The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America by Lee Ward

Abstract

161 LEE WARD. The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004. Pp. x ⫹ 459. $90. There are two competing stories about the ideological meaning of England ’s Exclusion Crisis and its aftermath . According to one, the ‘‘Liberal Consensus,’’ the key figure was Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government, written during the crisis although not published until many years later, defended the propositions that all people bear natural rights, that political authority comes from the consent of the governed , and that subjects have a right to revolt against their sovereign when the latter fails to uphold the terms of the social contract. On this view, the Whig side in the Exclusion Crisis was really interested in limited government and individual liberty; and their aborted revolution served as the first warning of the coming age of tolerance, commerce, secularism, and the rise of ‘‘possessive individualism.’’ After Locke’s ideas finally won out during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it took less than a century for them to jump the Atlantic and serve as the ideological foundation of the American Revolution. In the alternative story, called the ‘‘Republican Synthesis,’’ the key thinker of the Exclusion Crisis was James Harrington, along with the other civic humanists of the middle- and lateseventeenth century, who defended the importance of participatory government, the separation of powers, a written constitution , and the cultivation of civic virtue over bare individual liberty. On this view, the Whig side of the Exclusion Crisis was really interested in civic virtue as expressed in collective self-rule by the gentry, and their aborted revolution served as the first warning of the coming age of democracy, egalitarianism , nationalism, and the rise of ‘‘republicanism.’’ Needless to say, after Harrington’s ideas finally won out during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it took less than a century for them to jump the Atlantic and serve as the ideological foundation of the American Revolution. These two stories have dominated the study of Anglo-American politics for nearly a century. The ‘‘liberal’’ reading came on the scene in the 1920’s as a needed corrective to a narrowly economic interpretation of Anglo-American political history, but as soon as it had established its claim that ideas are a fundamental force in political history, the fight was on regarding which ideas dominated during this tumultuous period . The champions of the two camps constitute a who’s who of modern intellectual history, with the likes of Carl Becker, Louis Hartz, and Richard Hofstadter on the ‘‘liberal’’ side and Caroline Robbins, Gordon Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock on the ‘‘republican.’’ Today, these interpretations have reached a kind of stalemate. Most historians would agree that people’s ideas and values play an essential role in the movement of political history, and also that both liberal and republican ideologies were at work in this period on both sides of the north Atlantic. In his new book, Mr. Ward, wishing to end the stalemate, argues that that liberalism and republicanism were two strands of a single, complex Whig political philosophy that used every means at its disposal to oppose divine right absolutism. The point of his study is: ‘‘Through detailed analysis of the major Whig Exclusion era tracts by James Tyrrell, Al- 162 gernon Sidney, and John Locke, we will observe the emergence of distinctively liberal and republican modes of thought and discourse.’’ For the most part, it succeeds wonderfully. Mr. Ward’s simple but profound contribution to the debate shows that the liberal and republican interpretations present a false dichotomy—they both can be true. The intellectual forces that shaped the Exclusion Crisis and Glorious Revolution drew strength from the principles of natural liberty and individual rights as well as from the principles of civic virtue and political participation . The Whig political discourse of the period emphasized the value of liberty as well as the importance of virtue, which means that it is overly simplistic and schematic to reduce the whole conversation to a single paradigm. Mr. Ward does an excellent job of recreating the intellectual milieu of the Exclusion Crisis by revivifying the major alternative political philosophies, many of which are virtually unknown today, that formed the...