WEBVTT NOTE 70. The Expansion of Libertarian Thought 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.200 Volume 3, Part 8 Other Forces for Revolution 2 00:00:05.200 --> 00:00:10.640 Volume 3, Chapter 70 The Expansion of Libertarian Thought 3 00:00:10.640 --> 00:00:16.080 The accumulating conflict with Great Britain had led to armed revolution at Lexington and 4 00:00:16.080 --> 00:00:17.760 Concord. 5 00:00:17.760 --> 00:00:23.560 In addition, other forces had joined since the middle of the century to add strength 6 00:00:23.560 --> 00:00:26.480 to the revolutionary movement. 7 00:00:26.480 --> 00:00:34.160 One vital force was the further development and extension of libertarian thought in America. 8 00:00:34.160 --> 00:00:40.160 It was the general concepts of liberty and revolution that found expression in the specific 9 00:00:40.160 --> 00:00:44.360 revolutionary arguments against Great Britain. 10 00:00:44.360 --> 00:00:49.920 One of the most important sources of the dissemination of libertarian thought in pre-revolutionary 11 00:00:49.920 --> 00:00:58.320 For America, England, and elsewhere was Thomas Hollis V of Lincoln's Inn, England. Hollis's 12 00:00:58.320 --> 00:01:04.840 career is a stirring testament to the influence that can be wielded by the activities of one 13 00:01:04.840 --> 00:01:15.280 lone but dedicated man. An ardent libertarian, Hollis in 1754 conceived his plan of disseminating 14 00:01:15.280 --> 00:01:45.280 The Theory of Money and Credit 15 00:01:45.280 --> 00:01:52.680 Martin, sixteenth-century writers as Francois Hotman, George Buchanan, and John Poinay, 16 00:01:52.680 --> 00:01:59.960 who anticipated Sydney and Locke, and Marian exile Christopher Goodman, whose work influenced 17 00:01:59.960 --> 00:02:04.240 the later doctrines of disobedience to the state. 18 00:02:04.240 --> 00:02:09.920 Libertarian medals, coins, prints, pictures and manuscripts were also collected and sent 19 00:02:09.920 --> 00:02:11.440 abroad. 20 00:02:11.440 --> 00:02:18.440 In the late 1750s and early 1760s, Thomas Hollis distributed his libertarian gifts far 21 00:02:18.440 --> 00:02:26.040 and wide to Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Poland, Italy and France. 22 00:02:26.040 --> 00:02:31.520 But with the inception of the Stamp Act and other colonial struggles, Hollis turned the 23 00:02:31.520 --> 00:02:37.600 bulk of his attention after 1764 to the American colonies. 24 00:02:37.600 --> 00:02:43.080 Hundreds of libertarian works, regarded as subversive by the British government, were 25 00:02:43.080 --> 00:02:49.060 sent to the library at Harvard College, with libertarian mothos and characters stamped 26 00:02:49.060 --> 00:02:50.760 upon them. 27 00:02:50.760 --> 00:02:56.640 Hollis also carried on an extensive correspondence with two great liberal congregational divines 28 00:02:56.640 --> 00:03:01.900 of Massachusetts, Jonathan Mayhew and Andrew Elliott. 29 00:03:01.900 --> 00:03:07.580 And not only did Hollis ardently sow the seeds of English radicalism in America, he also 30 00:03:07.580 --> 00:03:18.120 Hollis, indeed, was the source of most of the pro-American writings printed in England 31 00:03:18.120 --> 00:03:25.180 and elsewhere in Europe during the 1760s, including the essays of Mayhew and Eliot. 32 00:03:25.180 --> 00:03:29.460 There was nothing namby-pamby about Hollis's libertarianism. 33 00:03:29.460 --> 00:03:37.200 It was profoundly radical and stressed Hollis's passionate devotion to king-killing, resistance 34 00:03:37.200 --> 00:04:01.120 Thomas Hollis was deep into the Wilkite movement, and a particularly active member of Hollis's 35 00:04:01.120 --> 00:04:07.240 in the business circle was the great radical writer and historian Mrs. Catherine Macaulay, 36 00:04:07.240 --> 00:04:14.000 sister of one of the Wilkite leaders, Alderman John Saubridge. When Edmund Burke published 37 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:22.000 his famous Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770, which defined the principles 38 00:04:22.000 --> 00:04:27.720 of the Whig Party, Mrs. Macaulay promptly attacked it from the Republican and Democratic 39 00:04:27.720 --> 00:04:36.720 This debate clarified the split between the regular or moderate Whigs and the libertarian radical Whigs. 40 00:04:36.720 --> 00:04:44.720 In America, the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew had been the leader of libertarian thought since his Great Sermon of 1750, 41 00:04:44.720 --> 00:04:53.720 which first gave public expression in colonial America to the sacred right and duty of resistance to tyranny. 42 00:04:53.720 --> 00:05:02.220 As a result of his extensive correspondence with Hollis from 1759 to 1766, the latter 43 00:05:02.220 --> 00:05:08.600 distributed Mayhew's works throughout England. Mayhew, in turn, spread the message of the 44 00:05:08.600 --> 00:05:15.840 liberal and radical works sent him by Hollis, works such as Harrington, Sydney, Milton, 45 00:05:15.840 --> 00:05:22.880 and Hoadley. When the Stamp Act crisis arrived, Mayhew was perhaps the first to urge a network 46 00:05:22.880 --> 00:05:37.280 In a sermon hailing repeal of the Stamp Act, Mayhew was among the first to envision America 47 00:05:37.280 --> 00:05:42.320 as a haven of liberty for the oppressed of other lands. 48 00:05:42.320 --> 00:05:48.040 And if any miserable people on the continent or isles of Europe should be driven in their 49 00:05:48.040 --> 00:06:04.200 John Locke continued to be the major fountainhead of libertarian theory in America, and his 50 00:06:04.200 --> 00:06:09.440 works and influence spread even more widely after mid-century. 51 00:06:09.440 --> 00:06:17.120 By the 1760s and early 1770s, for example, the libraries of Harvard, Princeton and Yale 52 00:06:17.120 --> 00:06:23.520 contained the numerous works of Locke. Locke's more revolutionary side, however, began to 53 00:06:23.520 --> 00:06:29.920 be stressed late in the colonial agitation, especially after the American printing of 54 00:06:29.920 --> 00:06:38.680 his Civil Government in 1773. Many writers have stressed the influence upon Americans 55 00:06:38.680 --> 00:06:46.240 of the American Printing of William Blackstone's Commentaries in 1771. 56 00:06:46.240 --> 00:06:52.400 But this work was used largely for its tactical strength as a source for quoting the eminent 57 00:06:52.400 --> 00:06:56.080 English Tory jurist against Great Britain. 58 00:06:56.080 --> 00:07:02.280 Actually, as Clinton Rossiter admits, the Americans read the eclectic commentaries in 59 00:07:02.280 --> 00:07:09.200 In a shrewdly selective manner, citing this oracle repeatedly and effectively in support 60 00:07:09.200 --> 00:07:15.560 of all manner of Whiggish doctrines, two of the most popular borrowings were Blackstone's 61 00:07:15.560 --> 00:07:20.280 memorable salutes to natural law and natural history. 62 00:07:20.280 --> 00:07:25.760 The Lockean emphasis on natural rights was further strengthened by the influence of the 63 00:07:25.760 --> 00:07:55.760 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 64 00:07:55.760 --> 00:08:02.440 not only in Germany. In France, the important journals featured Wolff's writings, and Voltaire 65 00:08:02.440 --> 00:08:08.780 was an enthusiastic student of Wolff's work. The Institutionis was translated into French 66 00:08:08.780 --> 00:08:15.580 in 1772, and Thomas Jefferson is known to have had a copy in his library, a copy in 67 00:08:15.580 --> 00:08:23.060 which passages on the asserted rite of Revolutionary War are specifically marked. Wolff's views 68 00:08:23.060 --> 00:08:28.460 The books were also carried to America by the Swiss writer on the law of nature, Emmerich 69 00:08:28.460 --> 00:08:37.460 de Vattel, whose book, published in French in 1758, influenced Jefferson, Otis, and the 70 00:08:37.460 --> 00:08:38.620 Adamses. 71 00:08:38.620 --> 00:08:44.780 As the revolution drew near, Algernon Sidney's influence continued to be strong. 72 00:08:44.780 --> 00:08:49.660 His martyrdom at the hands of Great Britain now had a personal meaning for the American 73 00:08:49.660 --> 00:08:51.580 radical leaders. 74 00:08:51.580 --> 00:08:57.580 Thomas Hollis had spread Sydney's writings, including his famous revolutionary motto, throughout 75 00:08:57.580 --> 00:09:03.660 the colonies, the maxim soon to be enshrined as the official motto of the revolutionary 76 00:09:03.660 --> 00:09:06.260 state of Massachusetts. 77 00:09:06.260 --> 00:09:13.380 The English translation of the Latin motto by John Quincy Adams runs as follows, This 78 00:09:13.380 --> 00:09:20.700 hand to tyrants ever sworn the foe, for freedom only deals the deadly blow, then sheathes 79 00:09:20.700 --> 00:09:28.500 in calm repose, the vengeful blade, for gentle place in freedom's hallowed shade. 80 00:09:28.500 --> 00:09:34.220 And as the anxious American rebels prepared for the outbreak of conflict, the Boston radical 81 00:09:34.220 --> 00:09:42.980 Josiah Quincy stirringly wrote, America hath in store her Brutei and Cassii, her Hamptons 82 00:09:42.980 --> 00:09:50.140 and Sidneys, patriots and heroes, who will form a band of brothers, men who have memories 83 00:09:50.140 --> 00:09:53.980 Stories and Feelings, Courage and Swords 84 00:09:53.980 --> 00:10:01.940 Beginning in the 1760s, the French Enlightenment began to have notable influence in America. 85 00:10:01.940 --> 00:10:07.820 Especially was this true of the great liberal Voltaire. Voltaire issued several important 86 00:10:07.820 --> 00:10:15.940 works during the 1760s, and an English translation appeared of his collected works. Americans 87 00:10:15.940 --> 00:10:23.580 steeped in lock-in thought recognized the French, especially Voltaire, as heirs to that tradition. 88 00:10:23.580 --> 00:10:30.420 Jonathan Mayhew, having read Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary and Philosophical History shortly 89 00:10:30.420 --> 00:10:36.480 after they appeared, wrote to Thomas Hollis praising these works, although stating that 90 00:10:36.480 --> 00:10:40.880 he could not agree with the Frenchman's anti-religious views. 91 00:10:40.880 --> 00:10:47.520 Howard Mumford Jones has shown, contrary to many historians, that Voltaire's influence 92 00:10:47.520 --> 00:10:54.480 on American thought was far greater than that of his conservative contemporary Baron de 93 00:10:54.480 --> 00:11:01.600 Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws, 1748, stressed state-building and checks and balances 94 00:11:01.600 --> 00:11:07.000 in that state, rather than natural rights or individual liberty. 95 00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:12.640 Jones shows that while Voltaire was the most popular French author in America in the second 96 00:11:12.640 --> 00:11:18.520 half of the 18th century, Montesquieu was only the sixth most influential. 97 00:11:18.520 --> 00:11:23.980 Moreover, Montesquieu's influence was exerted only in the later state-building period of 98 00:11:23.980 --> 00:11:29.420 America, during the last quarter of the century, rather than in the third quarter when the 99 00:11:29.420 --> 00:11:33.820 revolutionary American ideology was being forged. 100 00:11:33.820 --> 00:11:40.100 The annual number of newspaper advertisements during the last half of the century averaged 101 00:11:40.100 --> 00:11:47.100 in New York, thirty for Voltaire and eight for Montesquieu, and in Philadelphia, forty-five 102 00:11:47.100 --> 00:11:51.380 for Voltaire and seventeen for the latter. 103 00:11:51.380 --> 00:11:58.380 It is true that American revolutionary tracts cited Voltaire minimally, but this proves 104 00:11:58.380 --> 00:12:12.380 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. 105 00:12:12.380 --> 00:12:18.380 Voltaire's works, furthermore, permeated a wide segment of the American public. 106 00:12:18.380 --> 00:12:24.380 The general public absorbed his political and social thought by reading his literary works, 107 00:12:24.380 --> 00:12:30.660 While the influential elite read his political and social philosophies directly. 108 00:12:30.660 --> 00:12:37.300 The second most popular French writer in America was that confused and inconsistent radical 109 00:12:37.300 --> 00:12:39.860 Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 110 00:12:39.860 --> 00:12:45.540 Again and again he was referred to in America as the ingenious Rousseau or the celebrated 111 00:12:45.540 --> 00:12:47.020 Rousseau. 112 00:12:47.020 --> 00:12:52.940 Like those of Voltaire, Rousseau's ideas were absorbed on two levels, the masses reading 113 00:12:52.940 --> 00:13:02.060 In the novels Emile, 1762 and La Nouvelle Eloise, 1761, and the more serious-minded 114 00:13:02.060 --> 00:13:09.740 studying The Social Contract, 1762, all of which were translated into English shortly 115 00:13:09.740 --> 00:13:11.420 after publication. 116 00:13:11.420 --> 00:13:18.540 Indeed, an English translation of Rousseau's collected works appeared in 1774. 117 00:13:18.540 --> 00:13:25.920 John Adams had read The Social Contract as early as 1765, and he eventually accumulated 118 00:13:25.920 --> 00:13:33.420 four copies in his library. James Otis, in his pamphlets of the early 1760s, approvingly 119 00:13:33.420 --> 00:13:40.340 cited the radical Rousseau as well as John Locke. In his writings, Voltaire praised Locke's 120 00:13:40.340 --> 00:13:48.380 motto, liberty and property, upheld revolution in behalf of liberty, and attacked despotism 121 00:13:48.380 --> 00:13:50.100 and War. 122 00:13:50.100 --> 00:13:57.140 In the article On War in his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire acidly compared warring 123 00:13:57.140 --> 00:14:04.980 states to armed gangs and observed that the marvelous part of this infernal enterprise 124 00:14:04.980 --> 00:14:13.180 is that each chief of the murderers causes his flags to be blessed and invokes God solemnly 125 00:14:13.180 --> 00:14:16.380 before going out to exterminate his neighbor. 126 00:14:16.380 --> 00:14:21.920 Revolution for Liberty Against the State, on the other hand, was a different question. 127 00:14:21.920 --> 00:14:29.400 In rebuttal to the age-old conservative attack upon revolution for using violence, Voltaire, 128 00:14:29.400 --> 00:14:35.380 in the philosophical letters, trenchantly pointed out that all political history has 129 00:14:35.380 --> 00:14:37.560 rested upon violence. 130 00:14:37.560 --> 00:14:44.900 Violence was permanently foisted upon the people by the state, declared Voltaire, and 131 00:14:44.900 --> 00:14:50.740 The difference between England and the other countries of Europe was that violent revolution 132 00:14:50.740 --> 00:15:00.280 had succeeded in England, at least in Voltaire's romanticized model, but had failed elsewhere. 133 00:15:00.280 --> 00:15:06.820 To establish liberty in England had been costly, no doubt. The idol of despotic power has been 134 00:15:06.820 --> 00:15:12.480 drowned in seas of blood. But the English do not think they have purchased good laws 135 00:15:12.480 --> 00:15:42.480 In striking contrast to Voltaire, Montesquieu 136 00:15:42.480 --> 00:16:05.480 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. 137 00:16:05.480 --> 00:16:10.180 The current ruling class was the heir of the tribal conquerors. 138 00:16:10.180 --> 00:16:15.080 The ruled masses were the descendants of the subjugated. 139 00:16:15.080 --> 00:16:21.880 To the reactionary Boulanviers, this insight was only a support for complete domination 140 00:16:21.880 --> 00:16:27.780 by the ruling class, built on the presumed right of conquest. 141 00:16:27.780 --> 00:16:35.180 But to the philosopher and historian Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos, 1734, the origin in 142 00:16:35.180 --> 00:16:40.980 conquest of the ruling class made all the more necessary the restoration of freedom 143 00:16:40.980 --> 00:16:45.580 to the people by ending the power of the rulers. 144 00:16:45.580 --> 00:16:52.380 Montesquieu, evading the obligation to weigh existing institutions on the basis of natural 145 00:16:52.380 --> 00:16:58.780 and Social Moral Law, presumed and said to be a political scientist who takes existing 146 00:16:58.780 --> 00:17:05.420 institutions as his given, and therefore, of course, implicitly took as his undefended 147 00:17:05.420 --> 00:17:13.780 axiom the wisdom of the essentially feudal status quo. Indeed, Montesquieu, fundamentally 148 00:17:13.780 --> 00:17:21.220 a reactionary, wanted to return to stronger feudal checks against the Crown. As a political 149 00:17:21.220 --> 00:17:26.140 The original scientist defending the basis of the status quo, Montesquieu, accepting 150 00:17:26.140 --> 00:17:32.980 the facts of original and permanent conquest, undertook to defend the existing ruling class 151 00:17:32.980 --> 00:17:37.500 structure against possible revolution from below. 152 00:17:37.500 --> 00:17:43.180 It is no coincidence that Montesquieu's popularity in the New World was suited rather to the 153 00:17:43.180 --> 00:17:48.280 state building than to the revolutionary age in America. 154 00:17:48.280 --> 00:17:55.100 Over all his confusions, contradictions and romantic irrationalism that opened the doors 155 00:17:55.100 --> 00:18:01.780 to future forms of tyranny, Rousseau staunchly supported the people against the despotic ruling 156 00:18:01.780 --> 00:18:04.560 classes of his day. 157 00:18:04.560 --> 00:18:12.040 He therefore must be regarded overall as a vital part of the broad radical liberal movement 158 00:18:12.040 --> 00:18:13.840 of the era. 159 00:18:13.840 --> 00:18:22.200 In his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, 1750, English Translation, 160 00:18:22.200 --> 00:18:29.480 1752, Rousseau condemned the accretion of centuries of coercive government, with its 161 00:18:29.480 --> 00:18:35.960 hordes of officials and auxiliaries of power in the legal profession, as contrasted to 162 00:18:35.960 --> 00:18:40.880 the more natural or voluntary government of the past. 163 00:18:40.880 --> 00:18:47.360 A trenchant attack on the ruling class was contained in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality 164 00:18:47.360 --> 00:18:56.360 1754. Building on Locke's insight that private property began in the mixture of people's 165 00:18:56.360 --> 00:19:04.280 labor with land and natural resources, Rousseau described how the state arose in the imposition 166 00:19:04.280 --> 00:19:09.340 of Violence on Such Properties and Their Owners. 167 00:19:09.340 --> 00:19:16.820 This violence resulted in a ruling class imposing slavery and domination over the body of the 168 00:19:16.820 --> 00:19:18.380 ruled. 169 00:19:18.380 --> 00:19:24.900 From the state flowed the institutionalization of violence in perpetual conflicts between 170 00:19:24.900 --> 00:19:29.520 the original property owners and the ruling class. 171 00:19:29.520 --> 00:19:36.960 As Rousseau slashingly put it, such was the origin of society and law, which bound new 172 00:19:36.960 --> 00:19:44.440 fetters on the poor and gave new powers to the rich, which irretrievably destroyed natural 173 00:19:44.440 --> 00:19:52.440 liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, and converted clever usurpation 174 00:19:52.440 --> 00:19:59.220 into an alterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected 175 00:19:59.220 --> 00:20:07.620 All Mankind to Perpetual Labor, Slavery and Wretchedness. From the State also flowed perpetual 176 00:20:07.620 --> 00:20:12.740 wars, struggles between the ruling classes of each state, employing and exhausting the 177 00:20:12.740 --> 00:20:20.660 lives and labors of the ruled. The most distinguished men hence learned to consider cutting each 178 00:20:20.660 --> 00:20:27.620 other's throats a duty. At length men massacred their fellow creatures by thousands, without 179 00:20:27.620 --> 00:20:46.300 In Emile, Rousseau properly criticized Montesquieu for evading discussion of the philosophical 180 00:20:46.300 --> 00:20:51.740 and moral validity of the existing state, turning instead to elaborate treatment of 181 00:21:21.740 --> 00:21:28.640 in Ruling Class, however, Rousseau stood firm for libertarian view. Criticizing Hobbes's 182 00:21:28.640 --> 00:21:34.500 curious conclusion that the right of the rulers to govern stems from the fact that only the 183 00:21:34.500 --> 00:21:41.840 rulers can benefit from political power, Rousseau scornfully remarked, On this showing the human 184 00:21:41.840 --> 00:21:48.120 species is divided into so many kinds of cattle, each with its ruler, who keeps guard over 185 00:21:48.120 --> 00:21:57.120 On existing states, Rousseau's famous verdict was unambiguous. 186 00:21:57.120 --> 00:22:02.120 Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. 187 00:22:02.120 --> 00:22:07.720 Above all, Rousseau was concerned, in his proposed commonwealth in the social contract, 188 00:22:07.720 --> 00:22:13.880 that democratic forms be as pure and direct as possible, so that the specter of oligarchy 189 00:22:13.880 --> 00:22:17.580 could never more rear its ugly head. 190 00:22:17.580 --> 00:22:24.400 The more direct and continuous the control of the body of the people over state officialdom, 191 00:22:24.400 --> 00:22:29.860 the less likely would be the state to surmount the checks of popular vigilance and reestablish 192 00:22:29.860 --> 00:22:32.380 the despotism of oligarchy. 193 00:22:32.380 --> 00:22:39.980 Thus, for Rousseau, the necessary checks on state power were to be found not, as in Montesquieu, 194 00:22:39.980 --> 00:22:46.060 in legalistic forms within the state, but in popular forces coming from outside the 195 00:22:46.060 --> 00:22:48.060 of the State Apparatus.