the libertarian drive responsible for keeping alive the ideas of the ‘Real Whigs’, Harrington, Nedham, Milton, Ludlow, Sidney and Marvell who, while believing in the English constitution, also supported the separation of powers, freedom of thought and the sovereignty of the people in the face of increasing corruption and tyranny. As Robbins demonstrated, it was through the ideas of these ‘Real Whigs’, filtered through the writings of Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, that Americans developed a profound distrust of power and a fear of usurpation of liberty from the people.22
Following Robbins’s work, the republican paradigm was fully realized with the publication of three landmark texts: Bernard Bailyn’s Pamphlets of the American Revolution: 1750–1776, Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787, and J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment.23 These volumes each contended that the breach between Britain and the colonies was to be explained primarily by understanding the circumstances as the participants perceived them. According to Pocock:
in tracing history in terms of contemporary self-understanding – which is what the history of ideology really amounts to – one is not playing a barren game of pitting one cause against another cause, or one factor against another factor; one is exploring the contemporary perception of possibilities and impossibilities, and the limitations of that perception.24
Labelled the ‘neo-Whig’ or ‘idealist’ approach, these historians clarified the influence of English dissenting thought in America and the implications for American society on the intellectual life of the revolution. More significantly, they outlined the language and conceptual framework of republicanism and revealed the inherent concerns of the revolutionary generation which progressive and liberal historiography had tried to dismiss or contain. The revolution was not a smooth transition to republicanism, they argued, but an experiment punctuated by fear and despair. In this context, the classical dialects of virtue/corruption, liberty/tyranny, past/progress and authenticity/deception became the key terms to unlocking the meaning of eighteenth-century thought. For the neo-Whig historians, one solution to understanding this critical period is an awareness of the differences in political and social principle between the anti-Federalists and Federalists and, in particular, the dispute over the degree of balance between equality and the authority of the central government. Certainly, it was a generation deeply divided over its definition of social and political life. However, more important than the rivalries between opposing political parties was the fascination of the revolutionary generation with political ideology and, specifically, the ideology of republicanism. These historians viewed the whole revolutionary era as a continuing effort by the American people to decide exactly what republicanism meant to them. Arguments between Federalists and anti-Federalists were not to do with whether to have a republic, but rather what type of republic they envisioned and two modes of thought competed strenuously for the establishment of republican liberty: Protestantism and American legal thought. The oppositional rhetoric of clergymen provided revolutionary Americans with a forceful moral dimension to the nation’s fight against the British Empire, while the idea of law, reworked for an American republic from English common law and the legal treatise of the European Enlightenment, ‘defined the events and capped its directions’.25 Although individuals as diverse in political orientation as Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor may have differed over the specifics of political theory, they nonetheless shared a common body of assumptions about republican political society. At its most basic level, all agreed that republicanism implied an absence of both a monarchy and an English-style aristocracy and the establishment of a government directed by the will of the people. But this usage of the term was always vague and ambiguous. It appears only once in the constitution, and in The Federalist, James Madison offered only a general meaning:‘we may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the body of the people; and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for an unlimited period, or during good behaviour’.26 The term also encompassed a whole range of ideas regarding republican government which influenced the nation’s manners and institutions. The first was that all republics were dependent on a broad distribution of virtue among its citizens. In the classical republican tradition, man was by nature a political being, and public or political liberty meant participation in government. However, liberty was only achieved when citizens were virtuous – that is, willing to sacrifice their private interests in favour of the public good.‘What is called a republic’, wrote Thomas Paine, means the ‘public good’, or the good of the whole, compared with a despotic form, which makes the good of the sovereign or of one man the only object of government.‘Every government that does not act on the principle of a Republic, or in other words, that does not make the res-publica its whole and sole object, is not a good government.’27 The eighteenth-century classical values of public or civic virtue were not only American conceptions: virtue, and other values such as honour and sincerity that accompanied it,
lay at the heart of all prescriptions for political leadership in the eighteenth-century English speaking world. Throughout the century Englishmen of all political persuasions – whigs and tories alike – struggled to find the ideal virtuous leader amid the rising and swirling currents of financial and commercial interests that threatened to engulf their society.28
In the American context, public virtue or disinterestedness combined with the private virtues of industry, simplicity and sincerity to define the dimensions of republicanism; and it is because republics required such moral sacrifice that they are fragile polities, vulnerable to corruption and decay. The revolution had tested and refined the power of American virtue, but by the 1790s, when the crisis was over, men reverted to their naturally selfish, ambitious and extravagant ways. The greatest danger to virtue, both private and public, was commonly recognized as wealth and luxury, passion and competition, and with the return to prosperity after the economic disorder of the revolution, virtue was under threat. Profoundly aware of the historical fact that republican government never lasted for long, and challenged by the rapidly expanding commercial culture, American revolutionaries worried that the moral prerequisites of a republican order were difficult if not impossible to maintain. From their readings of both ancient and contemporary texts, they knew that all republics were vulnerable and impermanent; outside of a few European principalities, no other republican government prevailed at the time of the American Revolution. Because republican political society is characterized by individual liberty and the absence of a dominating authority, they were vulnerable to hostile attacks from without, and corruption and decay from within.
Another central idea was that the spirit and principle of a genuine republic was the promotion of equality of property among its citizens. Equality meant that no individual should be dependent on the will of another, and property made this independence possible. Americans concluded that they were naturally fit for republicanism precisely because they were ‘a people of property; almost every man is a freeholder’.29 But it was equally true that ‘Power follows property’, and as wealth increased, so too the tendency for power to consolidate in the hands of the few. The growing aristocracy of wealth led to the problem of faction, the internal rupture of society into competing political groups. As John Howe observes, ‘Faction was virtue’s opposite’, and in the resulting struggles, ‘passions were further aroused, internal divisions deepened and ultimately civil conflict was brought on. Such was the deadly spiral into which republican government too often fell.’30 These fundamental assumptions reveal that rather than sunny optimism, American revolutionaries were preoccupied with fears of tyranny, corruption and national degeneration. The truth was that the once great and illustrious ancient republics were no more and Americans studied and used this knowledge to diagnose the problems of eighteenth-century England, as well as to prevent their own burgeoning nation from succumbing to a similar fate.
One of the first works to detect the pessimistic strain underlying eighteenth-century republican discourse was Bernard Bailyn’s groundbreaking Pamphlets of the American Revolution. For Bailyn what was original about the revolution was not its social disruption but the alteration
