Early Modern Liberalism (review)

Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. [x] + 314 pages.

Patterson proposes to chronicle for an audience of humanities generalists the genesis of modern liberalism from a canon of eloquent seventeenth-century English poets and philosophers, notably John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke. This project, we read in her introduction, runs counter to the polemics of journalistic conservatives, who would diminish liberalism into a partisan ideology sprung fully developed from New Deal advocacy and High Sixties protest (p. 2). She admits that a genealogy of liberalism might justifiably extend back to classical antiquity, to "Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, and some remarks by Aristotle," but she finds it significant that Thomas Jefferson noted the influence in generating the Declaration of Independence of such early modern English as well as ancient "elementary books of public right, [a]s Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc." (pp. 1, 275). She claims further that liberalism's early modern English origins provide a more direct and demonstrable history of the phenomenon than its ancient foundations as traced by intellectual historians who dogmatically hold that "ideas can only have precedents in other ideas" (p. 22). Her book aims to reconstruct a canon of protoliberal authors created both by rhetorically gifted men of ideas and politically activist intellectuals who preserved their work in posthumous editions, such as the republican Whigs John Toland and Thomas Hollis. In this way she attempts to document "the original transmission of liberalism from England to the United States" (p. 1).

In addition, she seeks to produce "evangelical historicism" calculated to inspire readers to appreciate liberalism's cultivation of long-prophesied principles of enlightened government (p. 2). Here her adopted model is John Wingate Thornton's The Pulpit of the American Revolution (1860), a collection largely comprised of pre-Revolution sermons that protested British control over American religion and politics and concluded with a 1683 sermon by President Ezra Stiles of Yale exhorting the future preservation of American liberty. Patterson admires this book for having "deliberately scrambled" these sermons from different times and occasions, interjected prefaces with quotations from Milton, Sidney, and Locke, and evinced faith in higher education by celebrating the political education of President Samuel Langdon of Harvard and the benefactions of Thomas Hollis to Harvard's library (pp. 10-12).

In her book parallels are throughout educed between the modern liberal ideal of freedom of religious practice and early modern Protestant belief in the right of private religious judgment, as well as between the modern ideal of protections against bodily violation and early modern Puritan republican and Dissenting Whig preoccupation with the right to resist tyrannic rulers. For these symmetries she draws synthetically on Caroline Robbins' 1959 The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman; Richard Ashcraft's and Jonathan Scott's studies of, respectively, Locke and Sidney as Whig radicals; and her own previous scholarship treating oppositionist political expression in Milton and Marvell, early Tudor and Stuart narratives of treason trials, and late seventeenth-century political secret histories. She points parallels to other liberal human rights by recalling textual moments in her canonical early modern authors. For example, the right to free public speech as formulated in Milton's famous rendition of legend in Areopagitica comparing published truth to "living intellect" "as lively and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men"--which for Patterson predicts the American Revolution in the name of liberalism (pp. 22-23). The right to education as envisioned in lines of Milton's anti-Stuart The Readie and Easie Way (1660), advocating, for all political subjects, access to "schools and academies at thir own choice, wherein thir children may be bred up in thir own sight to all learning and noble education not in grammar only but in all liberal arts and exercises . . . communicating the natural heat of government and culture more distributively to all extreme parts" (p. 24). The right to fair and equal legal process as recommended in this pæan to...