“Producing a Reconciliation of Disinterestedness and Commerce”: The Political Rhetoric of Education in the Early Republic

Abstract

One of the vexing ambiguities in the historiography of the civic republican tradition has been just when and how republicanism ended. The American Revolution itself, according to Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock, was waged for republican principles, but the government established in its wake represented what Wood called “the end of classical politics,” abandoning virtue in the name of commerce and liberal individualism. By the close of the eighteenth century, Pocock writes, “A condition of thought … in which a bourgeois ideology, a civic morality for the market man, was ardently desired but apparently not to be found.” Later historians sought to extend republicanism's life into the nineteenth century, identifying figures and institutions who held fast to the tradition against the prevailing commercial and industrial winds, while others have taken the ambiguity of republicanism's end to suggest that no such coherent worldview existed in the United States, which was from the outset a liberal project employing only an occasional and misleading republican vocabulary. Even Wood, whose Radicalism of the American Revolution specifically set out to narrate the transformation of American political ideology from the Revolution to the ascent of the Jeffersonians, offers a general account of shifting rhetorical emphases—from virtue to equality, the common good to self-interest—but not the contours of this shift in any specific realm of American life.