Republicanism in Old and New Contexts

Author(s): Joyce Appleby

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Jan., 1986), pp. 20-34
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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Republicanism in Old and New Contexts

Joyce Appleby

did Americans in the late eighteenth century mean when

rHAT
they spoke about republicanism? This is the question that Lance
Banning addresses in the foregoing article and the one that I
shall explore in this companion piece requested by the editor of the
William and Mary Quarterly.For many men-and this was primarilya male
discourse-republicanism represented something new. Thus Thomas
Paine in CommonSense referred to the "new republican materials" of the
House of Commons on whose virtue depended the freedom of England.
Eight years later, Paine defined a republic as a sovereignty of justice, in
contrast to a sovereignty of will.1 Writing at about the same time, an angry
critic denounced the Philadelphia stage for insidiously fostering aristocratic values and alluded sarcastically to "our present state of imaginary
republican equality."2 In this man's mind, republicanism entailed the
reformation of social mores along democratic lines. Addressing the
American Philosophical Society on the subject of innovative farming
techniques, Timothy Matlack spoke of "the great Republican Virtues of
Industry and Economy."3 Here Matlack associated republicanism with
private virtues and linked them to productivity.
For John Adams, republicanism retained its historical connection with
classical and Renaissance texts. Abigail Adams described her husband's
immersion in those texts as his "travelling through the Itallian Republicks."4The results of Adams's scholarly perambulations-his Defence of
the Constitutions of Governmentof the United States of America-did not,
however, restore the pristine meaning of republicanism. We can read
James Madison, an equally learned man, lamenting the presence in
W

Ms. Appleby is a member of the Department of History at the University of

California, Los Angeles.
1 Thomas Paine, CommonSense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York, I976), 69, and
"Dissertations on Government; The Affairs of the Bank; and Paper Money," in
William M. Van der Weyde, ed., The Life and Worksof Thomas Paine, IV (New
Rochelle, N.Y., I925), 234.
2 Freeman's
Journal. or, the North-AmericanIntelligencer(Philadelphia), Feb. i i,
I784.

3 Timothy Matlack, An Oration, Delivered March I 6, I 780, before the ...

AmericanPhilosophicalSociety... (Philadelphia, I780), 27.
4 Adams to Mercy Warren, May I4, I787,
in The Warren-AdamsLetters ...
(Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, LXXII-LXXIII [Boston, I9I7II, 290.
I925]),

REPUBLICANISM

2 I

Adams's Defenceof so many remarks "unfriendly to republicanism." Four

years after its publication, Madison observed to Jefferson that Adams had
actually written a "mock defence" of the "Republican Constitutions of his
Country" while attacking them with all the force he possessed.5 Adams no
doubt provoked this harsh judgment by insisting on the accuracy of
Machiavelli's statement that all republics needed three orders of men.
This, he claimed was an "eternal principle, without the knowledge of
which every speculation upon government must be imperfect."6 But
clearly Adams expected controversy. He described the Defenceto Benjamin Franklin as a confession of political faith containing "the only sense in
which I am or ever was a Republican."7
The passage of time did not clarify the conceptual confusion about
republicanism in the early national period. Reading the political pamphlets
and private correspondence of the I790s, one gets the impression that
"republican"was a label to be fought over, a prized appellation to claim for
one's own views. This is particularly apparent during the political ferment
over Adams's reelection that began almost the moment he entered office.
In Massachusetts, for instance, a Federalist newspaper exulted that "the
inflexible republican virtues of the majority of the people" had foiled the
machinations of the Jeffersonians in the Senate,8 while simultaneously a
Jeffersonian editor in Maryland described how the genius of universal
liberty had finally combined with the new doctrine of universal rights to
draw almost all the people into America's "modernrepublic."9
Such quotations leave little doubt that republicanand republicfigured
prominently, if ambiguously, in the public discourse of the eighteenth
century. Republicin fact appears as the conceptual equivalent of union in
the nineteenth century and nation in the twentieth. Yet it was only in
i967, with the publication of Bernard Bailyn's IdeologicalOrigins of the
AmericanRevolution,that historians began to investigate what this protean
concept meant to men of the Revolutionary era. It would be surprising if
scholars were able to agree upon the meaning of a word that contemporaries themselves used in such disparate contexts. And of course they don't.
In part this is because the republican terrain Bailyn discovered turned out
to be virtually unknown territory. The pamphlets he examined did not
lead him to the familiar lawyerly absorption with constituent powers and
5Madison to Jefferson, June 6, I787, inJulian P. Boyd etal., eds., The Papersof
), XI, 402; Madison to Jefferson, May
ThomasJefferson(Princeton, NJ., I950VI (New
in Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison ...
I79I,
I2,
York, 1906), 50-5I.
6 Charles Francis Adams [ed.], The Works ofJohn Adams. . . , V (Boston,
i83.
7

I8),
i85

Adams to Franklin,Jan. 27, I 787, inJohn Bigelow, ed., The Worksof Benjamin
Franklin .., XI (New York, I904), 298-299.
8 Boston Gazette, Commercialand Political, Nov. 24, I 8oo.
9 "The American: A Country Gazette," Baltimore, i8oo, broadside, Historical
Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

22

prescriptive rights-the accessible principles that could be captured in the

slogan "no taxation without representation." Rather, he found himself in
the midst of a thicket of references to degeneration and corruption
attached to a rhetoric of passionate outrage and unbounded fears. This
excursion into the colonial mind convinced Bailyn that Americans had
formed their world view-more particularly, their grasp of political
reality-from the republicanism of the English commonwealthmen. From
these Opposition writers of Augustan England, he explained, colonial
pamphleteers had put together a social theory that stressed the eternal
opposition of liberty and authority, the aggressive nature of power, and
the dependence of the common good upon a delicate constitutional
balance of the one, the few, and the many.10 This world view, which
Bailyn evocatively portrayed, was wholly traditional in its emphasis upon
the essential fragility of civil order.
Since i 967, the thesis of the centrality of this classical republican model
in American thinking has been extended through the constitutional
period, the I790s, and beyond.11 Lance Banning best described the
revisionist position in I974: "Most of the inherited structure of eighteenth-century political thought persisted in America for years after I789.
And this persistence was not a matter of a shadowy half-life of fragmentary
ideas. A structured universe of classical thought continued to serve as the
intellectual medium through which Americans perceived the political
world, and an inherited political language was the primary vehicle for the
expression of their hopes and discontents."12J.G.A. Pocock spelled out
the larger implications for the history of the United States: the new
research displayed the American Revolution less as the first political act of
revolutionary enlightenment than as "the last great act of the Renaissance."13

With admirable clarity, Banning has epitomized the essential points of

the revision that has restored republicanism to the conceptual world of
our Founding Fathers. With the same lucidity he has recapitulated my
criticisms of the "republican hypothesis" as it pertains to the opposition
between the Jeffersonians and Federalists. What remains to be resolved in
the scholarly dispute about republicanism in America is whose republicanism are we talking about-that of the Founding Fathers or ours? And if
theirs is ours, which one of ours: the chaste and venerable classical
10

Bernard Bailyn, The IdeologicalOrigins of the AmericanRevolution(Cambridge,

Mass., i967), 34-93.

11 Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1 776- I1787 (Chapel
Hill, N.C., i969); Lance Banning, TheJeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party
Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y., I978). See also the special issue on republicanism edited by
Joyce Appleby of American Quarterly, XXXVII (i985).
12 Banning, "Republican Ideology and the Triumph of the Constitution,
I789 to
793," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXXI (I974), I73.
13 J.G.A. Pocock, "Virtue and Commerce
in the Eighteenth Century,"Journal of
InterdisciplinaryHistory, III (I972), I20.

REPUBLICANISM

23

republicanism distilled by Harrington for English needs and updated by

Montesquieu for eighteenth-century readers or the liberal republicanism
that contemporaries traced to the inquiries of Bacon, Newton, Locke, and
Smith. My answer is that both were present and that they represent the
contending republican paradigms of Federalists and Jeffersonians. Banning, after generously conceding the presence of some liberal tendencies
in those who opposed the Federalists, insists that the Jeffersonians
retained their intellectual moorings in English Opposition thought. Only
confusion will result, he writes, if we suppose that the analytical distinctions we detect were evident to the thinkers we study. Further, he
maintains that it was the striking similarity between Alexander Hamilton's
program and the policies of the English "court" party that called forth a
"country opposition" in the United States.14Here he is following Pocock,
who described the polemics over Hamilton's policies as a "replay of
Court-Country debates" held in England seventy years earlier.15
Our interpretations on this point are mutually exclusive, for in my view
it was precisely the recrudescence of both court and country thinking in
the Washington administration that crystallized the liberal political vision
of Jefferson and propelled him into action once he became convinced that
in style, purpose, and personnel the new federal government belonged to
men like Hamilton and Adams and not to those like Madison and himself.
Here I would summon Jefferson's own words. From the year of his
presidential election until his death Jefferson wrote about the issues that
had been at stake in that famous contest. During this twenty-six-year
period his account never varied. The Jeffersonians had liberated themselves from the bondage of old systems. They recognized that theirs was a
new era. The advances in science and learning were so striking that the
past need no longer haunt men's minds. Hopes for humanity once deemed
chimerical could be embraced as practical for those who could free
themselves of encumbering prejudices. Writing to Joseph Priestley in
i 8o i, Jefferson criticized his opponents for believing in an education that
looked backward, not forward, and hence failed to see what was new in
America. "We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun," he
wrote. "For this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great
extent of our Republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty
wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new." Exercising more
tact with Abigail Adams, he left it to time and experience to determine
whether the public good had more to fear from the people or its rulers,
pointing out that those who feared the people had long controlled
government while those who feared governments independent of the
people represented a new idea. When he resumed correspondence with
Adams himself, Jefferson characterized their parties as composed of
14 Banning, "Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the
New American Republic," pp. oo-oo, 00-oo, 0o, and n. 46 above, and "Republican
Ideology," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXXI (I974),
i80-i85,
esp. i83.
15 Pocock, "Virtue and Commerce," JIH, III ( 972),
I3I.

24

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

reformers and the enemies of reform who divided on the question of "the
improvability of the human mind, in science, in ethics, in government."11
Whatever the truth of these assertions, the language suggests that
Jefferson made sharp analytical distinctions in assessing how lines were
drawn in i8oo.
Jefferson was also clear about the import of the new learning, the
innovations, and the novelties that preoccupied him. They marked a great
divide in human history. No longer need eighteenth-century men be in
the thrall of the great philosophers of antiquity, he wrote. The loss of the
political writings of Aristotle or any other ancient philosopher need not
cause regret, he maintained, because the "new principle of representative
democracy has rendered useless almost everything written before on the
structure of government." Similarly he believed that the new science of
economics had brought to light the essential truths that were transforming
the material world. He insisted upon emphasizing the break in old
continuities. Power and force in international relations, for instance,
"were legitimate principles in the dark ages which intervened between
antient and modern civilisation." Disturbed by contemporaries who failed
to appreciate the significance of the dramatic changes they had witnessed,
Jefferson ridiculed those who "look at constitutions with sanctimonious
reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be
touched." Purists about language were equally antediluvian in his eyes.
Dictionaries were mere depositories, while society, he said, was the great
workshop for the smithing of new words.17These are the statements of a
man intent on making hard-edged divisions between himself and his
opponents. However exaggerated Jefferson's insistence upon the newness
of the intellectual terrain may appear to us, it clearly reflected a proposition of central importance to his world view. There is little evidence here
of a mingling of liberal and classical traditions or of a concern for those
staple fears of country thought-standing armies, public debts, executive
influence, and government by money.
Although Hamilton sounded like a latter-day Robert Walpole, the
attacks he provoked owed little to the influence of English Opposition
thought because Hamilton's opponents-Jefferson and the largely unknown group that formed around him-had far different goals. They did
'6Jefferson to Priestley, Mar. 2 I, I 8o i, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings
of ThomasJefferson (New York, i892-i899), VIII, 54-56; Jefferson to Abigail
Adams, Sept. I I, I 804, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson
Letters:The
Complete Correspondencebetween Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams
(Chapel Hill, N.C., I959), I, 278-280; Jefferson to John Adams, June I5, i8I3,
ibid., II, 332.
17Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, Aug. 26, i8i6, in Andrew A. Lipscomb and
Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., The Writings of ThomasJefferson(Washington, D.C.,
XV, 65-66; Jefferson to James Madison, Aug. 28, I789, in Boyd et
I903-I904),
al., eds., JeffersonPapers, XV, 367; Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July I2, i8i6,
in Ford, ed., Writings ofJefferson,X, 42; John Dewey [ed.], The Living Thoughtsof
ThomasJefferson(New York, I 940), 9.

REPUBLICANISM

25

not look to the past for wisdom; they did not yearn for a government of
balanced estates in a society of stable relationships; they did not celebrate
participation in the polis. The conceptual language of classical republicanism had little relevance to their social realities and positively impeded
their political purposes. It was just because of their disassociation from the
cherished convictions of English political thought that Jefferson and his
allies had to create an image of the society they hoped to bring into
existence. In their depiction of America's future, freedom was expanded
by drastically limiting the scope of government so that individual citizens
could be empowered to act on their own behalf. Democratic values were
invoked not to enlarge the people's power in government but rather to
justify the abandonment of the authority traditionally exercised over
them. In espousing limited government the Jeffersonians endorsed a
redrawing of the lines between the public and private spheres, and this
meant reordering their significance for the whole human enterprise. Old
and well-documented abuses rendered government suspect because-it
relied on coercion. The new realm of voluntary associations-for worship,
for study, for enterprise-held out the wonderful promise of shedding
past oppression. The virtue whose fragility required a carefully balanced
constitution grew robust when freed from old systems. Adams certainly
knew his man when he brought to Jefferson's attention his good fortune in
preferring "the dreams of the Future" to the histories of the past.18
Jefferson believed devoutly in progress, and like all such devotees he
had to explain why the future would be different from the past. His answer
lay with the prospect of making fundamental changes in human institutions. The new understanding of nature and society, as well as the
evidence that ordinary men could order their lives properly, argued for
the possibility of establishing a new direction for social development. This
was Jefferson's goal and the reason why his iconoclasm was basic to its
attainment. Freedom for him meant liberation. Civilization's spiritual and
material advances depended upon free initiatives and creative intelligence.
Progress had been impeded just because the public realm had been
dominated by the few who used their power to keep the many ignorant.
Unlike country party rhetoric with its lamentations about corruption and
decay, Jeffersonian campaign literature ran to hyperbolic descriptions of
America's future greatness once universal freedom, equal representation,
and natural rights were firmly established.
Because these themes have pervaded American politics ever since, it
has been difficult for historians to appreciate their novelty in the I790s.
And so the liberal tradition in America has been treated as a mindless
reaction to a supposed New World or-worse yet-construed as what all
human beings believe when not constrained by the elaborate intellectual
constructions of Old World societies. For both Banning and me, the
significance of the recent republican revision has been the discovery that
18

487.

Letters,II,
Adams to Jefferson, Aug. 9, i 8 i 6, in Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson

26

WILLIAM

AND

MARY QUARTERLY

many eighteenth-century Americans thought within a classical republican

frame of reference. For me, the importance of this fact is that it enables us
to see that liberalism did not sprawl unimpeded across the flat intellectual
landscape of American abundance, as Louis Hartz maintained.19Hence we
can begin to study it as a complex construction of reality put together, as
all world views are, through a selective interpretation of experience, to
serve profound human values.
While on the face of it Banning and I are arguing about facts-which
conceptual order animated the Jeffersonian opposition-our differences
are encumbered by theoretical issues as well. Since the evidence and
arguments around which we have constructed our contrasting accounts of
the I 790S are readily available in print, I think it will be more productive
to address these issues.20 Banning's presentation of the Jeffersonian
persuasion rests upon a theory about how ideas function in society that
permeates his entire interpretation. When Bailyn extended the range of
Caroline Robbins's original work on the impact of the English Commonwealthmen in colonial America, he integrated this research with the
compelling concept of ideology. In his study, the Cassandrasof the British
Opposition did not just furnish the articulate colonial mind with notions
about power, corruption, and liberty. Their literature could be counted as
a cause of the American Revolution because it fused "into effective
formulations" opinions and attitudes "otherwise too scattered and vague
to be acted upon." In this famous passage describing the heady potency of
ideology, Bailyn distinguished between mere ideas and those capable of
crystallizing inchoate social discontent, turning unrealized private emotions into a public possession and elevating to structured consciousness
the mingled urges that stir within us all.21This association of ideology with
the deep structuring of social consciousness has necessarily affected the
reading of texts. When Banning writes that the opponents of Hamilton
seized the only political language available to them or that evocative words
and phrases were assented to without further explanation because of
shared understandings of classical republicanism, he is working within the
scholarly conventions established a decade earlier by Bailyn and anatomized before that by Pocock and Quentin Skinner.22 Disentangling the
theory from the evidence in the "republican hypothesis" is basic to
understanding Banning's and my differing approaches to the disputes
between the Jeffersonians and Federalists.
A myriad of assumptions about how ideas become social facts is packed
into Bailyn's statement about ideology, and these assumptions have
19

Hartz, The LiberalTradition in America:An Interpretationof AmericanPolitical

Thought since the Revolution (New York, I 9 5 5).

20 Centrally in Banning, JeffersonianPersuasion,and Appleby, Capitalism and a
New Social Order:The Republican Vision of the I 790S (New York, I 984).
21
Bailyn, "The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation," in Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American
Revolution(Chapel Hill, N.C., I973), II.
22
Banning,Jeffersonian Persuasion, i85, 4I, I77, I 27, I 48, I 64.

REPUBLICANISM

27

unavoidably affected how he and his followers have interpreted their

evidence. Bailyn's understanding of the role of ideas in history rests
heavily upon the work of Clifford Geertz, and Geertz's thinking on
ideology flows from anthropological studies of small face-to-face communities.23 In these, the sharp differentiation between the social practices
under observation and those familiar to the scholarly observers has
encouraged scholars to search for the cues behind the patterned actions
they were analyzing. In time they found these cues in the consciousness of
the people under observation-those unspoken assumptions, visceral
reactions, and value-laden convictions that reside within individuals but,
from the outside, appear as patterned reactions. The exploration of this
link between belief and behavior has produced a theory that emphasizes
both the systematic and the social in our thought processes. Our construction of reality is not random but ordered, and it is not ours even though we
experience our knowledge as a personal possession. Just as significantly,
society's messages are constantly being conveyed to us through gestures,
intonations, symbols, and rituals, as well as by more articulate aspects of
human communication. Society, as Geertz has said, supplies the media for
expression, and the media mold the expresser.24 Of central importance to
this theory is that language is encoded through social practices. The words
used in any particular sentence acquire their meaning through previous
discourse; behind their utterance lies a richly textured interpretation of
reality. Human reason, in this view, operates within acquired consciousness; it does not stand outside socially conditioned thought as a tool in the
service of objective criticism.
Merging with this theory of ideology derived from anthropology have
been equally important reflections on the way human knowledge is
organized through interpretive schemes. These have been introduced into
the scholarship on republicanism through Pocock, who has approached
ideology by way of Thomas Kuhn and the sociology of knowledge. What
Kuhn offered historians, Pocock explains, was a way of treating social
thought as a process both linguistic and political because thinking could be
viewed as a means of distributing authority as well as a system of
communication.25 The complementary insights of Geertz and Kuhn
entered scholarly works at the same time that hermeneutics and structural23 Clifford Geertz, "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of
Man" and "Ideology as a Cultural System," in his The Interpretationof Cultures
See also Ronald G. Walters, "Signs of the Times: Clifford
(New York, I973).
Geertz and Historians," Social Research,XLVII (i980), 537-556.
24 Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in his Interpretationof Cultures, 2I2.
"The sociology of knowledge ought to be called the sociology of meaning, for what
is socially determined is not the nature of conception but the vehicles of
conception."
25Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, i962);
J.G.A. Pocock, "Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the
Study of Political Thought," in his Politics, Languageand Time.'Essayson Political
Thought and History (New York, I97 I), I4-I 5.

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

28

ism were transforming the way all texts were being examined. The net
result has been to diminish drastically the independence of the word and
the autonomy of the author. Nothing speaks to us directly; every text
must be comprehended within the linguistic, conceptual, and social
systems that controlled its creation and reception. What becomes paramount for historians is ferreting out the connections that relate the part to
the whole. This means that the texts that are the most valuable typify an
age while those that deviate from a reigning paradigm may be interesting
but less relevant to the enterprise of decoding public discourse. Thus
Pocock dismisses Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Governmenton the
grounds that his thought was notoriously not organized around historical
concepts at a time when his contemporaries were placing their politics in a
context of historical change.26
Bringing these theoretical insights to bear on Revolutionary America,
Pocock has made explicit their impact on the revision underway. The
classical view of politics, he writes, was a closed ideology, introducing into
eighteenth-century America a Renaissance pessimism concerning the
direction and reversibility of historical developments. Any change was
likely to evoke fears of corruption and, through corruption, degeneration
with its accompanying loss of liberty. The static ideal of the Americans,
according to Pocock, was embodied in the word virtue, a heroic concept
metaphorically braced for attack from the corrupting disruptions embodied in the word commerce.So firm was the grip of the notion of the
incompatibility of virtue and commerce on the colonial mind that Americans were compelled to interpret change as a threat to their liberties.27
This was true apparently whether the change issued from the English
imperial authorities before Independence, the popular involvement with
tax and debt policies after the Revolution, or the fiscal program of
Hamilton during Washington's administration.
This emphasis upon the social component in thought has had the
salutary effect of disengaging intellectual historians from their great texts
and plunging them into the systems of communication in which those
texts, and lesser ones, acquired meaning. The accomplishments of the
ideological school in this regard are major and permanent. However, this
achievement should be separated from theoretical assumptions about the
constraining effect of those ideas said to have paradigmaticstature. Among
scientists sharing a discipline or in small custom-oriented communities a
single conceptual order may in fact suppress imaginative deviation. This is
far less likely to happen in complex, literate societies. Such societies with
their plurality of religions and occupations naturally generate distinct
groups with diverging interests. Power relations within them are frequently troubled, and men and women enjoy an access to information that can
supply materials for alternative interpretations of reality. Ideologies in
such societies rarely enjoy an uncontested supremacy-which is why we
so often refer to them as persuasions.
26

Pocock, "Virtue and Commerce," JIH, III

27Ibid.,

I20-I23.

(I 972),

129.

REPUBLICANISM

29

By accepting the idea of a presiding paradigm, ideological historians

have created the notion of a collective mind that furnishes the promptings
that structure action. Ideologically the society is undifferentiated. Some
may benefit more than others from the distribution of authority built into
the society's conceptual language, but the distribution nonetheless presents itself as a given embedded in the minds of all. There is no room in
this conception of social thought for the kind of ideological warfare that
Jefferson injected into national politics. Conflicts instead are psychologized. As Gordon S. Wood explained about Bailyn's findings, the ideas of
the Revolutionaries took on an "elusive and unmanageable quality, a
dynamic self-intensifying character that transcended the intentions and
desires of any of the historical participants."28With this theoretical
approach, novelties and altered circumstances become intellectual problems for the whole society. A collective case of cognitive dissonance
produces a collective effort to accommodate the nonconfirming evidence.
Within each person rage the battles generated by the ideological contradictions of the whole. An ideology once in place, so it seems, imposes
itself upon the range of human interests that generated interpretive
schemes in the first place.
The ideological historians' emphasis upon the social structuring of
communication has greatly enhanced our ability to understand the process
of expression, but it has led to a neglect of the motives behind expression,
not the least of which is testing the validity of one's assumptions. Human
beings think for a purpose, for many purposes. It is possible to explore
with an anthropologist's sensitivity the riches of symbolic systems without
subscribing to the view that these systems possess a power to inhibit the
creation of new symbols. One of the most insistent intellectual demands
for men and women in the early modern period was the need to
understand the dramatic changes transforming their world. Since these
changes carried opportunities as well as threats, interpreting them had
unavoidable implications for existing institutional arrangements. But it is
just this play of intellectual power and imaginative virtuosity that the
ideological approach obscures. Wishing to move beyond the aridly
rationalistic search for causes in explanations of great historical events, the
republican revisors have come dangerously close to cutting the taproots of
human thought. While it is undeniable that human beings begin their
thinking with an established world view, it does not follow that the reality
testing that constitutes mature thought will necessarily stay confined
within that view. This is a fortiori the case if the different groups in an
open and pluralistic society are confronting changes powerful enough to
reshape the social landscape.
These criticisms of the ideological approach are particularly relevant to
the treatment of economic change in the "republican hypothesis." Again
Pocock has elaborated the controlling interpretation. In his Machiavellian
Moment he explains how commerce became arrayed against virtue. Late
28 Wood, "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution," WMQ, 3d Ser.,
XXIII (I966), 22.

30

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

seventeenth-century Englishmen confronted a series of fiscal innovations

that left the king with a bank, an expandable debt, and the means of
buying both an army and a complaisant Parliament. The political nation
split along the lines marked out by the classical republican model. Those
who embraced the ideal of an uncorrupted domain for political participation reserved to the propertied and independent members of the polity
endorsed the alarmist country position; those receptive to the new engines
for national wealth and power accepted the outlook of the court.
Henceforth the reigning republican paradigm controlled the reaction to
the accelerating advances in trade. Those who identified with the state
welcomed the new wealth-producing systems without removing the onus
of corruption from them; those who identified with the independent
gentry viewed commerce as the foe of virtue. Since civic virtue was
counted upon to maintain the constitutional balance that guaranteed
liberty and the survival of the polity, the commercial penetration of
England's agricultural economy represented an unalloyed threat.29
Revisiting his Machiavellian moment in i98i, Pocock reasserted the
primacy of the financial revolution in the history of ideology. It-not the
Glorious Revolution, certainly not the commercial revolution-produced
the nodes of significance that would dominate political discourse in the
Anglo-American world throughout the eighteenth century.30 Not the
least of the astounding historiographical consequences of his revision, he
said then, had been the displacement of Locke. Here Locke represents for
Pocock a code name for those earlier historical accounts-both whig and
Marxist-that interpreted the past from the front to the back and assumed
that the great Mr. Locke came into being to prepare the way for modern
industrial democracies. This Locke, of course, can be easily dispensed
with, but coming to terms with the Locke who was notoriously ahistorical
will require a less heroic view of how ideologies organize consciousness.
It has been a major goal of the ideological historians to move beyond
the bootless efforts of materialists and idealists to establish either social
facts or conceptions of them as fundamental. By making conceptual
languages part of the structure of personality and the world, they have
tried to envelop rather than transcend the epiphenomenal-phenomenal
split. "Men cannot do what they have no means of saying they have done,"
Pocock has written, "and what they do must in part be what they can say
and conceive that it is."'31We sense that that must be true. Indeed, it is not
uncommon now to read in scholarly works that a group-usually a
subordinate one-did not embark on a particular program because its
members did not have a language for discussing new goals. This equating
of conceptual languages with the actual structuring of our consciousness is
29 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment.FlorentinePolitical Thought and the
Atlantic RepublicanTradition (Princeton, N.J., I975).
30 J.G.A. Pocock, "The Machiavellian MomentRevisited: A Study in History and
Ideology," Journal of Modern History, LIII (1 98 I), 64-66.
31
Pocock, "Virtue and Commerce,"JIH, III (I972),
I 22.

REPUBLICANISM

3I

what gives plausibility to the idea of a single, shared world view operating
within a given society. This claim, which has not always been made
explicit, undergirds Pocock's and Banning's insistence that the classical
republican paradigm controlled how eighteenth-century men reacted to
change. With their reconstruction of the conceptual world of classical
republicanism we can appreciate just how discordant progressive economic development could be. Men living with sensibilities formed in an
agrarian society and struggling to interpret change with an ideology
pivoting on the preeminent importance of stasis could only be disconcerted by the intrusive vigor of the market. This much has been established,
and the fatuities of whig history can be quietly forgotten. However, by
insisting that the only significant intellectual accommodation to change
took place within a presiding paradigm, the revisionists have made it
difficult to recognize that alongside the Machiavellian conception of
citizenship, order, and liberty there grew up another paradigm.32
Men did find the means of talking about commerce that over time
produced a language totally unassimilable to the social grammar of civic
humanism. Indeed, they were forced to do so in part because their
political language had no means for discussing the early modern economy
as it in fact operated.33 Classical theory asserted the predominance of
politics over all other aspects of social life. This predominance reflected
and perpetuated the subordinate position of all other social institutions.
Economic life served purely private, household needs. The political whole
was not only greater than the sum of the parts; it alone possessed sufficient
unity for a history. Time existed within the polity; outside churned a
meaningless sequence of events ruled by fortune. To catalog in this
manner the central propositions of classical republicanism is to state the
problem. No concepts existed for analyzing a trading system that had not
only moved beyond the confines of political boundaries but had created
wealth essential to the conduct of politics. There was no classical language
for understanding a commercial system that was public, progressive, and
orderly. However appealing civic humanism was to English gentlemen
involved in public issues, it did not help persons who sought to understand
the private transactions that were determining the shape and direction of
the Anglo-American economy.
Publications on agriculture, trade, and manufacturing grew in volume
and range during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and these
writings indicate that the imagination of men who studied commerce was
not imprisoned within the classical republican world view. Many observers
were able to see that their economic system represented a wholly new
32
Ibid. Pocock here suggests that it was unlikely that there would be only one
language in use within a given society but goes on to accept that this was so.
33 On this subject see Nicholas Xenos, "Classical Political Economy: The
and
Apolitical Discourse of Civil Society," Humanities in Society, III (i980),
Charles Nathanson, Adam Smith and the Making of Market Society(New Haven,
Conn., forthcoming).

32

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

phenomenon. They interpreted the evidence of material advance as part

of a complicated transformation requiring new modes of analysis. Men
were able to talk about trade, in time to fashion a bold new conceptual
language capable of transforming traditional assumptions about the human
personality. They created an abstract model of the market. They constructed powerful hypotheses to explain to one another how regularities
emerged from the apparently random behavior of market bargainers.
They recognized, too, the implications for their political order in the
existence of an international organization for the production and distribution of wealth. They saw that trade engaged men as individuals rather than
as members of a polity. And they extrapolated new truths from their
observations and attached them to new models of human association.
Necessity was the mother of this intellectual invention in part because
classical republicanism offered only a language for lamenting, as opposed
to understanding, commerce. From the i620S,
when Gerald de Malynes
and Thomas Mun exchanged views on the English coin shortage, to the
I776 publication of Adam Smith's masterly synthesis, men thought about
the market economy in ways that incessantly impinged upon politics. In
exactly the way that Pocock has described the creation of all matrices of
language, writers decomposed old meanings about civil order and recomposed the elements of time, citizenship, and the distribution of authority.
Outside the polity, they constructed a model of economic life that
borrowed its order from nature-the newly conceptualized nature of
predictable regularity.34As this economy absorbed more and more of the
attention of men and women it supplied a new identity for them. By the
end of the eighteenth century the individual with wide-ranging needs and
abstract rights appeared to challenge the citizen with concrete obligations
and prescribed privileges.
In the I790s when the Jeffersonian Republicans and Federalists confronted each other, the battle lines had been drawn around opposing
conceptions of civil society. The passions mobilized by this contest over
national leadership reflected this fact. Hiowever diffuse the ideas of
ordinary participants, the parties' champions were disciplined and rigorous
thinkers, filled with a sense of the portentousness of the events they
sought to control, For the Jeffersonians the economy offered an escape
from the predicaments implicit in traditional ways of looking at social
order. Here was a system operating independently of politics and, like the
physical universe, taking its cues from nature. Where politics achieved
stability by imposing its structure of power, the economy appeared to
elicit voluntary participation as it wove ever more extensive networks of
free exchange. It also discovered a rationality in the humblest person
whose capacity to take care of himself could be used as an argument for
freedom. Like so many other staple concepts in traditional political
discourse, freedom underwent a transformation in this newly imagined
34 I have discussed this development in Economic Thought and Ideology in
Seventeenth-CenturyEngland (Princeton, NJ., I978).

33

REPUBLICANISM

society of the future. Freedom now could be construed as a universal

liberation wherein men-and, of course, it was a white male vision-were
free to define and pursue their own goals.
Only in the United States, with its undeveloped resources and flexible
social norms, could reality lend support to this proleptic vision of a free
society. The persuasiveness of the liberal paradigm, however, depended
less upon palpable evidence than upon powerful, new, analytical models
explaining human psychology, physical causation, and the workings of the
market. It would be hard to exaggerate the subversive role abstract
reasoning played in this retreat from politics. Science became the lodestar
for those who thought they were at the dawn of a new age; modern
scientists, not ancient philosophers, guided them into the future; the
inquiring mind presented itself as the inexhaustible resource for endless
improvement. The importance of the free market to this development
cannot be reduced to economics. Nor can Jeffersonians be distinguished
from Federalists on the basis of their enthusiasm for economic development. It was the economy's ordering of society with minimal compulsion
that stirred the Jeffersonian imagination, not its capacity to produce
wealth. Even after the incessant tendency of the unregulated market to
make the rich richer and the poor more vulnerable had fully revealed
itself, belief in spontaneous harmony died hard, for with it went the
expectation that progress inhered in the natural order.
Liberalism and capitalism have undeniable historical links, but the
concept of capitalism that we use today only obscures their connection in
the eighteenth century. Our postulates about capitalism crystallized in the
nineteenth century when the relentless dynamic of unimpeded economic
development became apparent. For us the end of capitalism is the
accumulation of capital, the means to that end the capitalist's organization
of hired labor, and the social consequence a permanent division between
dependent laborers and independent employers. Attached to the notion
of a bourgeois ethic, the culture produced by this capitalism appears in an
altogether different light from the Jeffersonian vision. Constricting rather
than generous, manipulative rather than emancipating, its values never
rise above the interests of its beneficiaries. This capitalism shimmers
beneath Banning's statements that the Jeffersonians had many reservations
about the "eager, unrestrained pursuit of economic opportunity" or the
"unrestrained pursuit of purely private interests." Similarly, when he
writes that liberalism "is comfortable with economic man, with the
individual who is intent on maximizing private satisfactions," it is William
Graham Sumner's liberalism, not Jefferson's, that provides the model.35
The recovery of classical republican thought has, as Banning writes,
enabled us to understand that the Revolutionary generation left "a lasting
commitment to ideas that were not part of a liberal consensus."936
However, by presenting this mode of political discourse as encapsulating
35Banning,

36Ibid.,

I3.

"Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited,"

I2,

I4,

above.

34

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Americans within a closed ideology, the republican revisionists have gone

beyond their evidence. It is of course possible that Jefferson and his
followers were simultaneously liberal and classical, as Banning has argued.
However, when we find a man as methodically reflective as Jefferson
repeatedly stating that his party distinguished itself by its commitment to
scientific advances in the knowledge of government, by its faith in the selfgoverning capacities of ordinary men, and by its liberation from reverence
for the past, it makes good sense to believe him. Not to do so is to
interpret his triumph as a defeat and to construe the emergence of
liberalism as a disappointing capitulation to the overpowering force of
economic development.
Republicanism in the I78os, according to Gordon Wood, was essentially anticapitalistic, representing "a final attempt to come to terms with the
emergent individualistic society that threatened to destroy once and for all
the communion and benevolence that civilized men had always considered
to be the ideal of human behavior."37It is this meaning that scholars have
in mind when they speak of the new republican hypothesis that has
transformed our understanding of political discourse in eighteenth-century America. Undeniably, republicanismcontinued to convey this complicated message to some, but the men who claimed republicanfor a party
title in i 8oo had elaborated a new meaning-equally complex-that
embraced and celebrated the free individual. No longer seen as a threat,
the emerging individualist had become the instrument of progress. What
was exhilarating in their world was not the experience of organizing
society around new principles-for that they had not had-but rather the
hopes such a prospect inspired. When Jefferson hailed his age as a whole
new chapter in the history of man, we sense that his opponents' reverence
for the past was uppermost in his mind. Indeed, the excitement generated
by the election of Jefferson tells us something about the connection
between American optimism and the promise of a different future.
Jefferson's victory stirred deeply his champions just because his republicanism represented a carefully constructed alternative to the human
predicament so forcefully depicted in classical republican texts.
37

Wood, Creation of the American Republic,4 I 8-4 I 9.