Classical Republicanism Research Articles

The Foundations of Neo-Classical Professionalism in Law and Business

Both the management of private enterprise and the practice of corporate law must be radically remodeled if they are properly to serve their correlate values: prosperity and justice. In that remodeling, the cornerstone of professional status would be appreciation of the deepest values of our common culture, gained through liberal education in the humanities and social sciences. Lawyers and managers need this appreciation because, under the best available institutional arrangements, they together must actively shape our public world, both in the law and in the market, for the common welfare.The professional’s requisite cultural appreciation has two essential components, one intellectual, the other moral: an understanding of our basic shared values and a commitment to their advancement. The former, intellectual, component can be guaranteed through some combination of market forces and legal mandates; putting the latter, moral, component in place poses greater problems. Yet it is equally basic, the foundation of public service on which both law and the market must rest in a capitalist republic.Remodeling professionalism along these lines it not a mere academic exercise; it entails significant structural changes in both business and law. In business, elite management must be recognized and re-structured as a profession; in law, the lower levels of practice must be removed from the relatively protected, quasi-autonomous regime of professional self-regulation and treated as ordinary trades or businesses. This dual shift would draw the dividing line of professional status not vertically, between law and business, as in the Anglo-American tradition, but rather horizontally, across the two occupations, more in accord with the continental European model. This shift would meaningfully respond both to management reformers like Brandeis in the US and Tawney in the UK and to critics of the professions from the sociological left, like Magali Larson, as well as the economic right, like Milton Friedman. And this shift will integrate the “intramural” perspective of legal and business ethics with the “extramural” perspective of the sociology of work. The result would be a neo-classical professionalism in both law and business, a model for modern professionals seeking to serve classical republican values. The remodeling recommended proceeds in two phases; this paper is the second. The first phase surveyed the foundations of classic professionalism theory, pointed out their failure to be deep enough for law and wide enough for business, and suggested how they might properly be expanded in both directions. This second phase undertakes that expansion, providing a blueprint for neo-classical professionalism in law and business. It shows how law and business function together at the base of our modern society, how lawyers and managers as neo-classical professionals are essential to the proper functioning of both the law and the market, and how we can sustain neo-classical professionalism without traditional institutions of occupational self-regulation.

"While Pen, Ink & Paper Can Be Had": Reading and Writing in a Time of Revolution

"'While Pen, Ink & Paper Can Be Had'" considers reading and writing from a variety of angles: as a cultural practice, as a form of self-representation, and as a material act. It is based on letters exchanged by members of two eighteenth-century discursive communities; the correspondence itself was situated within and given its character by a particular historical context, in this instance a British America in the midst of revolution. Those engaging in "converse of the pen," a metaphor invoked by the novelist Samuel Richardson, depended on a body of shared knowledge and presumed the ability both to recognize and to place in context allusions and passages taken from other texts. A son and a daughter of families who counted themselves members of Boston's merchant elite, William Tudor and Delia Jarvis forged a courtship in and through a remarkably rich trans-Atlantic literary culture. Tudor's correspondence with John Adams, which dealt with the invention of a nation, militarily and politically, was grounded in a second discursive community, which centered on eighteenth-century interpretations of classical republicanism. We have presumed that these interpretive communities operated on different discursive and cognitive terrains. The letters Tudor exchanged with Jarvis and Adams suggests that a shared language of sensibility cut across these categorical distinctions.

Dissenting Patriots: Anna Barbauld, John Aikin, and the Discourse of Eighteenth-Century Republicanism in Rational Dissent

Summary Sister and brother Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin; 1743–1825) and John Aikin (1747–1822) are two famous Rational Dissenting writers who strategically appropriated republican discourse to advance the Dissenting cause. Both make the case that, far from being subversive, Rational Dissent actually granted its adherents the independence that, from a republican perspective, was considered essential to true patriotism. In a fresh formulation of republican discourse, they present the strength of the Rational Dissenting commitment to ‘free inquiry’ as security for continuing independence, enabling liberal Dissenters to act as patriotic guardians of British virtue and liberty against the dangerous effects of luxury, even as they continued to contribute towards the development of the British commercial economy and to promote the benefits of commerce, traditionally regarded with hostility by classical republicans. Effectively exploiting the classical republican belief in the central role of education, Barbauld and Aikin particularly sought to publicize the role that the Dissenting academies had played in producing patriots by making ‘free inquiry’ the basis of their pedagogical philosophy and practice.

The Wizard of Oil: Abraham James, the Harmonial Wells, and the Psychometric History of the Oil Industry

American spiritualism and the oil industry developed around the same time and in relatively close geographic proximity. Both nineteenth-century phenomena were invested in a belief in the unseen, whether in the form of deceased loved ones or of underground oil reserves. Spiritualists such as Abraham James turned to the oil industry because of its lucrative financial opportunities and because of its potential to demonstrate the “practical” applications of spiritualism and Harmonial philosophy. Spiritualism offered an alternative to evangelical Christian and classical republican conceptions of industry, and a vibrant communication network through which events in the oil fields could be related to the general public. Reading accounts of James's work as an “oil wizard” reveals the industrial aspirations of spiritualism and the psychometric aspects of the oil industry, both of which have been largely erased in twentieth-century historiography. Spiritualist publications, newspapers, technical manuals, and popular accounts of the oil industry throughout the nineteenth century produced James as a new kind of male medium, capable of meeting the exigencies of the oil fields. He proved infinitely reproducible as an agent of “practical spiritualism” and was discussed alongside the other drillers, operators, laborers, teamsters, and investors at work in the oil region. As petroleum geology began to establish itself as a discipline in the early twentieth century, accounts of the early oil industry reframed James, along with other practitioners of divination, as an amusing, if somewhat embarrassing, anomaly in an attempt to distinguish the modern “scientific” oil industry from its chaotic and superstitious beginnings. While later historians have offered a more sympathetic reading of divination's role in the oil fields, James and his Harmonial wells have largely disappeared from the historical record. Yet, despite scientific innovation and revisionist history, the oil industry still bears traces of its psychometric past and must contend with the ways in which its future is dependent on successfully channeling the unseen.

What counts as arbitrary power?

What counts as arbitrary power? Civic republicans argue that an account of political liberty or freedom as consisting in the absence of domination best captures the spirit of the classical republican tradition, and also provides the basis for an attractive contemporary political doctrine. Domination, in turn, is usually understood as a sort of dependence on arbitrary social power. While there are many aspects of this conception of freedom as non-domination that might be regarded as controversial, this paper focuses on the specific issue of arbitrariness. It advocates a particular conception of arbitrariness that diverges from the mainstream view among civic republicans, and from the view of Philip Pettit in particular. Specifically, it argues that arbitrariness should be understood procedurally, and not substantively.

Conversations with the Classics: Ancient Political Virtue and Two Modern Revolutions

Since R. R. Palmer formulated his influential thesis about the Age of the Democratic Revolution half a century ago, historians have criticized and revised his views on the nature of the late eighteenth-century political revolutions in the Western world. They have, among other things, pointed out that whereas Palmer treated those revolutions as a sharp break with the past, revolutionary political thought in fact remained significantly rooted in classical republicanism. Departing from such insights, this article discusses some of the ways in which the classical heritage remained relevant to the late eighteenth-century revolutions in both America and the Dutch Republic. After reviewing the various ways in which the Palmer thesis has been revised over the past decades, this article focuses on the immense importance of the classical notion of virtuous participatory citizenship for revolutionaries on both sides of the ocean. It demonstrates how this notion not only was of crucial consequence in the initial assault on the established order, but also remained conspicuously present in the constructive phase of both the American and the Dutch revolutions, particularly in the substantial debates over the proper size of a republic and the nature of political representation.

Republics Ancient and Modern (Continued)

Republics Ancient and Modern (Continued) Michael P. Zuckert (bio) Paul A. Rahe . Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii + 422 pp. List of abbreviations, notes, and index. $74.00 (cloth); $29.99 (paper). Paul A. Rahe . Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. xvii + 374 pp. List of abbreviations, notes, and index. $38.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). Twice in Against Throne and Altar Paul Rahe calls John Milton "the best-read Englishman of his generation" (ATA, pp. 102, 155). I suppose that claim could be made for Paul Rahe himself. He seems to have read or at least cited in his notes every primary and secondary text of even tangential relevance to his topics. It is difficult to imagine a better bibliographical guide to those materials than Rahe's notes, which also contain extremely learned discussions of issues roiling the relevant scholarly waters. Moreover, the range of topics, thinkers, and historical eras Rahe covers is more than impressive. In the two books under review, he takes up the modern republican tradition from Machiavelli through Margaret Thatcher, Nicholas Sarkozy, and, very briefly, Barack Obama, with backward looks at Epicurus, Aristotle, Averroes, and the medieval Averroist tradition. He traces the resurgence of Averroism at Padua in the fifteenth century and follows the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of inquietude from Pascal through Nicole and Locke and up to its central role in Tocqueville's diagnosis of the ills of modern democratic republicanism, among many other things. Learnedness is not Rahe's sole virtue. Despite the heavy overlay of scholarship, he writes lucid, fluid, and graceful prose. He has a point—or many points—to make and addresses important questions. He writes not only clear but fearless prose, for he jumps into many raging scholarly and political debates with forcefully put judgments about where truth lies. For a historian, he delves extremely deeply into the thought he is discussing. For a student of political thought, he is remarkably knowledgeable about the relevant history. He is more careful with the thought and more pointed in his use of historical context than writers of the so-called Cambridge school, of whom he often reminds one. [End Page 10] Both books are related to Rahe's earlier mammoth Republics Ancient and Modern (RAM, 1992), which was an attempt to elucidate not the continuities between ancient and modern republicanism, as modern authorities like J. G. A. Pocock had done, but to bring out the "decisive break" between them (RAM, p. x). Against Throne and Altar is clearly part of that same agenda. Indeed, he presents it as "a sequel of sorts," aiming to make up for the "short shrift" he had given some thinkers in the earlier book's twelve hundred pages (ATA, p. 1). To redress the slight inflicted by the earlier book, he discusses at length Machiavelli, John Milton, Marchmont Nedham, Thomas Hobbes, and James Harrington. His point is not merely that these five thinkers were under-discussed earlier, but that they represent a tradition of Machiavellian republicanism (or at least Nedham and Harrington do); and the tradition is an important one, for "their thinking marked a turning point in the history of constitutional prudence" (ATT, p. 1). Although Milton is sometimes treated as one of the English republicans influenced by Machiavelli, Rahe sees him differently. He is a contrast with the Machiavellians, for he is a genuine representative of the classical republican tradition, albeit one who took Machiavelli seriously but wrote in opposition to him. The differences between Milton and the others, thus, is a carryover from the theme of Republics Ancient and Modern—that there is really a great difference between the two forms of political thought. Rahe does not consider Hobbes to be a Machiavellian republican either; he presents him rather as a "modern monarchist" who, in his youth, was touched by Machiavelli but who has a place in this book because he greatly influenced James Harrington, whose republicanism was, Rahe argues, an amalgam of Machiavellian and Hobbesean themes. Rahe's other book, Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift (SD...

Montesquieu and Modern Republicanism

In this article I explore Montesquieu's discussion of republics and the constitution of England in order to question the extent to which he should be accorded a central place in a tradition of modern republicanism. This involves challenging Paul Rahe's recent thesis that Montesquieu thought both that monarchy was not at all suited to modernity and that England was a republic all along. By stressing the importance of honour and ambition I argue that the liberty that Montesquieu thought exemplified in the English constitution was, in large part, secured by its monarchical principle. Moreover, by eschewing the relevance of political virtue for modern commercial societies, Montesquieu set his own proposals out in opposition to the prevalent French republican discourse of his time; thus it is highly problematic to view him as having proposed a republic for the moderns. The article also serves to disentangle Montesquieu's understanding of political liberty from his analysis of republics in order to refute the idea that he provides support for a distinctively republican conception of liberty as non-domination. This undermines the republican critique of liberalism set forth by Philip Pettit, which is further challenged by considering the affinities between Montesquieu's and Constant's conceptions of liberty. Many commentators have argued that Montesquieu repudiated classical republicanism, yet on the reading advanced in this article it is equally problematic to view him as a modern republican.

Milton Among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism

Reviewed by: Milton Among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism Katherine Romack (bio) Catherine Gimelli Martin . Milton Among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010. 360 + xvi pages. $99.95. Catherine Gimelli Martin opens her Milton Among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism with an offensive against the Whiggish tendencies of contemporary Milton studies, a subfield she characterizes as "exceptional" in its ignorance of the now "mainstream" revisionism informing early modern historiography (xiii). Framing her study as a corrective, Martin pointedly asserts, "contrary to long-standing assumptions still held widely in the academic community, Milton was not a puritan" (xi). Distancing Milton from his puritan [End Page 146] contemporaries, Martin situates him in the liberal theological tradition that gave rise to religious rationalism and modern Unitarianism and argues that Milton's art and philosophy, especially later in life, are better compared to the comprehensive, ecumenical, and rationalist thinking of the Anglican Latitudinarians than to the puritans (12). The book is divided into two parts. The first half of the book surveys revisionist contributions to seventeenth-century historiography and situates Milton in contexts that question the easy association of Milton with puritanism. Her introduction, "Carlyle's Ghost," deftly covers revisionist accounts of the "multiple causes and effects of the 'Great Rebellion'" (26) from Conrad Russell to Patrick Collinson. Martin moves on, in subsequent chapters, to examine the "non-puritanical" and Baconian aspects of Milton's early poetry and prose writing. She pits the puritans against rationalist and secular approaches to "law, education, science, rhetoric and the ministry" (26), anchoring Milton firmly to the latter. Part II "traces the effects of these mainly secular-rationalist influences (including classical republicanism) on Milton's major poems" (26). Her afterword explores Milton's "posthumous contribution" to modern "secular theories of toleration" (27). Despite her affirmation of the relevance and indispensability of the term "puritan" for Milton studies, Martin's somewhat murky and selective deployment of the term detracts greatly from the book (32-33). Her merging of a wide array of religious dissenters under the broad label of "puritan," a term that she not so subtly equates with anti-intellectual Calvinist zealotry, does more to obscure than to clarify Milton's place "among" but not "of " the puritans (21). Dissenters as disparate as Baptists, Fifth Monarchists, Levellers, and Quakers are yoked together and reduced to a "godly" common denominator throughout much of the book. Also, the privileged place of the Socinians in Martin's account is accomplished only by downplaying the radical piety and congregational impulses of Socinians like John Biddle, whose 1655 imprisonment for blasphemy, for example, was opposed most strongly by Henry Vane, a figure who is consistently identified with "the godly" by Martin (153; 284). The understanding of puritans advanced by her book is inferior to that of other revisionist scholars such as Nicholas Tyacke who, following the work of Christina Garrett, has carefully traced the genealogy of puritanism back to the Marian exiles. Contra Martin, Tyacke, recognizing the diversity of puritan thought, documents a progressive broadening of the field of their thought and action over time and has recently asserted that Milton's arguments [End Page 147] for liberty, in fact, "exemplify . . . the puritan paradigm of English politics" (550). Tyacke documents a long history of puritan engagements with secular politics and rejects "misleadingly narrow" religious definitions that "ignore the existence of a much more all-embracing puritan political vision" (527). The chapters in Part II are very strong for what they are: a close reading of the Baconian and secular aspects of the cosmology and anthropology of Paradise Lost, an interpretation of Paradise Regained that provocatively and persuasively critiques scholarship that "isolates" Milton from the dominant neoclassical aesthetics of the day, and an argument for classifying Samson Agonistes as a "classical republican" tragedy (279). These chapters offer a more nuanced survey of Milton's writings and to some extent qualify the strident anti-puritan polemic that structures the first two hundred pages of the book. The opening chapter of Part II offers a survey of "secular resources" that illuminate the "philosophical, cosmological and anthropological framework" (215) of Paradise Lost. Martin clearly states that her chapter is...

Harrington's Empire of Law

Nearly every reader of James Harrington has taken his theory that property is the foundation of government to be his central and most enduring contribution to political thought. Operating within this standard reading, most of the extensive literature on Harrington has focused on derivative issues, such as the accuracy and depth of his economic reading of English history, or the extent to which his mechanistic account of political institutions displaced more traditional republican accounts of civic virtue. But the standard reading is incomplete. For example, it is puzzling on this reading why Harrington should single out Thomas Hobbes as his chief opponent. To demonstrate the incompleteness of the standard reading, this article will examine a relatively neglected aspect of Oceana: namely, the sharp contrast drawn throughout the work between those communities organized as an ‘empire of laws' and those organized as an ‘empire of men’. As it turns out, Harrington strikes upon a deep problem, not noticed by previous authors in the classical republican tradition, but nevertheless lying at the very conceptual core of republican theory. Examining this problem in detail is both interesting in its own right, in so far as it sheds light on some central issues in republican theory, and in the renewed historical appreciation it brings to our reading of Harrington as well.

Classical republicanism and the contemporary voter: An empirical cultural sociology of the relationship between the private realm and the public sphere

Political behavior is often explained on the basis of the general presupposition that an individual's life experiences generate interests that, in turn, influence voting. The alternative conception, based on cultural sociology, explains ways of feeling, thinking, and doing (e.g., voting) on the basis of a social-symbolic text that creates a symbolic order, that influences a person's perception of his situation, and that establishes a legitimate link between this perception and a way to politically act upon it. A cultural sociology of politics has therefore, first, to answer the question whether today the private and the public spheres are fused or compartmentalized and, if compartmentalized, then which of the two influences voting. Hypotheses that can be derived from those different theoretical positions are tested on the basis of a purely random sample collected in 2006 of 2656 Dutch-speaking inhabitants of Belgium, aged 19–81. Findings indicate that the private and the public realms are compartmentalized—and it is not the degree of satisfaction with the private realm, but the evaluation of the public realm, that influences important electoral decisions. These findings run counter the hypotheses derived from rational choice theory, illustrating the importance of a cultural sociology of politics.

The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (review)

The Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good. By John Lauritz Larson. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 208. Cloth, $75.00; Paper, $20.99.)Reviewed by Daniel Walker HoweIn this model monograph, John Lauritz Larson explores the transformation of the American economy from independence to the eve of civil war, emphasizing its consequences for the population. A master of the subject, Larson beautifully lays out not only the broad outlines of his theme but its complexities and subtleties in two hundred judicious, insightful pages. He manages to convey the sophistication of current scholarship in language accessible to students or any other curious, literate reader.Larson here redeems the term from the treatment accorded it by Charles Sellers in TL· Revolution: Jfacksonian America, 1815-1846 (Oxford, UK, 1991). Sellers reified the market revolution, making it an actor in his story - indeed, its villain. Sellers's wicked Market ruined the lives of happy subsistence farmers, forcing their sons and daughters to become a proletariat in the service of a repressive bourgeoisie. By contrast, Larson shows how the market revolution was made by the people themselves, bit by unwitting bit. His own stance toward this process is richly ironic and nuanced; he never fails to point out ambiguities and paradoxes.Larson punctuates his account with interludes on the Panics of 1819 and 1837, moments when the public were shocked by the miscarriage of their plans, but not sufficiently disillusioned to scrap their various projects of improvement and self-improvement which, eventually and unintentionally, added up to the modernization or of the country. (These terms are used in a common sense rather than a technical sense.) Larson looks at the process from many points of view, including those of farmers, artisans, factory workers, entrepreneurs, black people, and women. The peculiarities of southern slavery in distorting the various developments are explained.Larson follows conventional historical understanding in referring to the situation that preceded the market revolution in America as classical republicanism. Sellers portrayed the Jacksonian Democrats as defending classical republicanism against the Whig supporters of the market revolution. In his telling, the Jacksonians lost their struggle against the Market, even though they won their battle for white male political democracy. Larson presents a different take on the political debates of the antebellum period, a more accurate one in my judgment. In his narrative, the political conflict of the Second Party System wasn't between capitalism and classical republicanism; instead, the two parties endorsed rival versions of the market revolution. Neither side in the Second Party System actually wanted to maintain the old classical republicanism, though both of them enlisted it for rhetorical purposes. When all the ambiguities and subtleties in Larson's account are said and done, his Jacksonians suplaissez-faire capitalism; his Whigs, government-sponsored economic development and diversification.This analysis aligns the Jacksonians with Adam Smith, whose economic theory Larson presents at some length, and Smith's later American disciple William Graham Sumner. (It could have helped Larson make his point if he had thought to mention that Sumner was a Democrat.) So, in Larson's understanding, the Jacksonians win on both political and economic fronts: Mass-participation political parties and free enterprise each become the American norm. …

From exile of citizens to deportation of non-citizens: ancient Greece as a mirror to illuminate a modern transition

This article is an ancient Greek historian's response to an invitation to reflect upon modern liberal democratic deportation. The article identifies a revealing contrast between ancient Greek city-states and their modern republican successors. In ancient Greece, institutionalised lawful expulsion of non-citizens was not a major concern. Rather, it was lawful expulsion of citizens which was a prominent political issue, comparable to modern liberal democratic deportation. Indeed, modern liberal democratic deportation and associated rhetoric were significantly foreshadowed in the ancient Greek politics of expulsion: Greeks used and justified lawful expulsion of citizens as a means of constructing and reinforcing both state power and abstract, rationalistic norms of citizenship. The article suggests the hypothesis that the contrast between the ancient and the modern situations can be explained by the modern prevalence of universalist human rights norms, not politically influential in ancient Greece. First, human rights norms exert pressures on modern liberal democratic states, unparalleled in ancient Greece, to integrate and assist outsiders. Deportation is partly a reaction against those pressures, of a type unnecessary in the ancient Greek world. Second, although the modern liberal democratic analogues of Classical republican ideas, partly derived from their Classical antecedents, encourage lawful citizen expulsion, the modern citizen's inalienable human right to residence in his home state militates against it. Modern liberal democratic deportation of non-citizens, and associated rhetoric, can thus be interpreted partly as alternative outlets for the use of expulsion and exclusionary rhetoric to construct and reinforce complex norms of citizenship.

Milton among the Puritans: the case for historical revisionism

Contents: Preface Introduction: Carlyle's ghost Part I The Revolutionary Era: Historical Overview and Analysis of Milton's Early Works: A brief history of the 'Puritan revolution' Milton among the Puritans Vocation, prophecy, and secular reform in the early poems and prose The humanist ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics of Milton's Spenserian masque Mid-century debates on law, religion, rhetoric, education and science. Part II Restoration Culture and Milton's Major Works: The secular cosmology and anthropology of Milton's civilized Eden The neoclassical poetics of Paradise Regained The classical republican tragedy of defeat in Samson Agonistes Afterword: Milton and the early development of toleration in England Bibliography Index.

Dan Edelstein . The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2009 . Pp. xi, 337. $40.00.

Dan Edelstein's book has a challenging agenda: the ideological basis of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. The question of why the revolution, which began with such high‐minded idealism, descended within four years into a legalized Terror led by the Jacobins poses a fundamental problem. For some historians the primary cause lay in the “force of circumstances”—namely, the king's flight to Varennes, simultaneous war on several fronts, the threat of foreign invasion, civil war in the Vendée, factionalism, and federalist revolts. David Andress has recently reworked this view in The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution (2005). Other historians dismiss such explanations as letting the Jacobins too easily off the hook. They look instead into the ideologies that propelled the revolution forward, and argue that there was an inherent movement toward terror in certain ideas of the Enlightenment adopted by the Jacobins. But even those historians who seek an explanation for the Terror in prerevolutionary ideologies do not necessarily agree on which idea was the “fatal” one. The concept of the “general will” as propounded by Jean‐Jacques Rousseau has long been the most popular culprit, an argument made by François Furet in Interpreting the French Revolution (1981). Yet this notion has generated at least as much contention as consensus. Keith Michael Baker has taken a contrasting view: for him the call for terror emerged out of a mutation of the discourse of classical republicanism (for this argument, see Baker's article “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth‐Century France,” Journal of Modern History 73:1 [2001]: 32–53). Edelstein owes a considerable debt to Baker that he readily acknowledges. Nonetheless, his own conclusions are rather different. For him the ideological source of the Terror lay neither in “forcing people to be free,” nor in the political tradition of classical republicanism, but in one of the great liberal ideologies of the eighteenth century: that of natural right theory. “It was under the aegis of natural right, not the general will, that the Montagnards brought ‘terror’ into the Republic” (p. 259). It is a bold statement, with echoes of Edmund Burke, but Edelstein has an original approach, and musters an impressive amount of evidence to support his contention.

Contesting Thucydides' Legacy: Comparing Hannah Arendt and Hans Morgenthau on Imperialism, History and Theory

Post-war realists of every stripe have long sought to bolster the intellectual pedigree of their visions of international politics by claiming to be heirs of Thucydides. Hans Morgenthau invokes Thucydides to identify his own brand of realism with the timeless wisdom of a long tradition in Western political thought against the shallow modern conceits of contemporary liberal idealists. Using Arendt's and Morgenthau's treatments of imperialism as a point of comparison, the paper argues that she not only thought much more carefully about Thucydides' example than Morgenthau ever did, but also that her approach to politics, theory and history is much closer to Thucydides' own approach than Morgenthau's. This essay employs both Thucydides and Arendt to critique Morgenthau's approach, and argues that Arendt's approach to realism is superior to Morgenthau's. In drawing this comparison the paper focuses on three issues. First, Morgenthau's conception of ‘rational theory’ is compared with Arendt's understanding of event-centered history and the importance of narrative. Second, Morgenthau's attempt to ground the study of politics on human nature is compared with Arendt's focus on the character of human action. In contrast to Thucydides, Morgenthau postulates human nature as an abstract construct divorced from any specific circumstances. However, Arendt develops her conception of action from pre-Platonic Greek sources. Third, the theme of corruption in Arendt's analysis of imperialism is examined. The idea of corruption is a fundamental category of both classical and early-modern republican thought, and is predicated on the belief that politics is a virtuous activity but one always prone to decay, decadence and degeneration. Thucydides' account of the civil war in Corcyra offers one of the most incisive analyses of corruption. However, this theme is not only absent in Morgenthau's analysis of imperialism, but is fundamentally incompatible with his conception of politics as intrinsically corrupt in itself.

“The Use of Conversation”: William Godwin’s Conversable World and Romantic Sociability

JON MEE “The Use ofConversation”: William Godwin’s Conversable World and Romantic Sociability W illiam Godwin’s diary has the following entry for november 22, 1791: “Holcroft calls: talk of the Widow. Webb calls: talk of necessity virtue & perception. Call on Jacob, fr. Sup at Hollis’s, talk ofDa­ vid, Canaanites, and the use of conversation.”1 Around a century earlier, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a newly commercial culture had begun to think of its activities across the range of human endeavors as a kind of general “conversation,” this metaphorical shift being accompanied by the promotion (in handbooks and other places) of the social practice of conversation. In this context the question of the uses of conversation be­ came, long before Godwin’s time, a key issue for inquiries into the unity of the new society and the means of its further development. My particular historical window on this conversation of culture is the Romantic period, roughly speaking 1780 to 1822. For at least one critic, “the conversable world” (the phrase is Hume’s) meets one of its ends in Romanticism, where it runs into a wall of “solitude and the sublime.” My own perspec­ tive is closer to David Simpson’s in so far as I think the conversational turn remains one of the defining shifts into modernity.2 From this perspective, Romanticism may have asked new questions about the ends of conversa1 . “Godwin’s Diary,” Bodleian Library, MS. Abinger e.4. Godwin’s diary has been edited by Mark Philp, Victoria Myers, and David O’Shaughnessy and is now available online at http://godwin.oucs.ox.ac.uk:8o8i/index2.html, last accessed June 13, 2011. I am grateful to the editors for their help. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust for the award ofa Philip J. Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship that allowed me the time to pursue the research that went into this essay. 2. See Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History ofA Declining Art (New Haven and Lon­ don: Yale University Press, 2006), 177, and David Simpson The Academic Postmodern and the Pule of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). SiR, 50 (Winter 2011) 567 56S JON MEE tion, but it was far from signalling the end of the conversable world. Sam­ uel Taylor Coleridge’s conversation poems and William Wordsworth’s at­ tempt to reorient poetry towards “the language of conversation” in the preface to their Lyrical Ballads may serve as a provisional proof of this view, although the peculiar ends to which they put conversation are not my con­ cerns in this essay.3 My primary focus will be on the philosopher and nov­ elist William Godwin. The idea of “the conversation of culture” has, of course, become a cliche. Attempts to inaugurate various cultures ofconversation in a range of different spheres are also legion today. Governments in Britain and the United States frequently figure exercises in public consultation in terms of “conversation.” Possibly this tendency has filtered down (or up) from po­ litical theory. Certainly, theories of “deliberative democracy” (indebted more or less to Jurgen Habermas’s ideas) and also various attempts to reviv­ ify the classical republican tradition have both placed a great deal ofempha­ sis on the model of conversation.4 Both are attracted to it as a metaphor, at least, for an idea ofcommunity that is open to difference rather than the te­ leological fulfillment of prior identity. Although, strangely perhaps, he has little to say about Habermas or even developments in political theory in this regard, Simpson has recently related these cultural reflexes to various trends in academic philosophy and literary criticism, most notably in the work ofRichard Rorty and the new historicism respectively.5 Simpson sees in Rorty a tendency to make philosophy “a matter of conversations be­ tween persons rather than a matter of interaction with nonhuman reality. ”6 For Simpson, both the academic and political manifestations of this reflex ought to be understood as part of the long modern history of the “turn to the personal. ”7 At its worst, from Simpson’s point ofview, the appeal to 3. The various paratexts to the Lyrical Ballads several...

George Washington: Founding Philosopher?

George Washington:Founding Philosopher? Alan Gibson (bio) Jeffry H. Morrison . The Political Philosophy of George Washington. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2009. xxi + 226. Appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00. In a brief biographical sketch that he wrote of George Washington, Mark Twain asserted that Washington had shown no early signs of greatness or sagacity. "Young George," Twain quipped, "was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie." Twain continued: "It is related of him that he once chopped down his father's favorite cherry-tree, and then didn't know enough to keep dark about it."1 Although Twain sarcastically summoned this Parson Weems image of Washington for entertainment, variations of the view that Washington was simple, limpid, and obtuse have had serious defenders since the earliest days of the republic. Thomas Jefferson credited Washington with a "great and powerful" mind and concluded that, "as far as he saw," no one's judgment was sounder. Nevertheless, Washington's mind was "slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination," according to Jefferson. "When called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed."2 John Adams was less generous. Washington, Adams concluded, was "not a scholar" and was "too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his Station and reputation."3 More recently, John C. Fitzpatrick, editor of the Library of Congress edition of the Washington Papers, maintained that it "is easy to understand George Washington. It is easy to understand any thoroughly sincere, honest, simple soul" (p. xiv). Such assessments—strengthened by Washington's admissions that he was "conscious of a defective education," had little time for reading, and was a man of action whose designs should be judged from his deeds—have raised a persistent barrier to serious consideration of Washington's political thought.4 To be sure, scholars have acknowledged the importance of Washington's role as president of the Constitutional Convention. They have also recognized that the letter he signed that accompanied the proposed Constitution as it was submitted to Congress and then the states gave the Constitution legitimacy and helped secure its ratification. Garry Wills and Paul K. Longmore have [End Page 629] shown how Washington shrewdly shaped his own image.5 It is also increasingly fashionable to suggest that Washington was more complex than previously thought, to seek out his Machiavellian side, and to speak of Washington's political genius. Nevertheless, few scholars have suggested that anything on the order of a "political philosophy" can be reconstructed from Washington's correspondence and state papers.6 In the Political Philosophy of George Washington, Jeffry Morrison, an associate professor of government at Regent's University and the author of John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic, argues that standard characterizations of Washington as unlearned, dense, and thus intellectually dependent on others are as "mythical as Parson Weem's tale of the cherry tree" and should not stand in the way of exploring Washington's "coherent theory of American constitutionalism" and his "fully formed political philosophy" (pp. xiv, 18). The core of Washington's political philosophy, Morrison maintains, "revolved around the central principles of union, liberty, and self-government under the Constitution, administered with virtue as an example to the world, all under the superintendence of a benevolent Providence" (p. 16). This conception of political philosophy was built by combining classical republicanism, British liberalism, and Protestant Christianity—the three ideologies that, according to Morrison, were "dominant at the Founding" (p. xiv). Indeed, Washington's "syncretism," combined with his unsurpassed popularity among his contemporaries, helps to explain how he came to embody American ideals and to be viewed as the "Father of His Country" (p. 2). Speaking the three political languages that were literally "in the air" in the early republic, Washington became "uniquely the incarnation of early American political thought" (p. xv). More specifically, Washington, according to Morrison, had by 1789 "become the most classically republican American of his generation" (p. 63). The Greeks taught Washington and other Founders that tyranny often sprang from anarchy, which, in turn, resulted from excessive democracy, and that balanced and mixed government was the necessary antidote for this problem. They also inspired Washington...

The politics of patriotism in France (1770-1788)

—This article focuses on the language of patrie as it was employed from the 1770s to the 1780s in relation to the parlements. It was a complex and ambiguous rhetoric with roots in classical republicanism that was significantly modified in the 1740s and put to many uses. The study seeks to show how and why the parlementaires moved in public opinion from being patriotic heroes in the early 1770s to the decidedly unpatriotic agents of aristocracy in late 1788. The premise is that language in the courts is employed rhetorically and involves an attempt to convince auditors and readers of the arguments on both a rational and an emotional level. The discourse was thus appropriated by actors rather than dominating them. Patrie was evocative of emotions on several levels, from austerity to sensibility. On the other hand, the courts were not supposed to employ emotional arguments but judicial ones based upon the corpus of existing legislation. It is therefore instructive to trace their relationship to this idiom, particularly in the crisis periods of 1770–74 and 1787–89.

Sarah Scott and America: Sir George Ellison, The Man of Real Sensibility, and the Squire of Horton

Sarah Scott's English novel, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), had its broadest contemporary impact in a Philadelphia-issued epitome, The Man of Real Sensibility (1774). Considering the novel and the epitome together illustrates the instability of stories in transatlantic print culture, and important differences in transatlantic cultures and ideas. Reading both Ellisons against an important pro-American pamphlet (1774) by Scott's brother, Baron Rokeby, which shared many of the same concerns, distinguishes Scott's politics from classical republicanism and Lockean contractualism, and shows that Scott's conservatism was both less Utopian and more radical than it has seemed to previous critics.