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ESSAY REVIEW up from Civic Virtue ESSAY REVIEW Up From Civic Virtue The Gift of Government: Political Responsibility from the English Restoration to American Independence, By J.R. POLE. (The Richard B. Russell Lec- tures, Number One. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983. xiv, 185p. Appendix, index. $16.00.) Revolutionary Statesman: Charles Carroll and the War. By THOMAS O'BRIEN HANLEY. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1983. x, 448p. Frontis- piece, documentary notes, index. $15.95.) George Clymer: Philadelphia Revolutionary, 1739-1813. By JERRY GRUND- FEST. (Dissertations in American Biography. New York: Arno Press, 1982. 554p. Appendix, bibliography. $60.00.) In an incisive review essay written more than a decade ago, Stanley N. Katz assessed a spate of new works that he correctly predicted would represent a paradigm shift in our understanding of the intellectual origins of revolutionary America. These studies, focusing on late seventeenth- and early eighteenth- century constitutional thought, revealed a political world obsessed with insti- tuting mixed government, the separation of powers, and a balanced constitu- tion in order to control power and preserve individual liberty. A traditional morality emphasizing the need for citizens' political participation and disin- terested concern for the commonweal underlay this constitutional theory. The entire constellation of ideas, it was argued, was drawn from a larger intellectual tradition, that of republicanism or civic humanism, which traced its roots back to Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and especially Machiavelli and James Harring- ton. What previous historians had assumed to be the staples of Anglo- American political thought for understanding the American Revolution— contract, the state of nature, doctrine of consent, theory of natural rights, and the right of revolution—were now labeled myths or dismissed as inconse- quential.1 The major casualty of this republican revisionism was John Locke, the standard-bearer of liberal individualism. At Katz wrote, "Locke et praeterea nihil, it now appears, will no longer do as a motto for the study of eight- eenth-century Anglo-American political thought."2 Subsequent works by John Dunn, Gary Wills, J.G.A. Pocock, and Norman Fiering have further discredited Locke's influence, denying, respectively, his impact on the origins 1 Stanley N. Katz, "The Origins of American Constitutional Thought," Perspectives in American History, 3 (1969), 474-90. 2 Ibid., 474. 368 ESSAY REVIEW July of the American Revolution, his importance for Thomas Jefferson's formu- lation of the Declaration of Independence, and his preeminence in eight- eenth-century constitutional thought and moral philosophy.3 In the past ten years some historians, reacting strongly against reading Locke out of Anglo-American intellectual history, have systematically at- tempted to re-establish the importance of liberal individualism for under- standing the political upheavals of this period. In a masterful article in 1982, Isaac Kramnick convincingly challenged the republican school by demon- strating that eighteenth-century English radicals' campaign for parliamentary and franchise reform owed a large debt to Locke's political ideas.4 Similarly, recent religious, political, and literary studies of colonial America have re- vealed the importance of Locke's A Letter on Toleration (1689) and On the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) in constructing Virginia's "Bill for Es- tablishing Religious Freedom" (1786), the centrality of his Two Treatises of Government (1689-90) in forming Jefferson's ideas about the Declaration of Independence, and the potency of his antipatriarchal Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) in shaping the dispute between Great Britain and the col- onies.5 And while F. W. Anderson does not mention Locke in describing the 3 John Dunn, "The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century," in John W. Yolton, ed.,John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge, 1969), 48-80, Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978), J.G.A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), Pocock, "Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3 (1972), 124, 127, 129, Norman Fienng, Moral Phi- losophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline m Transition (Chapel Hill, 1981), Fienng, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill, 1981) For cogent criticism of Dunn, see Michael Zuckert, "The Recent Literature on Locke's Political Philos- ophy," Political Science Reviewer, 5 (1975), 294-96. 4 Isaac Kramnick, "Republican Revisionism Revisited," American Historical Review, 87 (1982), 629-64. 5 Sanford Kessler, "Locke's Influence on Jefferson's "Bill for Establishing Religious Free- dom," Journal of Church and State, 25 (1983), 231-52, Ronald Hamowy, "Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment. A Critique of Gary Wills's Inventing America: Jefferson s Declaration of Independence," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 36 (1979), 503-24, Jay Fhegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, 1982). See also Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, "The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation," Perspectives in American History, 6 (1972), 167-308, Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York, 1978). At this date, the verdict on Locke's influence is becoming clearer. On the one hand, in the political realm, it is evident that such scholars as Dunn, Pocock, and Wills were wrong to discount Locke's impact on eighteenth-century political thought and action It does not follow, however, that civic humanism was an unimportant factor in colonial politics, only that there was more than one influential intellectual tradition in early America On the other hand, even in works such as Fienng's that persuasively demonstrate Locke was only one among many English and continental philosophers who influenced Jonathan Edwards, it is apparent that Locke's psychological empiricism set the terms of the debate. See James Hoopes, "Jonathan Edwards's Religious Psychology," Journal of American History, 69 (1983), 849-65, esp. 851-52, Donald Weber, "The Figure of Jonathan Edwards," Review Essay, American Quar- terly, 35 (1983), 560-62. Either way, there appears to be an emerging consensus on Locke's importance for understanding eighteenth-century American political and intellectual history 1984 ESSAY REVIEW 369 contractual nature of New England soldiers' term of service, it is apparent that by the Great War for the Empire, Lockean principles had permeated the colonists' understanding of military duty.6 The reaffirmation of Locke's influence is only one part of a larger, more direct challenge to the republican synthesis of early America. In an insightful and comprehensive survey of recent work by, among others, Rhys Isaac, Gary Nash, Eric Foner, and Joyce Appleby, Robert E. Shalhope contends that prerevolutionary America contained several ideologies which conflicted with some tenets of classical republicanism and harmonized with others. The net effect of these new studies is to revise our thinking about the ideological origins of the American Revolution and political conflicts during the Revolutionary War. Yet, as Shalhope notes, these scholars differ among themselves on several points. In particular, Isaac, Nash, and Foner find that the lower orders com- prised a premodern social order, emphasizing communalistic and egalitarian values, while Appleby portrays the middle and lower classes as the vanguard of modernization, embodying the individualistic, materialistic ethos of liberal America.7 Within this context, J.R. Pole's lucid and wide-ranging Gift of Government: Political Responsibility from the English Restoration to American Independence reinforces Appleby's perspective and enlarges our understanding of liberalism as a contributing factor in the breakup of the first British Empire. Characteristically, Pole employs a comparative framework to discuss the parallel development of political accountability in England and America. He begins by setting out the obligations of government in the seventeenth century. For the Stuarts and the Puritans, the fundamental duties of the state were to maintain religion and to protect personal property and security. Because po- litical power was considered a gift of God, kings and governors owed the people the gift of good government. Parliament and colonial asemblies, Pole claims, did not figure prominently in the political calculus of the seventeenth century. The people's role in politics was also minimal, limited until the 1740s to the people's duty to obey their rulers. In the century following the Restoration, on both sides of the Atlantic, the obligation of rulers and the political role of the people changed completely. As a result of the secularization of society—which Pole believes "was itself a product of a broader transmutation, which can better be called diversification" (p. 11)—government lost its religious function and was recast into the utili- tarian role of promoting the happiness of the people. Increasingly, the hap- piness of the people revolved around the idea of interests, specifically the 6 F.W. Anderson, "Why Did Colonial New Englanders Make Bad Soldiers? Contractual Principles and Military Conduct During the Seven Years' War," WMQ, 3d Ser., 38 (1981), 395-418. 7 Robert
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