Interpreting the American Republic: Civic Humanism vs. Liberalism

There is a great deal of literature produced by historians of early America that should be of interest to scholars of liberalism. In particular, a debate among historians over the character of early American political ideologies offers an opportunity to explore the sources of the American liberal social order, while reflecting on the meaning of the liberal social vision when it was clearly something fresh, new, and vibrant. An effort by some historians to dismiss liberalism as an irrelevant anomaly in the early modern era and an overrated force in political thought ironically may have precipitated opportunities for those interested in rehabilitating both liberalism’s past and its fortunes.

Those with an interest in the history of political thought in the modern era will at some point encounter the work of a group of historians that over the last two decades has effected nothing less than a revolution in our understanding of modern political and social theory. These historians have all taken as their theme the elucidation of the “classical republican” or “civic humanist” paradigm, which maintains that the individualist, interest-bound, capitalist-road liberalism hitherto imagined to dominate Anglo-American political theory from the late seventeenth century on, was, in fact, unimportant in comparison to the corporatist and largely anticommercial constellation of ideas rooted in the values of the ancient republics, variously described as classical republicanism, civic humanism, or “country party” ideology. Drawing on themes of classical political thought, these ideas stressed man’s collective identity as a member of a political community, along with a cyclical view of history.

J. G. A. Pocock enunciated this interpretation most clearly in his book, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), and his essay, “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,” (Journal of Modern History, 1981). The outstanding historiographical reviews of this literature are Robert Shalhope’s “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of Republicanism in American Historiography” (William and Mary Quarterly, January 1972) and “Republicanism and Early American Historiography” (William and Mary Quarterly, April 1982).

Because classical republicanism lauded the virtue of the selfless servant of the polis, the development of a commercial society of self-interested actors could not help but be seen as a portent of decline and corruption. Thus, rather than justifying a social order of liberal individualism, Anglo-American thinkers in the eighteenth century were concerned with protecting a community of virtue against the forces of degeneration and decline that capitalism and commerce signaled.1

Notwithstanding the considerable value of such scholarship in enriching our view of the past, and in uncovering a neglected form of political discourse, one suspects that a great deal of this hypothesis’s appeal lies in its promise to provide an alternative, nonliberal, communitarian basis for those institutions attacked by Marxists as being based on a shallow individualism and crass commercialism. Classical republicanism can be seen as a dodge to critical jabs at the Western political tradition, and a ready communitarian alternative to the individualism of liberal theory, an alternative that concedes nothing to Marx. Evidence for this interpretation can be found in two essays by Pocock, in which he argued that conservative and Marxist critics of the Western polity “converge in perpetuating a distortion of history, which consists of vastly exaggerating the role of liberalism . . . within it” in a self-serving effort to show that a “monolithic paradigm of liberalism, or bourgeois ideology, or possessive individualism, . . . reigned undisturbed until they came to challenge it.” This, says Pocock, is the fantasy he has helped dispel, for the “Myth of Liberalism is itself a myth. In its philosophical and in its public writings, the Age of Reason was an Age of Virtue . . . .“² Following Pocock’s description of the American Revolution as “the last act of the civic humanism of the Renaissance,” many scholars have seen an ambivalence about commercial society and republican virtue in the struggle between Federalists and Republicans, as well as anxiety about the inevitable decline of republican government and a peculiar conception of the historical process, all having their roots in the same classical republicanism that is said to have animated the Revolution. Notable in this regard are Gordon Wood’s treatment of the American Revolution, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969) and the work of Lance Banning on Thomas Jefferson, especially The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), “Republican Ideology and the Triumph of the Constitution, 1789–1793” (William and Mary Quarterly, 1974), and “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic” (William and Mary Quarterly, January 1986).

John Murrin’s highly regarded essay (see footnote 1) is one of the more sophisticated statements of this approach to the early national period. Drawing heavily on the work of Pocock and Banning, Murrin sees American politics in terms of the conflict between the “court” and “country” ideological positions that developed in post-1688 British politics. The court position was “intensely statist,” said Murrin, while their opposition had a “strong suspicion of government power.” Yet it was the “financial revolution”—the creation of a huge funded national debt and the Bank of England—that generated the most vociferous debate, pitting agrarian “country” interests against the new commercialism of the court. What was really being debated was modernity itself. Here in America, Murrin claimed, the “country” ideology was already firmly established, having animated the Revolution. But the creation of the Constitution created a “splendid opportunity to attempt traditional court politics on a Continental scale,” forcing “opponents to gather behind proven Country defenses.” Driven by traditional country faith in balanced government as the only foil of degeneration and decline, Jefferson (a “country ideologue” enamored of “virtuous yeomen”) saw the prospects for creating a virtuous society receding before Hamilton’s “court” policies. Republicans, said Murrin, “like the English opposition . . . idealized the past more than the future and feared significant change, especially major economic change, as corruption and degeneration.” While Jefferson was not strictly agrarian, Murrin acknowledges, he favored commerce only as a civilizing force that preserved the virtuous farmer. Likewise, Madison’s economics must be seen as animated by a desire to “postpone the evil day in the name of Republican virtue” when huge cities and manufactures would appear.

Drew McCoy’s monograph, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian Virginia (New York: Norton, 1980), offers a sophisticated and valuable refinement of the classical republican portrayal of Jeffersonian theory championed by Banning. An ambitious and erudite effort to trace the origins and development of Republican ideology, McCoy’s essay stated that “the Jeffersonian vision grew out of an attempt to reconcile classical republicanism with more modern social realities and American conditions.” McCoy’s exploration of eighteenth-century social thought unearthed a powerful current of historicism, the notion that society develops in stages according to an inexorable historical process. This current is especially notable in the thought of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, especially Hutcheson, Reid, Ferguson, Hume, and Adam Smith. These thinkers were divided over the issue of how to regard the emergence of commercial society, which, McCoy argues, threatened the classical values that inspired so much of their thought. With a few exceptions, like Hume, they were left profoundly uneasy by commerce, emergent industrialism, and the political structures that accompanied modernity. The Jeffersonians, similarly imbued with an historicist outlook, yet committed to classical values, says McCoy, were forced by events into transforming their ideology and embracing agricultural commerce as the only way to stave off American advance into the final stage of historical growth, that stage represented by cities, manufactures, corruption, and the end of virtue. Republican policy (particularly in territorial acquisition and trade policy) is therefore seen as shaped by this concern to keep America “forever young.” Opponents like Hamilton (an enthusiast of Hume), by contrast, “stepped confidently and unequivocally into modernity and wanted to use [the] government to push the United States as rapidly as possible into a higher stage of development, for he interpreted this stage as progress, not decay.... Hamilton had an unabashedly positive sense of development through time.”

Yet for all its impressive scholarship and attention to the subtleties of Republican thought, McCoy’s book repeatedly uncovers issues that suggest that something other than historicism and concern with virtue was central to Republican ideology, indeed, that a strikingly liberal set of concerns informs many supposedly nonliberal attitudes. For example, Franklin’s disgust at British society turned on his belief that, as McCoy quotes him, its “social pathology [was] exacerbated by the operation of its government . . . its predicament was aggravated by a misguided political system,” and he frequently linked the corruption, waste, and entrenched privilege of British politics with its social problems. Likewise, McCoy shows that the Republican distaste for “manufactures” owed much to the fact that in the eighteenth-century context these were chiefly state-run or chartered workhouses for the poor, or heavily subsidized monopoly institutions for the production of luxury goods for ruling elites. This point is also strongly made by Joyce Appleby in her Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Jeffersonian Vision of the 1790s (New York: NYU Press, 1984). The role of state power in commercial development both here and in England raised criticism from sources wholly distinct from those with antimodern or anticommercial views. This obfuscation of liberal criticisms of commercial policy seems itself to reflect an historicist bias, for it construes the particular uses of political power that accompanied the growth of the economy and emergence of industrialism as being themselves constitutive of “modernity,” and opposition to or support for such uses of political power as growing out of an attitude toward modernity. A more accurate and less contorted account focuses on the debates over the proper use of coercive governmental power. Underlying these debates over power and its use are moral values, visions of man and society, rather than hidden pro-or antimodernist agendas.

Appleby has responded to the classical-republican description of the Jeffersonians by demonstrating in several works that the Jeffersonian vision owes more to Lockean liberalism, as transmitted by Paine and others, than to the civic humanist background now in vogue. Republicanism, cautions Appleby, was a venerable designation to be fought over; its disputed content divided the classical republican Federalists from the liberal Jeffersonian Republicans. Moreover, argues Appleby, the competing social visions of Jeffersonians and Federalists differed fundamentally on the degree to which social life was spontaneous, self-regulating, and best left free.

We must not be misled by the equation of capitalism with an industrial economy, which many historians have made, says Appleby, for the first “capitalists” were farmers and landlords. Thus, she shows in Capitalism and a New Social Order that by the last half of the eighteenth century rising European demand for American foodstuffs drew an increasing number of American farmers into commercial agriculture, especially in the mid-Atlantic region, and fostered the attitude that the commerce in food was “exemplary of the harmony of free economic relations.” It was in the newly rich, fast-growing areas of the country that the Jeffersonians were to be found. Here were the partisans of a social philosophy that explicitly repudiated the notion of a republic of orders and the necessity of wise hands at the helm, and embraced the classless vision of a society of “informal, voluntary political life open to all.”

It was from this body of ideas, which stressed the chances for progress and spontaneous social cooperation through the free actions of individuals, that many Jeffersonian Republicans drew their core ideas. In Jefferson’s vision, what was necessary was the freeing-up of mankind’s natural capacity for advancement: as he stated in his First Inaugural Address, what was sought was “a wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall otherwise leave them free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” As Appleby notes, “Instead of regarding the public arena as the locus of human fulfillment where men rose above their self-interest to serve the common good, Jefferson wanted government to offer protection to the personal realm where men might freely exercise their faculties” (“What is Still American in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson,” William and Mary Quarterly, 1982). It was the notion of market as social paradigm, in fact, that lay at the heart of Destutt de Tracy’s Treatise on Political Economy (1817; New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970), the translation of which was edited by Jefferson himself. Jefferson stated in his Preface, “By diffusing sound principles of Political Economy, it [de Tracy’s work] will protect the public industry from the parasite institutions now consuming it . . . .” As de Tracy saw it, the mutual gain of trade is the essence of a contract, and society is “nothing but a succession of exchanges.” De Tracy even explicitly addressed the central claim of the classical republican tradition, that social benefits derive from a disinterested concern with virtue: “I do not pretend to say that men never render gratuitous services . . . but I say it is not on this that all the progress of society reposes . . . and if we wish, as we ought, to take in all the extent of its signification, we may say with justice that a benefit is still an exchange. . . .” The source of mischief in society was the creation of obstacles to free social life by the erecting of special privileges; and the removal of obstacles and the protection of justly acquired property rights was the path to social harmony and prosperity. De Tracy was an enthusiast of the economic theory of Adam Smith and Jean Baptiste Say, as was Jefferson, who corresponded with Say and recommended The Wealth of Nations and Say’s Treatise on Political Economy as “the best works” on the subject of political economy. 4 De Tracy’s Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws (1811; New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), a criticism of the preeminent work in the classical republican tradition, was recommended by Jefferson as the “elementary book of instruction in the principles of civil government.” As Appleby notes, this endorsement of so strong a criticism of Montesquieu casts into doubt the construal of Jefferson in the classical republican mold.