Comment on Appleby

It must have been around 1980 when I first read Joyce Appleby’s reflections on the roles of capitalism and pro-capitalist thinking in the early modern world. Doing so changed my life as an American legal historian.

Those of us who became historians in the 1970s had imbibed a certain understanding of the levers of historical change from our intellectual parents and grand parents, as well as from the countercultural and New Left air we breathed. There had once been—we learned or intuitively knew—a more communitarian past. That past was one where “capitalists” were relatively absent. The minds (some of us had learned to use the word mentalité) of those living in that past were shaped by many forces, but capitalism was not one of them. There were varied and competing ways of connecting with, studying, and also liking or disliking that past. But everyone agreed that that past was gone, having been erased by the amoral if not immoral capitalists of 19th-century America.

Those of us interested in American constitutional history still carried within our little brains (at least, I carried such within my little brain) an implicit Beardian understanding of the course of history. That was the case even though we had certainly spent many seminar hours unpacking and exploring Charles Beard’s mistakes. Aproto-democratic community unleashed by the American Revolution had been constrained and controlled by the entrepreneurial forces that took over the country in 1787. And that takeover had given definitive shape to the U.S. Constitution. We still took as gospel an understanding drawn from early 20th-century Progressive critics about the relationship between constitutional law and capitalist change. We assumed that courts, particularly federal courts, were usually in the pocket of capital and worked to limit the public goals of democratic legislatures and working people. Modern law, as an expression of capitalism, stood in opposition to the democratic aspirations and plans of “the people.”

Many of us yearned for a soft, Marxisant interpretation of the American past. Many of us were entranced by Gramscian hegemony. For nearly all of us, capitalism was mindless; thought occurred else where. Few of us had ever read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. We were far more likely to have spent time with the early Marx (few read Capital ) or with newer French reflections on Marx and historical change.

During the late 1970s, just before Joyce Appleby’s entry onto the historical scene, many of us were seduced by the power of new civic republican interpretations of American origins. J.G.A. Pocock’s discovery and exploration of an early modern civic republican tradition seemed to remake the historian’s world. The languages of corruption, of the householder, of widened understandings of the political meaning of property ownership, and of the threats that commercialism posed to self-government excited us and renewed our sense that there was a radical past worth reclaiming. And, one might add, those interpretations resonated in deep ways with received tacit understandings. Civic republicanism seemed to offer a useful and attractive—that is to say a non-capitalist—tradition to which we could attach ourselves.

Appleby’s first book, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, and her famous essay “What is Still American in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson” in the William and Mary Quarterly were central to a sea change that affected me and I believe others of my generation of historians. Capitalism had a brain. Economic liberalism challenged the reactionary and patriarchal commitment to the household that characterized civic republican thought. After reading Appleby, I suddenly saw the civic republican householder in a different light. Now I recognized the propertied man who became entitled to participate as a citizen because he governed his domestic domain as a patriarch and a master. He might have been a virtuous model of civic republican thought because of his capacity to govern and resist oppression and corruption, as well as his land-based anti-capitalism. He might still have been a paragon of self-government and of citizenship. But he was also a patriarch and a master.

From Appleby many of us...