing that set political reading apart from other scholarly humanist pursuits was its practical, immediate ramification in the world of politics.

Yet while the method of practical reading often spread via the absolutist work of Bodin and Lipsius, absolutist royal and ecclesiastical authorities would have increasing trouble with the “true” histories they commissioned, especially as they became more public and were increasingly followed by works critical of monarchy and religious authority. Republicans and political critics such as Paolo Sarpi, on the other hand, began to see the publication of the methods of prudence and revealing political histories as the very symbol of political liberty and free speech.[39] These odd political mechanics by which true history was the basis of effective politics, but also of political criticism, was noted by Trajano Boccalini and other Italian reason of state philosophers.[40] The critical truth was subversive to dogma as well as to absolutism. The seventeenth century thus became a Boccalinian moment, as arguments over Tacitean and Machiavellian philosophies of virtue and political action were publicized and coupled with discussions of historical accuracy and impartiality. As the French publicist and translator of Tacitus and Machiavelli, Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye, pointed out, critical history found a way to exist under tyranny, but it flourished with political liberty.

In this context, the Machiavellian humanist historical methodology evolved into something new. Hobbes and Grotius would use history in the humanist way, but they would come up with new ideas. Indeed, Grotius wrote his History and Annals of the Low Country Wars (1612) in a meticulous Tacitean Latin style. At the same time, it criticized cruelty, reason of state, and dissimulation. Grotius would use Tacitus not as a source for learning about reason of state, as Harvey had done with Livy, but as a moral critique of it. Tacitus, he inferred, could be used as a moral source and not just a coldly practical one. At the very moment Grotius was formulating his theories of natural law, he was emendating Tacitus, copying his writing and extracting maxims to use in his own history. He was reading in the old way for new ideas.

Tacitism and the founders

This brings us back to J. G. A. Pocock’s thesis about classical republicanism in the early American context. The learned traditions that grew from humanism, but were popularized by Machiavellian and Tacitean culture throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, would have a remarkable influence on the leading American political philosophers. As the Machiavellism and Tacitism of tyrants evolved once and for all into republican fervor, the very methods that had bolstered political absolutism were now used to criticize it. Tacitus had been the historian of seventeenth-century monarchists, but the work of the Roman senator now became a firm pillar of republicanism, as the case of Thomas Gordon illustrates.

The Tacitean critique of political corruption and the practice of critiquing it through historical analysis became ever more influential as the cause of American republicanism grew. This should not be surprising. Tacitus was a primary staple of early American education and learned culture. He was not just a classical author amongst many, but he, like Livy, was seen as one of the principal sources of wisdom for political action. So much so that Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend Peter Carr from Paris on the subject of the sciences, that one should read the Bible as one does Tacitus and Livy, with an eye to verifying the facts. All three sources, he stated, should be subjected to the test of natural reason.[41] Jefferson had pared Tacitus and Livy to the Bible for they were three texts that were clearly great authorities whose texts demanded close reading and deep skepticism; he was thus fluent in old humanist scholarly practice that saw these two classical authors as “Bibles” of secular political wisdom. As H. Trevor Colbourn noted in his “Thomas Jefferson’s Use of the Past,” Jefferson was not only a Lockian idealist: like many readers of the age, he was influenced by the reading of history and historical skepticism.[42] Even if he did not share the Tacitean distrust of humanity, he did see the need to learn through history for action. In the vein of Grotius, he stated that he believed that Tacitus was “the first writer in the world without exception,” since his work was “compounded of the history and morality of which we have no other exception.”[43] Colbourn reveals that Jefferson collated Thomas Gordon’s translation of the works of Tacitus with the Latin version, surely to make accurate extracts. If Tacitus’s narrative of Germanic virtues interested Jefferson, then Jefferson was tied to the old political fascination with corruption and virtue as Pocock claims. In any case, he kept the Machiavellian and Tacitean reading tradition alive using the old tools of humanist collation, annotation, and commonplacing. The paradox that Jefferson the Lockian should extol Tacitus and use Tacitist intellectual tools is not surprising. The cultural and intellectual backgrounds of early American scholars mixed the traditional with the innovative. Jefferson’s library was both old-fashioned and innovative. It was filled with the classics as well as an unparalleled collection of books on Americana. Jefferson harbored some of the greatest self-contradictions in history: the great writer on liberty enslaved his own children. The complexity of his own political and social positions, as well as his family life, would have certainly attracted him to Tacitus’s psychological studies. Surely the examples of Augustus, Tiberius, and Nero had personal, professional, and political resonance all at the same time.

There are traces of strong Tacitist culture in early literate America. John Dickinson (1732–1808)—the founding father who opposed American independence—folded the pages of his signed edition of Gordon’s Works of Tacitus, pointing the ends of the pages to passages examining prudence and political liberty.[44] America’s first great private library was a traditional Tacitist collection. James Logan—the pioneering Irish Quaker, classical scholar, and book collector, cofounder of Philadelphia with William Penn, and later its mayor and chief justice—not only owned the finest private library during the first half of the eighteenth century, but he was also a traditional humanist reader of political history. His library contained five editions of the Works of Tacitus containing his signature; three copies of Livy’s History; eight editions of various works by Justus Lipsius, including an extraordinary three copies of the Politica; three copies of works by Machiavelli, including The Prince; two editions of Guicciardini; Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent and his History of Benefices; five editions of Trajano Boccalini, including two copies of his Tacitean masterwork, I Regguagli di Parnasso; and works by the Tacitist, Virgilio Malvezzi. This was a Tacitean collection par excellence, based on ancient texts by Tacitus and Livy and then modern readings by Machiavelli, Lipsius, and the others.[45] Indeed, his collection resembled seventeenth-century Tacitist collections, such as Don Juan de Lastenosa’s library, organized in part by the Spanish Jesuit master of Tacitism, Balthasar Gracián.[46]

Logan saw the reading of Tacitus and Livy as the basis of sound education. On the flyleaf of his copy of Tacitus’s Germania,[47] he wrote to his son on May 30, 1733: “In thy Learning I desire thou shouldest goe on in the Greek; read Tacitus and Livy in ye Latin; getting ye of last, if thou hast none, one of ye small Dutch edition in I vol. 12mo, but perhaps I may send another for I have several ones.” In buying books, he sought scholarly editions by Lipsius, as we know from letters to his book buyer in London.[48]

Logan’s collection of classical and humanist works stands in contrast to Franklin’s more traditional Enlightenment collection, with its top selection of works by modern philosophes. And yet, Logan and Franklin were still bound by the classical learned tradition. Logan was Franklin’s mentor, and he helped Franklin print his translation of Cicero’s Cato Major in 1744, the first classical book published in the colonies, thus consciously continuing the Aldine tradition. Franklin was a philosophe, but he was certainly influenced by the more humanistic Logan and formed by the classical traditions of both literature and print. In his “Silence Dogood” pamphlet series in the New-England Courant, July 9, 1722, Franklin quoted Livy’s History, book 2, chapter 8, on the popularity of leaders who allow free speech, and in the great Tacitean tradition, misquoted Tacitus, Histories, I, on the sweetness of political liberty:

The best Princes have ever encouraged and promoted Freedom of Speech; they know that upright Measures would defend themselves, and that all upright Men would defend themselves, and that all upright Men would defend them. Tacitus, speaking of the Reign of some of the Princes above-mentioned, says with Extasy, Rara Temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quae veils, & quae sentias dicere licet: A blessed Time when you might think what you would and speak what you thought.[49]

In his tract “On the Need for an Academy,” printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette, August 24, 1749, Franklin proposed founding an academy of fine arts and sciences in the colonies, the basis for his foundation of the University of Pennsylvania. To make his case, he cites an entire letter from Pliny the Younger to Tacitus on the value of formal education.

Of all the founders, John Adams was the most traditional in terms of his humanist style of scholarship. Yet Adams would use Tacitism in new ways: to attack the optimism and concept of human perfection of the philosophes, and to defend an Augustinian, Protestant pessimistic view of mankind and the political state of nature, and thus defend a literally conservative and cautious Whiggish republicanism based on deep skepticism, which Adams pared with an Augustinian, Protestant cynicism about humankind. Adams chose his personal motto from book 1 of Tacitus’s Histories: “libertatem amicitiam retinebis et fidem.” This passage was extracted from a description of Augustus’s discussion of how to lead effectively and wield power in the face of power and flattery:

But Augustus looked for a successor in his own family, I look for one in the state, not because I have no relatives or companions of my campaigns, but because it was not by any private favour that I myself received the imperial power. Let the principle of my choice be shown not only by my connections which I have set aside for you, but by your own. You have a brother, noble as yourself, and older, who would be well worthy of this dignity, were you not worthier. Your age is such as to be now free from the passions of youth, and such your life that in the past you have nothing to excuse. Hitherto, you have only borne adversity; prosperity tries the heart with keener temptations; for hardships may be endured, whereas we are spoiled by success. You indeed will cling with the same constancy to honor, freedom, friendship, the best possessions of the human spirit, but others will seek to weaken them with their servility. You will be fiercely assailed by adulation, by flattery, that worst poison of the true heart, and by the selfish interests of individuals. You and I speak together to-day with perfect frankness, but others will be more ready to address us as emperors than as men. For to urge his duty upon a prince is indeed a hard matter; to flatter him, whatever his character, is a mere routine gone through without any heart.[50]

The practice of loosely extracting maxims from Tacitus and using them for personal politics and ethics was a stock practice of Tacitism, but also of the Tacitean French moralists, such as La Rochefoucauld.[51] Although he never cited him, Adams owned three books by the most popular French Tacitist of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Amelot de La Houssaye (1631–1706), amongst them an English translation of Amelot’s La Morale de Tacite. De la Flatterie (Paris, 1686), The Modern Courtier, or, The Morals of Tacitus upon Flattery, Paraphras’d and illustrated with observations by Amelot de La Houssaye (London, 1687). Amelot’s treatise on Tacitean flattery was not simply a classic set of essays on the imperial corruption of power, with several notes about republican antidotes; the book was also a model of reading for action. Amelot would choose one maxim from Tacitus, translate it, and then write a long commentary explaining the political lessons that could be learned from examples of flattery, its dangers, and the effects of its corruption.

If John Adams drew from an eclectic mix of classical and humanist political thought as well as modern sources, he worked quite traditionally as a Tacitean, Machiavellian scholar, reading history for political action and decision making. Written to counter Turgot’s criticism of American bicameral government, Adams’s Defense of the Constitutions of the United States against the Attack of Turgot in his Letter to Dr. Price (1778) was also a stock exercise in Tacitism. It was a cento: that is to say, collections of maxims, commonplaces, and passages by other authors used to bolster an argument. In this, its pages resemble those of Amelot’s works. It is remarkable that Adams did not own any of the works of Justus Lipsius, whose Politica had set the model for the political cento. In spite of his prominent place in James Logans’s library, Lipsius had been an open absolutist, and his works, once popular, had grown obscure by the eighteenth century. Yet his traditional mode of Tacitist prudence and learned political virtue remained. Adams’s preface to his Defense is a collage of citations, many by Cicero and Tacitus in which they give their own criticisms of unicameral legislature. In it, Adams actively tries to see politics through their eyes:

If Cicero and Tacitus could revisit the earth, and learn that the English nation had reduced the great idea to practice, and brought it nearly to perfection, by giving each division a power to defend itself by a negative; had found the most solid and durable government, as well as the most free; had obtained by means of it a prosperity among civilized nations, in an enlightened age, like that of the Romans among barbarians; and that the Americans, after having enjoyed the benefits of such a constitution a century and a half, were advised by some of the greatest philosophers and politicians of the age to renounce it, and set up the governments of ancient Goths and modern Indians,—what would they say? That the Americans would be more reprehensible than the Cappadocians, if they should listen to such advice.[52]

Chapter 4 and letter 26, entitled “Dr. Price,” are pure centos of citations from ancient and modern authors to advance Montesquieu’s theory of mixed government against Turgot. It should be noted that Montesquieu drew heavily from the Tacitist tradition and quoted Amelot de La Houssaye’s Tacitist constitutional, History of the Government of Venice (1676), another work owned by Adams. In chapter 4, Adams cites Swift’s Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions between the Nobles and Commons of Athens and Rome, with the Consequences they had upon both those States, citing Tacitus and Polybius in the defense of mixed government. In letter 26, he cites Aristotle, Livy, Junius, Machiavelli, Sidney, Hobbes, Mandeville, La Rochefoucauld, De Lolme, Harrington, and Beccaria. The following chapter is entitled “Mixed Governments. Machiavel’s Discourses upon the First Decade of Livy, Book I. C. 2.” There is obviously strong reference to the classical and northern Italian as well as the Swiss republican tradition, but also reference to a scholarly tradition by which he extracts and formulates political theory from historians ancient and modern. Adams was not just putting forward an idea of republicanism, but also a scholarly method of it.

Adams’s Discourses on Davila (1805) was a traditional humanist commentary on a famously Tacitean work of history, Davila’s History of the Civil Wars in France (1630). Davila himself had claimed that his work revealed “secret and notable circumstances” of the civil wars; having consulted the very princes involved in the conflict, his work would reveal their “motives” and the “causes” of the wars.[53] In 1667 in a discourse entitled “On an active life and on a Contemplative Life, and when and why the one ought to be preferred to the other,” Lord Clarendon had extolled Davila’s History as a model of how to be a scholar and a statesman at the same time, essentially extolling the Tacitean use of history for understanding political prudence.[54] Clarendon claimed that historians with practical experience of politics make better political historians than pure contemplative scholars, and thus Davila, who had been close to Catherine de Médicis and had played an active role in northern Italian politics, was, along with the Cardinal Bentivoglio, a perfect historian for learning the political motives of historical actors in civil wars.

In choosing Davila and the title “Discourses,” Adams was not just choosing a well-established Tacitean author; he was engaging in the old practice of choosing passages he believed were useful for political prudence and commenting on them in the vein of Machiavelli’s Discourses and Tacitists such as Amelot de La Houssaye. The very form of the book, maxims followed by commentaries often about tyranny, faction and prudence, resembled both the form and content of Amelot de La Houssaye’s La Morale de Tacite. “Discourse No. 3” is on the passage, “August verité! C’est à toi de montrer aux yeux des nations/Les coupables effets de leurs divisions,” and followed by a long historical dissertation begun by the phrase: “When one family is depressed, either in a Monarchy, or in any species of republic, another must arise.”[55] He then goes on to analyze the mechanics of the decline of the Valois and the Rise of the Bourbons through a close analysis of Davila’s text. Discourse No. 7 is more in the vein of Amelot de La Houssaye’s Tacitean analysis of flattery and the decline of republican virtue: “The result of the preceding discourses is, that avarice and ambition, vanity and pride, jealousy and envy, hatred and revenge, as well as the love of knowledge and desire of fame are very often nothing more than various modifications of that desire of the attention, consideration and congratulations of our fellow men. . . .”[56] In studying the history of the French civil wars, Adams underlined the old Machiavellian topos of factionalism amongst the French nobility as part of his belief that rich and powerful citizens could not be excluded from the Republic. Thus he sought general maxims not only about morality, but also about historical prudence to create a tool to build stable government.

This method or techné of politics is nowhere more clear than in Adams’s manuscript annotations of printed books in his library. His library is filled with more than thirty books containing his annotations in the margins.[57] This of course was standard for early modern readers, but the political tradition of Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, and Amelot de La Houssaye, to name just a few, used the practice of reading and annotating to handle and formulate political ideas and actions. This was a standard practice of Tacitism and of indeed religious reading practice: to use the marginal reference to authority to bolster or refute a certain text. Adams was not just using a generalized learned practice; he was clearly conscious of a longer political tradition, for when he read, he often cited Tacitus in the margins of his books.

In the margins of his books, Adams waged a personal war against what he saw as the naive and dangerous idealism of the philosophes and the French Revolution. And he did so through citations from Tacitus. Thus he read books, and either memorized Tacitus or had a copy of his works nearby from which he drew thematic citations. On the flyleaf (recto) of his copy of Condorcet’s Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind,[58] Adams wrote the following passage in 1811:

The rapid Progress of the The Mind to perfection has been the common Place Topick of Declamation for half a Century. But I can see no other End they have in View as their Ultimate Object than to bring Men back to the State of Mind so frankly avowed by Tacitus and [Quinctilius]—absolute doubt, whether Chance or Fate governs the World. But it will be found that Men must be governed as well as cultivated. Without Government there is not a more savage Beast of the Forest.

The Phylosophers of France were too rash and hasty. They were as artful as Selfish and as hypocritical as Priests and Politicians of Babilon Persia Egypt India Greece Rome Turkey, Germany Wales Scotland, Ireland France Spain Italy or England. They understood not what they were about. They miscalculated Their Forces and Resources; and were consequently overwhelmed in destructi[on] with all their Theories.

The Precipitation and Temerity of Phylosophers, h[ave] I fear, retarded the Progress of Improvement and Amelioration in the Condition of Mankind, for a[t] least a hundred years.

The public Mind was improving in Knowledge and [the] public heart in Humanity Equity and Benevolence: The [illegible] [acts] of Feudality, the Inquisition, the Rack, the Cruelty of Punishment, Negro Slavery were giving Way etc. But the Phylosophers must arrive at Perfection, per Saltum. Ten times more furious than Jack in the Tale of a Tub they rent and tore the whole Garment to Pieces and left not one whole thread in it[.] They have even been compelled to resort to Napoleon, and Gibbon himself was [often] an advocate for The Inquisition. What an [illegible] Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty they have [illegible] established in [illegible].

These passages are extraordinary, for in them Adams not only enunciates his resistance to the optimism and sense of progress of French philosophes and revolutionaries, but also makes clear that he will use Tacitus as his historical witness to what he perceives as their folly.[59] Throughout the margins of Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and moral view of the origin and progress of the French Revolution: and the effect it has produced in Europe, the abbé de Mably’s De la Legislation, and Voltaire’s Traité sur la Tolérance, Adams writes counter maxims, some cited by Tacitus, others in Tacitean style. Whether he cites him or not, Adams’s Tacitean message is clear—the quest for secular political perfection and man’s attempt to master natural law leads to folly and catastrophe. Indeed, he makes the same reference to human faultiness to defend traditional religion:

God has established no Equality among Men in Practice or Theory but a moral Equality. The Giant has a natural Right to his Eight foot Stature, and to his Strong equal to 500 Weight as the Dwarf to his Three feet and his Strong but equal to 50 Pounds. (p. ii)

Man is by Nature a religious Animal, a religious Man will say: and that The Phylosophers have taught the People, Atheism and irreligion in order to rob them. Invisible Powers th[a]t produce Sun, Moon and Stars Animals Vegetables, Fruits Flowers and Blossoms form themselves on the human Mind as soon as it can think. A Sense of his own Weakness, Wants and Dependence forces him to think whence he came and what produced him and all Things. (p. 34)

In his copy of Voltaire’s Traité sur la Tolérance, Adams read Voltaire’s calls for tolerance and optimism with the lens of Tacitean cynicism. On page 26, Adams notes with scorn that Voltaire would have been guillotined as a member of the aristocracy. Where Voltaire writes “La Philosophie, la seule . . . l’avait emporté la fanatisme,” Adams writes, “Is it possible to read this in 1801”?[60] His most extensive notes are on Wollstonecraft’s defense of the French Revolution, in which he attacks not only the idea that a woman could make profound political judgments, but also again the ideas of human perfection and political utopianism.

Adams annotated his own Discourses on Davila on February 24, 1813, critiquing a speech made by Napoleon on December 20, 1812, which Adams transcribed on the endpaper of the Discourses.[61] Adams felt the need to bring out his book of Tacitean political commentaries again, for Napoleon, he believed, proved that his earlier pessimism was justified. Next to Napoleon’s speech, Adams writes, “Napoleon! Mutato Nomine, de te Fabula narrabature! This Book is a Prophecy of your Empire before your name was heard.”

Worn out by politics and time, Adams goes through his old book again, annotating his own commentaries, writing about events that have since taken place, and writing maxims in his own margins: “Science extinguishes no passions” (p. 85), or “Duties of Birth. What a dangerous idea!” (p. 124). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as he feared the rise of oligarchy in the United States, he was still fascinated with the example of the Guises and how they attempted to gain power (pp. 110–13). And he could not hide his bitterness toward those whom he clearly saw as the leading figures of the political Enlightenment:

Franklin Turgot Rochefaucault and Condorcet under Tom Paine, were the great Masters of that Academy!/ It may be modestly Suggested to the Emperor to coin another Word in his new Mint in conformity or Analogy with Ideology; and call every Constitution of government in France from 1789 to 1799 An Idiocracy./ Quincy December 6. 1814. This Volume was returned yesterday from Mr Colman of Hingham, who has had it almost a year. The Events in Europe since March 3d 1813 are remarkable. Napoleon is now in Elba and Talleyrand at Vienna! Let Us read Candide and Zadig and Rasselas and see if there is anything extravagant in them.!/ Have not Phylosophers been as honest and as mad as Popes, Jesuits, Priests, Emperors Kings, Heroes Conquerors. Has the Inquisition been more cruel than Robespierre or Marat or Napoleon?/(Page: next endpaper)

Man ought to “drop into himself”!/ The Inquisition is now revived and the order of The Jesuits is restored. Sic transit Gloria Phylosophia! Even Gibbon was for restoring the Inquisition! Philosophy is now as distracted as it was At Alexandria, during the Seige of Jerusalem! And where is our New England bound? To Hartford Convention.! And how many Paines and Callenders Robespierres and Napoleons are to be begotten by that Assemblage? Vide Rasselas, Candide, Zadig, Jenni Scarmontado. Micromegas, the Huron etc.

Ridendo dicere verum, quid vetat?[62]

By the end, he no longer cites Tacitus, yet pessimism and moral scorn for tyranny are still his leading topoi. Government came not from “nature,” but rather from “art,” and this was learned from history and experience.

Adams might have considered republicanism an unintelligible puzzle, yet he was a republican, and on a quest to figure out this concept, he turned to the classical and early modern traditions of Tacitism as his primary intellectual tool for interpreting politics. If the founders did not build the entire republic or successfully create popular democracy, they did write the American constitutions and thus had a profound effect on the world. Remarkably, they build their republican founding texts with the intellectual tools of humanism from Italy, Britain, and France. The way Machiavelli read for politics was the way that Logan, Adams, and even Jefferson and Franklin did too. Thus Pocock’s republican thesis still has resonance. Cultural traditions from the Florentine and Venetian politics, in all their complexity, wound their way across the Atlantic, into the libraries and learned practices of the founders as they created their republic of history.

A version of this article previously appeared in Japanese in Shiso (Special Issue in Honor of J. G. A. Pocock) February (2008): 82-107.

[1] Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (1992): 11–37.

[2] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 486.

[3] Ibid., 506.

[4] Rodgers, “Republicanism,” 37.

[5] Ibid., 38.

[6] Ibid.

[7] For a Europeanist reading of Rodgers’s critique, see William J. Connell, “The Republican Idea,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 14–29.

[8] Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). There are certainly exceptions to this. See Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian America (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004).

[9] Pasley, Robertson, and Waldstreicher, Beyond the Founders, 13.

[10] For a study of the Tacitist and Machiavellian political culture in the context of the history of scholarship, see Jacob Soll, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

[11] Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Also see Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Tension (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).

[12] The field of the social and cultural history of knowledge has emerged as an important force in the works of Lisa Jardine, Margaret Jacob, Peter Burke, Anthony Grafton, Paula Findlen, Barbara Shapiro, William Sherman, Ann Blair, Peter Miller, Deborah Harkness, and even Pocock himself. See Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982); Peter Burke, The Sociology of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); and Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). Notable intellectual biographies are Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); William Sherman, John Dee: The Politics and Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Nancy Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Peter Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Man Who Knew Everything (London: Routledge, 2004); and Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Also see Richard Yeo, “John Locke’s ‘New Method’ of Commonplacing: Managing Memory and Information,” Eighteenth Century Thought 2 (2004): 1–38. Also see Yeo’s work on Bacon as well as on encyclopedic culture in the eighteenth century: “Between Memory and Paperbooks: Baconianism and Natural History in Seventeenth-Century England,” History of Science 45 (March 2007): 1–46, and Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

[13] Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, “Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1991): 30–78.

[14] J. G. A. Pocock, “Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 341.

[15] Donald R. Kelley, “What Is Happening to the History of Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990): 3–25.

[16] Miller, Peiresc’s Europe, 77. Miller’s first book, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion, and Philosophy in Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), was a product of Skinner’s Cambridge School of “Ideas in Context,” and focused on the history of political discourse.

[17] On the Warburg Institute, see Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 17–59.

[18] Anthony Grafton, “Momigliano’s Method and the Warburg Institute: Studies in His Middle Period” in Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter N. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

[19] See in general Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, ed. Riccardo Di Donato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

[20] Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth Century Florence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964); Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

[21] On the connection between erudition and political philosophy, see Anthony T. Grafton and J. H. M. Salmon’s introduction to their edited volume, Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001), pp. vii–xi.

[22] Q. R. D. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:201–7.

[23] For an intellectual genealogy that connects Enlightenment secularism, humanism, and ancient and medieval ecclesiastical scholarship, see Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1–21.

[24] For a good example, see Pocock’s chapter in Historians and Ideologues, “The ‘Outlines of the History of the World’: A Problematic Essay by Edward Gibbon,” 211–30.

[25] J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1:121.

[26] Ibid., 2:18.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment; the World and Work of LaCurne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968); Dieter Gembicki, Histoire et politique à la fin de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Nizet, 1976); Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Les historiens et la monarchie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976); Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

[30] On chancelleries, archives, history, and Renaissance Italian politics, see Aidée Scala, Girolamo Rorario: Un umanista diplomatico del Cinquecento e i suoi Dialoghi (Florence: Olschki Editore, 2004), 25–41. On the ambiguities of the state ownership of administrative archives, see the pioneering work of Gary Ianziti, “A Humanist Historian and His Sources: Giovanni Simonetta, Secretary to the Sforzas,” Renaissance Quarterly 34 (1981): 491–516, and Humanistic Historiography under the Sforzas: Politics and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Also see Marcello Simonetta, Rinascimento segreto: il mondo del segretario da Petrarca a Machiavelli (Milan: F. Angeli, 2004).

[31] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 98–99.

[32] Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 260–70.

[33] Jan Waszink, introduction to Politica, by Justus Lipsius, trans. and ed. Jan Waszink (Assen, Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004), 3–221.

[34] Grafton and Jardine cite this passage from Harvey’s annotations of Livy in “Studied for Action,” 38.

[35] Ibid., 39.

[36] Ibid., 43.

[37] Ann Blair, “Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book,” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1992): 542–43.

[38] On commonplace books and their place in learned and political culture, see Francis Goyet, Le sublime du “Lieu Commun”: L’invention rhétorique dans l’antiquité et à la Renaissance (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996); Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Jan Waszink, “Inventio in the Politica: Commonplace Books and the Shape of Political Theory,” in Lipsius in Leiden: Studies in the Life and Works of a Great Humanist, ed. K. Enenkel and C. Heesakkers (Voorthuizen, Netherlands: Florivallis, 1997), 141–62; and Yeo, “John Locke’s ‘New Method’ of Commonplacing” and “Between Memory and Paperbooks.”

[39] On the idea that absolutist political culture contained seeds of political criticism and its own demise, see Soll, Publishing The Prince, 19–20.

[40] Ibid., pp. 44–46; and Gianfranco Borelli, “Reason of State: The Italian Art of Political Prudence,” in Ragion di Stato. L’arte italiana della prudenza politica. Mostra bibliografica, by Gianfranco Borelli (Naples: Instituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 1994), 52.

[41] Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, Paris, 10 August 1787, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 432.

[42] H. Trevor Colbourn, “Thomas Jefferson’s Use of the Past,” William and Mary Quarterly 1 (1958): 56.

[43] Ibid., 61.

[44] For striking examples, see Dickinson’s copy at the Library Company in Philadelphia: Thomas Gordon, The Works of Tacitus with Political Discourses upon that Author, 3rd ed. (London: T. Longman, C. Hitch, 1753), 1:271, 283, 353.

[45] On Logan’s collection, still intact at the Library Company of Philadelphia, see Edwin Wolf, The Library of James Logan of Philadelphia 1674–1751 (Philadelphia: Library Company, 1974). Also see Wolf’s James Logan, 1674–1751: Bookman Extraordinary (Philadelphia: Library Company, 1971).

[46] Karl-Ludwig Selig, The Library of Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa, Patron of Gracián (Geneva: Droz, 1960).

[47] Tacitus, Germania, ed. Melancthon (Wittenberg: Johannem Lufft, 1557).

[48] Wolf, Library of James Logan, 476–77.

[49] The meaning of the whole passage is somewhat different: “In my own case I had no acquaintance with Galba, Otho or Vitellius, through either kindness or injury at their hands. I cannot deny that my political career owed its beginning to Vespasian; that Titus advanced it; and that Domitian carried it further; but those who profess inviolable fidelity to truth must write of no man with affection or with hatred. Yet if my life but last, I have reserved for my old age the history of the deified Nerva’s reign and of Trajan’s rule, a richer and less perilous subject, because of the rare good fortune of an age in which we may feel what we wish and may say what we feel.” Tacitus, The Histories, trans. Clifford H. Moore (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1925), bk. 1, chap. 1, p. 3.

[50] Tacitus, Histories, bk. 1, chaps. 15–16, pp. 29–31 (emphasis added).

[51] On La Rochefoucauld’s Tacitism and Augustinian pessimism, see Jean Lafond, La Rochefoucauld, augustinisme et literature (Paris: Éditions Klinksieck, 1977). Adams owned Amelot de La Houssaye’s critical edition of La Rochefoucauld’s Pensées, maxims et réflexions morales (Paris: Bailly, 1777).

[52] John Adams, Defense of the Constitutions of the United States against the Attack of Turgot in his Letter to Dr. Price, 3 vols. (London: C. Dilly, 1787-88), 1, pp. xxii-xxiii of preface.

[53] Henrico Caterino Davila, The Historie of the Civill Warres of France (London, 1657), 2–3.

[54] Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, A Collection of Several Tracts (London: T. Woodward and J. Peele, 1727), 167–204.

[55] John Adams, Discourses on Davila: A Series of Papers on Political History (Boston: Russell and Cutler, 1805), 19.

[56] Ibid., 43–44.

[57] See Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). These annotations are now found online with digitized copies of Adams’s books: http://www.johnadamslibrary.org/.

[58] London, printed for J. Johnson, 1795.

[59] Zoltan Haraszti, “John Adams Flays a Philosophe: Annotations on Condorcet’s Progress of the Human Mind,” William and Mary Quarterly 7 (1950): 223–54; John R. Howe Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 39–40.

[60] Adams’s MS annotations, 29.

[61] The speech is the following: By Napoleon Emperor of France. “On the 20th of December 1812. The emperor Napoleon made the following answer to an Address. ‘It is to Ideology, to that obscure Metaphysics which, Searching with Subtlety after first causes, wishes to found upon them the Legislation of Nations, instead of adapting the Laws to the knowledge of the human heart and to the Lessons of History: that We are to attribute all the calamities that our beloved France has experienced. Those Errors necessarily produced the Government of the Men of blood. Indeed who proclaimed the Principle of Insurrection as a Duty? Who flattered the People by proclaiming for them a Sovereignty, which they were incapable of exercising? Who destroyed the Senate and the respect to the Laws by making them to depend not upon the Sacred Principles of Justice, upon the nature of Things, and upon civil Justice; but only upon the Will of an Assembly of Men composed of Men, Strangers to the knowledge of the civil, criminal, administrative, political and military Laws? When we are called to regenerate a State, We must Act upon opposite Principles. History paints the human Heart. It is in history that We are to seek for the Advantages and disadvantages of different Systems of Laws. These are the Principles of which the Council of State of a great Empire ought never to lose Sight. It ought to add to them a Courage equal to every Emergency, and like the Presidents, Harlay and Mole be ready to perish in defence of The Sovereign, The Throne and The Laws.’”

[62] See Adams’s annotations on p. 249 of his Discourses on Davila.