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II. The Marriage of Rights and Inequality
- University of Virginia Press
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british legacies 41 defined an elite, by basing value on merit, a quality that, unlike noble birth, was achievable by the middle class. That this competition was transmitted to eighteenth-century America can be seen in the fact that Revolutionary elites condemned (unobtainable) pedigrees, and instead endorsed (obtainable) merit as the primary virtue legitimizing them as an upper class. Although they were otherwise emulating many of the old values of landed nobility, the historically new American elite was in fact in a situation closest to that of the contemporary English commercial class in their struggle for respectability. Like the metropolitan merchants, they attained their wealth not through a long line of inheritances but through their own economic activities. As Zygmunt Bauman has compellingly argued, the newness of the elevated position of such self-made men made it easier for them to claim rights and liberties they did not previously possess because their very lives showed that change was possible. This, combined with the growing Enlightenment faith in human perfectibility, encouraged those who insisted that what thus far had been an ancient and impregnable social order could be modified to accept them.∞≤ It was a path tailor-made for Americans. In England, the link between birth and rights continued unbroken until the early nineteenth century. What matters for our argument is that whatever the divergences existed between them in the eighteenth century, both the metropolis and the colonies witnessed a firm nexus between privilege, in the form of exclusively held liberties, and the cultural identity of those who held them. II. The Marriage of Rights and Inequality They are silly People who imagine, that the Good of the Whole is consistent with the Good of every Individual; and at best they are insincere. —Bernard Mandeville, A Letter to Dion, 1732 One of the most intellectually thorny discoveries for students of Enlightenment in England and America is that natural rights not only coexisted, but coexisted quite e√ortlessly with inequalities and unfreedoms. Upon deeper examination, an even more inconvenient truth emerges—they 42 culture and liberty in the age of the american revolution did not just coexist, they were closely tied in a bond of matrimony. Liberty, as pointed out earlier, denoted a spectrum of enforceable rights, with their fullest enjoyment exclusive to members of the elite. It was a selective entitlement to which one was admitted under certain conditions. At its core lay what one Massachusetts author called the freeholders’ ‘‘privilege of becoming party to the laws.’’ Notably, those few liberties that were granted to the nonelites tended to be viewed as passive rights, implying the lack of full control over them by those who nominally held them. Henry Parker, the great theorist of the English Revolution, o√ered a particularly clear explanation of the reasoning behind the distribution of liberty in proportion to social rank: ‘‘Liberty is the due birth-right, of every Englishman: but Liberty has its bounds, and rules. . . . By the laws of Liberty every man is to injoy, that which is his own: but since one man has far greater, and better things to injoy, than another, the liberties of one may extend further, than the Liberties of another.’’∞≥ In America one encounters this understanding throughout the eighteenth century. As the Massachusetts Congregationalist Abraham Williams observed in a sermon on the eve of the Stamp Act, ‘‘All Men being naturally equal, [they are] embued with like Faculties and propensities, having originally equal Rights and Properties . . . yet Men not being equally industrious and frugal, their Properties and Enjoyments would be unequal.’’ These di√erences led to a natural hierarchy: ‘‘A Society without di√erent Orders and O≈ces, like a Body without Eyes, Hands, and other Members, would be uncapable of acting, either to secure an internal Order and well-being or defend itself from external injuries.’’ ‘‘I think it must be manifest,’’ wrote Timothy Ford more than thirty years later, ‘‘that men cannot be considered equal in their natural endowments, nor in their personal acquisitions; nor in their civil rights, as regards those acquisitions: that is to say, that though a man worth but 10l. has as clear a right to what he holds, as the one worth 10 000l. yet the latter surely has more extensive civil rights guaranteed by society, than the former.’’ ‘‘A fly, or a worm,’’ noted John Allen, ‘‘by the law of nature, has as great a right to Liberty, and Freedom, (according to their little sphere in life,) as...