Pocock, Virtue and Commerce in the s. XVIII

8/13/2019 Pocock, Virtue and Commerce in the s. XVIII

1/17

Review: Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth CenturyAuthor(s): J. G. A. PocockSource: Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer, 1972), pp. 119-134Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202465

Accessed: 17/11/2010 09:02

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The MIT Pressis collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toJournal of

Interdisciplinary History.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpresshttp://www.jstor.org/stable/202465?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpresshttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpresshttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/202465?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress


2/17

J. G. A. PocockVirtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth CenturyThe Creation ftheAmericanRepublic, 776-1787.By Gordon S. Wood(Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, I969) 653 pp. $I5.00AlexanderHamiltonandthe Ideaof RepublicanGovernment.By GeraldStourzh (Stanford, Stanford University Press, I970) 278 pp. $8.50These two books formthelateststatementsn aprocessof re-evaluatingthe characterand role of ideology in the American Revolution.Rossiter'sSeedtimeof theRepublicmay be saidto have initiatedit byhis attackon the belief that eighteenth-centurypolitical thought con-sistedof Lockeetpraetereaihil.Robbins TheEighteenth-Centuryom-monwealthmanevolutionizedacceptedconceptsof oppositionaltheoryrelevant between i688 and I776. But the central occurrencein thisprocessremainsthe seriesof works publishedby Bailyn, in particularTheIdeologicalOriginsof the AmericanRevolution.'We are now livingwith the consequencesof a major upheaval in historiographyandattemptingto assessa changedlandscape.It is now apparent hat the Revolution employed-and in somemeasurewas occasionedby-an oppositional ideology that had beennurtured n Britishpolitics for nearlya century.2Latein the reign ofCharlesII the idea developed that the main threat to parliamentarylibertylay in the crown'seffectiveemploymentof an enlargedpatron-age power. During the reignsof William IIIandAnne,England-GreatBritain had emerged as a majorEuropeanand Atlanticwar-makingpower, fortified by an expandingprofessionalarmy and a system ofJ. G. A. Pocock is Professor of History and Political Science at Washington University,St. Louis. He is the author of The Ancient Constitutionand the FeudalLaw (New York,1967) and Politics,Languageand Time (New York, I97I). He is working on a study ofFlorentine, English, and American republican thought (1494-1789) and preparing anedition of the works of James Harrington (I611-76).I Clinton Rossiter, Seedtimeof the Republic: The Origin of the American TraditionofPoliticalLiberty(New York, 1953); Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-CenturyCommon-wealthman: Studies in the Transmission,Developmientand Circumstances f English LiberalThoughtfrom the Restorationof CharlesII until the War with the Thirteen Colonies(Cam-bridge, Mass., 1959); Bernard Bailyn, Political Pamphlets of the American Revolution(Cambridge, Mass., 1965), I; idemii.,The IdeologicalOrigins of the American Revolution(Cambridge, Mass., 1967); idem., The Origins of AmericanPolitics(New York, 1968).2 See J. G. A. Pocock, Politics,Languageand Time (New York, 1971), Chs. 3 and 4.


3/17

120 J. G. A. POCOCKpublic reditandnational ebt.Bothof thesephenomena ereseenbytheiradversariess not only increasinghe crown'spatronage owers,but also multiplying he incidence n societyof individualswhosemodes of socialand politicalexistenceentaileda dependence pongovernmenthatmade hema menace o theirneighbors.Consequently, n ideology opposingall of thesethingsarose,variouslyknown to historiansas Old Whig, Commonwealth, or(thetermto be usedhere) Country. t stressedheindependenceftheorgans f mixedgovernmentKing,Lords, ndCommons; xecu-tive,judiciary,andlegislature)romone another, sagainst he sup-posedattemptsof patronagemanipulatorso bringthe second andthirdbranchesntodependencen thefirst;and t stressedhe role oftheindependentroprietorideallyhe andowner,lthoughmerchantswere not excluded) sagainstherentier, fficer,placeman, ensioner,and(lowestof allin thescaleof humanity)tock-jobberr speculatorin public unds.In this interweaving f the themesof mixed governmentandpersonalndependence,heCountrydeology-as a studyof its vocab-ularyand its transmissionlearlyshows-belongedto a traditionofclassicalepublicanismndcivichumanism,3nchorednthe FlorentineRenaissance, nglicized y JamesHarrington,AlgernonSidney,andHenrySt.John,ViscountBolingbroke,ut ookingunmistakablyackto antiquity ndto Aristotle,Polybius, ndCicero. tswide dissemina-tionandacceptanceccountormuchof theclassicismf theeighteenthcentury,whose characters civicandpatriotic ather han eisured rArcadian.An effectof the recentresearchasbeento displayheAmericanRevolution essasthefirstpolitical ct of revolutionarynlightenmentthanasthelastgreatactof theRenaissance.4na varietyof ways,wearenow to seetheFoundingFathers s theculminating eneration fcivichumanistsndclassicalepublicans;ut t isthe ntention fWoodand Stourzho display heir houghtbothin the hour of victoryand,3 The former term is especially associated with Zera S. Fink, The ClassicalRepublicans:An Essay in theRecovery of a Patternof Thoughtin Seventeenth-CenturyEngland(Evanston,I945), the latter with Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance(Princeton,1966; rev. ed.).4 Howard Mumford Jones, O StrangeNew World(New York, 1964); H. Trevor Col-bourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the IntellectualOrigins of the AmericanRevolution (Chapel Hill, I965); Richard M. Gummere, The AmericanColonial Mind andthe Classical Tradition:Essays in ComparativeCulture(Cambridge, Mass., 1963).


4/17

VIRTUE AND COMMERCE 1| 21simultaneously, in the agony of crisis and transformation-a themeanticipated by Bailyn and now being further exploited.5

Among the classicist characteristics which the Country ideologycarried into the eighteenth century was a Renaissance pessimism con-cerning the direction and reversibility of social and historical change.The health of the balanced constitution lay in the independence of itsparts; should a change or disturbancebring one of these into dependenceupon another, a degenerative trend would commence which wouldsoon become almost impossible to remedy. Similarly-or indistinguish-ably-the moral health of the civic individual consisted in his independ-ence from governmental or social superiors, the precondition of hisability to concern himself with the public good, respublica,or common-weal. Should he lose the economic foundations of this ability (i.e.,independent property), or be demoralized by an exclusive concern withprivate or group satisfactions, a comparable imbalance or disturbancein the civic and social foundations of moral personality would set inwhich would also prove irreversible. The name most tellingly used forbalance, health, and civic personality was virtue ; the name of its losswas corruption. Since the former was essentially a static ideal, anychange was likely to threaten corruption, and degeneration was likelyto prove uncheckable. Men could not be born in new natures; theconcept was at once post-Christian and pre-historicist.The classical view of politics was consequently a closed ideology.Bailyn-now followed by Wood-argued that its grip on the colonialmind was so absolute that the Americans of the I76os and I770s werecompelled, first, to identify as corruption what seemed to be threatsto their polities and, second, to conclude that the degeneration notmerely of their liberties but also of their moral personalities would soonpass beyond redemption unless they reaffirmed the first uncorruptprinciples of civic virtue. Their revolution was thus primarily a rivolu-zione, ricorso,or ridurreai principi-the terminology is appropriatelyMachiavellian-rather than a transformation; only in its consequencesdid it become the latter.6

But this argument has resurrected the old problem of ideologicalcausation. Bailyn argued that the omnipresence of Old Whig or Countryideology-the conditioning and imprisoning effects of its conceptual5 Bailyn, The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution -the titleused in the introduction to PoliticalPamphletsof the AmericanRevolution.6 There are many stimulating remarks on this theme in Hannah Arendt, On Revolution(London, 1963).


5/17

122 J. G. A. POCOCKsystem-offered a self-sustaining explanation of why Americans re-sorted to revolutionary action. Their vocabulary, conceptual frame-work, and entire mental set offered them no alternative.Bailyn flung a most refreshing challenge at that historians'orthodoxy which insists that ideologies and concepts are purelyepiphenomenal to other social phenomena-that they are always effectand never cause. But, looked at more narrowly, the argument of theBailyn school appearsfarlesscausal than structural. A reevaluation of thehistoriography of political thought has been going on for a long time,and it seems less useful to consider conceptual systems as theories (whichhere includes ideologies ) and to mediate them back to practicethan to treat them as elaborations, explorations, and unpackings of theconceptual languages used within society.7 If language is not epiphe-nomenal but part of the structure of both personality and world, it islegitimate once more to study the languages men have used and to askhow far they could have done other, or been other, than their lan-guages indicate. The Country ideology did not cause the Revolution;it characterized it. Men cannot do what they have no means of sayingthey have done; and what they do must in part be what they can sayand conceive that it is.But a sophisticated, institutionalized, and highly factional lan-guage, such as the Country ideology, is unlikely to be the only lan-guage in use within a given society, and here we are on the way backto treating language as a dependent variable. It is not enough toshow that the ideology was in itself a closed system; we also need toknow whether and why no other ideology was available. More workmight be done, for example, with the thesis that eighteenth-centuryEngland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia were subcultureswithin a single Anglophone world whose disruption is a main themeof Revolutionary history.8The Americans were using, or were enclosed by, an ideology thathad originated in England and was still very much in use there. In theminds of James Burgh, John Cartwright, or Richard Price, it was asobsessive and terrifying as in any American mind. It formed the con-ceptual framework of all early- and middle-Georgian demands forparliamentary and franchise reform. Butterfield, describing it as part7 Forthis,see Language nd theirImplications:The Transformation f the StudyofPoliticalThought, in Pocock, Politics,LanguagendTime,3-4I.8 But seeJ. R. Pole, PoliticalRepresentationn England nd theOriginsof the AmericanRepublic(New York, I966).


6/17

VIRTUE AND COMMERCE 1I23of his studyof the Yorkshireassociations f I780, was right at leasttoaskwhy a movementhavingsuchan ideology did not take on revolu-tionary characteristics.9Part of the answer, it seems, may be found inreflecting that in England the word Country possessed an opposite,namely Court, and that Court and Country were highly inter-dependent terms.In both England and America there existed an ideology whichpresented governmental corruption as a nearly total threat to societyand personality. It was sparked into life in America by the first apparentencroachments.10 In England, the threat was mitigated by longfamiliarity with the Court and means of countering its machinations,and the Court had its own ideology for which men had long beenarguing in intimate dialogue with their adversaries. The Countryideology ran riot in America, but in England its referents were betterknown and a more complex intellectual scheme existed for dealingwith them. The scene grows more involved, however, when we dis-cover the presence of alternative ideologies, already established in theeighteenth-century tradition, as part of the process of the post-Revolu-tionary transformation which both Wood and Stourzh study.

Wood restates Bailyn's thesis of the transforming radicalism ofthe American Revolution in a way that may be summarized asfollows: The Revolution originated as a response to executive andparliamentary encroachment; Americans found at hand, and theirthinking was dominated by, an ideology which developed the conceptof corruption as both the cause and the effect of such encroachment,to the point where it could be asserted that the people's representatives,whether in the colonial assemblies or at Westminster, were themselvescorrupt. At this point, the only way for the people to avoid becomingcorrupt themselves was to asserttheir virtue in autonomous, popular,civic action, which at this stage of the ideology's articulation shouldideally take the form of a reaffirmation of the basic principles of9 Herbert Butterfield, GeorgeIII, Lord North and the People, 1779-80 (London, I949).

o0 Burke may have had this in mind when he remarked during the Second Speech onConciliation: ... they snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze (Wood,5).iI The best study of this is Isaac F. Kramnick, Bolingbrokeand His Circle: The Politicsof Nostalgia in theAge of Walpole(Cambridge, Mass., I968). Since this article was written,a valuable and suggestive comment has appeared on the interdependence of Court andCountry attitudes in England as opposed to the colonies: Paul Lucas, A Note on theComparative Study of the Structure of Politics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain andits American Colonies, William andMary Quarterly,XXVIII (I97I), 301-309.


7/17

124 J. G. A. POCOCKconstitutional and social life, in which virtue itself was defined. Theidea of appeal from a corrupt representative to a virtuous countryor people can be found in English oppositional ideology at intervalsduring the preceding century; 2 but in America the thing actually tooka variety of revolutionary forms during the middle I770s, whereas inEngland it was talked about by a few, repressed by the authorities, andseriously attempted by no one.The idea of power reverting to the people can, of course, be statedin the language of Locke's Second Treatise,but it is overwhelminglyimportant to realize that the predominant language in which it wasexpressed by eighteenth-century radicals was one of virtue, corruption,and reform, which is Machiavellian, classical, and Aristotelian, and inwhich Locke himself did not figure. But-to resume the summarizationof Wood-the people conceived as so acting were defined, in JohnAdams' terms, as a trinity in unity (577), divisible into a one, few,and many, constituted as modes of action called monarchy, aristocracy,and democracy, and, in a special sense, distinguishable into a naturalaristocracy or elite capable of political initiative, and a many ordemocracy capable of judgment but not of initiative, who might besaid (but the word should be used with caution) to have deferred tothe former category. And in a doctrine of balanced government asold as Polybius, the balance was defined as a relationship betweenvirtues no less than between classes or powers, so that virtueconsisted not merely in the exercise of one's own virtue-the mode ofintelligence and action proper to membership in the one, the few, orthe many-but also in respect for the virtues of the two categories towhich one did not belong, and in maintenance of the constitutionalstructure in which the balance of virtues was institutionalized. Defer-ence, therefore, was part of the virtue of the many, often inaccu-rately termed the people ; but it was far from being the whole of it.It is Wood's thesis (and has been that of others) that this aristo-democratic differentiation of the people broke down under the stressesof revolution, and with it the whole classical conception of politics.Not merely was the American patriciate insufficiently entrenched tomaintain its social ascendancy; it was discovered that a constituentpeople (to borrow the phrase of Robert R. Palmer), under the condi-tions which Locke had defined as dissolution of government, simply12 Such as the demand or frequently-elected arliaments sa remedy againstcorrup-tion-from 1675;or the far more dangerousdea of a conventionor anti-parliament-hardlybeforeGeorgeIII'sreign.


8/17


9/17

I26 i J. G. A. POCOCKindicateheways nwhich t seemedbetteradaptedhan tspredecessorto dealwith thepolitical xperience f the I780s. It is, however,withthe long-termconsequencesf the valuesarticulated ndimplied nFederalistheory hatthisessay s concerned; ndhereemphasismustfallon certain mbiguities hichWood detectsntheFederalistttitudeto theconcept fvirtue,which s basic o thewholeideologyand o thewholeargument.In the firstplace,hecontends,t wasaFederalisturposeo restorea patrician naturalaristocracy o theirproperrole in politics,andinsodoing o restore hreatenedlements f theclassicaloncept fvirtue.Thiswasin the senseof restoringheleadershipf a leisured lite thatwassupposedo look further ndattendmoreeffectivelyo thepublicgood thanwere lessermen,and n the senseof restoringhatdualismof political apacitybetweenwhosepoles-symbolizedas few andmany -therecould be that mutualrespectandmutualdeferencein which virtue o largelyconsisted.But at a deeperevelthispur-posemust befrustrated,or in supposing peoplewhichwasmerelyrepresentedy the differingpoliticalcapacitiesnsteadof beingem-bodiednthem-one is almostdriven o the anguage f Christology-theyhad denied hat t couldbe differentiatedntopartsanda whole,and so thattheindividuals ndgroupscomposingt couldexercise rdisplay irtue n the classicalenseat all.Itwas,heshows,anoutputofFederalistolitics hattheorists ppearedwho denied hat the healthof the republicdependedon the virtue of its members (6Io-612).I3Interest roupsand nterestedndividuals, ho neednot be thoughtofas looking beyond the realization f their separate or selfish )interests,ouldbe induced o relate hemselveso a governmentom-posedof checked-and-balancedowersin sucha way that privateinterestswere satisfiedand public authoritymaintained.Since theinterestedartyneednolongerbe so constituted sto possess built-inregard or the good of others( virtue ), t was now possibleto replacea classicaland organicwith a romanticand kinetic theory of politics;the interestgroups could change rapidlyas the society grew, yet thestructureof governmentcould persistunchanged(612-614).Wood's interpretation thus falls into line with-although it is notits main intention to assert-the view that the Revolution and the13 SeealsoMelvinRichter, The Uses of Theory:Tocqueville'sAdaptation f Montes-quieu, in idem. (ed.), Essays in Theory and History: An Approachto the Social Sciences(Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 74-I02.


10/17

VIRTUE AND COMMERCE | 127Constitutionmarked the establishmentof American politics on thebasis of an interest-group heory of politics, a theory and practiceofpluralismand consensuswhich has characterized he national life eversince. Such a conception of politics is under strong attack from theintellectualdissenters f the presentmoment, and-as often happens-the vigor of their critiquetends to reinforce the view, originallyputforwardby those more favorablydisposedto a pluralist deology, thatit hasdominatedthe nationalhistorysincethe latter'sbeginnings.It isstill the conventional wisdom to term American pluralistideologythe Lockean-liberalconsensus. Wood, more cautiously, speaksofthat encompassingliberal tradition which has mitigated and oftenobscured the real social antagonisms of American politics (562), andeitherphrase s liable to recall the doctrine,put forwardby Hartz,thatAmerican thinking was, for good historical reasons, dominated fromits outset by Lockean ideas to the point where no other theory ofpolitics ever becameviable.I4But the time has perhapsarrivedfor areevaluation of this orthodoxy. Locke is a visible but hardly a dominat-ing figure in Wood's enormously detailed survey of Revolutionary,Federalist, and Anti-Federalist thinking. Dunn has boldly argued thatit is a myth that Locke was an especially authoritative political thinker-as philosopher it is another matter-in eighteenth-century America orEngland. 5The time for a reassessment of Locke's reputation and authorityin the age between the Revolutions may be at hand, for at any rate itis clear that the image of a monolithically Lockean eighteenth centuryhas gone forever. The rejection of virtue as (in Montesquieu's phrase)the principle of republics emerged slowly and painfully from an intel-lectual scene dominated to the point of obsessiveness by concepts ofvirtue, patriotism, and corruption, in whose making and transmissionLocke played little part. Aristotle, Polybius, Machiavelli, Harrington,Sidney, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, Bolingbroke, and Burghwere its lineage; and the extent to which our thought is dominated bya fiction of Locke is shown by our uncertainty whether the later figuresin this tradition were Lockeans under the skin or that they found inLocke their chief dialectical adversary. Was even the emergent interest-group theory of the Federalists significantly Lockean? We need to14 Louis B. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition n America(New York, I955).I5 John Dunn, The Politics of Locke in England and America in the EighteenthCentury, in John W. Yolton (ed.), John Locke: Problems and Perspectives Cambridge,I969), 45-80.


11/17

128 I J. G. A. POCOCKknow; and one line of investigation is to return to the circumstance,mentioned earlier, that in England the Country ideology had long hadits adversaries, and that alternatives to virtue were known.It is here that Stourzh's study of Alexander Hamilton is of value.Whatwe calltheCountryideology wasareaction-performed by menin opposition, though its strength was that it seemed to express andexplain so many things that it dug itself into the fabric of social thinkingat large-against the growth of banks and paper credit, professionalarmies and bureaucrats,and patronage and political machines. In oppo-sition to these developing phenomena it stated the images of a returnto an older, purer time, of society as founded on principles from whichany departure must be decay, and of the individual whose virtue wasrooted in an independence of governmental and social processes socomplete that no form of property less autonomous than an inheritablefreehold could truly guarantee it. The reply of the Court writers-which was at a peak about I730, in the controversy between Boling-broke and Sir Robert Walpole-denied both the historical and thesocial foundations of Country thought.16 It asserted that commerceand professionalization had come to stay; that the older agrarianworldof Country nostalgia had gone forever, and had, in any case, restedon feudal ties of dependence between man and man which were nowbeing replaced by the new dependences created by patronage andcredit. It denied that society was or ever had been founded upon a setof original principles-if such existed, they had been found out noearlier than 1689-and presented instead an image of the historicalexistence of individuals and societies which consisted of incessant prag-matic adjustments to changing emergencies and social conditions. Thisadjustment had to be carried out under the protection supplied by agovernment exercising sovereign authority, and it was the ideologuesof the Court and the ruling Whigs who built up the doctrine of asovereign and illimitable parliament for whose sake Englishmen wentto war with Americans in the I770s. The pluralist consensus, now sub-ject to criticism under the none-too-appropriate name of liberalism,was, in its origins as a doctrine, English rather than American, Courtrather than Country.There is not, at present, sufficient evidence that it was significantlyLockean. Locke was simply not a central figure in the Court-Country16 Kramnick, Bolingbrokeand His Circle, Ch. 5; Pocock, Politics, Languageand Time,141-I44.


12/17

VIRTUE AND COMMERCE I 129debates,houghaningenious nalystwouldno doubthave ittlediffi-culty ninterpretingimso thathe wouldrank n theCourt ide. twasthe farmorecopiousanddiverse eniusof DavidHumethatemergedfromthiscontroversywith aninterpretationf Englishhistoryastheinterplay etweenagrarian ndmercantile,Countryand Courtele-ments,althoughheconnection etweenHume'shistoryandhispoliti-calphilosophys stillamatter f controversy.'7hefact sthat hekeyproblems f Anglo-Scottish-Americanolitical hought n theeight-eenthcenturywere of a nascent istoricism,f aperception f generalhistorical hange takingplacein the contemporaryworld. Locke'sthought s notoriously ot organized roundhistoricalconcepts tall.Forthefirsttime,eighteenth-centuryenweresetting heirconcep-tionsofpoliticsn a contextof historicalhange,hetransitionromtheagrarianworldof the MiddleAgesto the mercantile ndspecializedworld of theirown generations. heCountry esistedhischangeandthe Courtwelcomed t; thegrowthof publiccreditandprofessionalarmies,andthenovelty of a conceptionof politicsthatwent with thesethings,were the commonly-acknowledgedactsaroundwhich theymusteredheirdivergent alue-judgmentsndphilosophiesf history;and hekeyconceptsnorganizingheseatterwere virtue nd com-merce. Virtue, the slogan of the Country, requiredan individualso independentf othermenandtheir ocial tructureshathisdedica-tion to the respublica ould be wholly autonomous.It must be autono-mousif he were not to be anotherman'screature,ndsoa sourceofillegitimateprivate, nsteadof public,power;thereforehe must bemaster f hisownfamily,property, ndarms. Commerce, hesloganof theCourt,denoted world nwhich virtue adbecomehistoric-allyobsolete, ince hegrowthof wealthhadbredprofessionalrmies,the structures hatmaintained hem, andthe necessityof a politicsthatmanagedmennolonger enderedndependentytheprivate ossessionof arms.It is importanto notice, first,that commerce temmedfrom a perception f therentier ndsalariate,ather hanof themer-chant and entrepreneur,s new historicalphenomena; econd,thatvirtue mightbe thoughtof as inhabiting hierarchized orld ofseparately-orderedapacities,but equallyas inhabitinga fiercelyegalitarianndamateurworld of independent arrior-farmers.omelocated t in theGreatChainof Being;others n theHighland lans.I817 Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Hume politico e storico(Turin, I962). See also the review byDuncan Forbes, HistoricalJournal, VI (I963), 280-294.I8 For hierarchical elements in Bolingbroke's thinking, see Adam Ferguson (ed.


13/17

130 | J. G. A. POCOCKFinally,the extent to which CourtandCountryuseda sharedlanguageand premisesis discoverable n the Court'swillingness to admit that

commerce was the antithesisof virtue. In a commercializedandprofessionalizedworld, they conceded, men were not virtuous, andmeans must be found of governing them in the full knowledge thatthey were not. Historical pragmatismand egoistic philosophies ofhuman nature enter and become ascendant in eighteenth-centurypolitical theory, largely in consequenceof the Court'swillingness toaccept heCountry'sdefinitionof virtue and of historyasthemovementaway from it.I9It emergesfrom Stourzh'sadmirablestudy that Hamilton was athinker in the direct Court tradition-although we do not seem toknow whether heand hiscontemporarieswere consciousor unconsciousof his predecessors.He held that interestwas a mainspringof govern-ment, that the establishment f a nationalgovernmentnecessitatedheestablishmentof a class of persons, in legislaturesand out of them,directly nterestedn supporting t, andthatpatronageandthe develop-ment of a system of governmentalcredit were appropriateways ofdoing so. The issuewas preciselythat which had been debatedat thetime of the Bank of England'sfoundationin the I69os and underthefully-fledged Walpolean system in the I720s. Hamilton held that associeties became increasinglycommercialized,specialization mpelledthem to maintain arge professionalarmiesby which theirmercantileinterestswere protected and extended, so that commercial societiesfound themselves n militarycompetitionfor wealth andlooked uponthemselvesas empiresratherthan asrepublics.This is the sameissueasthat explored by John Toland and CharlesDavenant,JonathanSwiftand Daniel Defoe, and again duringthe zenith of empire in the mid-eighteenthcentury.Hamilton heldallof theviews which Marlboroughor CharlesMontagu,John Somersor Robert Walpole hadbeenattack-ed for holding-with the singlemajordifference hathe held them in acontext of continentalrevolution and the creation of a new state20-and he was attacked n preciselythe same languageand on preciselyDuncan Forbes), Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, I966), and Forbes'introduction.19 Montesquieu-much affected by the English debate-was a crucial figure here. Forthe exploitation by Hamilton of his concessions to commerce, see Stourzh, 140-146,i54-I6I.20 If this is indeed so different from the situation of Anne's reign, when England becameGreat Britain and a great power in transforming the European states-system.


14/17

VIRTUE AND COMMERCE | 131the same ground as they had been attacked. To a quite remarkabledegree, the great debate on his policies in the I79os was a replay ofCourt-Country debates seventy and a hundred years earlier.2IBut it is further apparent that he accepted a dichotomy of valueand history, and agreed that commerce involved a departure fromvalues which virtue quite truly defined. Stourzh quotes him assaying in 1788: As riches increase and accumulate in few hands; asluxury prevails in society; virtue will be in a greater degree consideredas only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things willbe to depart from the republican standard. This is the real dispositionof human nature.... It is a common misfortune, that awaits our stateconstitution as well as all others (7I). The passage from virtue tointerest was not, in Hamilton's mind, a serene withdrawal into liberalcomplacency. He was opting for empire, not for free trade, andacknowledging that the real disposition of human nature was tooutdistance its deepest values through economic growth and historicalchange. A vision of power and glory, not of adjustive pragmatism, layat his furthest horizon, and the dynamic and demonic elements whichcontemporaries sensed in his personality are explicable in terms ofperceived historical tensions. The ambivalence of his feelings aboutCaesar fall into this pattern of interpretation. Since Machiavelli, Caesarhad figured as the agent who destroyed a republic, and substituted aprincipate, in consequence of the former's having acquired an empire;andJefferson accused Hamilton of thinking Caesar the greatest of men.But what he wrote was: It has been aptly observed that Cato was theTory, Caesar the Whig, of his day. The former frequently resisted, thelatter always flattered, the follies of the people. Yet the former perishedwith the republic, the latter destroyed it (Stourzh, 99). The languageis that of English party controversy, at any date since the advent ofOld Whig ideologues, and replete with its ambivalences. If Hamiltonever saw himself as Caesar, he was accepting a role in a Machiavelliantragedy which he could see as the triumph of history over virtue (sedvicta Catoni); and when he wished to denounce Aaron Burr, he calledhim an embryo-Caesar and a Catiline. Burr symbolized to Hamiltonthe dark forces which Hamilton symbolized to Thomas Jefferson-military ambition, the consequences of the replacement of virtue bycommerce.2I See Lance G. Banning, The Quarrel with Federalism, unpub. Ph.D. thesis (Wash-ington University, 1972), for a treatment of this subject.


15/17

132 J. G. A. POCOCKWhat all of this should reveal to us is not that the Lockean-liberalconsensus, he pragmaticoperationof interest-grouppolitics,

was from the beginningwhat Hamilton said it was, but that the ideaof such a consensushad to emerge from travail and trauma,from anintense and occasionallytragic struggle between opposing ideals andagainsta sense of history'smarch. The trouble with the concept ofLockeanconsensus-apart from the very considerablehistoricalmis-statementswhich seem to beinvolvedin this useof the word Lockean-is that it carries he ideaof a prolongedideologicalserenity.Americanpolitics have often been complacent; but when werethey serene? A study of the transition rom a classical o an interest-grouptheoryof politics n RevolutionaryandFederalistthoughtrevealsit to have been rooted in a tensionbetween virtue and commercesufficientlyancientby 1776to dispel any idea thata Lockeanconsen-sus existed before that time. If one were subsequentlyestablished, thad to struggle for its existence and articulation;and it would be aproperquestionto ask whether the tensions out of which it may haveemerged were overcome or whether they remainedingrainedin theAmericanvalue system.Clearly, the simple republic-empireantithesis which Stourzhuncovers n Hamiltonianrhetoricwill carryus only into a limitedareaof our inquiry. If a pragmatic-consensusheory of politics emergedout of the AmericanRevolution, it shouldhave been able to articulateits socialvaluesby means of a simplebourgeois ideology: an image ofeconomic man, tranquillypursuinghis interestsand maximizing hissatisfactions,ertain hatby doingno morehewasautomatically ervingthe general good. Such an ideology can no doubt be discoveredatappropriate imes, but it is remarkablehow little it has met the eyesof those who have analyzed the thinking behind the transition tointerest-groupconstitutionalism;and where it has appeared,as in arecentarticleby EdmundS. Morganon The ProtestantEthic and theAmerican Revolution, one reader at least has been struck by theextent to which much of it was lightly-disguised classicism.22 No in-considerablepartof theemphasiswhich fell on the frugality and self-denial of acquisitiveman,it canbe suggested,was occasionedby aneedto explainhow he could resistthe temptationsof luxury, respectthegood of others,andgenerallyremainvirtuousin a commercialsociety.Is therea solutionto our problemhere? It is curiousthat so little work22 William and Mary Quarterly,XXIV (I967), 3-43.


16/17

VIRTUE AND COMMERCE | 133appears o have been done on the receptioninto Americaof the ideasof Adam Smith and the Scottisheconomists,who are creditedwithdeveloping the concept of economic man, and certainlyretainedadeepconcern with the ancientproblemof corruptionat the very pointwhere this was about to become the modern problem of alienation.23It might also be valuable to know more about the decline of theCountryideology in theAtlanticsubculture hatgaveit birth.Georgianradicals,n the eraof the RevolutionaryWar andits aftermath,used alanguage indistinguishablerom that of their Americanpeers,and weare getting a pictureof what the lattersubsequentlydid with it; but,especiallyif we decide that the Federalist-Republican ebate was solargely a Court-Countryreplaythatwe must postponethe demise ofthe Country stylein Americato (say)the end of the FirstParty System,then we shall observe that in the contemporaneousera of EdmundBurkeandJeremyBentham,Adam SmithandDavid Ricardo, SamuelTaylor Coleridge and Thomas Arnold, and the emergenceof an in-dustrialworking-classconsciousness,Englishpoliticalthoughtdepartedfromeighteenth-century lassicismmoredecisively-it canbe argued-andcertainlyalong other lines than was the casein America. To knowwhat took placeon one shore of thenow sunderedAtlanticculturemayilluminatewhat developedupon the other.Wood may slightlyoverstatehis insistence hat the classicaltheoryof politics was overthrown and abandonedat the point where theFederal Constitution emerged as something other than a balancedrepublicof one, few, and many. Virtue consisted as much of thecivic independenceof the arms-bearingreeholder rom privatepatronor governmentalinterest,as of his membership n one of a hierarchyof orderswho respectedanddeferred o oneanother;andit isonly fromone aspect, though a very realone, thatrepublican heory can be de-scribedashierarchical.Wood's argumentis valid, important,and not to be minimized:theinadequacies f the classicaltheoryof balancedo explain how JohnAdams cameto be leftbehindby thevery constitution hathe hastenedto defend(Ch. XVI). But therewas more to the classicaltheory thanbalanceandits legion of accompanying deas;there was the inveterateopposition between the agrarianman of independentvirtue and theprofessionalizedman of governmentand commerce; andJohn Taylorof Caroline,who exposed the obsolete characterof Adams'sDefence,23 Pocock, Politics,Languageand Time, I88-I90.


17/17

134 | J G. A. POCOCKalso wrote anti-Hamiltonian polemic in which the spirit ofBolingbrokestalked on every page.

Deeply entrenched in eighteenth-century agrarian classicism wasan image of the human personality, at once intensely autonomous andintensely participatory, entailing a vita activa and vivere civile whichcarry us back to the beginnings of humanism. In the essays collectedin the book referred to above,24 I have tried to show that there aremessianic and apocalyptic overtones to this image, and that it possessedimportant affinities with the image of the Puritan saint. The presentintellectual mood, of suspicion toward a privatized pluralism and

liberalism, and a willingness to see this replaced by something moredynamic, civic, and participatory, is tending to warp and foreshortenour image of the past.It is the whole strength of the historiographical movement to whichBailyn, Kramnick, Wood, and Stourzh all belong that they havedemonstrated the existence, throughout the eighteenth century, of aline of thought which staked everything on a positive and civic conceptof the individual's virtue. This, I have argued, carried on throughJefferson into the whole tradition of American agrarian and populistmessianism. There is no hurry to adopt a neo-Beardian interpretationwhereby the founders shall be seen to have sold out from a civic to amerely liberal ideal in the moment of triumph; but should this cometo be adopted, it will need to be expressed in the form of a continuingtension between working institutions and underlying values. To anewcomer during the I96os, the American psyche, if not the governingstructure, suggested less a nation of pragmatic Lockeans than one oftormented saints. The clamor ofjeremiads, sick jokes, and enquiries asto what became of the dream at times became deafening and obsessive.And it seemed evident that the eighteenth-century quarrelbetween virtueand commerce, citizen and government, republic and empire was stillgoing on in the twentieth century, and that historiography and politicalphilosophy were still much involved in it. For this reason, it may beimportant to get the historical story straight. It may be that parts ofthe eighteenth-century debate can be interpreted as a dialogue betweenprivatization and patriotism in the civic consciousness; but a good dealwill have to be done before what was a straightforward thesis that aliberal consensus obtained dominance at the beginning of United Stateshistory can be restated in a form satisfactory to historians. That is whythese two books are so valuable.24 See fn. 2, above.

Pocock, Virtue and Commerce in the s. XVIII

Documents

Transcript of Pocock, Virtue and Commerce in the s. XVIII