Neither Machiavellian Moment nor possessive individualism: Commercial society and the defenders of the English Commonwealth

American Historical Review

Volumn 103, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 705-736

  Pincus, Steve ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 33645509251     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2650569     Document Type: Article

References (305)

1. Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal of American History 79. (June 1992): 11.
2. See also Knud Haakonssen, "Republicanism," in Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, eds., A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford, 1993), 568. Haakonssen, unlike Rodgers, does not see any diminution in the fashion for republicanism.
3. The phrase is Joyce Appleby's in Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 279.
4. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962), 1;
5. Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock, The Liberal Tradition: From Fox to Keynes (London, 1956), xx;
6. Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago, 1995), 13-15.
7. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975);
8. Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 1. While I dissent from Macpherson's depiction of liberalism and from Pocock's emphasis on classical republicanism, I agree with both of them that an analysis of early modern British political and social thought is essential to understanding the nature of our own political presuppositions.
9. J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), 15;
10. see also Pocock, "The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology," Journal of Modern History 53 (March 1981): 49-50. Some readers might be bewildered by the extent to which I have quoted Pocock. This is because Pocock has often claimed that his critics misrepresent him. In many cases, I think he is right. To avoid that pitfall, I have relied on Pocock's own words rather than paraphrasing him.
11. Chantal Mouffe, "Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community," in Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (London, 1992), 227;
12. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), ix.
13. (Skinner and his fellow defender of republicanism, Philip Pettit, have come to maintain that liberalism was only invented in the nineteenth century. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, ix;
14. Philip Pettit, "Liberalism and Republicanism," Australian Journal of Political Science 28 [1993]: 163. This claim can only be defended if based on an extremely restrictive and ungenerous definition of liberalism.)
15. Blair Worden, "Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism," in David Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649-1776 (Stanford, Calif., 1994), 45.
16. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven, Conn., 1994), 196;
17. David Armitage, "The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire," Historical Journal 35 (1992): 532-33;
18. Armitage, "John Milton: Poet against Empire," in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1995), 206.
19. For the purposes of this essay, I have elided some very important differences between Milton and Harrington and focused instead on their similar conceptions of political economy and their rejection of contingent politics of interest. Milton, I am convinced, was much more interested in politics as a means to godliness, while Harrington saw politics much more as an end in itself.
20. I use this term throughout to describe the political ideology uncovered and celebrated by Pocock. While I am aware that Pocock has warned that "republicanism in England was a language, not a programme" (Political Works of James Harrington, 15), it is quite clear that he means this only in the revisionist sense that republicanism did not cause the English Civil War, the execution of the king, or the establishment of the English Republic in 1649. Throughout his voluminous writings, he insists on certain key ideological continuities, which I will explore below. It is these continuities that, Don Herzog has rightly insisted, account for "some of the zeal animating republican revisionism," for it makes it possible to claim "that civic humanism is a valuable possibility today."
21. Herzog, "Some Questions for Republicans," Political Theory 14 (August 1986): 474.
22. I argue this point at length in "From Holy Cause to Economic Interest," in Steve Pincus and Alan Houston, eds., A Nation Transformed? The Modernity of Later Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge, forthcoming).
23. While I agree with Joyce Appleby that England in the seventeenth century was experiencing "commercialization" and that this ultimately required "the endorsement of new values," her account of how that happened is too simple. Discussions of the economy in the seventeenth century are really discussions of political economy. English men and women were not so interested in the abstract questions of modern economists as in how economic developments related to the state's promotion of the common good. Economic change was not only mediated by ideas but also by the development and massive expansion of the English state. The quotations are from Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J., 1978), 3-4.
24. The methodology is outlined by David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London, 1984), 11-12;
25. see also Michael Wilding's narrow definition of Milton's "historical context" as being the "political and ecclesiastical revolution." Wilding, Dragon's Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1987), 234. Far from being a methodology unique to one particular discipline, this is the prevailing mode of analysis in early modern British studies.
26. While this essay calls for a rethinking of liberalism, it does not offer a fleshed-out new historical account. I am planning such an account in my forthcoming book The Glorious Revolution and the Origins of Liberalism. Both in this essay and in that book, I suggest that the liberal ideas that receive their more elegant and sophisticated statements in Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill begin to emerge as a coherent political position in the seventeenth century.
27. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 40-41.
28. It should be noted that Quentin Skinner has recently argued that republican liberty was negative, not positive: "The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty," in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1990);
29. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 82-83. I find myself in complete sympathy with Alan Patten, who claims that Skinner's new "instrumental republicanism" is unable to articulate any "interesting disagreement between liberals and republicans" in their depictions of liberty.
30. Patten, "The Republican Critique of Liberalism," British Journal of Political Science 26 (1996): 26-27.
31. Skinner's response, that liberals only fear coercive restraints on liberty whereas "neo-romans" insist that "to live in a condition of dependence is in itself a source and a form of constraint" (Liberty before Liberalism, 84), fails to convince on two grounds. First, he is unable to show that there was any historical debate between early modern neo-romans and their more commercially oriented critics over this issue. Second, many liberals seem to have the same concerns.
32. Stephen Holmes, for example, insists that the "ideal-typical liberal" "was more distressed by poverty and personal dependency . . . than by inequality of income or wealth" (Passions and Constraint, 15.) Skinner, it seems, is only able to demonstrate this distinction by reducing liberalism to "utilitarian principles"
33. (Liberty before Liberalism, 96-99). I hope to show in the final section that this is a historically unwarranted distinction. Early defenders of commercial society were deeply committed to notions of the common good.
34. Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 5-6.
35. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 87;
36. Blair Worden, "The Revolution of 1688-89 and the English Republican Tradition," in Jonathan I. Israel, ed., The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact (Cambridge, 1991), 249.
37. See also his elegant discussion in "English Republicanism," in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700 (Cambridge, 1991), esp. 446.
38. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York, 1969), 49.
39. Robert E. Shalhope derides those scholars who "assumed that republicanism represented simply a form of government." Shalhope, "Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972): 51.
40. Skinner, "Republican Ideal," 302;
41. Worden, "Revolution of 1688-89," 250.
42. John Milton, "A Defence of the People of England," 1651, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Don M. Wolfe, gen. ed., 8 vols, in 10 (New Haven, Conn., 1952-82), 4: 535.
43. John Milton, "A Second Defence of the People of England," 1654, Complete Prose Works, 4: 561. Milton also took great pride that Queen Christina of Sweden affirmed that he "had uttered no word against kings, but only against tyrants - the pests and plagues of kings."
44. "Second Defence," 4: 604.
45. Henry Stubbe, The Commonwealth of Israel, May 16, 1659 (London, 1659), 4.
46. See also An Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, September 1659 (London, 1659), sig. a5r.
47. It should be noted, as Rodgers has, that there were always two schools of republicanism: "Harvard republicanism . . . and St. Louis republicanism" with very different outlooks. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," 18. It would perhaps be helpful to widen Rodgers' focus to note divisions in the debates about Italian and English republicanism as well.
48. The exception seems to be among American labor historians. However, when pressed, Leon Fink concedes that "those of us who invoke labor republicanism as a category of nineteenth-century analysis must more carefully distinguish it from the more formal tradition of classical, civic republicanism." Fink, "Relocating the Vital Center," Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 158. I am grateful to Bruce Nelson for calling this literature to my attention.
49. Pocock, Political Works of James Harrington, 56;
50. J. G. A. Pocock, "Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana," Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (April-June 1987): 339.
51. Pocock counts himself among "the critics of the Marxian tradition," in "Machiavellian Moment Revisited," 59.
52. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 48.
53. Pocock, "Machiavellian Moment Revisited," 55.
54. It is true that in his more cautious moments, Pocock says he is only critiquing a caricature of liberalism (see Political Works of James Harrington, 146;
55. "Between Gog and Magog," 337), but he fails to provide his readers with a description of liberalism with which he would be sympathetic.
56. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," 27;
57. Skinner, "Republican Ideal," 304, 306;
58. Jonathan Scott, "The English Republican Imagination," in John Morrill, ed., Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s (London, 1992), 37-39;
59. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 59;
60. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent, 5;
61. Ian Shapiro, Political Criticism (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 167;
62. Ronald Dworkin, "Liberalism," in Michael J. Sandel, ed., Liberalism and Its Critics (New York, 1984), 72-75;
63. Mouffe, "Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community," 227;
64. Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism, 23;
65. Jeffrey C. Isaac, "Republicanism vs. Liberalism: A Reconsideration," History of Political Thought 9 (Summer 1988): 350.
66. Assessments similar to Isaac's are offered by Herzog, "Some Questions for Republicans," 473;
67. and Alan Craig Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 3.
68. Worden, "English Republicanism," 444.
69. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 48.
70. See also Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 386;
71. J. G. A. Pocock, "England's Cato: The Virtues and Fortunes of Algernon Sidney," Historical Journal 37 (1994): 931, 933.
72. I quote from Pocock not because his is a lone voice but rather because his views have reached the level of orthodoxy. "The traditional view of political economy articulated by republican theorists at the time of the American Revolution," argue Cathy Matson and Peter Onuf, "was founded upon the premise that political right and personal virtue flowed from the ownership of hereditary and transmissible land." Republicans associated the accumulation of commercial wealth "with luxury and vice, the leading threats to good citizenship in their 'Christian Sparta.' " Matson and Onuf, "Toward a Republican Empire: Interest and Ideology in Revolutionary America," American Quarterly 37 (1985): 496, 498. In this brilliant article, Matson and Onuf argue for the breakdown of republican political economy. My only dissent is that the conditions they isolate for the breakdown occurred in the 1650s in England, and that the same ideological moves were made then, rendering the existence of such a republican synthesis concerning political economy in the late eighteenth century problematic.
73. Pocock, "Machiavellian Moment Revisited," 58.
74. It should be noted that, when criticized, Pocock denies that he ever said these things. He has "often been misrepresented," Pocock complains. He really said "that the republican attitude to the growth of commerce was not one of blanket opposition but one of critical evaluation." By this, he apparently means (and I hope I am being fair) that republicans "feared the 'trading interest' less than the 'monied interest,' the artisan or merchant less than the financial speculator in the availability of capital; when they criticized 'commercial society,' it was for favoring the growth of the soldier, the stockjobber, and the manipulative politician, though commercial society always found republican defenders who believed that these types could be assimilated or eliminated." Pocock, "Between Gog and Magog," 340, 343. It turns out, however, that the radical political economists of the 1650s (and beyond) defended the creation of a national bank and the development of national credit.
75. Pocock, Political Works of James Harrington, 59-60;
76. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 390-91.
77. Unsurprisingly, "the neo-Harringtonian thesis became an instrument of radical reaction in an era of devastating economic change" (Machiavellian Moment, 422).
78. It is worth noting at this point, as I hope to show below, I find Pocock's understanding of Harrington's economic thought more persuasive than that offered by Isaac, "Liberalism versus Republicanism," 364-65;
79. and Shapiro, Political Criticism, 192-93. Both of these political theorists want to suggest that Harrington "took for granted the core tenets of the new political economy" (the phrase is Shapiro's). They are right to suggest that there were radical defenses of a new political economy; they are wrong to think that Harrington offered one.
80. John Milton, Commonplace Book, entry dated to 1651-52, Complete Prose Works, 1: 414-15.
81. Some might see Milton's Sonnet 17, praising Sir Henry Vane the younger for his ability "to advise how war may best, upheld, / Move by her two main nerves, Iron and Gold / In all her equippage," as an admission that money did indeed constitute the sinews of war. John Milton, "Sonnet 17," in John T. Shawcross, ed., The Complete English Poetry of John Milton (New York, 1963), 230. But a careful reading of the sonnet reveals that Milton is praising Vane, whom "religion . . . reckons . . . her eldest son," as uniquely virtuous. It is only with such a virtuous man at the helm that England can make proper use of iron and gold. It is not the iron and gold that generate power but their proper deployment by a man of virtue. Significantly, Vane is figured in the poem as a Roman senator leading England/Rome against the commercial republics of the Netherlands/Carthage. I am grateful to Sharon Achinstein for drawing this sonnet to my attention.
82. Milton, "Second Defence of the People of England," 4: 636.
83. John Milton, "The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth," February 22-29, 1660, Complete Prose Works, 7: 387. Here Milton is attacking the monarchists' defense of political economy, but the same arguments for political economy and consumption were advanced by the radicals in the Rump Parliament not six months before. It is, of course, true that Milton praised the United Provinces as a free state. But wealth, he made quite clear, could only be praised if it were the by-product, not the end goal, of a commonwealth. See 7: 357, 386.
84. Milton, "Defence of the People of England," 4: 400-01, see also 348.
85. See the discussion of Milton and Sparta in Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (1969; rpt. edn., Oxford, 1991), 188-90;
86. Milton, "Second Defence of the People of England," 4: 577.
87. Thomas Hobbes, trans., Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre Written by Thucydides (London, 1629), 102, 104.
88. Sir Thomas North, trans., The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans . . . by . . . Plutarch (London, 1631), 46.
89. John Milton, "Digression," Complete Prose Works, 5: 442-44.
90. find myself persuaded by Nicholas Von Maltzahn's dating, as against that of Austin Woolrych. See Woolrych, "Dating Milton's History of Britain," Historical Journal 36 (1993): 929-43;
91. Von Maltzahn, "Dating the Digression in Milton's History of Britain," Historical Journal 36 (1993): 945-56.
92. However, I think Milton's contempt for merchants was a constant factor in his thought. For the second quote, see Milton, "Defence of the People of England," 4: 316-17. "Citizens" in this context refers to the merchant participants in urban governments.
93. Milton, "Areopagitica," 1644, Complete Prose Works, 2: 544-45
94. . I do not share the view of Ann Baynes Coiro that "Areopagitica is typical of its historical moment in its assumption, at once fearful and exhilarated, that the marketplace could come to pervade everything." Coiro, "Milton and Class Identity: The Publication of Areopagitica and the 1645 Poems," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (Spring 1992): 263. Milton was ambivalent, and would become more so, about the consequences of events in the 1640s and 1650s. He welcomed the growth of political and religious liberty. He absolutely condemned the commercialization of society and ultimately blamed it for the downfall of the Commonwealth.
95. Nicholas Von Maltzahn, Milton's History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1991), 43;
96. Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 195. It should be clear from the above discussion that I dissent from David Armitage's claim that Milton's critique of empire "marks a stage in the gradual transformation of the strenuous classical republicanism of the 1650s into the Whig thought of the latter part of the century." Armitage, "John Milton," 223. There were many critics of England's possessions of colonies throughout the seventeenth century. Later seventeenth-century Whig thought, however, was commercial thought. That Milton rejected commercial society made it impossible for him to be part of that transformation. There are, however, a plethora of other candidates.
97. Pocock, Political Works of James Harrington, 59;
98. James Harrington, "The Commonwealth of Oceana," 1656,
99. in Pocock, Political Works of James Harrington, 315-16.
100. James Harrington, "The Prerogative of Popular Government," 1658,
101. in Pocock, Political Works of James Harrington, 404.
102. Harrington, "Oceana," 259. The lord archon is the sole legislator of Oceana and introduced the commonwealth as a form of government to it; in this context, he is also a character whose speeches I occasionally quote.
103. Harrington, "Oceana," 158. Harrington is thus compelled to argue that Venetian political culture is not truly urban.
104. Harrington, "Oceana," 257.
105. Harrington, "Oceana," 260.
106. My reading of Harrington is in sympathy with that of Rawson, Spartan Tradition, 190-91.
107. Harrington, "Oceana," 239, 234.
108. Worden, "English Republicanism," 451.
109. See also Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England, 2d edn. (Evanston, Ill., 1962), 187.
110. Harrington, "Oceana," 304.
111. Harrington, "Oceana," 238, 251-52.
112. Harrington, "Oceana," 163.
113. Harrington, "Oceana," 164-65, 295. Earlier, Harrington warns that Jews were a people that would "suck the nourishment which would sustain a natural and useful member"; p. 159.
114. I do not mean to suggest that there were not other republicans who shared the agrarian and anti-commercial sentiments of Milton and Harrington, only that the hegemony of their ideological position among the radicals has been vastly overstated. For views similar to those expressed in Harrington and Milton, see Captain Adam Baynes, March 5, 1659, in John Towill Rutt, ed., Diary, of Thomas Burton, Esq., Member in the Parliaments of Oliver and Richard Cromwell from 1656-59 . . . With an Account of the Parliament of 1654; From the Journal of Guibon Goddard, 4 vols. (London, 1828), 4: 31;
115. William Spriggs, A Modest Plea for an Equal Commonwealth (London, 1659), 13-14, 84.
116. I have argued this point elsewhere, as have others. Richard Tuck has also isolated "the creation of a new military organisation" as vital in forcing a shift in English political thought. See his extremely stimulating Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge, 1993), 226.
117. Anthony a Wood, in Helen Darbishire, ed., The Early Lives of Milton (London, 1932), 44.
118. Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Kingdom Stated, 2d edn. (London, 1647), 12-13;
119. Nedham, The Case of the Common-Wealth of England, Stated (London, 1650), 92;
120. Nedham, A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth (London, 1654), 45.
121. Slingsby Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation upon the Trade of England (London, 1679), 3, 4;
122. Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated (London, 1671), 8, 1-2. Bethel's commitment to trade, which permeates all his writings, should inform our reading of his ostensible Harringtonian defense of balance: "That as the house of Lords had anciently a natural right to a superior jurisdiction, in that their propriety was five parts of six, in the whole nation: so is it now more natural for the commons, to have that superiority; their proportion of propriety being ninety nine parts or more, of a hundred. And therefore moved, that if they would have another house, it might be so bounded as might suit with the people's interest."
123. Slingsby Bethel, A True and Impartial Narrative (London, 1659), 8. Given Bethel's consistent ideological defense of commerce, we must read "propriety" and "interest" to include movable goods as well as real property.
124. Benjamin Worsley, The Advocate (London, 1651), 12.
125. Henry Parker, Of a Free Trade (London, 1648), 5.
126. R. H. [Richard Hawkins], A Discourse of the Nationall Excellencies of England (London, 1658), 175, 177.
127. Samuel Lambe, Seasonable Observations, January 27, 1658 (1658), postscript, pp. 1-2.
128. See the very similar argument advanced by Henry Robinson, Brief Considerations Concerning the Advancement of Trade and Navigation (London, 1649), 1.
129. John Bland, Trade Revived (London, 1659), 23.
130. William Potter, The Key of Wealth (London, 1650), dedication to reader (unpaginated).
131. The Grand Concernments of England Ensured (London, 1659), 32. This pamphlet was originally conceived as a commonwealthsman's response to royalist pamphleteering, especially that of John Fell. See also Long Parliament-Work (London, 1659), 13-14.
132. England's Safety in the Laws Supremacy (London, 1659), 19.
133. Henry Robinson, Englands Safety in Trades Encrease (London, 1641), 47;
134. see also Robinson, Certain Proposalls in Order to the Peoples Freedome and Accommodation in Some Particulars (London, 1652), 24;
135. Grand Concernments of England, 15.
136. W. S., The Golden Fleece Wherein Is Related the Riches of English Wools in Its Manufactures (London, 1656), sig. A2, p. 119. The author knew his Pliny, Cicero, and Guicciardini.
137. Henry Neville, February 21, 1659, in Rutt, Diary, of Thomas Burton, Esq., 3: 388; Charles Lloyd, February 21, 1659, in Rutt, 3: 392. See also Major Beake, February 24, 1659, Rutt, 3: 472.
138. England's Settlement (London, 1659), 8.
139. Slingsby Bethel, The World's Mistake in Oliver Cromwell (London, 1668), 7-8;
140. A Declaration of the Parliament Assembled at Westminster, January 23, 1660 (Edinburgh, 1660), 13-14.
141. I have found a rather fuller defense of Athens than Rawson allows, Spartan Tradition, 199-200.
142. Marchamont Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free-State (London, 1656), 7-8.
143. Nedham specifically contrasts the exclusivity of the Council of the Areopagus with the Athenian popular assemblies. He also celebrates Holland: Excellencie of a Free-State, 14;
144. Nedham, Case of the Commonwealth, 82.
145. Bethel, Account of the French Usurpation, 15.
146. Algernon Sidney, in Hans W. Blom, Eco Haitsma Mulier, and Ronald Janse, eds., Court Maxims: Sidney (Cambridge, 1996), 74-75.
147. Sidney's attitude toward trade is admittedly equivocal - he does heap praise on martial valor. Yet Pocock's categorical dismissal of Sidney's interest in commerce as merely a nostalgic longing for "a post-Elizabethan deployment of naval intervention in Europe" appears to have gone too far. It cannot make sense of Sidney's praise for Dutch state thinking or of his deep and abiding friendliness toward Nieuwpoort and other Dutch commercial advocates. See Pocock, "England's Cato," 920.
148. prefer the more nuanced reading of Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage, 161-62.
149. Robinson, Certain Proposals, 10;
150. Robinson, England's Safety, 1;
151. Henry Robinson, A Short Discourse between Monarchical and Aristocratical Governments (London, 1649), 15.
152. Lambe, Seasonable Observations, 7-8.
153. Similar views are expressed by the author of The Good Old Cause Explained, Revived, & Asserted and the Long-Parliament Vindicated (London, 1659), 3.
154. Parker, Of a Free Trade, 36.
155. Nedham, True State of the Case, 45.
156. Robinson, England's Safety, 34;
157. Robinson, Certain Proposals, 18.
158. Lambe, Seasonable Observations, 9.
159. He had in mind their political and military as well as their commercial power. Bethel, Present Interest, 10-11.
160. Parker, Of a Free Trade, 3;
161. Potter, Key of Wealth, 2. Potter, it should be noted, expressly argued that the best means to improve the economy was to increase consumption.
162. See, for example, Key of Wealth, 6.
163. Grand Concernments of England, 34.
164. Bethel, Present Interest, 31-33;
165. Sidney, in Blom, et al., Court Maxims, 74.
166. Worsley, Advocate, 10-11;
167. Robinson, Brief Considerations, 2.
168. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626-1660 (London, 1975), 355.
169. S. E., The Toutch-Stone of Money and Commerce (London, 1659), 12.
170. Parker, Of a Free Trade, sig. A2r, p. 2;
171. W. S., Golden Fleece, sigs. A2v-A3r.
172. Grand Concernments of England, 17, 34.
173. Bethel, Present Interest, 2-3.
174. John Streater, The Continuation of This Session of Parliament Justified (London, 1659), 3;
175. Streater, A Glympse of That Jewel, Judicial, Just, Preserving Libertie (London, 1653), 15.
176. James Howel [Howell], Londinopolis (London, 1657), epistle dedicatory, 397.
177. For other critiques of Cromwellian foreign policy with specific reference to trade, see Thomas Scot, February 21, 1659, Rutt, Diary, of Thomas Burton, Esq., 3: 394;
178. Bethel, World's Mistake in Oliver Cromwell, 3, 11;
179. Hawkins, Discourse of the National Excellencies, 232-34.
180. Streater, Continuation of This Session, 11-12.
181. John Streater, A Shield against the Parthian Dart (1659), 17-18.
182. Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 198.
183. See also Nigel Smith, "Popular Republicanism in the 1650s: John Streater's 'heroick mechanics,'" in Armitage, Himy, and Skinner, Milton and Republicanism, 142, 153.
184. Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623-1677 (Cambridge, 1988), 115-16. The differences between Goodgroom and Harrington are sufficiently large, despite the similarities in their historical model, that Harrington cannot have been guilty of plagiarism.
185. R. G. [Richard Goodgroom], A Copy of a Letter from an Officer of the Army in Ireland (1656), 9, 5, 7.
186. Sylvanus Taylor, Common Good (London, 1652), 8;
187. Edward Sexby, Killing Noe Murder (1657), 5;
188. Marchamont Nedham, Interest Will Not Lie (1659), 46.
189. Grand Concernments of England, 32-33;
190. Parker, Of a Free Trade, 3-4.
191. Matson and Onuf, "Toward a Republican Empire," 499.
192. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 47.
193. Robert E. Shalhope, "Republicanism and Early American Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982): 335;
194. Herzog, "Some Questions for Republicans," 487.
195. Herzog, "Some Questions for Republicans," 484.
196. I am suggesting that classical republicans did in fact defend a politics of interest - the interest of landed proprietors, which they defined narrowly as virtue. They resisted the language of interests because it often seemed to them that "interest" connoted a much broader definition.
197. Milton, "Readie and Easie Way," 7: 361-62, 360.
198. Milton, "Digression," 5: 450.
199. Milton, "Defence of the People of England," 4: 535.
200. John Milton, "Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon," April 1660, Complete Prose Works, 7: 481-82.
201. For Milton's emphasis on republican self-control, see "Second Defence of the People of England," 4: 684.
202. Michael Walzer has argued that typically "republican theorists" imagine that "citizens should not have to work," a position Walzer believes is incompatible with a commercial society. Walzer, "The Civil Society Argument," in Mouffe, Dimensions of Radical Democracy, 92.
203. For Milton's friendship with John Dury, see Leo Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard: New Light on Milton and His Friends in the Commonwealth from the Diaries and Letters of Hermann Mylius . . . (New York, 1985), 82.
204. For Dury's condemnation of interest and interest arguments, see The Interest of England in the Protestant Cause (London, 1659), 2-3.
205. Kevin Gilmartin, "History and Reform in Milton's Readie and Easie Way," in Milton Studies 24 (1988): 17-41;
206. Laura Knoppers, "Milton's The Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad," in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner, eds., Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose (Cambridge, 1990), 213-25;
207. Von Maltzahn, Milton's History of Britain, 42, 48;
208. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 253;
209. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, "Milton: Political Beliefs and Polemical Methods, 1659-1660," Publications of the Modern Language Association 74 (June 1959): 198, 202;
210. Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 40, 193;
211. Z. Fink, Classical Republicans, 107-08, 116;
212. Perez Zagorin, Milton: Aristocrat and Rebel (Rochester, N.Y., 1992), 86-87;
213. William Kolbrener, Milton's Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge, 1997), 29-30. I should note that Tuck sees Milton's devotion to aristocracy as "perfectly in line with much republican thought in both the United Provinces and England" (p. 253). This is true if one's frame of reference is the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. However, in both England and the United Provinces, the middle and later seventeenth centuries saw an increasing commitment to commercial society, hence allowing the possibility of more democratic notions of governance.
214. Milton, "Defence of the People of England," 4: 471.
215. John Milton, "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates," 1649, Complete Prose Works, 3: 192.
216. This concern was expressed in very similar language in "Defence of the People of England," 4: 343.
217. Milton, "Digression," 5: 448-50.
218. Milton, "Defence of the People of England," 4: 458.
219. Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard, 171-72 (records a conversation of February 9, 1652).
220. It is surely significant that in the Second Defence of the People of England Milton condemns his polemical antagonist as "an ignorant artisan"; 4: 576.
221. John Milton to Leo Van Aitzema, February 5, 1655, Complete Prose Works, 4: 871-72;
222. Milton, "Readie and Easie Way," 7: 356-57, 364-65. Responding to Milton's increasing pessimism about the English people, Milton's friend Moses Wall explained Milton's insensitivity to material issues, his inability to consider that "whilst people are not free but straightened in accommodations for life, their spirits will be dejected and servile." The only way to promote a true state, Wall advised Milton, was to improve English manufactures, increase trade, and capitalize agriculture. Wall understood precisely the relationship between Milton's elitist politics and his opposition to commercial society.
223. Moses Wall to John Milton, May 26, 1659, Complete Prose Works, 7: 511. I am grateful to David Loewenstein for calling this letter to my attention.
224. John Toland, "Life of John Milton," in Darbishire, Early Lives of Milton, 166.
225. Milton, "Second Defence of the People of England," 4: 668, 674.
226. Milton, "Second Defence of the People of England," 4: 666, 672, 671-72.
227. Throughout his career, Milton had displayed an interest in Trajan as the best of leaders. See Milton, "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates," 3: 205-06;
228. "Defence of the People of England," 4: 445, 465-66.
229. Andrew Marvell was quick to understand the Trajanic nature of the panegyric to Cromwell in the Second Defence of the People of England: Andrew Marvell to John Milton, June 2, 1654, Complete Prose Works, 4: 864.
230. John Milton, "Proposals of Certain Expedients," 1659, Complete Prose Works, 7: 336.
231. Milton, "Readie and Easie Way," 7: 370-71.
232. Harrington, "Oceana," 172, 182. Harrington did allow for the inclusion of the new concept of "interest" but only as the "interest of the whole," not "of the parts." As a result, interest was rendered a static and exclusively agrarian concept. Harrington's notion of interest was too thin to allow it to be a transformative concept in his work. "Oceana," 171.
233. Harrington, "Oceana," 173.
234. Harrington, "Oceana," 258.
235. Harrington, "Oceana," 259, 246.
236. Harrington, "Oceana," 267.
237. Harrington, "Oceana," 177, 267-68.
238. They did have a range of supporters: see Spriggs, Modest Plea, 80;
239. A Word to Purpose: Or, a Parthian Dart Shot Back to 1642 (1659), 14;
240. George Wither, A Cordial Confection, December 23, 1659 (London, 1659), 8-10.
241. The defenders of the Commonwealth, and modern liberals, do not I think reject virtue, but reject it in the classical republican sense. They believe society should be virtuous, but virtuousness need not be incompatible with the interests of those beyond the landed classes. For classical republicans, "virtue" is a timeless concept with a precise set of classical or Christian meanings. For liberals and the defenders of the English Commonwealth, "virtue" is a contingent concept, contingent on social, economic, and geopolitical considerations. That contingency can only be discovered through dialectic. This is not to say that liberal "virtue" is relative, but, rather, in a skeptical sense, liberals and defenders of the English Commonwealth do not believe that the totality of "virtue" is yet known. This is a point I hope to flesh out in subsequent work.
242. Charles Herle, Wisdomes Tripos, 2 vols. (London, 1655), 169;
243. J. W. [John Warr], The Priviliedges [sic] of the People (London, 1649), 5.
244. Parker, Of a Free Trade, 19.
245. Nedham, Case of the Kingdom Stated, [sig. A2v].
246. This understanding was based on his reading of the modern politician Henry Duc de Rohan. See also Nedham, Interest Will Not Lie, 3.
247. [Marchamont Nedham], The Case Stated between England and the United Provinces in This Present Juncture (London, 1652), 23.
248. Nedham, Case of the Commonwealth, sig. A3;
249. Nedham, True State of the Case, 26.
250. The phrase is Lewalski's from her very perceptive and persuasive "Milton: Political Beliefs and Polemical Methods," 202.
251. Streater, Shield against the Parthian Dart, 17, 7.
252. Sidney, in Blom, et al., Court Maxims, 27.
253. For a more complete and much more sophisticated discussion of Sidney's interest theory that supports and elaborates the contention I am making here, see Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage, 165-67, 198-99.
254. Bethel, World's Mistake in Oliver Cromwell, 12;
255. Bethel, Present Interest, sig. A2r.
256. I am not suggesting that interest analysis led ineluctably to arguments for democracy. They did not. It was certainly possible to suggest, and many did, that only a small number of people had an interest in the nation, and hence only they should rule. I am suggesting, however, that the language of interest allowed for the possibility of democracy in a way that the language of virtue did not. Interest analysis was necessary but absolutely not sufficient for a commitment to democracy.
257. Warr, Priviliedges [sic] of the People, 8.
258. therefore find it hard to accept James T. Kloppenberg's assessment that "the doctrine of popular sovereignty" was "the decisive achievement of the American political imagination," which could only develop from "the colonial experience of self-government." See Kloppenberg, "The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse," Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 24. There was a long and distinguished European tradition of such arguments upon which the Americans drew. However, as I will make clear below, I am sympathetic to some of the sophisticated theoretical claims Kloppenberg makes in that article.
259. William Ball, The Power of Kings Discussed (London, 1649), 3;
260. Ball, State-Maxims (1655), 27;
261. Ball, Power of Kings Discussed, 3, 13.
262. To His Excellency the Lord General Monck: The Unanimous Representation of the Apprentices and Young Men Inhabiting the City of London, February 2, 1660 (London, [1660]), broadside.
263. Grand Concernments of England, 25.
264. Nedham, Excellencie of a Free-State, 15-16, 122.
265. It should be noted that Nedham's notion of epochal change runs counter to a classical republican commitment to timeless virtue. I thus find myself in disagreement with Nigel Smith's claim, which is similar to Skinner's (Liberty before Liberalism, 31-32), that "Nedham's republic is as meritocratic as Milton's"
266. (Literature and Revolution in England, 185), and closer to Worden's that "Nedham is perhaps socially the most radical of the republicans"
267. ("English Republicanism," 449). However, I wonder whether, given Nedham's commitment to interest, epochal change, and commercial society, he should still be considered a classical republican in the Pocockian sense.
268. John Streater, A Letter Sent to His Excellency, the Lord Fleetwood (London, 1659), 3.
269. John Streater, Government Described, June 1, 1659 (London, 1659), 3.
270. Streater, Government Described, 4, 8;
271. Streater, Shield against the Parthian Dart, 11.
272. Sidney, in Blom, et al., Court Maxims, 23.
273. Worden, "Revolution of 1688-89 and the English Republican Tradition," 258-59.
274. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 45;
275. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent, 4.
276. Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 3. Remarkably, Skinner also reduces the liberal tradition to "classical utilitarianism" (Liberty before Liberalism, 96-97). I have read this passage to mean that those living in a "polite and commercial age" are somehow incapable of sharing the "moral vision" of Skinner's neo-romans. As I have emphasized throughout this essay, many of the neo-romans thought they were living in a polite and commercial age. While they rejected Harrington's political economy and conceptions of interest, they shared his moral vision.
277. Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism, 24 , 51, 56. I find myself persuaded by Donald Winch's observations that "Adam Smith serves as the ideological goal of Appleby's teleological treatment of English liberal ideology," and that "the idea that man was ruled by one passion alone, even in his economic dealings, and one that was based on rational calculation, would not have been regarded by Smith as a discovery or insight, but rather as a pervasive error which had prevented many important questions of politics and economics from being given serious treatment by philosophers."
278. Winch, "Economic Liberalism as Ideology: The Appleby Version," Economic History Review, 2d ser., 38 (1985): 290, 292.
279. While I remain unconvinced by the normative claims advanced by Philip Pettit and endorsed by Quentin Skinner, for my purposes it is sufficient to suggest the faulty historical assumptions on which their distinction between liberalism and republicanism is based. "Liberalism" for Pettit is an ideology appropriate "for the modern, commercial, and increasingly democratic world." As such, it could not emerge until "early in the nineteenth century." Pettit, "Liberalism and Republicanism," 163;
280. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 96-97. The point of this essay is to show that in the 1650s many were developing a political theory for just such a modern, commercial, and increasingly democratic society. Neither Skinner nor Pettit has presented any evidence to suggest that these people had a different conception of liberty or a different moral vision than those committed to a politics of unitary virtue or a predominantly agrarian political economy. They rely on a non-contextualized comparison between nineteenth-century utilitarians and seventeenth-century defenders of the Commonwealth.
281. William Ball, Power Juridicent (London, 1650), 3;
282. Thomas Scot, March 9, 1659, Rutt, Diary, of Thomas Burton, Esq., 4: 94.
283. Nedham, Interest Will Not Lie, 4;
284. Lambe, Seasonable Observations, 1.
285. Hawkins, Discourse of the National Excellencies, 246. Hawkins also suggested that those nations that paid the highest taxes attained the greatest liberty (p. 177).
286. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed., 2d edn. (Cambridge, 1967), 287.
287. Locke, Two Treatises, 350, 371.
288. See John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford, 1965), 85
289. (Bethel, Account of the French Usurpation), 203
290. (Parker, Of a Free Trade), 214
291. (Potter, Key of Wealth), 251
292. (S. E., Toutch-Stone of Money and Commerce).
293. It should be clear at this point how much I have learned from Matson and Onuf, "Toward a Republican Empire," 496-99, 515-16. English republicans in the 1650s were confronted with the same expansion of international commerce and the same problems of maintaining a wartime economy that the Americans were in the 1780s, and they made some of the same ideological adjustments. I do not think, however, that those who did so remained classical republicans.
294. Bernard Bailyn, Context in History (Melbourne, 1995), 15.
295. See also Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enl. edn. (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), vi, 351-52.
296. Kloppenberg, "Virtues of Liberalism," 33.
297. Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 10;
298. Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage, 277.
299. See also Isaac, "Republicanism versus Liberalism," 355;
300. Haakonssen, "Republicanism," 571.
301. What I am arguing here follows closely the arguments laid out by Worden in "Revolution of 1688-89 and the English Republican Tradition," 243.
302. It should be noted that Zera Fink did not see republicanism and liberalism as incompatible. That was clearly Pocock's great innovation. See Z. Fink, Classical Republicans, 189-90.
303. The 1650s Commonwealth support for a republican conception of liberty alongside a new commercial political economy is equivalent to John Rawls' suggestion that classical republicanism is largely consistent with political liberalism while civic humanism is not, precisely because in the latter
304. Janel Mueller, "Contextualizing Milton's Nascent Republicanism," in P. G. Stanwood, ed., Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World (Binghamton, N.Y., 1995), esp. 265-66.
305. Nicholas Von Maltzahn, "The Whig Milton, 1667-1700," in Armitage, Himy, and Skinner, Milton and Republicanism, 230.