Volume 3, Part 8 Other Forces for Revolution
Volume 3, Chapter 70 The Expansion of Libertarian Thought
The accumulating conflict with Great Britain had led to armed revolution at Lexington and
Concord.
In addition, other forces had joined since the middle of the century to add strength
to the revolutionary movement.
One vital force was the further development and extension of libertarian thought in America.
It was the general concepts of liberty and revolution that found expression in the specific
revolutionary arguments against Great Britain.
One of the most important sources of the dissemination of libertarian thought in pre-revolutionary
For America, England, and elsewhere was Thomas Hollis V of Lincoln's Inn, England. Hollis's
career is a stirring testament to the influence that can be wielded by the activities of one
lone but dedicated man. An ardent libertarian, Hollis in 1754 conceived his plan of disseminating
The Theory of Money and Credit
Martin, sixteenth-century writers as Francois Hotman, George Buchanan, and John Poinay,
who anticipated Sydney and Locke, and Marian exile Christopher Goodman, whose work influenced
the later doctrines of disobedience to the state.
Libertarian medals, coins, prints, pictures and manuscripts were also collected and sent
abroad.
In the late 1750s and early 1760s, Thomas Hollis distributed his libertarian gifts far
and wide to Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Poland, Italy and France.
But with the inception of the Stamp Act and other colonial struggles, Hollis turned the
bulk of his attention after 1764 to the American colonies.
Hundreds of libertarian works, regarded as subversive by the British government, were
sent to the library at Harvard College, with libertarian mothos and characters stamped
upon them.
Hollis also carried on an extensive correspondence with two great liberal congregational divines
of Massachusetts, Jonathan Mayhew and Andrew Elliott.
And not only did Hollis ardently sow the seeds of English radicalism in America, he also
Hollis, indeed, was the source of most of the pro-American writings printed in England
and elsewhere in Europe during the 1760s, including the essays of Mayhew and Eliot.
There was nothing namby-pamby about Hollis's libertarianism.
It was profoundly radical and stressed Hollis's passionate devotion to king-killing, resistance
Thomas Hollis was deep into the Wilkite movement, and a particularly active member of Hollis's
in the business circle was the great radical writer and historian Mrs. Catherine Macaulay,
sister of one of the Wilkite leaders, Alderman John Saubridge. When Edmund Burke published
his famous Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770, which defined the principles
of the Whig Party, Mrs. Macaulay promptly attacked it from the Republican and Democratic
This debate clarified the split between the regular or moderate Whigs and the libertarian radical Whigs.
In America, the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew had been the leader of libertarian thought since his Great Sermon of 1750,
which first gave public expression in colonial America to the sacred right and duty of resistance to tyranny.
As a result of his extensive correspondence with Hollis from 1759 to 1766, the latter
distributed Mayhew's works throughout England. Mayhew, in turn, spread the message of the
liberal and radical works sent him by Hollis, works such as Harrington, Sydney, Milton,
and Hoadley. When the Stamp Act crisis arrived, Mayhew was perhaps the first to urge a network
In a sermon hailing repeal of the Stamp Act, Mayhew was among the first to envision America
as a haven of liberty for the oppressed of other lands.
And if any miserable people on the continent or isles of Europe should be driven in their
John Locke continued to be the major fountainhead of libertarian theory in America, and his
works and influence spread even more widely after mid-century.
By the 1760s and early 1770s, for example, the libraries of Harvard, Princeton and Yale
contained the numerous works of Locke. Locke's more revolutionary side, however, began to
be stressed late in the colonial agitation, especially after the American printing of
his Civil Government in 1773. Many writers have stressed the influence upon Americans
of the American Printing of William Blackstone's Commentaries in 1771.
But this work was used largely for its tactical strength as a source for quoting the eminent
English Tory jurist against Great Britain.
Actually, as Clinton Rossiter admits, the Americans read the eclectic commentaries in
In a shrewdly selective manner, citing this oracle repeatedly and effectively in support
of all manner of Whiggish doctrines, two of the most popular borrowings were Blackstone's
memorable salutes to natural law and natural history.
The Lockean emphasis on natural rights was further strengthened by the influence of the
Distinguished Philosopher of the German Enlightenment, Christian Wolff, in the Institutionis, 1750 Wolff emphasized more consistently than Locke that man's natural rights are inalienable and cannot therefore be alienated to the state by any social contract. Wolff's rigorously systematic work was highly influential
not only in Germany. In France, the important journals featured Wolff's writings, and Voltaire
was an enthusiastic student of Wolff's work. The Institutionis was translated into French
in 1772, and Thomas Jefferson is known to have had a copy in his library, a copy in
which passages on the asserted rite of Revolutionary War are specifically marked. Wolff's views
The books were also carried to America by the Swiss writer on the law of nature, Emmerich
de Vattel, whose book, published in French in 1758, influenced Jefferson, Otis, and the
Adamses.
As the revolution drew near, Algernon Sidney's influence continued to be strong.
His martyrdom at the hands of Great Britain now had a personal meaning for the American
radical leaders.
Thomas Hollis had spread Sydney's writings, including his famous revolutionary motto, throughout
the colonies, the maxim soon to be enshrined as the official motto of the revolutionary
state of Massachusetts.
The English translation of the Latin motto by John Quincy Adams runs as follows, This
hand to tyrants ever sworn the foe, for freedom only deals the deadly blow, then sheathes
in calm repose, the vengeful blade, for gentle place in freedom's hallowed shade.
And as the anxious American rebels prepared for the outbreak of conflict, the Boston radical
Josiah Quincy stirringly wrote, America hath in store her Brutei and Cassii, her Hamptons
and Sidneys, patriots and heroes, who will form a band of brothers, men who have memories
Stories and Feelings, Courage and Swords
Beginning in the 1760s, the French Enlightenment began to have notable influence in America.
Especially was this true of the great liberal Voltaire. Voltaire issued several important
works during the 1760s, and an English translation appeared of his collected works. Americans
steeped in lock-in thought recognized the French, especially Voltaire, as heirs to that tradition.
Jonathan Mayhew, having read Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary and Philosophical History shortly
after they appeared, wrote to Thomas Hollis praising these works, although stating that
he could not agree with the Frenchman's anti-religious views.
Howard Mumford Jones has shown, contrary to many historians, that Voltaire's influence
on American thought was far greater than that of his conservative contemporary Baron de
Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws, 1748, stressed state-building and checks and balances
in that state, rather than natural rights or individual liberty.
Jones shows that while Voltaire was the most popular French author in America in the second
half of the 18th century, Montesquieu was only the sixth most influential.
Moreover, Montesquieu's influence was exerted only in the later state-building period of
America, during the last quarter of the century, rather than in the third quarter when the
revolutionary American ideology was being forged.
The annual number of newspaper advertisements during the last half of the century averaged
in New York, thirty for Voltaire and eight for Montesquieu, and in Philadelphia, forty-five
for Voltaire and seventeen for the latter.
It is true that American revolutionary tracts cited Voltaire minimally, but this proves
since any such references to the great French radical would have been as tactically unwise as the window-dressing references to respectables like Blackstone or Montesquieu were shrewd.
Voltaire's works, furthermore, permeated a wide segment of the American public.
The general public absorbed his political and social thought by reading his literary works,
While the influential elite read his political and social philosophies directly.
The second most popular French writer in America was that confused and inconsistent radical
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Again and again he was referred to in America as the ingenious Rousseau or the celebrated
Rousseau.
Like those of Voltaire, Rousseau's ideas were absorbed on two levels, the masses reading
In the novels Emile, 1762 and La Nouvelle Eloise, 1761, and the more serious-minded
studying The Social Contract, 1762, all of which were translated into English shortly
after publication.
Indeed, an English translation of Rousseau's collected works appeared in 1774.
John Adams had read The Social Contract as early as 1765, and he eventually accumulated
four copies in his library. James Otis, in his pamphlets of the early 1760s, approvingly
cited the radical Rousseau as well as John Locke. In his writings, Voltaire praised Locke's
motto, liberty and property, upheld revolution in behalf of liberty, and attacked despotism
and War.
In the article On War in his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire acidly compared warring
states to armed gangs and observed that the marvelous part of this infernal enterprise
is that each chief of the murderers causes his flags to be blessed and invokes God solemnly
before going out to exterminate his neighbor.
Revolution for Liberty Against the State, on the other hand, was a different question.
In rebuttal to the age-old conservative attack upon revolution for using violence, Voltaire,
in the philosophical letters, trenchantly pointed out that all political history has
rested upon violence.
Violence was permanently foisted upon the people by the state, declared Voltaire, and
The difference between England and the other countries of Europe was that violent revolution
had succeeded in England, at least in Voltaire's romanticized model, but had failed elsewhere.
To establish liberty in England had been costly, no doubt. The idol of despotic power has been
drowned in seas of blood. But the English do not think they have purchased good laws
In striking contrast to Voltaire, Montesquieu
In 1727, the Comte de Boulogne-Villiers had concluded from his historical researches that the existing French government was rooted in conquest, and that the current political structure was therefore the frozen embodiment of that past conquest.
The current ruling class was the heir of the tribal conquerors.
The ruled masses were the descendants of the subjugated.
To the reactionary Boulanviers, this insight was only a support for complete domination
by the ruling class, built on the presumed right of conquest.
But to the philosopher and historian Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos, 1734, the origin in
conquest of the ruling class made all the more necessary the restoration of freedom
to the people by ending the power of the rulers.
Montesquieu, evading the obligation to weigh existing institutions on the basis of natural
and Social Moral Law, presumed and said to be a political scientist who takes existing
institutions as his given, and therefore, of course, implicitly took as his undefended
axiom the wisdom of the essentially feudal status quo. Indeed, Montesquieu, fundamentally
a reactionary, wanted to return to stronger feudal checks against the Crown. As a political
The original scientist defending the basis of the status quo, Montesquieu, accepting
the facts of original and permanent conquest, undertook to defend the existing ruling class
structure against possible revolution from below.
It is no coincidence that Montesquieu's popularity in the New World was suited rather to the
state building than to the revolutionary age in America.
Over all his confusions, contradictions and romantic irrationalism that opened the doors
to future forms of tyranny, Rousseau staunchly supported the people against the despotic ruling
classes of his day.
He therefore must be regarded overall as a vital part of the broad radical liberal movement
of the era.
In his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, 1750, English Translation,
1752, Rousseau condemned the accretion of centuries of coercive government, with its
hordes of officials and auxiliaries of power in the legal profession, as contrasted to
the more natural or voluntary government of the past.
A trenchant attack on the ruling class was contained in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality
1754. Building on Locke's insight that private property began in the mixture of people's
labor with land and natural resources, Rousseau described how the state arose in the imposition
of Violence on Such Properties and Their Owners.
This violence resulted in a ruling class imposing slavery and domination over the body of the
ruled.
From the state flowed the institutionalization of violence in perpetual conflicts between
the original property owners and the ruling class.
As Rousseau slashingly put it, such was the origin of society and law, which bound new
fetters on the poor and gave new powers to the rich, which irretrievably destroyed natural
liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, and converted clever usurpation
into an alterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected
All Mankind to Perpetual Labor, Slavery and Wretchedness. From the State also flowed perpetual
wars, struggles between the ruling classes of each state, employing and exhausting the
lives and labors of the ruled. The most distinguished men hence learned to consider cutting each
other's throats a duty. At length men massacred their fellow creatures by thousands, without
In Emile, Rousseau properly criticized Montesquieu for evading discussion of the philosophical
and moral validity of the existing state, turning instead to elaborate treatment of
in Ruling Class, however, Rousseau stood firm for libertarian view. Criticizing Hobbes's
curious conclusion that the right of the rulers to govern stems from the fact that only the
rulers can benefit from political power, Rousseau scornfully remarked, On this showing the human
species is divided into so many kinds of cattle, each with its ruler, who keeps guard over
On existing states, Rousseau's famous verdict was unambiguous.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Above all, Rousseau was concerned, in his proposed commonwealth in the social contract,
that democratic forms be as pure and direct as possible, so that the specter of oligarchy
could never more rear its ugly head.
The more direct and continuous the control of the body of the people over state officialdom,
the less likely would be the state to surmount the checks of popular vigilance and reestablish
the despotism of oligarchy.
Thus, for Rousseau, the necessary checks on state power were to be found not, as in Montesquieu,
in legalistic forms within the state, but in popular forces coming from outside the
of the State Apparatus.