Ruth Bloch

Visionary Republic

Although eighteenth-century English political dissent included a few Jacobites who mourned the end of the Stuart reign, the whig opposition always drew more conspicuously on seventeenth-century Puritan revolutionary thought. Among the intellectual heroes of such radical whig polemicists as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon were John Milton, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidney. Most of the radical whigs themselves were religious Dissenters, a fact most evident in their stinging denunciations of Anglican bishops. Despite the largely secular, political orientation of their polemical literature, many of their basic premises remained imbedded in an essentially Puritan cast of mind. The assumption that unchecked power would automatically be corrupt drew conviction from the belief in the depravity of unredeemed human nature. The very words 'corruption,' 'virtue,' and 'vice,' which so infused radical whig rhetoric, were laden with religious connotations. Even the qualities thought to be inherent in the civic virtue of the body politic-self-sufficiency, industriousness, frugality, public responsibility-were cornerstones of the Puritan ethic. The civic humanist tradition conceived of this virtue as having a material basis in the wide distribution of land among independent citizen farmers, but it was usually attributed as well to Protestant religious morality. Conversely, along with luxury and economic dependence, a key symptom of the corruption of public virtue was the ignorant acceptance of superstitious and despotic religion. By this, the radical whigs, like several generations of American Protestants, meant Catholicism and high-church Anglicanism.

The historical and symbolic convergence of Dissenting Protestantism and radical whig ideology points to the difficulty of defining one as purely religious and the other simply as secular. Just as Max Weber wrote of the Protestant ethic that lay beneath 'the spirit of capitalism,' it may be argued that a secularized religious impulse infused oppositionist whig ideology in the eighteenth century. Of course, Reformation theology did not necessarily breed political rebellion, much less dictate specific constitutional arrangements. But such fundamental doctrines as the priesthood of all believers, the corruption of unredeemed human nature, and the need to activate faith in this world had a radical political potential that carried into the eighteenth-century whig opposition.

Not that radical whig ideology can be understood merely as a product of the radical Reformation. What most clearly distinguished it from the Protestant religious tradition were the elements it borrowed instead from classical republican thought. The distance between the civic republican tradition and seventeenth-century English and American Calvinism is particularly evident in their conflicting conceptions of history. Whereas radical whig ideology derived its historical theory from classical and Renaissance thought, the Anglo-American revolutionary religious tradition inherited the endemic millennialism of English Puritanism.

The radical whigs generally assumed a cyclical perspective on history. According to this originally classical view, the history of human society showed continuous circular movement among various forms of government, of which the 'republican' mixture of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic parts was by far the most preferable. Because republics were established on the fragile basis of liberty and public virtue, however, they were particularly vulnerable to internal corruption, external invasion, and eventual overthrow by despotic power. The basic question that had long confronted theorists of republican government was how to maintain republics against these formidable odds. The traditional answer was to divide power against itself, particularly by limiting the nonrepresentative monarchical branch and by guaranteeing the political expression of public virtue in the representative legislature. According to the radical whigs this was the very solution enacted in England during the previous century by the constitutional settlement of the Glorious Revolution. But in the eighteenth century they worried that the self-interested machinations of executive power had begun seriously to weaken the legislature. They warned that corrupt ministers of the Georgian monarchs had undermined the autonomy of the House of Commons and, in league with dishonest financial speculators and popish Anglican bishops, were threatening to destroy the entire fabric of British liberty. Unless virtue and balance could be rapidly restored, the radical whigs repeatedly warned, the future promised unmitigated despotism. Dominated by an idealization of the past and a fear of change, their perspective on history was fundamentally conservative. Its object was the protection of a preexisting political, social, and moral order against the continuous threat of degeneration.

This fearful, pessimistic vision of the future drawn from civic republicanism was fundamentally in conflict with millennialism. Millennialists foretold not the probable demise of liberty but the creation of a heavenly paradise on earth. They conceived of history not as an endless series of cycles but as an essentially progressive movement towards an inevitably happy conclusion. Viewing this movement in Manichaean terms as a cosmic conflict between good and evil, they recognized that the Antichrist might seem to be winning in the short run but held that his days were fatefully numbered. His final defeat would usher in a new dispensation realizing the Edenic possibility of human virtue, physical comfort, and spiritual grace. There would then be no more tyranny or oppression, no more war or animosity, no more greed or want, no more ignorance or false belief.

The millennial tradition in colonial America, like the ideas of the radical whigs, can largely be traced back to revolutionary England of the seventeenth century and, beyond that, to the Protestant Reformation. Prior to the Reformation the orthodox Catholic position of Augustine had been that the millennial prophecies be read figuratively, as referring to the perennial perfection of the City of God but not to the future of the City of Man. Thus deemed heretical by the medieval church, the millennial ideas of ancient Judaism and early Christianity nonetheless persisted underground. They had already gained strength by the late Middle Ages and then rose to the surface within the left wing of the Protestant movement, first in Northern Europe and then in England and the American colonies.

Luther and Calvin themselves had sought to establish a Protestant eschatology in keeping with Augustine. But despite their efforts the critical rallying cry of the Reformation invited the dismantling of the orthodox Catholic position on this as on other matters of doctrine. For against the authority of ecclesiastical tradition, the reformers upheld the biblical word as spoken to the individual conscience before God. This central teaching inevitably gave rise to the proliferation of individuals and sects who claimed their own understanding of Scripture. It was in this more fluid situation, in which bare biblical text commanded the highest respect, that a more literal reading of the millennial prophecies in the books of Daniel and Revelation acquired a legitimacy long lost in the traditional church.