Men of Little Faith: The American Revolution as a Rebellion against the Modern State (1765-1850) by Ivan Jankovic MA Political Science, University of Windsor, 2011 Honours BA Philosophy, University of Belgrade Serbia, 2002 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Ivan Jankovic 2016 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Spring 2016 Approval Name: Ivan Jankovic Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (Political Science) Title: Men of Little Faith: the American Revolution as a Rebellion against the Modern State (1765-1850) Examining Committee: Chair: : Rémi Léger Assistant Professor Laurent Dobuzinskis Senior Supervisor Associate Professor Genevieve Fuji Johnson (in absentia, Pentington) Supervisor Associate Professor David Laycock Supervisor Professor Michael Everton Internal Examiner Associate Professor, English Filippo Sabetti (via videoconference, Montreal) External Examiner Professor, Department of Political Science McGill University Date Defended/Approved: December 18, 2015 ii Abstract This dissertation explores American political thought and development in the period 1765-1850. It is a study aimed at reinterpreting the American Revolution, both in terms of its temporal extent as well as its political and ideological sources and meaning. When it comes to temporal dimension the study claims that the Revolution did not end in 1783 or 1787 but continued for decades afterwards, and in terms of meaning it argues that the Revolution was not a process of gaining independence and creating a nation-state, but a process or resisting the multiple attempts at creating a centralized state in America. Revolutionary thought encompassed the patriots and antifederalists, included Jeffersonian writers and theorists in the early national period and Jacksonians in the 1830a and 1840s, to culminate with John C. Calhoun. What drove this Revolution was skepticism about both political consolidation of a nation state and economic policies of mercantilism that went hand in hand with it. It was both reactionary and liberal: reactionary in its resistance to modern state-building, and liberal in terms of its philosophy of rights and economic theory. The study deals with the two central motifs of revolutionary thought: political localism and economic liberalism. This duality is studied against the background of conventional theories which presuppose political modernization in the form of a consolidated, centralized, enlightened state as necessary for the development of modern commerce. It is argued that a better model for understanding America is a “decoupled modernization” hypothesis. Within it economic and social modernity, most obviously expressed in a widespread acceptance of laissez-faire economic ideas, is seen as coinciding with a pre- modern localist political mindset, derived and strongly influenced by medieval principles and practices as well as by British common law. This study finds a counterintuitive combination of modern economic and social ideas and largely “antiquated,” anachronistic political theories in American early tradition. Free market economic theories were dominating the thought of American localists, whereas their political thought transformed slowly so as do adapt to the realities of the nation state and to make peace with it, through the so called states’ rights philosophy. iii Keywords: men of little faith; American Revolution; modern state; economic liberalism; localism iv Dedication: To the remnants… v Acknowledgements The author wants to thank professors Laurent Dobuzinskis, David Laycock and Genevieve Fuji-Johnson for their constant support and their spirit of productive challenge during the entire process of writing this dissertation. Prof Alexander Moens read some of the first brief formulations of the general argument of the study and helped me through our general discussions of American history and politics. The thank is also extended to prof Michael Zuckert of the University of Notre Dame and editor of “American Political Thought; prof Zuckert and some 6 or 7 anonymous referees at APT helped immensely in improving a paper which represents an enlarged version of chapter 2 of this dissertation. A special gratitude is owed by the author to historians and political theorists who influenced the most my way of thinking about the early American political tradition, most notably Luigi Marco Bassani, Thomas E. Woods Jr, Donald Livingston and Clyde Wilson. It goes without saying that none of the mentioned persons bears any responsibility for the views and arguments offered in this study. vi Table of Contents Approval .......................................................................................................................... ii Abstract .......................................................................................................................... iii Dedication: ...................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ vi Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1. Introduction ............................................................................................. 1 Chapter 2. Original Men of Little Faith: The Country Party Ideology in Great Britain ........................................................................................... 30 Chapter 3. Hobbes, Locke and the Long Parliament against America ................. 63 Chapter 4. Consent, Representation and Liberty: America as the Last Medieval Society .................................................................................... 92 Chapter 5. Medieval heritage: Consent, Rebellion and Liberty .......................... 121 Chapter 6. The Great Derailment: the Coming of the American State ................ 156 Chapter 7. 1776 Strikes Back – Critics of the Constitution ................................. 200 Chapter 8. Jefferson-Jackson Society – a counter-revolution within a form ...................................................................................................... 232 Chapter 9. The last Stand - John C. Calhoun ....................................................... 271 Chapter 10. Conclusion ........................................................................................... 307 Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 321 vii Chapter 1. Introduction This study is an attempt at reinterpretation of the American Revolution. The reader could be excused for being sceptical about yet another attempt to say “something new”’ on a topic so many thousands of books were written about, by both historians and political theorists (and economists as well). However, this dissertation does not purport to discover anything “new” in terms of historical data or analysis; it rather seeks to offer a novel interpretation of the ideational and ideological underpinnings of the Revolution and to challenge the usual interpretations of what the Revolution was and meant. The primary focus of this study is the relationship between the American Revolution and the modern state in North America. It is often recognized by many historians and political theorists that American society in colonial times was a stateless one (Wood, 2011b). The state of extreme political decentralization, coupled with “anarchy” in economic regulations by the British Empire created a condition closely resembling the European Middle Ages. British colonies were authorized by British royal charters, but in actual terms colonial societies were built from the bottom-up, as highly decentralized experiments, drawing on English traditional legal and political institutions, 1 and semi-medieval localism.1 It is often argued (with good justification) that the American union of the revolutionary and early national periods was just a confederation of independent states: yet, to say even this much is to exaggerate slightly, because the North American colonies and newly emerging “states” of 1770s and 1780s were nothing like modern states, exercising sovereign decision-making power over their territory. They were themselves confederated, composite political forms built from the bottom up within a loose network of similar independent agglomerations (Wood, idem), resembling overall the anarchic kaleidoscope of European medieval or early modern principalities and dukedoms. Consolidation in America was lagging behind Europe even at this, local-state level, let alone the federal level. The main thesis of this study is that the American Revolution actually represented a resistance movement of this traditional American society and attending political mindset against the consolidating and centralizing revolution begotten by British authorities in the 1760s and continued after the Independence by the domestic American political elites. It was a revolution to conserve the existing social and political traditions against the novelty of state building. What I am trying to do is to follow the intellectual articulations of this resistance movement, in order to outline the contours of continuities and discontinuities of this process, from 1765 when the controversy began, until 1850 when the last great thinker of this decentralist