Thematic Essay: British Political and Social Thought

V

The Contribution of Puritanism

The militant Puritans who supported Cromwell, particularly the Levellers, took more extreme measures to defend the rights of Parliament and Englishmen during the constitutional crisis. Members of Cromwell’s military force, the New Model Army, believed that God chose them to purge England of its pro-Catholic monarch. Cromwell's soldiers also opposed what they regarded as the unmerited privilege of the idle aristocracy. Cromwell’s army demanded voting rights for all men holding property, rather than just for wealthy landowners. One part of his army, the Levellers, took the demands a step further and argued that all men should be able to vote, a revolutionary idea in the 17th century. The Levellers asserted that 'the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he.' Some in the radical Puritan camp, called Diggers, advocated communal property, claiming that the Bible tells of the early Christians holding goods in common.

Behind the social and class radicalism of the Puritans lay the Protestant work ethic. From antiquity, social and political thought had been essentially limited to the concerns of men of leisure, ignoring those who worked for their livelihood. Political power by right belonged to those with the leisure time to be concerned with the public good, a task beyond the capacity of those who had to work hard. The Protestants reversed these assumptions with their embrace of the work ethic. Puritan writers such as Richard Baxter and John Bunyan produced influential texts describing a cosmic struggle between the forces of industry and idleness. Their texts vibrate with the conflict between productive, hardworking energy and idle, unproductive sloth.

Protestants viewed work as a battleground for personal salvation. Men served God by busying themselves in work that served both society and the individual. The doctrine of the calling gave each man a sense of his unique self, as God imposed the work appropriate to each individual. After being called to a particular occupation, it was a man's duty to labor diligently and to avoid idleness and sloth. The virtuous man realized himself and his talents through labor and achievement. The corrupt man was unproductive, indolent, and in the Devil's camp; he failed the test of individual responsibility. The ruling classes of idle nobility and useless monarchy were the enemy that God had sent the hardworking Puritan to slay.

VI

Thomas Hobbes

The political and constitutional crisis of the 17th century produced two of the most important figures in the history of British political thought. The first, philosopher Thomas Hobbes, challenged the assertions of both the parliamentary side and the Stuart royalist camp. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes repudiated the royalist argument that God gave kings absolute and indivisible power to rule, arguing that human beings make a conscious decision to be led. Long ago, living as free and equal individuals in a state of nature lacking any political authority, people voluntarily contracted to create a common governmental power over them. According to Hobbes, total freedom in the state of nature left each man insecure and frightened at the unrestrained power of other individuals, all of whom were driven by insatiable self-interest. Thus, Hobbes argued, government emerged from a rational and prudent act of will. Formerly free men consented to give up their freedom and to be governed, or, as Hobbes put it, to be held in awe by a common sword. The restraint that government imposes on personal freedom is thus justified by the security and order that government provides.

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Leviathan infuriated the royalists by challenging the notion of divine right, but it also upset the supporters of Parliament because Hobbes advocated absolutist rule. Hobbes argued that the consent of the people to be led justifies an all-powerful government. Either a legislature or a monarch may exercise power as long as authority over society is complete. Any challenge to this authority jeopardizes the peace and security provided by government and is thus both illegitimate and dangerous. In Hobbes’s view, disobeying government will return individuals to the chaos and fear of the state of nature, where nothing restrains the appetites of competitive men. Many supporters of Parliament saw Hobbes's idealized government, which he labeled Leviathan, to be just as authoritarian as the government that the Stuarts attempted to impose.

VII

John Locke

In 1688 Parliament triumphed in the Glorious Revolution, securing the division of power between the throne and the legislature. John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), best captured the predominant political theory that ensued after this final settlement of the constitutional crisis. Much like Hobbes, Locke conceived of civil government as a rational creation, established by people wishing to leave a chaotic state of nature. Locke, however, was more optimistic about the nature of human beings. He described a state of nature in which people tend to respect one another's natural rights to life, liberty, and property. The assumption that human beings are inherently good is at the heart of what has come to be called Lockean liberalism.

However, Locke acknowledged that conflicts will inevitably arise over property, and the occasional thief will disregard the natural rights of others. Therefore, Locke maintained, individuals consent to be governed; in this claim, he echoed Hobbes. Locke differed dramatically from Hobbes, however, in asserting that the people, having consented to be governed, can change government if it interferes with the natural rights of those who contracted to obey it, or if it fails to protect individual rights. Locke's description of the people's power to change governments was embodied in the Glorious Revolution and was later enlisted by Thomas Jefferson during the American Revolution in the argument of the Declaration of Independence (1776).

VIII

Republicanism

The English Revolution produced another school of political thought, republicanism, which was drawn from classical Greek and Roman theories of government. The word republic derives from the Latin res publica, which literally means “public things.” The book Oceana, published by scholar James Harrington in 1656, describes a republican utopia. In Oceana, government is not a personal possession of a monarch but is rather the common business of the people. Citizens participate in selecting representatives in government and serve in the military to secure the common good. Republican writers such as Harrington and British statesman Algernon Sidney, his contemporary, argued that citizens should run their own public affairs. Citizens, according to Harrington, are motivated by public spirit or civic virtue, a willingness to set the common good above their own individual interests. In Harrington’s conception, bearing arms and forming militias for common protection express this public spirit and guarantee independence from autocratic rule.

The principal republican theorist of the 18th century was statesman Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, who headed the opposition in Parliament to statesman Sir Robert Walpole’s leadership of the House of Commons. Bolingbroke contrasted the republican commitment to public spirit and civic virtue with the political corruption that he perceived in figures such as Walpole. Bolingbroke greatly expanded the definition of corruption beyond simple venality: He considered all leaders who lacked civic virtue to be corrupt. He regarded such men as preoccupied with self and uninterested in the public good. According to Bolingbroke, this type of corruption brings about a cycle in which states decline and require periodic revitalization and renewal to return to the original and pristine republican commitment to civic virtue.

Bolingbroke was widely read in the American colonies, and some scholars interpret the American Revolution (1775-1783) as a republican effort to throw off corrupt British rule and return to public-spirited self-government. Other scholars focus on the influence of Lockean liberalism on the American Revolution. Locke, too, was widely read in 18th-century America. His belief in the natural rights of men to life, liberty, and property are concerned less with republican civic spirit and more with individual self-interest, which can be discerned in much of the political rhetoric surrounding the revolution.

IX

The Scottish Enlightenment

Another group of 18th-century British thinkers, Scottish intellectuals from Glasgow, Edinburgh, and St. Andrews, offered a conception of human nature and an interpretation of history rather different from those put forward by Lockean liberalism and neoclassical republicanism. Thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith did not depict men as the independent and autonomous individuals described by Locke. Men, they insisted, are moved to community by a common moral sense that produces sociability and benevolent cooperation. These thinkers regarded the quest for a moral life as the product of a disinterested and rational perception of the common good. Moral sense provides all men with an intuitive knowledge of what is right and wrong. All men are equal in the view of this school, since they all possess the moral capacity for sociability and benevolence.

The Scottish school proposed a unique interpretation of history. Unlike the republican thinkers, Scottish writers such as Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Lord Henry Home Kames, did not see history as Bolingbroke’s repeating cycle of destructive corruption and virtuous revitalization. Nor did they see the present as an era of luxury and selfishness, falling short of the goals of republicanism. Rather, they depicted history as evolving in terms of distinct stages of development, each characterized by the primary mode of economic production. Societies move through four progressive stages: the ages of hunting, herding, agriculture, and commerce. The highest stage, commerce, produces economic abundance and a freer, more civilized social order. For Hume and Smith, modern market society, not the classical or Saxon past, produced freedom and happiness.

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