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  • Classical Republicanism, Whig Political Science, Tory History: The State of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought
  • Jack Fruchtman Jr.
J. G. A. Pocock, ed., with the assistance of Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer. The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. vii + 373. $59.95
Michael P. Zuckert. Natural Rights and the New Republicanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. vii + 397. $39.50
J. C. D. Clark. The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. vii + 404. $59.95
Peter N. Miller. Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 472. $69.95
E. J. Hundert. The Enlightenment’s “Fable”: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 284. $54.95

More than twenty years ago, with the publication of his magisterial The Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock set the terms of the debate over eighteenth-century political thought in the English-speaking world. 1 So influential has this book been that its themes concerning the origins and progress of the classical republic undergird two recent comments on contemporary American politics. 2 In it, Pocock argues that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century quarrel about politics and social relations rests on the paradigm of civic humanism derived from classical and Renaissance ideas beginning with Aristotle and ending with Machiavelli.

Civic humanism holds that the most practicable form of government is the republic because it promotes virtue through the citizenry’s public spirit and avoids corruption of self-aggrandizement and greed. As social relations are naturally divided between royalty, aristocracy, and the common people (the one, the few, and the many), government may balance the executive branch and two legislative branches so that no two coalesce to dominate the other. Pocock contends that James Harrington in the mid-seventeenth century imported these Machiavellian ideas into England, although Pocock never explicitly says how this transmission [End Page 94] took place. By 1675, under the leadership of the “neo-Harringtonian” Shaftesbury, the Lords and Commons, in political opposition to James II, concluded that the country and its constitution could only be saved with the installation of a new monarch who appreciated the balanced constitution. Thereafter, civic humanism in eighteenth-century discourse focused on the role of placemen in the court, infrequent elections and meetings of Parliament, an unequal representation, the rise of a new and threatening monied interest, and, with it, the dangerous development of paper money in place of natural specie. Included in these grievances were the collusion of church and state and the accompanying demand for subscription to the liturgy of the English Church for those desiring full citizenship rights.

The controversial character of Pocock’s work, particularly with its emphasis on the public-spirited citizen seeking the common good, has led critics to focus on several themes. Marxists claim that Pocock misses the class divisions that ravaged English society. 3 Straussian and “neo-Lockean” critics are appalled that Pocock ignored Locke’s individualism and liberalism. 4 Long regarded as central to the early opposition to James II and the subsequent success of the Revolution of 1688, Locke also figured prominently across the Atlantic nearly one hundred years later at the time of the American Revolution and the preparation and ratification of the American Constitution. For Pocock, Locke’s ideas never fit into the pattern (or paradigm, as Pocock prefers) of ideas that he traced from the classical to the early modern world. Instead he held that Locke’s place in English and American political thought is best relegated to the periphery. Because Locke simply did not engage in this debate, Pocock wrote, we must now realize that our “obsession with liberalism” derives from “the myth of John Locke.” 5

Pocock did not present his work on civic humanism de novo. Its origins lay in the pioneering work of three scholars: Zera S. Fink, who over fifty years ago first suggested the importance of civic humanist ideas in seventeenth-century English political thought; Caroline Robbins, who extended these ideas into the realm of...

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