Thank you, Dr. Reiko. After all these speakers, conventionally you say, well, the previous speaker was a hard act to follow, but there have been, all the speakers we've had would be hard acts to follow.
Now my topic is the Puritan Revolution and Republicanism, by which we mean Republican theory, a body of ideas which we'll get to directly.
I've made about three outlines and they're all too long, so I finally concluded to stick with this one and see how far I got.
I'm looking at this topic, the parents and the Republican theorists, kind of in the shadow of the American Revolution,
because I think that's probably what interests us, and in any event, we in effect had the English Revolution for the English.
They didn't manage it, so we had their revolution for them in a real sense.
And I can dispense with a larger background about the state of Europe and a lot of other things
because the previous speakers have covered much of that.
So I'll cut to the chase and talk about what historian Bernard Balin calls
the transforming ideology of the American Revolution.
And some writers try to reduce this to one or another of the constituent elements, so that someone like the very brilliant J.G.A. Pocock tends to read the entire operation as purely elaborations of republican theory,
whereas traditionally historians intended to say, well, it's all footnotes to John Locke. It seems to me that there is, in fact, a synthesis, as Robert Shellhope calls it, in the American Revolution.
So what are the elements that this synthesis consists of?
I think there's at least four that we could specify.
So we'll have the American synthesis.
The first element would be liberalism.
The second, republicanism.
The third, English law, in no particular order exactly, not really a hierarchy.
And fourth, Protestantism, or at least the kinds we have in the New World.
And all of these are powerfully combined because there's some features in these sets of ideas
that tend to reinforce the others or are compatible with them, so it becomes a very powerful ideology.
In fact, John Adams famously said that the revolution was accomplished by some time in 1776.
The revolution was the change in the outlook of something like a majority of the American colonists
with regard to the British Empire and political life generally.
The revolution was the intellectual change.
What happened from 1776 to 1783 was just a war to see if those ideas would prevail in any form.
I think Adams may have been right.
Now I'll grant to Dr. Higgs that there were some sinister fellows who wanted to re-establish
a mercantilist system under their own control as soon as possible,
but I doubt that this would have motivated the popular masses, so to speak, to participate in the exercise.
So I have to say that ideology has its own share of importance in these situations.
Okay, well, let me say more about these.
Now, liberalism, I will attribute to, among others, the Loevelers in the Puritan Revolution,
who first state, I think in a fairly coherent way, some of the themes that are later developed by John Locke
and his contemporaries, Molyneux and Turrell.
And here we have the idea of that the natural rights can be derived from natural law and an emphasis or a starting point of individuals and the rights that individuals are thought to have inherently.
I'm not going to say state of nature just to avoid all that.
Now, Republican theory, I'm going to leave blank for the moment because I'm going to come back to that.
That's my main main topic.
I'll come back to that, how these ideas came to be in the picture.
English law is interesting.
There are always people out there discovering the latent radicalism in English law.
And we have both rights and the patriot movement, and they all want to file common law rights.
And there's all sorts of fun stuff going on.
Because over the centuries, there's certain things had developed in English law that lend themselves to this kind of treatment.
The columnists summarized this in the concept the rights of Englishmen, and the rights of Englishmen, as the columnists understood them, are essentially a short list of 18th century rights that are the same thing they generally meant when they used the phrase natural law, so they list the actual contents very much the same, the right to move about, own property, the right to defend oneself, there's a number of things that make a pretty coherent package that's put together by, say, Blackstone.
and so on.
And so some of this coming through the evolution
of the common law, largely outside the state.
In fact, Edna Smith has a famous long passage
where he talks about the courts in effect
as competitive institutions that had taken cases
that people actually wanted someone to deal with
and reason out and so forth,
as opposed to, I guess, the Chancery courts
and some of the other courts,
which only affected a small number of people.
Another theme, which I'll put under English law, is constitutionalism, the idea that there is some body of fundamental law, whether it's written or not, that is above the king, or whoever the rulers are, I suppose, in principle, be above the parliament also, constitutionalism.
And as a number of speakers have pointed out, this idea exists all across Europe.
There's a notion of constitutionalism and fundamental law, and this is what the kings,
the would-be absolute monarchs, are trying to overthrow by whatever means they can overthrow this idea.
And these are the ideas to which the opposition movements appeal.
And one footnote to the whole business about the centralizing states competing with one another
through Increasingly Violent Warfare.
There's a whole series of popular uprisings,
sometimes led by aristocrats
and sometimes not led by aristocrats
against the new impositions of the monarchs
and their new attempts to find revenue.
And there's so many of these that we refer to this
as a general crisis of the 17th century,
of the front in France and some other episodes.
Perhaps we could conceive of the Dutch Wars of Independence as an earlier phase of the same process.
Okay, so that's English law.
One more thing that sometimes turns up with the more radical characters in Britain and America is the idea of the Norman Yoke.
That is that Alfred the Great or someone that had really wonderful laws that corresponded to the ideal set of natural rights or whatever.
and that the Norman Conquest had set many of these aside and the reform would consist in throwing off the Norman yoke.
This is often made fun of. I happen to like it myself. I see no problem with this formulation.
Thomas Paine would use this sometimes. Thomas Jefferson is ridiculed for using it, but I see nothing wrong with it, at least as a rhetorical device.
Now we come to Protestantism, and this is immensely complex, and I don't claim to be any sort of theologian,
but I will say this, other than that the Protestant Reformation has created new occasions for the state to intervene
by either nationalizing the church or imposing uniform tolerance when that didn't work.
It's also led to some interesting debates about the structure of church government and people tended,
and indeed intended for a long time, to make analogies between church government and political
government. As Charles I memorably said, no bishop, no king. So that if the church is
is monarchical in structure than it follows that the political state should be,
that they made constant analogies.
And this brings us to Calvinism, which I'll just very briefly say
has long since come into Britain, at least by,
I suppose, by the time of Elizabeth, if not earlier, or Calvinists.
By the time of the English Civil War, beginning in 1642,
1642, Scotland has long since become largely Presbyterian with the Catholic Scots modeled up in the Highlands and the Hebrides
and then they all moved to Nova Scotia for the most part after that.
Anyway, make a long story a little bit longer.
With Calvinism in Scotland and with some of the Calvinists in Britain,
You have this notion of Presbyterianism, the idea that the center of church organization
is the minister of the separate congregations who meet in a synod.
So you begin to have a kind of conciliar model that might be analogous to
a republican form of government or even democracy, and we see the sort of perfect example in
the Congregationalist establishment in New England, in the colonies, where it's almost impossible to
Now, what we have of course in Britain, in England at least, is an established church, the product of Henry VIII's various divorce proceedings and need for revenue and as you saw at some point, with religious issues being debated on the continent, that there was an opportunity to seize the lands of the monasteries and the churches and the churches.
and solve a number of his problems, and he was always out of money. Kings were always out of money, they were always fighting wars in France or somewhere, that the people are supposed to go to for the money, don't really want to support, and so Henry, for a number of reasons, puts himself in charge of the Church in England, and strips away some sacraments and some doctrines, but leaves it somewhat like Catholicism,
Protestant Light with the King as the titular head.
Well, this isn't good enough for the more Protestant elements in the Church of England.
They want to purify the Church of England, hence the name Puritan, and there's a whole
spectrum of how far they want to take the process, and this unfolds in part in the Civil
War.
Okay, now let's see. Other Protestant contributions to the American synthesis might be the notion of the importance, the centrality of the individual conscience, and so forth.
And particularly the idea of covenant, whether it's a covenant between the church and God, various sorts of covenants,
which of course has pretty dramatic political implications in terms of the idea of contract proliferating into the political system.
And in the North American situation, since we had what, well in time we will have 13 colonies that have been governed separately
Now let me go back and fill in the Republican part, which I left blank.
Well, Republican practice precedes Republican theory.
You have the city-states in ancient Greece, probably from somewhere around 600 BC.
There's a transition from aristocratic social authority to something we can reasonably call
Republican.
This is the result of the change in military tactics.
Some clever tactician figured out that if you had the right weapons and trained infantrymen
in the right way, they could withstand the cavalry charge, and since the equation in
these states, or these, I guess they're not really states really, I'll concede that point,
anyway these republics, since the equation is between someone who can fight, bear arms
in defense of the society and citizenship, more people can now be citizens.
Again, you're providing your own weaponry, so it's much more expensive to set yourself
And then something similar happens in Rome, about the same time, and then this is theorized.
It's just sort of narrated by Titus Livy with a bunch of mythological material that might be some of which is about 2,000 years older, possibly, in any event, Titus Livy tells some stories about the Roman Republic.
Aristotle actually theorizes republicanism in a sense by having people go around and find out what the constitutions are of the different cities,
the cities, the politumata, the constitutions, which is not a written document, it's just what they do, go find out what the laws are like in Thebes, how they govern themselves, and they'd get this information in and compare it, again this empiricism perhaps.
And to Aristotle we owe the notion that there are three fundamental forms of government, and you're all probably familiar with this, monarchy, aristocracy, and something we can call republic, or commonwealth, in which the popular element predominates.
And then these have degenerate forms, tyranny, oligarchy and democracy.
This is never a favorable term in this literature as far as I know.
And essentially it has to do with the nature of what you might call the social pyramid.
Ideally you have this broad middle group of independent property owners
capable of bearing arms in defense of their own property and the Republic.
And there's a fairly short transition from this to the Second Amendment.
Although I think the Second Amendment also has some other material from other sources in it.
I'm not going to accept the, well, I don't want to get into that right now.
In any event, if you had a different social pyramid with a small wealthy class,
Class, you'll be prone to, here's the wealthy, what the ancient Greeks called stasis or evolution,
because these oligarchs will oppress the people and then the people will rise up and oppress them
and there'll be this property transfer and nothing is stable.
So the ideal state has this kind of distribution socially and also this distribution may correspond
in some way to the forms of government so there may be, although in the Greek
Republics there isn't typically an executive, you've got the ephors that
Sparta and Rome had the two consuls, but in any event you've got the aristocrats
up here, plus or minus a hereditary executive, then you've got your broad
middle group represented and possibly some large popular assembly, and down
Down here you have others, because after all the ancient world held slavery in the fairly unnuanced form.
Okay, so you have non-citizens down there.
Okay, so to make a long story short, this is also punched up a bit and theorized by the Greek writer Polybius in the second century B.C.
And then, of course, the Roman Republic is the most successful one militarily, it keeps expanding, it absorbs Italy, it starts absorbing the entire neighborhood, pretty soon it's this colossal empire.
And by the time of Octavian, they're still pretending there's a republic, but essentially the power is gravitated to one man and the military and the bureaucracy, and it's effectively the empire, the first phase of which we call it the Principate.
So there seems to be a problem with republics that go into the expansion business and end up absent the republican forms, and this is a troubling thing.
And we're next to hear of republican theory in the Renaissance, when the city-state form of government is recreated.
Florence, Venice, all sorts of Italian city-states with different constitutions.
And rather than carry on about that, I'll just stipulate that Niccolò Machiavelli, who dies in 1527,
is generally regarded as the most thorough exponent of the Renaissance Italian form of Republican theory.
Again, using largely these same categories, but concerned in particular about the sort of the diseases of republics,
It's how to keep republics, how to avoid what his interpreter, J.G.A. Pocock, I believe a New Zealand historian, calls the Machiavellian moment,
which is the point of crisis in which the whole constitutional order could be lost.
And there's a lot to do with the republican reflections on the nature of time and whether time as such tends to cause these systems to decay
and there may be a certain fear of history
and there's all sorts of interesting themes.
Anyway, J.G.A. Pocock.
If, I don't know, is Professor Bassani here?
Okay, well, he won't pick a quarrel with me then
for mentioning Pocock, but then it was a very brilliant book
which I think may have misled us in some later periods
by overemphasizing making the republic constrain
and the sort of dominant mode of production, so to speak, where these ideas are concerned, but nonetheless very useful.
And with Machiavelli, you hear a lot about this concept of virtu.
This has to do with all these sort of manly, quasi-Spartan attributes of character.
The problem with the word virtu in English is that the Victorians ruined it for us by making us think it has to do mostly with chastity.
But this has to do with the character traits that these ideal citizens would have to have on their own land bearing arms in their own defense or defense of the republic.
Okay, so so far we've got at least a theory of government and of course the ongoing concern that if something happens to this distribution of property the balance, the social balance is disturbed
and you suffer a transition to some less desirable form of government.
What's this have to do with Britain and the current revolution?
Okay, well here's the tricky part.
Well, all of the ideas of the Renaissance tend to percolate from south to north into northwestern Europe.
Machiavelli has some interpreters in time in English who don't seem to have made much of an impact,
But there's an impact, I think, on Shakespeare.
The play Coriolanus seems to be centered on these Republican themes.
And so there are a few people who know these ideas and are ready to expand them.
Should there be any reason to?
Shouldn't there be a crisis in the system?
And Pocock argues that it's precisely the breakdown of orderly government
in the conflict between king and parliament that creates an opening for the Republican theorists
to put their ideas into the discussion.
So let me see.
So the Civil War, I guess that's a distinct category.
The Civil War, essentially 1642 to what,
49 when the king is beheaded.
and then the the rest of it to to 1660 when there's a restoration the rest of this we might separate and call it the Puritan Revolution as such but this is the English Civil War if you should ever be in Uxbridge in West London and walk past a particular pub you'll see a plaque that says on this site in 1642 the negotiations between the representatives of Charles the First and Parliament broke down and then the the war became inevitable
So there's a pub you might happen to go by sometime.
So there's a whole set of issues that are cut to the quick.
The essential problem in some ways is that the Stuart's who have replaced the Tudor line
with the death of Elizabeth, the Stuart's wanted to rule somewhat in the manner of the French monarchs.
They wanted to try out this absolute monarchy.
And unfortunately, in Britain, they were faced with some institutions that made that difficult.
Of course, chiefly parliament, but also the independent courts.
And so it's a bit of a problem, and particularly since the states insist on having wars in France and so forth,
and then they need money for them, and then they go to parliament, and parliament says,
well, fine, we'll give you some money, but you have to sign this petition of rights.
It sort of restates Magna Carta and some other rights of the subject,
Some of which pretty much literally end up in the American Constitution, some of the things from the petition of right.
So the stewards aren't very happy about this.
So Charles, the first having had to submit to that doesn't call Parliament.
There's still some option that the King can try to get along without Parliament for a period of time.
So you have a gap from 1629 to 1640 in which there's no parliament.
And in the meantime, the Syrians have another problem, which is they're always suspected of being crypto-Catholics.
They're always suspected because they support the high church party within the Church of England.
And this is very important because, again, the Church is central to the spiritual welfare of all the subjects
and also has the welfare functions which are taken over by the abstract state later.
So church government is important for any number of reasons.
Also, it's a question of who's going to get the living,
who's going to actually get the money
that goes to the ministry for preaching.
There's interesting stuff there.
So this is the reign of Archbishop Laud,
and he's hated by all of the more Protestant elements
in the church, and eventually he has a bad end
in the course of the struggle.
Also, 1635, the king decides he needs some extra revenue, so he, on his own motion, he says,
well, I'm going to tax the port cities for some extra money. This is called the ship money.
And he hasn't got a parliament, it's not in session, it can't consent, so people, I guess,
mostly pay the tax and some don't. And John Hampton became a fairly popular figure by
not paying the ship money even though he lost in court.
Okay, now the church policy again is having further results.
You have to remember that the stewards are kings of both Scotland and England.
The countries are separate. This just happens to be the same king.
So he's trying to push his church policy into Scotland.
Well, the Scots are by now are largely Presbyterians, they won't stand for this and they've signed their Solemn League and Covenant to resist this and the king decides he has to call a parliament to get some money to subdue the Scots as he calls the short parliament and then the Scots aren't subdued and he needs more money to bribe the Scots, so it's constant problems and this is by no means the complete
political history. So he calls the long parliament in 1641. He has no idea it's going to be a long
parliament, but it ends up outlasting him. And also, in short order, there's a rebellion in Ireland,
again, partly over these church questions and the usual questions. And there's a large Presbyterian
Party in Parliament. Again, here we have to introduce the concept of the gentry.
The gentry are an interesting social class. They are large landholders. Some of them may
dabble, I guess, in some the high end of commerce. They're not the title nobility. They don't sit in
the House of Lords, but they're the dominant element in the House of Commons. And very many
Many of them are on the spectrum of radical protestants from the milder ones, I guess
the Presbyterians, independents over to some other. Protestantism is very complicated in
this period. Once the war breaks out you hear more from the Anabaptists and people who become
the Quakers and so forth and the Anarcho-Baptists as I call them because many of them didn't
I don't believe in serving in the military or having anything to do with government and so on.
So to make a long story very short, the royalist forces are defeated once parliament and the king are putting their own armies in the field to fight.
So it's like having a war between the Supreme Court, I guess, and the presidency or something in our terms.
And out of this emerges, of course, Oliver Cromwell, who becomes the sort of symbolic figure and the, in time, dictator ruling under a written constitution of some sort.
And there's constant purges of parliament as the element, revolutionary elements in control of parliament become more radical.
They have to purge the less reliable members who want to negotiate with the king, and the king is finally beheaded.
and so you go from the long parliament to the rump parliament which is the remnant after they purge the less reliable elements and eventually you end up at the bare bones parliament and some of those guys are purged so it's quite a bit like the sequence in the first revolution that said that Louis XVI used to read books about the English Civil War while he was awaiting his fate to kind of find out what was going to happen on the theory that things repeat themselves okay so to make a long story short eventually for
There's a whole number of reasons this revolution stalls, but in the interim there's a very interesting phenomenon coming out of the army.
And this is the new model army that comes into being after the Battle of Marsden-Moore, which I guess is what, 1644.
And this is the most radical Protestant elements in what's becoming a Puritan Revolution and not just a civil war, are in the army.
and this is a large mass army called the New Model Army
and the army begins to want to make policy.
They don't necessarily want to demobilize,
they want to take direction of the revolution
and out of this comes this whole episode of the levelers
and the levelers are interesting to us,
these people like Lilburn, Walden and Overton
because they start saying that everyone has a propriety
in his own body.
This is the older term for property
or an alternate term for property.
So you have the whole notion of self-ownership stated here
that John Locke will later develop in his own way.
So you have a number of the liberal themes.
In fact, I wanna go ahead and,
you wanna tell me how I'm doing on time?
All right, I think I'm okay.
Anyway, so the Levellers are interesting
in contributing to the liberal strand
in the synthesis that we get in the American Revolution.
They believe in equal liberty of individuals, self-ownership,
and these are stated in a number of famous manifestos
and pamphlets, as well as an attempt
at a written constitution that they propose
the agreement of the people.
And the most famous episode is the debates at Putney,
1647, in which Rainborough, speaking for the agitators,
which are what some of the radical leaders
are called in the Army, argues with Ayrton Cromwell's son-in-law and the more conservative elements, including Cromwell,
and this is all relative, revolutions keep moving so the radical element last week is now the more conservative element this week,
Cromwell and the more conservative element at this point begin to fear that these guys want to eliminate or redistribute property
And that's really not what they're saying, but it's a good name to call them, so this is why they're called Levellers.
And for a long time, the socialist historians have claimed them as proto-socialists.
And it took a Marxist, C. B. McPherson, a Canadian Marxist, to demonstrate that the Levellers were in fact propertarians,
something like early radical libertarians or something and not interested in limiting property,
but wanting to redefine the rules of government, so they wanted to abolish things like imprisonment for death, they wanted to limit capital punishment to only the crime of murder, they were opposed to primogeniture, so their program taken as a whole is fairly scary, but they weren't actually interested in, so McPherson actually says, well they're the radical wing of the bourgeois revolution, well it's fine with me, I have no problem with that,
as such. So here's the most interesting ideological development in this whole
process from 1642 to 1660, but of course they lose. They don't prevail and the
revolution is reigned in by Cromwell and the leadership. Cromwell dies in 1658.
There's an attempt to have his son rule in his stead, but the steam has gone out
and for a whole number of reasons, everyone's ready finally to restore the king.
So let me go back now to how the Republican ideas come into the picture.
It's interesting, of course, that Hobbes, about whom Dr. Ludwigsen was just speaking, is a product of this period.
He's very unhappy about disorder, naturally enough, and wants to find a solution, so you don't have to go through these things anymore, civil wars and so forth, and he writes in 1651.
Now, probably the classic statement of Republican theory in its English form is in Oceania, a utopian novel or work by James Harrington published in 1656, just before the Restoration.
And Harrington disagrees with a lot of the writers on English politics.
He says there really wasn't an ancient constitution,
but there was a Gothic social order by which he means he understands the feudal system.
But this has been eliminated by institutional changes since at least Henry VII.
And so England has to find a new political balance and a social balance to go with it.
and so he's recommending various reforms to bring about the Republican program.
And so he has some readers, but by the time the restoration has taken place and new issues have come up,
the Harringtonians, the followers of Harrington, are standing his arguments somewhat on their head,
as happened with Hegel in relation to Marx,
and arguing that, well, there had been an ancient constitution, and we have to restore it, or the constitution we have now is good, what we have to do,
in effect, people like Shaftesbury, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who is the leader of the Whigs and the Exclusion Crisis,
which I don't really have to go into, I guess, just to explain that James II, the last of the stewards is deposed, and part of the background is the Exclusion Crisis.
Again, he's openly Catholic and this is not selling very well and plus he's trying to proclaim a policy of tolerance
so that the Catholics can be tolerated and so forth. The radical Protestants aren't very happy with this, even the moderate Protestants aren't happy.
So to make a long story not too much longer, people like Shaftesbury and the Whigs, the Whig Party, as it's now called within Parliament,
begin using this republican rhetoric as part of their armament, as part of what they use in debate.
And they say, well, actually we have in Britain right now something approaching a republican constitution
with the division of government and the social distribution of property is close enough.
But the danger is that the king, this bad king, the Stuart King, is going to use various means of corruption
and in the small sense of buying votes and so forth in parliament to unbalance the system.
And that's the larger corruption is the constitutional violation of this order or undermining of the constitutional structure.
That's the larger corruption. It's not actually the money so much.
And they're saying, well, he's going to do this with a standing army.
Well, by now, having gone through the civil war and so forth,
There is a reasonable fear of a standing army, and these gentlemen use the rhetoric that James the Second is like all these other stewards, he's attempting to create a standing army so he can overpower parliament and the people.
And if the political constitution is changed, then the social structure, the whole social structure will change and everyone will be oppressed.
And this is the famous division that's expressed by this time as the opposition of the court party and the country party.
So the court party are these kind of drones and parasites that hang around the court and constitute the bureaucracy
and get all the favors and do all the corruption, the stock-jobbing and all of that.
And these are the people who want to undermine the whole order of the Constitution and society.
The country party are the virtuous citizens on their own land, able to bear arms.
The fact that they're, you know, huge landowners isn't beside the point.
They're the country party.
And you can see how potentially in North America, you could democratize this concept
because there's a lot more people owning land and despite Professor Valziel's owning weapons and firearms and so on.
So you can see that this sort of rhetoric has a real future in North America.
Now, the Whigs do depose James II and they take power and are quickly known as the Whig Oligarchy
And they begin to govern somewhat the way he did. I mean, they simply say, well, you can't govern a modern kingdom without some corruption, and you have to have a little bit of a standing army, even though we can mostly get by with the Navy.
There are just things you have to do.
So a new opposition arises, and the new opposition consists of some of the Tory party, the old Tories, like Viscount Bolingbroke,
but also some of the people who had supported them, who are now known as radical Whigs, and attacked them using the same rhetoric.
And here we have writers like what have been called the Commonwealthmen.
There's a book by Carolyn Robbins on this. It's quite good.
And Valen talks about this whole literature.
And this is what the Americans read.
They read all these guys who are talking about these dangers of standing army
and the executive overpowering the popular branches
and changing the whole nature of the society, which they identify as a free society.
Now, in my view, Trenchard and Gordon and such writers,
Many of them are already combining several strains of thought, and you can already see the beginnings of the American synthesis, so to speak, across the water.
So the Americans are reading this literature, and after 1763, when the British imperial authorities decide they want to tighten up the system and have a better run empire,
the Americans take this as a bad sign that precisely the sorts of things that these writers predict are now being undertaken by George III
and his ministers and Lord North and all of that.
So there's a tendency, of course, for some historians to dismiss this as mere paranoia.
It's some crazy antique ideology the Americans have read and it's really not very reasonable of them to not want to pay the stamp tax and so forth.
But in fact, they actually read the news.
It might take a few weeks to get over here, but they read the news.
They knew there'd been a royal reaction in a number of countries that the King of Denmark had sort of abolished
or subdued his parliament and they had a number of reasons and plus they knew that when the
T was shipped over they knew who that was supposed to bail out. It was supposed to bail
out the directors of the East India Company who had lost a bunch of money on a particularly
large boondoggle. So this can't be reduced to paranoia. It does show however they had
had a much higher standard than we do of deciding when they were being oppressed, a rather higher standard.
Okay, I think I'm running out of time. Let me try to bring this to some sort of reasonable conclusion.
Now, there's a downside to Republican theory, which is why I'm glad it's not the only element
in the American Synthesis as it emerged in the revolution.
Not that it saved us in the very long run,
but it was a pretty good synthesis
because after all, liberalism had no theory of government
other than there were some rights
and someone should protect them.
Republicanism had a theory of government,
really had no theory of rights.
If you combine the two,
it seems to me you get a more powerful system,
even if there are times when the elements seem to pull apart
as people try to apply them.
So I think the synthesis itself is interesting.
Republican theory, left to its own devices, can go off in the direction of integral nationalism about which Dr. Livingston was speaking.
And there's also an interesting tension with the American Republican thinkers.
And this goes back to Harrington.
There's still this idea that some of them have, and I understand, as did Machiavelli, that there's a danger,
But some of the Republican thinkers are still interested in maybe having an empire anyway.
They'll say, well, maybe just this one time we can have an empire and it'll remain Republican.
And Harrington already says this in Oceania.
Harrington says, oh, well, let's see.
Okay, that'll be England.
And Harrington says, well, Oceania, meaning England, hasn't gotten the immediate neighbors by land,
so we don't have to have any big standing army.
We can do everything by naval power. So we can expand indefinitely to the West.
Well, we'll start there, the Irish model, always a starting point for these problems.
But also into the Indies, so there's this infinite possibility of expansion over land.
So Harrington's already predicted the American Empire, except he thinks it'll be British.
He doesn't realize the empire might outgrow the state that set it in motion.
And this seems to me is what happens with some later figures like Jefferson.
This can't turn down a big real estate deal because of the importance of the landed individuals on their own property.
He wants to postpone any moment of reckoning that...
I think they're wrong about there having to be a moment of reckoning, but they tended to believe this.
at least some of the time they don't really entirely assimilate the notion that a complex market economy sort of gets you around some of these problems and some of them and not so much Jefferson and even less John Taylor some of them tend to think that all credit and all banking is suspect simply because they're looking at the national debt which is a new invention that Harrington didn't anticipate that becomes central to some of the debates after 16
in 1988, they don't understand that banking is not all about national debt and money doesn't have to be funny money and so forth so there's some problems in the Republican tradition left to itself including the tendency some of the Republican thinkers have to say well as long as we keep expanding and it's just over land that's okay because we incorporate the land and everybody gets some land and then they're citizens and then we
And so in a way, Harrington already anticipates James Madison's argument in the tenth Federalist
paper that you actually reduce the problem of faction by allowing for expansion of the
system over land.
In a way, it didn't work that badly, except when it didn't work.
And it didn't work when we had in effect followed the Roman model of rapid expansion, had a
bunch of land, and then we had to quarrel about who got the benefit from it.
And this cut across the slavery question with certain results that we're all familiar with.
One more thing very quickly, there's an interesting way in which the Republican attitude towards
military policy comes straight down. Republicans tended to, and Britain had the luxury of saying,
well, we can base anything we do on naval power and a small standing army. And in a
In a way, this comes right down to the Taft Republicans in the 1940s and early 50s who say,
well, we'll do everything with air power, if we have to do anything with air power and naval power,
and we still have a small standing army.
And the court party, we might say, who knows, court party, FDR, Kennedy, people like that,
they don't mind a larger standing army in principle.
The Court Party always had a different set of assumptions about this particular issue,
but this may in fact be a long-run heritage of, because Jefferson, you'll recall, wanted
to defend the United States with these little PT boats that would go around the coast, and
we don't know how workable that was, but it was an interesting notion.
All right, there's a lot more one can say, but I'd better not, so thank you for your indulgence.
Thank you very much.