Volume 2, Chapter 33, The Growth of Libertarian Thought
We have touched several times, especially in dealing with religious doctrines and institutions, upon the growth of libertarian views in 18th century America.
This extremely significant development was not a full-blown giant suddenly burst upon the European and American scenes.
J. H. Hexter, in his brilliant Reappraisals in History, warns us of the dangerous temptation
toward a linear view of history, a view adopted in different ways by Whig and Marxist alike.
The linear view assumes a steady march from past to present. Hexter cites the concept
of the Rising Middle Classes. Historians, he points out, noted that the English middle
classes were dominant in the 19th century and virtually non-existent in the Middle Ages.
Hence, the linear assumption of a steady march upward by the middle classes century by century,
a picture which Hexter indicates is far from the truth. But the important point here is
is that history often moves not in a smoothly linear trend, but in varying patterns of rises
and falls of trends shattered by contrary trends.
The growth of libertarian thought in 18th century America was, to be sure, heavily influenced
by preceding growth in England, the main source of cultural influence on its colonies.
But the pattern was not so simple, for it must be remembered that parts of America itself
had experienced entirely libertarian institutions in the seventeenth century.
For example, Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
To a large extent, this libertarianism had been unarticulated.
In short, the abundance of fertile virgin land in a vast territory enabled individualism to come to full flower in many areas.
But only in such cases, important to be sure, as those of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson,
did practicing libertarianism receive theoretical articulation and groundwork.
This does not mean that no theoretical rationale existed.
Indeed, it exploded in a mighty surge during the height of the Puritan Revolution.
Roger Williams and his friends among the libertarian wing of that revolution helped each other develop these doctrines.
But the significant fact of the mid-17th century was the defeat of the Revolution
and the Victory of the Counter-Revolution.
In England, this victory can be pinpointed in Oliver Cromwell's shift rightward
and his suppression of the levelers, perhaps the finest libertarian movement up to that time.
The steady retreat of Roger Williams from libertarian principles and enthusiasm
A similar counterrevolution against liberalism occurred in other parts of Europe. In France, with the defeat of the Holy League in the late 16th century, and of the popular Frandour movements in the 17th century.
In Holland, with the victory of the Orange Party over the Republicans, civil war and
foreign wars prevented England from turning its attention to its American colonies until
the end of the seventeenth century. When it finally did so, it used its power to crush
libertarian reality where it existed in America. Thus, England imposed a counterrevolution
Rebellion on Virtually Libertarian Conditions in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and reversed
the liberal-tending Lislerian Revolution, which it had to force its way against what
was in many ways the most reactionary colony of all, New York.
Liberal-tending rebellions in the South, for example Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, were
were crushed, and reactionary policies entrenched or deepened. After the vigorous turmoil and
turbulence of the late seventeenth century, when so many parts of America struggled in
various ways toward freedom, a rather bleak uniformity was imposed on the colonies by
England. The first half of the eighteenth century saw an increasing political stalemate
between the contending forces, now generally consisting of crown and privileged oligarchy,
as against the rest of the population.
This period of quiescence was matched in the mother country, in institutions as well
as in thought and opinion.
In the first half of the 18th century, England settled down into a centrist Whig settlement.
Radical liberal thought was more or less underground, expressed in thin trickles by lone independent
thinkers. These liberals kept alive the torch of seventeenth-century Republican liberalism.
When the radical liberal movement burst forth once again as a political force in England
in the later eighteenth century, it came not as a completely new phenomenon, but as a renaissance
of 17th Century Radical Models. In the first half of the 18th Century, America
was more eager to learn from British liberalism past and contemporary than were the English
themselves. England was, for one thing, the major cultural and ideological influence in
the colonies, and Americans were eager to learn. For another, America had the heritage
of the 17th Century.
A Drive for Proprietary Profit and an American Refusal to Pay Quit Rents, an Established
Church Hierarchy, a Large Central State Apparatus, and a Thoroughly Oligarchic Polity.
Americans suffered from these ailments to some degree, differing from one colony to
the next, and such institutions as slavery, especially in the plantation south, and quasi
by Feudal Land Holdings in the Hudson Valley, presented great problems, but not nearly to
the extent experienced by Great Britain. Above all, the rapid breakdown of attempts at imposing
a feudal land system through open land and areas of American life to a mobility and opportunity
and Opportunity that Europe could not yet experience.
The far greater democracy in the bulk of the American colonies than in England was a reflection
of this breakdown.
If liberty was to be achieved in the Western world, it was clear by the 18th century that
America would have to take the lead to achieve in practice the fruits of a theory generated
in England.
One basic influence on colonial American thought was the fact that two contrasting traditions
emerged from its Protestant and Puritan heritage.
One was the fanatical, theocratic, persecuting tradition, which reached its apogee in Massachusetts
Bay and in the Dutch Orange Party.
The other was optimistic, individualist, libertarian, and even deistic, and was reflected in the
levelers, and in such escapees from Massachusetts as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, and
later in Charles Chauncey and Jonathan Mayhew.
Apart from ancient writers, three sources were the most frequently cited and quoted
in 18th Century America, especially in the first half of the century, Algernon Sidney,
John Locke, and Trenchard and Gordon of Cato's Letters. Each made a profound contribution
to the growth and development of libertarian thought in America. Algernon Sidney was one
of the leading theorists of the Republican movement in 17th Century England. In particular,
The doctrines expounded in his posthumously published Discourses Concerning Government
were stamped on men's minds by the circumstances of his martyrdom.
Arrested in the early 1680s, Sidney was killed in late 1683 by the Crown and thus dramatized
the Republican and Libertarian cause.
Sydney's basic importance was his stress on the right of revolution. To Sydney, revolution
and freedom were closely linked. Whenever people's liberties were threatened or invaded,
they had the right, nay, the duty, to rebel. Everyone might legitimately slay a tyrant,
And there is much justification for defending the rights of individuals against tyranny.
Revolution to Sydney was not an evil, but the people's great weapon for the overthrow
of tyranny and for exercising their rights to popular government.
There was nothing sacred about governments, which, on the contrary, should be changed
as required.
The types of law necessary in a country were to be discerned by man's reason investigating
the fundamental laws of man's nature. Against the arbitrary whim of the ruler, Sidney championed
law as written reason and as defense of life, liberty and property.
If there be no other law in a kingdom than the will of a prince, there is no such thing
as liberty.
Property also is an appendage to liberty, and tis as impossible for a man to have a
right to lands or goods if he has no liberty and enjoys his life only at the pleasure of
of another, as it is to enjoy either when he is deprived of them.
Although Sidney urged popular government as against monarchy, he was no believer in the
unlimited rights of Parliament. On the contrary, it was to be subordinated to the individual
and the Rights of the People. Power, he warned, inevitably corrupts, and every institutional
power must be guarded against. To Sydney, government rested on a contract between government
and governed. When government fails to perform its role in the service of the people, it
The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit
A liberal Republican and friend of Sir Henry Vane, the Massachusetts champion of Anne
Hutchinson, Sidney had been unhappy with Cromwell's turn to tyranny and had spent
the Republican years in retirement. He was then forced to spend the bulk of the restoration
Sydney's great classical model was Brutus and his stirring motto, Manus Hec Inimica
Tyrannus, this hand to tyrants ever sworn the foe, in the translation of John Quincy
Adams.
Algernon Sydney's widening impact on America during the 18th century influenced the great
Liberal Massachusetts Congregational Ministers Andrew Eliot and Jonathan Mayhew. Eliot testified
that this martyr to civil liberty first taught him just principles of government. Indeed,
the defense of revolution by the martyred Sidney was far more inspiring to Americans
than the defense by the timorous John Locke. Sidney's historical honor roll consisted of
of those who had helped their countrymen get rid of tyrants. Injustice, to Sidney, made
a government illegal. Swords were given to men that none be slaves, but such as knew
not how to use them, and the law that forbids injuries were of no use if no penalty might
be inflicted on those who will not obey it. Concluded Sidney, let the danger be never
are so great, there is a possibility of safety whilst men have life, hands, arms and courage
to use them, but the people must certainly perish who tamely suffer themselves to be
oppressed by the injustice, cruelty and malice of an ill magistrate.
The dying words of another contemporaneous martyr of the stewards, the Cromwellian Colonel
Richard Rumbold also served as inspiration to such revolutionary Americans as Thomas Jefferson.
I am sure there was no man born with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred
to ride him.
If Liberty found its martyr in Algernon, Sydney, it found its elaborated systematic
Defense in the Essay Concerning Civil Government of the noted philosopher John Locke. The essay,
we now know, was written in the early 1680s at about the same time as Sidney's discourses.
It was, therefore, written when Locke, too, was a revolutionary plotter against Stuart
Rule and not, as had been assumed, as a conservative ex post facto rationale for the Glorious Revolution
of 1688.
There were two strains in Locke's essay, the individualist and libertarian and the conservative
and majoritarian, and examples of caution and inconsistency are easy to find, but the
The individualist view is the core of the philosophic argument, while the majoritarian
and statist strain appears more in the later applied portions of the theory.
We know, furthermore, that Locke was an extraordinarily secretive and timorous writer on political
affairs, even for an age when criticism could and did lead to exile and death.
Hence it is not unreasonable to assume that the conservative strain in Locke was a camouflage
for the radically libertarian core of his position. Certainly it was not difficult to
concentrate on that core and make it the groundwork of a libertarian creed. And Locke's essay
was particularly worthwhile in that it soared above the usual narrowly parochial concern
of the Day for Time and Place, from English liberty, ancient privileges and the common
law to a universal abstract political philosophy grounded on the nature of man.
Locke began his analysis with the state of nature, not as a historical hypothesis but
as a logical construct, a world without government.
To penetrate to the proper foundation of the state, in the state of nature, each man as
a natural fact has complete ownership or property over his own person.
These persons confront unused natural resources, or land, and they are able to maintain and
advance themselves by mixing their labor with the land.
Through this mixing, the hitherto unowned and unused natural resources become the property
of the individual mixer.
The individual thereby acquires a property right not only in his own person but also
in the land that he has brought into use and transformed by his labor.
Locke adopted the curious, theologically oriented view that the original unused land was given
was given to mankind in common and was then taken out of this common stock by individual labor.
Actually, in fact, original land, being unused, was therefore unowned by anyone, individual or communal.
It should be mentioned that, contrary to some historians, Locke's labor theory of property
has no relation to the labor theory of value of Karl Marx and other socialist authors.
The individual, then, may keep this property, exchange it for the property of others, or
bequeath it to his heirs.
MacPherson has shown that Locke's state of nature includes a free market for exchange
of property, including monetary exchanges, all of which is logically anterior to government.
He has the natural right to the property and to defend it against invasion by others.
The moral justification for government to Locke was to defend these rights of property.
The government failed to serve this function, and itself become destructive of property rights.
The people then have the right to revolt against such government and to replace it with one that will defend their rights.
It is a misconception to accuse Locke of setting property rights above human rights, for the two were conjoined.
And property rights included the right of the individual's property in his own person.
Thus Locke, by the use of reason in investigating the laws of man's nature, adumbrated the
doctrine of the natural rights of the individual to person and property, rights that are anterior
to Government and that Government is duty-bound to defend on pain of a justified overthrow.
Lock is clear that aggression and invasion of another's right can establish no just
title to property or rule, and that this holds for great heads of states as well as for petty
criminals.
The injury in the crime is equal, whether committed by the wearer of a crown or some
The title of the offender and the number of his followers make no difference unless it be to aggravate it.
The only difference is great robbers punish little ones to keep them in their obedience.
But the great ones are rewarded with laurels and triumphs because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world
and have the power in their own possession which should punish offenders.
As to the legislature, the reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.
In the end, why they choose and authorize a legislature is that there may be laws made and rules set
as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society.
Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence.
Lock's reply to the critics of his theory of revolution was trenchant. Those who oppose
the right to revolution as turbulent and destructive may as well say upon the same ground that
honest men may not oppose robbers or pirates, because this may occasion disorder or bloodshed.
If any mischief come in such cases, it is not to be charged upon him who defends his
To the objection that his theory allowed for frequent revolution, Locke countered that
such revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes
in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty will
will be borne by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses,
prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the
people, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves.
The third great influence on America and perhaps the most widely cited source in the colonies
was the works of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, especially their Cato's letters.
We have already noted the influence of the letters on the freedom of the press as well
as the strong influence of Trenchard and Gordon's contemporaneous independent Whig series, both
both written in the early 1720s. Trenchard and Gordon were part of a small group of Englishmen
who during the 18th century kept alive the torch of liberal Republican principles. This
group was variously called commonwealthmen, real Whigs, or true Whigs. The great significance
of Cato's letters is that in them the wealthy John Trenchard and his young protege Thomas
Hans-Gordon greatly radicalized the impact of Locke's libertarian creed. They did so
by applying Lockean principles to the concrete nature and problems of government in a series
of powerfully argued and hard-hitting essays that were often cited and reprinted and widely
read throughout the American colonies. Cato's letters did more than merely restate Lockean
Doctrine, from the position that the people have the right to revolt against a government
destructive of liberty, Cato proceeded to argue with great force that government is
always and everywhere the potential or actual aggressor against the rights and liberties
of the people.
Liberty, the source of all the fruits of civilization and human happiness, is ever liable to suffer
the aggressions and encroachments of government, of power, the source from which war, tyranny
and impoverishment ever flow.
Power always stands ready to conspire against liberty, and the only salvation is for the
and to be ever watchful, vigilant and hostile to the inevitable tendencies of government power to encroach upon liberty.
Expounding Lockean doctrine, Cato puts it thus,
All men are born free.
Liberty is a gift which they receive from God himself, nor can they alienate the same
by consent, though possibly they may forfeit it by crimes.
The right of the magistrate arises only from the right of private men to defend themselves,
to repel injuries, and to punish those who commit them.
That right being conveyed by the society to their public representative, he can execute
the same no further than the benefit and security of that society requires he should. When he
exceeds his commission, his acts are as extrajudicial as are those of any private officer usurping
an unlawful authority. That is, they are void. And every man is answerable for the wrong
Liberty, Cato defined as the power which every man has over his own actions and his right
to enjoy the fruit of his labor, art, and industry. As far as by it he hurts not the
The fruits of a man's honest industry are the just rewards of it, ascertained to him
by natural and eternal equity, as is his title to use them in the manner which he thinks
And thus, with the above limitations, every man is sole lord and arbiter of his own private
actions and property.
From Liberty all other blessings flow.
Indeed, liberty is the divine source of all human happiness.
To possess in security the effects of our industry is the most powerful and reasonable
incitement to be industrious.
And to be able to provide for our children and to leave them all that we have is the
best motive to beget them.
But where property is precarious, labor will languish.
The privileges of thinking, saying and doing what we please and of growing as rich as we
can without any other restriction than that by all this we hurt not the public nor one
another are the glorious privileges of liberty and its effects to live in freedom, plenty
and safety.
Moreover, Cato made clear that the rights and liberties he was enunciating were individual,
and not those of the majority. The despotism of the majority can be as bad as the tyranny
of one or a few. It is a mistaken notion in government that the interest of the majority
is only to be consulted, since in society every man has a right to every man's assistance
in the enjoyment and defense of his private property. Otherwise, the greater number may
sell the lesser and divide their estates amongst themselves, and so, instead of a society where
Where all peaceable men are protected, become a conspiracy of the many against a minority.
With as much equity may one man wantonly dispose of all, and violence may be sanctified by
mere power.
But in this idol of liberty there is always and ever the threat of the encroachments and
aggressions of power, of government.
Only the checks put upon magistrates make nations free, and only the want of such checks
makes them slaves.
They are free where their magistrates are confined within certain bounds set them by
the people, and they are slaves where the magistrates choose their own rules and follow
their lust and humours.
In which a more dreadful curse can befall no people, and therefore most nations in the
world are undone, and those nations only who bridle their governors do not wear chains.
Once acquiring power, rulers will try their best to keep and extend it.
We know by infinite examples and experience that men possessed of power rather than part
with it will do anything, even the worst and the blackest, to keep it. And scarce ever
any man upon earth went out of it as long as he could carry everything his own way in
This seems certain that the good of the world or of their people was not one of their motives either for continuing in power or for quitting it.
It is the nature of power to be ever encroaching and converting every extraordinary power
If liberty, for Cato, is the source of human happiness, the tyranny of power is the source
of Vast Human Misery. Tyrants reduce mankind to the condition of fruits and make that reason,
which God gave them, useless to them. They deprive them even of the blessings of nature,
starve them in the midst of plenty, and frustrate the natural bounty of the earth to men, so
So that nature smiles in vain where tyranny frowns. The very hands of man given them
by nature for their support are turned by tyrants into the instruments of their misery
by being employed in vile drudgeries or destructive wars to gratify the lust and vanity of their
Excrucible Lords, Tyrants are supported by general ruin, they live by the destruction
of mankind, and as fraud and villainy and every species of violence and cruelty are
the props of their throne, so they measure their own happiness and security and strength
by the misery and weakness of their people. That wealth, which dispersed amongst their
subjects and circulated in trade and commerce, would employ, increase and enrich them, is
barbarously robbed from the people and engrossed by these, their oppressors. Alas, power encroaches
daily upon liberty with a success too evident, and the balance between them is almost lost
The corruption and lust for power in human nature are the cause of the aggressive nature
There has been always such a constant and certain fund of corruption and malignity in human nature that it has been rare to find that man whose views and happiness did not center in the gratification of his appetites, and worst appetites
The Theory of Money and Credit
and, afterwards, at its expense.
And if they had been content to have been moderate traitors, mankind would have been
still moderately happy.
But their ambition and treason observing no degrees, there was no degree of vileness and
misery which the poor people did not feel.
The appetites, therefore, of men, especially of great men, are carefully to be observed
and stayed, or else they will never stay themselves.
The experience of every age convinces us that we must not judge of men by what they ought
to do, but by what they will do.
Cato assured his readers that there was no danger that the public might exercise its right of revolution against tyrannical government too frequently, or imprudently, due to settled habits as well as the propaganda and power of the government.
It is foolish to say that this doctrine can be mischievous to society, at least in any proportion to the wild ruin and fatal calamities which must befall and do befall the world when the contrary doctrine is maintained, for all bodies of men subsisting upon their own substance or upon the profits of their trade in industry
find their account so much in ease and peace, and have justly such terrible apprehensions of civil disorders, which destroy everything that they enjoy,
that they always bear a thousand injuries before they return one, and stand under the burdens as long as they can bear them.
What with the force of education and the reverence which people are taught and have been always
used to pay to princes?
What with the perpetual harangues of flatterers, the gaudy pageantry and outside of power,
and its gilded ensigns always glittering in their eyes?
What with the execution of the laws in the sole power of the prince?
But with all the regular magistrates, pompous guards and standing troops, with the fortified
towns, the artillery and all the magazines of war at his disposal, besides large revenues
and multitudes of followers and dependents to support and abet all that he does, obedience
to authority is so well secured that it is wild to imagine that any number of men formidable
are so universal enough to disturb a settled state can unite together and hope to overturn it till the public grievances are so enormous, the oppression so great, and the disaffection so universal that there can be no question remaining whether they're calamities to be real or imaginary and whether the magistrate has protected or endeavored to destroy.
The American colonist eagerly imbibed from Trenchard and Gordon not only the Lockean
doctrine of individual liberty and of the right of revolution against government, in
what Professor Bernard Balin has justly called a superbly readable form, but also, and even
and, more important, the dichotomy between liberty and power, and the ever-constant threat
to the crucial liberties of the people by the eternal incursions and encroachment of
governmental tyranny. Even more concretely, Trenchard and Gordon were not afraid to point
to the corruption and the increasing power of government and its bureaucracy in the relatively
Free England of their day. It was a warning that the American columnists were eagerly
to take to heart.
Libertarian English views were also brought to America with a dramatic burst by the great
liberal Massachusetts minister, Jonathan Mayhew. We have seen how this deist and unitarian
Men studied Locke at Harvard and was later to laud the influence upon him of Locke and
Algernon Sidney. In early 1750, Mayhew delivered his most celebrated political sermon, significantly
as a centennial celebration of the execution of Charles I, a discourse concerning unlimited
Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers. This sermon, which has been called
the warning gun of the American Revolution, was the first expression in 18th century America
of the sacred right of resistance to tyrannical government.
Reason, said Mayhew, dictates the usefulness of obedience to government for social protection.
But when government becomes oppressive, when it robs and ruins the public, then they immediately
cease to be the ordinance and ministers of God, and no more deserve that glorious character
The Theory of Money and Credit
themselves, and posterity from inglorious servitude and ruin. Following Locke and Cato,
Mayhew pointed out that there was little danger of revolution for trivial causes for mankind
in general have a disposition to be submissive and passive and tame under government. Mayhew
You also stressed every man's right and duty of private judgment, basing this in turn on
the nature of man, his capacity for reason and freedom of will, to choose his course
of action, and as criteria for choice, the individual had available to him knowledge
of truth and rightness rooted eternally in the nature of things.
The 1744 pamphlet of the Reverend Elisha Williams of Massachusetts, The Essential Rights and
Liberties, was also frankly locked in throughout, writes Williams, As reason tells us, all are
born thus naturally equal, that is, with an equal right to their persons, so also with
with an equal right to their preservation. And every man having a property in his own
person, the labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his own, to which
no one has right but himself. It will therefore follow that when he removes anything out of
The State that Nature has provided and left it in, he has his labor with it and joined
something to it that is his own and thereby makes it his property, thus every man having
a natural right to or being proprietor of his own person and his own actions and labor
which we call property.
It certainly follows that no man can have a right to the person or property of another,
and if every man has a right to his person and property, he has also a right to defend
them, and so has a right of punishing all insults upon his person and property. Consequently,
A law violating natural and constitutional rights is no true law and requires no obedience.
The natural right of private judgment was also upheld by the Reverend William Rand of
Massachusetts in 1757 and by the Reverend Joseph Fish of Connecticut three years later.
During this period, many of the New Light ministers, under pressure of establishment
persecution in several colonies, began to move towards a libertarian position.
Alicia Williams was a New Light.
The Reverend Samuel Davies, leader of the Southern Newside Presbyterian, declared in
1751 that people had a legal as well as natural right to follow their own judgment and to
to Gauge Governmental Authority Against the Great Principles of Natural Justice
Davies' focus, of course, was on religious aspects of liberty. Princeton, the training
ground of the New Lights, soon developed as a libertarian center. Davies, president of
Princeton from 1759 to 1761, lauded the English Puritan Revolution and exhorted his listeners
to fight if need be for their liberties. His predecessor, the Rev. Aaron Burr, was noted
as a great friend to liberty, both civil and religious, in state and church. Separates,
new lights in Massachusetts and Connecticut, who insisted on clear-cut separation from
the state establishment, petitioned extensively for religious liberty, an exemption from church
Church Taxes, even though the petitions were almost always spurned by the government.
Daniel Hovey of Mansfield was imprisoned in 1747 for refusing to pay the church tax and
petitioned for relief on the ground that liberty of conscience was the unalienable right of
every rational creature.
The separates of Canterbury went beyond this to include the right of liberty and property.
In their petition of 1749, they asserted that God's law strictly limited the functions
of government to defense of everyone in the free enjoyment and improvement of life, liberty
and property from the force, violence and fraud of others.
There are different opinions in ecclesiastical affairs notwithstanding.
The Canterbury separates also insisted on the natural right of parishioners to dissent
and to separate from them, a welcome consistency for that or indeed for any era.
Another leading libertarian petition came in 1743-44 from Exeter, Massachusetts.
The petition asked, Is not liberty equally every man's right?
The Exeter separates asserted the right of private judgment, the right to separate, and
the right to be free of taxes for a religious establishment.
And though it was rejected, they petitioned again eleven years later.
While England was the great fountainhead of intellectual influence in 18th century America,
France also was important, even in the first half of the century, more so than has been
generally believed. By far the most widely read French writer in the colonies was the
great French liberal and deist Francois Voltaire. Despite the enormous prejudice in America
against Roman Catholicism and against France. Voltaire was able to make his way as a representative
of deist and optimist thought and especially as an avowed disciple of John Locke. For liberalism
in 18th century France was a heritage of 17th century liberalism in England and especially
of John Locke. The young Voltaire spent three years of exile in England in the late 1720s,
and there became a firm advocate of religious liberty and of freedom of speech and press,
and of Locke as their philosophical groundwork. Voltaire's libertarian views were therefore
English by Inspiration and Incontent Voltaire conveyed this liberalism to France
with his Philosophical Letters on the English, published in English in 1733 and then in French
in 1734. In the letters, he spread the Lockean message to the continent. He also praised the
Quakers for their Condemnation of War. His English exile also influenced Voltaire to write
modern European history. His popular History of Charles XII was published so that people
could be cured of the folly of conquest. It is the curious belief of many writers that
Whereas English liberalism was moderate, pragmatic and cautious, French liberalism was destructive,
absolutist and revolutionary.
The truth is almost the reverse.
Liberalism emerged as a coherent doctrine and as a full and powerful force in 17th century
England, and a thoroughgoing revolutionary force at that.
French liberalism in the following century was, frankly, taken from England, albeit at
a time when English liberal thought had been all but stifled by the Whig settlement. But
French liberals despaired of the odds of fomenting revolution against the might of French feudalism
and royal absolutism, which were far more rigidly fastened upon France than upon England.
The eighteenth-century French liberals therefore remained content with the futile cause of
urging liberty upon the royal power as a free gift to the people, a vain hope, when in history
has a ruling elite voluntarily surrendered its power and rule as a free gift, unpressured
by Severe and Persistent Opposition from Below.