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Foundations of American Conservatism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2014
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To the student of comparative political theory, few things are more fascinating than the contrast not only between different ages but also between different countries in one and the same age. The greatest advances in the collective thinking of Western humanity have been made coöperatively by men of every nation; and in every age all unite to give to that age its own distinctive character; yet each people contributes something of its own national genius to the spirit of the age. He, then, who would understand a country and the pattern of its people's thinking does well to inquire in what way it has deviated from the thinking of other nations in particular epochs.
Whoever looks at early nineteenth-century America must be struck by its aloofness from many of the main currents of Western thinking. In the great Revolution of the eighteenth century, it had not been thus. The Lockean and Blackstonean tradition of the right of Englishmen to protect their property through representative organs; Rousseau's concept of equal natural rights of every individual and the right of the sovereign people in convention to reconstitute society according to its general will; Montesquieu's advocacy of checks and balances as safeguards of liberty; Quesnay's physiocratic cult of land as the natural source of wealth and power; Adam Smith's analysis of the relationship between national policy and private commerce; deism in religion; and associationism in psychology—these were among the many trends in the Age of Reason that came to a focus in the revolt of the thirteen colonies and the establishment of the United States.
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References
1 This has previously been suggested in Carpenter, W. S., Development of American Political Thought (1930)Google Scholar, without, however, stressing the ambivalence or dialectic inherent in American political thinking, which provided the theme of Parrington's, V. L. illuminating and suggestive Main Currents in American Thought (1927, etc.)Google Scholar.
2 As has been done in Dicey, A. V., Law and Public Opinion (lectures 1898; pub. 1905)Google Scholar; Wallas, G., Francis Place (1898)Google Scholar; and Halévy, E., Formation du Radicalisme Philosophique (1901, etc.)Google Scholar and Histoire du Peuple Anglais (1912, etc.).
3 See the writings of Étienne Dumont, and, on the origins of utilitarianism, Wickwar, W. H., Baron d'Holbach (1935)Google Scholar.
4 In spite of some early references to the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” by John Adams and Fisher Ames:
“There is in nature, and there must be in the administration of government, a fixed rule and standard of political conduct, and that is, the greatest permanent happiness of the greatest number of the people.” Ames, F., “Camillus” (1787)Google Scholar, in Works, II 108 (Boston, 1854)Google Scholar.
“Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.” Adams, J., “Thoughts on Government” (1776)Google Scholar, in Works, IV, 193 (Boston, 1851)Google Scholar.
5 As was well demonstrated in Palmer, P. A., “Benthamism in England and America,” in this Review, Vol. 35, pp. 855 ff. (Oct, 1941)Google Scholar.
6 It may be also that the wide latitude left for administrative discretion in the United States, especially in benefactory administration, comes from non-attendance at the rigorous school of Benthamism, with its effort to maximize certainty and minimize discretion.
7 It was probably Benedetto Croce who first demonstrated, in his Storia d'Europa, how social evolutionism antedated biological evolutionism. John Adams oscillated between a philosophy of history based on the idea of progress, as in “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government” (1789) in Works, IV, 283 Google Scholar, and a cyclical view of history, as ibid., VI, 186.
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10 Adams, J. Q., “Letters of Publicola” (1791)Google Scholar, in Writings, ed. Ford, W. C., I (1913)Google Scholar. Parrington, op. cit., seems to be mistaken in thinking that Adams here advocated “judicial trusteeship.” The evidence seems to me overwhelming that Adams was preaching parliamentary sovereignty, not judicial supremacy—the more so since he did not believe that written constitutions should be superior to statute law.
11 Adams, J., “A Defense of the Constitutions,” Vol. III (1788)Google Scholar, in Works, VI, 65 Google Scholar. James Kent, in his praise of the elder Adams's “great work,” missed the point that Adams was not advocating bicameralism as such so much as bicameralism as a device for representing property as well as persons. Commentaries, Lect. XI.
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13 A. Hamilton, brief for speech at Philadelphia, on submitting his plan for a national constitution, June 18, 1787, in Works (ed. Lodge, H. C.), I, 375 (1903)Google Scholar. Similarly, notes on the speech by Madison and by Yates.
14 Federalist, No. IX.
16 Kent, J., Commentaries, Lect. XIV (1827)Google Scholar.
16 Adams, J., “Thoughts on Government” (1776)Google Scholar, in Works, IV, 207 Google Scholar.
17 Bowman v. Middleton (South Carolina, 1792), in Kent, op. cit., Lect. XX, citing I Bay 252.
18 Kent, loc. cit. (1827).
19 Kent, J., Commentaries, Lect. XXXIV, “Of Personal Property Google Scholar.”
20 D. Webster, speech in the constitutional convention on the basis of the Massachusetts senate, December 15,1820, in Works (1853), III, 15fGoogle Scholar.
21 Calhoun, J. C., Disquisition (written in 1850 or earlier; published in 1851)Google Scholar; Mill, J. S., Representative Government (1861), Chap. 17Google Scholar, praised Calhoun as “a man who has displayed powers as a speculative political thinker superior to any who has appeared in American politics since the authors of the Federalist.” The similarities between Mill and Calhoun are so striking as to suggest the indebtness of the later to the earlier writer, despite the greater emphasis of Calhoun on economic, and of Mill on intellectual, progress.
22 Calhoun, Disquisition, in Works, I, 38 (1854)Google Scholar.
23 Ibid., p. 52.
24 Ibid., p. 57.
26 Hamilton, A., The Farmer Refuted (1775)Google Scholar, loc. cit., I, 73, citing Hume, D., Essays (1740)Google Scholar, Essay V, on “Independency of Parliament”; cited also by J. Kent, ubi supra. Hamilton's mercantilist policy of basing public power on private wealth, patriotism on profit, and government on property, recalls the contemporary conception of statecraft as the harmonizing of the “the general interest” with “particular interests”—phrases that had been put into circulation by Helvetius. See Wickwar, W. H., “Helvetius and Holbach,” in Hearnshaw, F. J. C. (ed.) Social and Political Ideas of Some Great French Thinkers of the Age of Reason (1929)Google Scholar.
26 Adams, J., “Defense of the Constitutions,” ubi supra, IV, 428 Google Scholar, also citing Harrington, J., Oceana, ed. Toland, John (1700)Google Scholar. Toland was also the father of eighteenth-century materialism, and for these reasons must be counted a precursor of materialist interpretations in general; see Wickwar, , Holbach, p. 74fGoogle Scholar. Daniel Webster, ubi supra, pointed out that the rôle of property in social statics was first recognized, not by Harrington, but by Aristotle.
27 V. L. Parrington seems to hint at this interpretation, op. cit., Vols. II and III, passim, although he complicates a generally tenable theory by associating Hamilton's mercantilism with Adam Smith's anti-mercantilism and by omission to note that the French physiocrats, although agrarian equalitarians, were anything but democrats.
28 On conservative blindness to the political implications of small landed property, see Horton, J. T., James Kent (1939), pp. 279 ff.Google Scholar, and cf. Webster ubi supra.
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