‘public virtue’.39 Republics were vulnerable because in a polity that rested solely on the authority of the people, an extraordinary moral character was required. It was every man’s duty to be benevolent, to subordinate their individual loves to the greater good of the whole. However, there existed an inherent conflict in this theory. Liberty means the security of property, but the security of property also begets wealth, and wealth is the source of luxury and degeneration; therefore, any attempt to regulate wealth is to restrict liberty. It is this conundrum, according to Wood, which is at the centre of republican ideology.
Wood also contends that the failure of the revolutionaries to identify a natural aristocracy resulted in the federal crisis of the 1780s and the ‘end to classical politics’. The vocabulary that animated the revolutionaries in 1776, he claims, did not possess a timeless quality, and by 1787 the meaning of terms such as liberty, democracy, virtue or republicanism had undergone fundamental change:‘The Americans of the Revolutionary generation had not simply constructed a new form of government, but an entirely new conception of politics, a conception that took them out of an essentially classical and medieval world of political discussion into one that was recognizably modern’.40 It was a shift, in other words, from republicanism to liberalism, from the classical theory of the individual as civic or active to one where the individual is primarily concerned with his own interests. According to Wood, as Federalist theory moved away from the paradigm of virtue toward self-interest, it abandoned the rhetoric of republicanism:
Once the people were thought to be composed of various interests in opposition to one another, all sense of a graduated organic chain in the social hierarchy became irrelevant, symbolized by the increasing emphasis on the image of a social contract. The people were not an order organically tied together by their unity of interest but rather an agglomeration of hostile individuals coming together for their mutual benefit to construct a society.41
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
