At the same time that historians of colonial Virginia like Bruce and Wertenbaker were searching for the origins of the Southern gentleman, European scholars following in the footsteps of Karl Marx were searching for the origins of the modern capitalist. If the Bruce-Wertenbaker framework would come to dominate Virginia historiography, the “transition to capitalism” framework of Marx, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber would come to dominate the twentieth-century social sciences in general.
The two searches parallel each other in several ways. Both share a nexus in developments in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Both pose the central question of the relative importance of culture versus environment in societal evolution. More importantly, both frame the analysis in terms of similar dichotomous ideal types: Yankee versus Cavalier, precapitalist versus capitalist, traditional versus modern. This antithetical framework, the direct descendant of Aristotelian economic ethics, has long shaped and continues to shape Western thinking. Yet the two literatures–that in the Chesapeake and that in Western social evolution–have rarely cross paths.
Despite the consensus among historians about the dominance of modern economic behavior in seventeenth‑century Virginia, few have looked seriously at Virginia for insights into the transition to capitalism. In part this lack of attention reflects the difficulty of fitting Virginia into any of the traditional frameworks developed for contemporaneous England or New England. The dubious religiosity of early Virginia, the forced-labor plantation system, the lack of towns and manufactures, and the rise of gentility as the dominant ethic in the eighteenth century all give Virginia a problematic location in any “transition-to-capitalism” narrative. For their part, the historians of Virginia have failed to address adequately the issues of central concern in the transition to capitalism debate: the relationship between economic ideals and behavior. Social historians, focusing solely on revealed behavior, have for the most part ignored expressed ideals. Cultural and intellectual historians have noted a discrepancy between expressed ideals and revealed behavior but have summarily dismissed the divergence as a function of short-term environmental constraints.
Any attempt to bridge the gap between the particular historical and the general social science literatures reveals inherent problems which rest fundamentally on the dichotomous thinking central to both. By avoiding dichotomies and coming to grips with the actual economic ethics of seventeenth-century Virginia, we can begin to move beyond the limitations of both debates.
Transition to Capitalism
Scholars have identified a major shift in Western attitudes toward the pursuit of wealth at some point between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, a shift at the heart of “the transition to capitalism.” Whether Marx’s transition from “use values” inherently limited by needs to infinitely expansive “exchange values,” or Sombart’s and Weber’s shift from Bedarfsdeckungsprinzip (“the principle of satisfaction of relatively fixed needs”) to Erwerbsprinzip (“the principle of unlimited acquisition”), this shift rests ultimately on Aristotle’s contrast between two economic ethics: oikonomik_ (“the art of household management,” or domestic economy) and chrematistik_ (“the art of wealth-getting,” or chrematistics). In what Karl Polanyi labelled “probably the most prophetic pointer ever made in the realm of social science,” Aristotle contrasted the two as radically different approaches to acquisition. Whereas domestic economy limits acquisition to “the amount of property which is needed for a good life” and “the satisfaction of men’s natural wants”–“the elements of true riches”–under chrematistics “riches and property have no limit.” Domestic economy seeks to maximize leisure within the context of a good life, while chrematistics seeks to maximize wealth without limit. Aristotle, like his contemporaries and many later writers influenced directly or indirectly by classical thought, condemned chrematistics as unnatural and illegitimate.[ref]Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Modern Library, 1943) 66-70; Albert Augustus Trever, A History of Greek Economic Thought (1916; Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1978) 85-8, 105-7; Lewis H. Haney, History of Economic Thought, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1936) 63-5; M. Beer, Early British Economics from the XIIIth to the Middle of the XVIIIth Century (London: Allen, 1938) 130; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart, 1944) 53-4; Louis Schneider, The Freudian Psychology and Veblen’s Social Theory (Morningside Heights, NY: King’s Crown, 1948) 186; Walter A. Weisskopf, The Psychology of Economics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955) 12-5; Herbert Lüthy, “Once Again: Calvinism and Capitalism,” The Protestant Ethic and Modernization, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (New York: Basic, 1968) 105; Odd Langholm, Wealth and Money in the Aristotelian Tradition: A Study in Scholastic Economic Sources (Bergen: Universitetforlaget, 1983) 46-55; Thomas O. Nitsch, “Further Reflections on Human-nature Assumptions in Economics–Part I: The ‘Men’ of Aristotle, Adam Smith et al. Revisited,” International Journal of Social Economics 17 (1990): 4-5; David Parker and Richard Stead, Profit and Enterprise: The Political Economy of Profit (New York: Harvester, 1991) 20-1; Paul A. Rahe, Republic Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992) 88-104.[/ref]
Marx, Sombart, and Weber simply historicized this dichotomy, showing when and how Aristotelian aversion to chrematistics was transformed into the capitalistic championing of profit maximization. Thus, in the transition to capitalism framework, domestic economy and chrematistics represent the dominant ethic and behavior of the pre-capitalist and capitalist eras respectively.[ref]On Marx, see Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977) 247-69, esp. 247-8, 253n, 267; Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., “Marx on Aristotle: Freedom, Money, and Politics,” Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980): 351-67; J.G.A. Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth‑Century Social Thought,” Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, eds. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983) 237; Charles Perrings, “The Natural Economy Revisited,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 33 (1985): 829‑31; George E. McCarthy, Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and Nineteenth-Century Political Economy (Savage, MD: Rowman, 1990) 58-9, 303-4n2; William James Booth, “The New Household Economy,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 59-75; William James Booth, “Households, Markets, and Firms,” Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth‑century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity, ed. George E. McCarthy (Savage, MD: Rowman, 1992) 243-4, 249. On Sombart and Weber, see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958) 53, 58-9, 64-5, 195n12; Talcott Parsons, The Early Essays, ed. Charles Camic (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991) 3-37; H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism: A Criticism of Max Weber and his School (New York: Kelley, 1959) 35-6; F. X. Sutton, “The Social and Economic Philosophy of Werner Sombart: The Sociology of Capitalism,” An Introduction to the History of Sociology, ed. Harry Elmer Barnes (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948) 322-3, 327; Lüthy 105; Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1983) 19-21.[/ref] Weber and Sombart differed from Marx in stressing the dominance of ideological over material forces in this transition, but they and their followers eschewed any ideological determinism.[ref]Weber, Protestant Ethic 55-6; Robertson xii; Parsons, Early Essays 3-37; M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (1939; Chicago: U Chicago P, 1965) 513; Ephraim Fischoff, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The History of a Controversy,” Social Research 11 (1944): 57-62, 66-8; H. R. Trevor-Roper, “Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change,” Historical Studies (Irish Conference of Historians) 4 (1963): 20.[/ref]
Although endless numbers of critics and supporters of Marx, Weber, and Sombart followed with their own particular combinations of ideological, institutional, and material forces in their solutions to the transition question, a broad region of unchallenged consensus gradually arose to dominate twentieth-century social science. Despite different emphases, present-day scholars agree on certain key points: the present dominance of a modern “spirit” of capitalism, the antithesis of the traditional “spirit” which ruled in the Middle Ages; the chrematistic ethic at the heart of this modern spirit; that regardless of the role of religion in the origins of capitalist spirit, secularization played an even greater role in removing traditional constraints on the full exercise of the ethic; and, finally, that regardless of the origins of this ethic, once adopted the ethic took on a life of its own, forcing others to conform or perish in Darwinian fashion.
Most of the traditional explanations of the timing of the transition to capitalism have focused directly on England as the first major industrial power. The three dominant interpretations stress alternately: a sixteenth-century commercial agrarian revolution coming with the Age of Discovery, a shift of the commercial center of Europe from the Mediterranean to Northwest Europe, and the enclosure movement in England; a seventeenth-century intellectual revolution, usually linked to Puritanism, secularization, and the rise of economic and political liberalism; an eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. Although followers of Marx have traditionally stressed the sixteenth- and eighteenth-century revolutions, much of the modern debate on the ethical aspects of capitalism naturally highlights–as a consequence of Weber’s work and the debate over his Protestant ethic thesis–the seventeenth-century intellectual revolution.
The Weberian debate has necessarily involved students of both colonial America and England, since Puritanism strongly shaped both intellectual environments and Weber’s case rested equally on evidence from both sides of the Atlantic. While Weber emphasized the direct impact of Puritanism, his followers and critics alike have tended to emphasize even more the role of secularization, the evidence of the spirit of capitalism before Puritanism, and the differences between early and late Puritanism. Supporters equate the spirit with a secularized Puritanism and critics emphasize the triumph of a secular spirit with the demise of Puritanism. Weber’s critics also find the religious and capitalist spirits adamantly opposed and Puritans practically indistinguishable from Anglicans and Catholics on economic ethics. Both sides of this debate agree that regardless of the factors involved, the spirit of capitalism dominated England by the late seventeenth century, coming directly upon the demise of institutional Puritanism at the Restoration.[ref]On Weber, see Weber, Protestant Ethic 55-6, 62-3. For supporters of Weber, see Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon, 2 vols. (1931; New York: Macmillan, 1949) 2: 642-6; R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (New York: Harcourt, 1926); Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1935) 1-4, 121-200, 268; Fischoff 55n9; S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Protestant Ethic Thesis in an Analytical and Comparative Framework,” The Protestant Ethic and Modernization, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (New York: Basic, 1968) 3-8; Christopher Hill, “Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism,” Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975) 81-102. For critics, see Robertson, Aspects; Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism (1935; New York: Arno, 1972); Knappen 401-23, 513-4; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 5 vols. (New York: Viking, 1946-59) 1: 13; Winthrop S. Hudson, “Puritanism and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Church History 18 (1949): 3-17; Wallace Notestein, The English People on the Eve of Colonization 1603-1630 (New York: Harper, 1954) 166-7; Winthrop S. Hudson, “The Weber Thesis Reexamined,” Church History 30 (1961): 91-4, 98; Charles H. George and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation 1570-1640 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961) 117-73; Kurt Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action: A Critique of Max Weber, trans. E. Geoffrey French (New York: Harper, 1961); A. G. Dickens, The English Refor-mation (New York: Schocken, 1964) 317; Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965) 300-16; Timothy Hall Breen, “The Non-Existent Controversy: Puritan and Anglican Attitudes on Work and Wealth, 1600-1640,” Church History 35 (1966): 273-87; Leo F. Solt, “Puritanism, Capitalism, Democracy, and the New Science” American Historical Review 73 (1967): 20-8; Lüthy 87-108; Laura Stevenson O’Connell, “Anti-Entrepreneurial Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Anglican Literature,” Journal of British Studies 15 (1976): 1-20; Paul Seaver, “The Puritan Work Ethic Revisited,” Journal of British Studies 19 (1980): 35-53; C. John Sommerville, “The Anti-Puritan Work Ethic,” Journal of British Studies 20 (1981): 70-81.[/ref] In New England, historians have variously dated the “declension” from Puritan to Yankee at any time from 1630 when John Winthrop stepped off the Arbella to the American Revolution and beyond.[ref]For American supporters of Weber, see Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, 3 vols. (1927; Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987) 3‑8; A. Whitney Griswold, “Three Puritans on Prosperity,” New England Quarterly 7 (1934): 475-93; Max Savelle, Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind (New York: Knopf, 1948) 188; Wright, Middle-Class 199-200; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Random, 1958); Edmund S. Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 24 (1967) 3-8. For American critics, see Clive Day, “Capitalistic and Socialistic Tendencies in the Puritan Colonies,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1920 (Washington: GPO, 1925) 223-35; E. A. J. Johnson, American Economic Thought in the Seventeenth Century (London: King, 1932) 6-8, 86-100; Dorfman 1: 29-74; Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1956) 138-9, 143; Samuelsson 55-79, 113-5; Gabriel Kolko, “Max Weber on America: Theory and Evidence,” History and Theory 1 (1961): 246; Page Smith, As A City Upon A Hill: The Town in American History (Cambridge: MIT P, 1966) 189-90; J.E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974) 60-3, 83-5; John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991) 1‑4.[/ref]
With the current emphasis on secularization, the search for evidence of the spirit of capitalism has naturally turned to the non-religious literature, particularly political and economic tracts. Just as Weber and Sombart earlier highlighted Benjamin Franklin as the ideal Yankee capitalist, C. B. Macpherson has set the later agenda with his analysis of seventeenth-century writers like Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke for the origins of a dominant “possessive individualism” (Macpherson’s modern equivalent of chrematistics).[ref]C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). See also Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1953) 234-5, 242-8.[/ref] Following Macpherson, other historians of political economy have addressed the writings of various seventeenth-century political economists and eighteenth-century writers like Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, James Steuart, and Adam Smith for incipient positive statements of modern capitalism.[ref]Joyce Appleby, “Ideology and Theory: The Tension between Political and Economic Liberalism in Seventeenth-Century England,” American Historical Review 81 (1976): 499-515; Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977); Joyce Oldhan Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978).[/ref]
However, despite the overwhelming acceptance of the dominance of the spirit of capitalism in late seventeenth-century England, the research in the secular literature has proved conclusively that whatever the ambiguities and paradoxes in individual tracts or authors, chrematistics never achieved a positive normative status in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England or America.[ref]Nathan Rosenberg, “Some Institutional Aspects of the Wealth of Nations,” Journal of Political Economy 68 (1960): 557-70; Kolko 255-7; Alan Ryan, “Locke and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie,” Political Studies 13 (1965): 219-30; E. J. Hundert, “The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke between Ideology and History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972): 3-17; J. A. W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1969); John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969) 210-63; Nathan Rosenberg, “Adam Smith on Profits–Paradox Lost and Regained,” Journal of Political Economy 82 (1974): 1177-90; Crowley, Sheba; J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975) 390-1, 423-552; E. J. Hundert, “Market Society and Meaning in Locke’s Political Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 15 (1977): 33-44; Thomas A. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Columbia UP, 1978) ix, 54-63, 77-94; Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge, 1978) 35-52; Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978); Richard R. Johnson, “Politics Redefined: An Assessment of Recent Writings on the Late Stuart Period of English History, 1660 to 1714,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 35 (1978): 710‑1; James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980) 148-50; Karen Iversen Vaughan, John Locke: Economist and Social Scientist (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) 77-107; Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms” 243; Thomas A. Horne, “Bourgeois Virtues: Property and Moral Philosophy in America, 1750-1800,” History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 317-40; Nathan Tarcov, “A ‘Non-Lockean’ Locke and the Character of Liberalism,” Liberalism Reconsidered, eds. Douglas MacLean and Claudia Mills (Totowa, NJ: Rowman, 1983) 130-40; Donald Winch, “Economic Liberalism as Ideology: The Appleby Version,” Economic History Review 2nd ser. 38 (1985): 287-97; Banning 14, 16; James T. Kloppenberg, “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 74 (1987): 9-33; Donald Winch, “Adam Smith and the Liberal Tradition,” Traditions of Liberalism: Essays on John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, ed. Knud Haakonssen (St. Leonards, NSW, Australia: Centre for Independent Studies, 1988) 81‑104; Tony Dickson and Hugh V. McLachlan, “In Search of ‘The Spirit of Capitalism’: Weber’s Misinterpretation of Franklin,” Sociology 23 (1989): 81-9; Malcolm Jack, Corruption & Progress: The Eighteenth-Century Debate (New York: AMS, 1989) 3-4, 20; James R. Jacob, “The Political Economy of Science in Seventeenth-Century England,” Social Research 59 (1992): 505-32; Craig Muldrew, “Interpreting the Market: The Ethics of Credit and Community Relations in Early Modern England.” Social History 18 (1993): 167.[/ref] Even Joyce Appleby, who supports Macpherson’s interpretation of seventeenth-century English society, acknowledges that his possessive individualism was “strangely neglected, perhaps even suppressed” in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.[ref]Cf. Appleby, “Ideology” 512, 515; Joyce Appleby, “Response to J.G.A. Pocock,” Newsletter (Intellectual History Group) 4 (1982): 20-2; Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992) 336-8.[/ref] The early English thinkers actually rejected any such ethic, arguing simply for the removal of some particular constraints on the pursuit of wealth well in line with a traditional English defense of liberties and always for the benefit of the common good, hardly a reversal of the Aristotelian aversion to chrematistics.
Economic versus Political Liberalism
If a modern consensus stresses the dominance of the capitalist spirit in early modern England and America, while neither religious nor secular literature reveals any unequivocal statement of ethical support, what are we to make of the entire transition to capitalism debate? Basically, the debate exists because the two sides are arguing at cross purposes. Followers of Weber and Macpherson look backward from the present for incipient statements of a presumed modern ethic while their critics, more concerned with finding alternatives to the modern ethic, find much more discontinuity with the present.
Much of the problem arises from the confusion engendered by equating the triumph of the chrematistic ethic with the rise of economic and political liberalism, with their common locus in the English revolution of the seventeenth century and the writings of Hobbes and Locke. If research has sufficiently undermined the case for chrematistics, the case is by no means clear for liberalism. Although scholars differ widely on the exact timing, almost all accept that modern liberalism came to dominate the West by the nineteenth century and some have made a good case for its dominance in England by the late seventeenth century.
Almost all students of early modern Europe accept the dominance before the mid-seventeenth century of the traditional idea of a “common good” which framed all the statutes and acts of the realm and to which all individual or particular goods and liberties were subservient–“a good proper to, and attainable only by, the community, yet individually shared by its members,” thus “at once communal and individual.”[ref]Louis Dupré, “The Common Good and the Open Society,” Review of Politics 55 (1993): 687-8, 694-6, 702.[/ref] Individual good was an essential element of the common good but, however defined, the common good clearly represented much more than any function of individual goods, including such concepts as justice and liberty.
The relationship between liberty and the common good was similarly ambiguous. By the Middle Ages, the concept of liberty combined two elements: one evolved from the Roman libertas, essentially a “negative” image of liberty as “freedom against” or the opposite of slavery and captivity; and a “positive” image of liberty as “freedom to” or territorial immunity and political participation.[ref]Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State, 1100-1322 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964) 183; Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969) 118-72; “Liberty,” OED, 1933 ed.; “Libertas,” Oxford Latin Dictionary, 1976 ed.; Hexter, On Historians 293-303; Guy Howard Dodge, Benjamin Constant’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Study in Politics and Religion (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1980) 34-51; Alan Harding, “Political Liberty in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 55 (1980): 423-43; Quentin Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, eds. Richard Rorty et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984) 194, 197; Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York UP, 1984) 15-23; Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1984) 31-52; J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) 37-42, 104-5; Rahe 15,39.[/ref] In the pre-Hobbesian, pre-Lockean era both positive and negative liberty constituted essential elements of the common good. Consistent with the common good, all citizens shared equally in positive liberty. But the common good demanded strict limits on negative liberty, if for no other reason than the paradoxical but universal belief that sacrifice of one’s liberty was essential to preserve one’s liberty.[ref]Skinner, “Idea” 218.[/ref]
In this context, chrematistics was proscribed in ancient times and the Middle Ages, and even into the modern era, as “the lowest sort of avarice,” one of the seven deadly sins.[ref]Weber, Protestant Ethic 56; Tawney, Religion xiii, 15-62, 84-5, 149, 216; Adriano Tilgher, Work: What It Has Meant to Men Through the Ages, trans. Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1930; New York: Arno, 1977) 5-49; E. Johnson, American 83-4; Knappen 401-23; Schlatter 119-23; Beer 19, 25, 33-4; Edmund Whittaker, A History of Economic Ideas (New York: Longmans, 1940) 63-83; Helen C. White, Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1944) 189-254; Savelle 188-90; Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New York: Oxford UP, 1954) 51-142; John W. Baldwin, “The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists, and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 49 (1959): 1-92; Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (1952; Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1967); S. White, Coke 88; Langholm 46-55; Stanford M. Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins: Social and Evil, 2nd ed. (Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, 1989); Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England: Essays and Studies (London: Pinter, 1989) 13.[/ref] The degree of proper constraint was determined by laws consistent with the common good, with too much or too little constraint clearly contrary to the common good. Although the thirteenth-century English jurist Henry de Bracton noted that in Roman law, to which all medieval jurists likened English law, libertas was defined as “the natural power of every man to do what he pleases, unless forbidden by law or force,” clearly by the early modern (if not the earlier) period this only applied to “good” laws, “just” force, and all within the context of the common good.[ref]C. H. McIlwain, “Mediaeval Institutions in the Modern World,” Speculum 16 (1941): 280-3; Harding 424.[/ref]
In making a case for an intellectual revolution, historians of political thought have depicted this traditional world view as coming to an end in the English Civil War, a war that shattered the entire concept of “community” upon which the common good rested and gave rise to modern liberalism. Following the work of Hobbes and Locke, the idea of the common good was challenged by two distinct sets of ideas‑-political liberalism and economic liberalism‑-which we may define thusly:
(1) Political liberalism: The Hobbesian triumph of the utilitarian concept of “interest” and the disappearance of both positive and negative liberty, with the common good replaced by the concept of the “public interest,” ultimately equal to no more than the sum of private interests, and with the community reduced to a bourgeois “community of interests” that had no greater function than to protect those private interests;[ref]Gunn, Politics; Robert Eccleshall, Order and Reason in Politics: Theories of Absolute and Limited Monarchy in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978); J. A. W. Gunn, “Public Interest,” Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, eds. Terence Ball et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 195, 198-204; Sharpe 7-8, 10-3; Rahe 30-1, 39, 48-9, 52-4, 57-8, 93-4, 322, 364-479, 511; Dupré 687-8, 696-8, 701-2.[/ref]
(2) Economic liberalism: The Lockean triumph of negative liberty, beginning with claims for natural rights superseding the common good, concluding with the disappearance of ideas of positive liberty and the common good, and constraints on one’s liberty reduced to the avoidance of that which would impinge on others’ liberty.[ref]Tawney, Religion 259-60; Harold J. Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation (London: Allen, 1936); Alfred F. Chalk, “Natural Law and the Rise of Economic Individualism in England,” Journal of Political Economy 59 (1951): 332-47; Strauss 242-6 et passim; Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, ed. E. F. Söderlund, trans. Mendel Shapiro, 2 vols. (New York: Barnes, 1955) 2: 267-339; Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought 1865-1901 (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1956); Macpherson, Possessive Individualism; William D. Grampp, Economic Liberalism, 2 vols. (New York: Random, 1965); Walzer 300-6; Hirschman, Passions; Appleby, Capitalism 15-23; Michael Lessnoff, Social Contract (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1986) 6-8; Skinner, “Idea” 193-221; Dupré 688, 697-8, 701-3; A. John Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) 33-6.[/ref]
Economic liberalism and chrematistics share much the same foundation and thus their critiques parallel each other, which means that the triumph of either chrematistics or economic liberalism can be similarly dismissed for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.[ref]Cf. Strauss 242-6; Charles H. Monson, Jr., “Locke’s Political Theory and Its Interpreters,” Locke and Berkeley: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968) 186; Dunn 251.[/ref] If Appleby finds possessive individualism “strangely neglected, perhaps even supressed,” she says the same for economic liberalism.[ref]Appleby, “Response” 21; Appleby, Liberalism 336-8.[/ref] The case for the rise of political liberalism, however, has a much more solid foundation and requires a full explication in order to understand the complexities of the prevailing political beliefs in England over the course of the first century of Virginia’s settlement–beliefs against which we might measure divergence in Virginia thought.
Liberty and the Common Good in Traditional Thought
Anyone who has examined closely the political language that Englishmen employed during the centuries preceding the English Civil War would acknowledge the fairly unanimous consensus proclaiming the common good as the cornerstone of all policy and action–what Clive Holmes calls the “the commonwealth ideology” which through constant employment “filtered down to become part of a general stock of ideas widely dispersed through [sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English] society.”[ref]Clive Holmes, “Parliament, Liberty, Taxation, and Property,” Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War, ed. J. H. Hexter (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992) 148. See Savelle 185; Helen M. Cam, Antonio Marongiu, and Günther Stökl, “Recent Work and Present Views on the Origins and Development of Representative Assemblies,” Relazioni del X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche, Vol. I. Metodologia Problemi Generali-Scienze Ausiliarie della Storia, ed. G. C. Sansoni (Firenze: n.p., 1955) 15-21; Post, Studies; Gunn, Politics 1-2; Stephen D. White, Sir Edward Coke and ‘The Grievances of the Commonwealth,’ 1621-1628 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979) 88; Seaver 48; Jon Kukla, Political Institutions in Virginia, 1619-1660 (New York: Garland, 1989) 49-50; Sharp 3-20; Quentin Skinner, “Machiavelli’s Discorsi and the Pre-humanist Origins of Republican Ideas,” Machiavelli and Republicanism, eds. Gisela Bock et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 137; David Harris Sack, “Parliament, Liberty, and the Commonweal,” Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War, ed. J. H. Hexter (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992) 85-92; Holmes 122-54; Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994).[/ref] The exact English terminology used varied among a host of interchangeable terms like “commonweal”, “commonwealth,” or “public weal.”[ref]Post 22-3; Gunn, Politics 1; Sharp 10-1.[/ref] The idea and language reflected influences from both Roman and medieval law as well as the medieval rejuvenation of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, and other classical and patristic thinkers.[ref]Post 19, 114n97, 253, 258, 316-7; Gunn, Politics ix-x; Gunn, “Public Interest” 195, 197; Sharpe 10-1, 14.[/ref]
What anyone meant by the common good was less clear, however, apart from the universal opinion that particular interests were subordinated to it. General statements neglected to define “who” was included in the common and “what” was good–let alone “why.”[ref]Gunn, Politics 1-2.[/ref] More specific, if equally ambiguous, definitions historically included doing the will of God, being virtuous, following the Aristotelian mean, and applying justice.[ref]Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957) 173; Gunn, Politics 1; Sharpe 14; Rahe 25-6.[/ref]
Yet the ambiguity did not make the ideal any less real to Englishmen. To supplement such words they drew on numerous real-life analogies to capture the essence of the commonweal: the family, the biological organism, the human body, and societies of social insects such as ants and bees.[ref]Sharpe 3-20.[/ref] The most prominent historical analogy was the classical model of Sparta‑-of all the Hellenic communities the closest in giving absolute primacy to the common good.[ref]Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969) 139‑241; Rahe 136-72.[/ref]
In essence, the individual, community, and state were united in an organic harmony “in which there was only one relationship: that of all to all, and of everything to one divine truth.”[ref]Sharpe 11.[/ref] In this moral community, particular rights and interests were clearly subordinate to the common good, yet there was no confrontation between the good of the individual and the good of the whole, since individual good derived from and depended on the common good.[ref]Post 19, 443, 503; Gunn, Politics 7-8; Sharpe 10-3; Rahe 30-1.[/ref]
The ideal of a single good applicable to the entire community was subject, of course, to ethical challenges and Englishmen had a realistic awareness of the inherent tensions between the individual and the community. However, as is so often the case, such challenges and tensions led not to the abandonment of the ideal, but to its more forceful articulation. Contests for power were dismissed as mere temporary imbalances in the body politic. Thus, in mid-seventeenth-century England, few dissenters were willing to separate from the church and abandon “the idea of one indivisible truth and religious community” and Parliamentarians in open rebellion claimed to be defending the Crown.[ref]Gunn, Politics 18-9; G. E. Aylmer, The King’s Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I 1625‑1642, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1974) 464; Sharpe 11-4, 20-3.[/ref]
Englishmen, at least as far back in myth as the reign of the “liberty-loving” Goths and the pre-Norman Anglo-Saxons, also cherished their “liberties.”[ref]Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967) 432, 449; Rowland Berthoff, “Independence and Attachment, Virtue and Interest: From Republican Citizen to Free Enterpriser, 1787‑1837,” Uprooted Americans: Essays to Honor Oscar Handlin (Boston: Little, 1979) 100; Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) 58-125; Rahe 931‑2n75.[/ref] But, whether under the code of honor or the code of law, regardless of how defined, how safeguarded, and how fiercely defended, wherever the community or state was concerned, liberties fundamentally and always served the common good and not vice versa.[ref]Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honor,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills, 19 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1968) 6: 509-10; E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975) 258-69; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and behavior in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982) 71; Pocock, Virtue 104; Rahe 25-6.[/ref] English mercantilists up to and including Adam Smith accepted as the general guiding principle that the state should not interfere with individual or household liberties–except where interference would best serve the common good.[ref]Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Scribner’s, 1960) 24-5; Jacob Viner, “The Intellectual History of Laissez Faire,” Journal of Law and Economics 3 (1960): 56; Warren B. Catlin, The Progress of Economics: A History of Economic Thought (New York: Bookman, 1962) 137-53; Thomas 223-4, 229; Appleby, “Modernization” 263; Gunn, Politics 211-2, 234; Sack 85-121.[/ref] Even Sir Edward Coke, the great champion of the common law and defender of English liberties, stressed that “the common law will rather suffer a private injury than a public inconvenience.”[ref]Viner 54-5; David Little, Religion, Order, and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Harper, 1969) 167-217; S. White, Coke 18-23, 31-3, 80n199, 86-8; Gunn, “Public Interest” 195, 197; Sack 93-101.[/ref] Thus, contrary to theories propounded by Roscoe Pound and others, there is little evidence for the rise of economic liberalism and “ultra-individualism” in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Britain.[ref]Cf. Little 238-46.[/ref]
Necessity and Competency
If the commonweal was inconsistent with the unconstrained pursuit of individual interests, the state was concerned with the well-being of its citizens, in particular providing a safety net for preservation in times of “necessity” or “poverty”–in the sense of the Latin term necessitas.[ref]Cf. “Necessity,” OED, 1933 ed.; “Poverty,” OED, 1933 ed.; “Necessitas,” Oxford Latin Dictionary, 1976 ed.[/ref] Indeed, many of the harshest criticisms of avarice–reflected most strongly in the condemnation of enclosures–highlighted impoverishment as the key detrimental effect of avarice on the commonweal.[ref]See, e.g., Thomas 223; J. Thomas Kelly, Thorns on the Tudor Rose: Monks, Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars (Jackson, MI: UP of Mississippi, 1977) 74-8.[/ref] This concern reflected a Judeo-Christian/classical consensus combining both the Christian duty of charity and natural law that justified private property based on the proviso that all things existed in common in times of necessity and all men had the right to a livelihood and self-preservation.[ref]Richard B. Schlatter, The Social Ideas of Religious Leaders 1660-1688 (London: Oxford UP, 1940) 124-45; Post 13, 21-2, 494-561; Thomas 225-9; Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and Its Application in England (Berkeley: U of California P, 1959) 22-46, 146n17; Gunn, Politics 17-26; Thomas A. Horne, Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain, 1605-1834 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990) 4-5 et passim; P. Miller, Defining 80-3.[/ref]
Indeed, so important was the preservation of the individual that although normally the state demanded that individuals comply with the law as the definitive statement of the common good, in case of necessity the state allowed the individual to cast the law aside. Rooted firmly in the natural law tradition, this idea was well captured by the classical axiom of private law: Necessitas non habet legem or “Necessity knows no law.”[ref]Thomas Benfield Harbottle, Anthology of Classical Quotations (San Antonio: Scylax, 1984) 151; Post 21-2, 318n21; Tierney 37-8; Bergen Evans, Dictionary of Quotations (New York: Delacorte, 1968) 480.[/ref] Numerous observers, from Sir Thomas More in the early sixteenth century to John Cook and Thomas Hobbes in the mid-seventeenth century, drawing on classical and scriptural precedents, held up this maxim to defend the right of poor men to steal food when needed to preserve themselves and their families.[ref]Cooke 11, 44; Rodick 1-25; Post 21-2, 316-7; Thomas 225-6; Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon, 1975) 35-6.[/ref] Religious writers like Hugh Latimer and William Perkins extended the idea to their understanding of the calling, following the apostolic injunction against changing one’s calling or practicing two trades except for “the common good” or out of “private necessity.”[ref]Wright, Middle-Class 172-84.[/ref] More generally, scholars and statesmen alike had long recognized that works of necessity absolved individuals from religious and civic duties such as attending court or church.[ref]Post 271; P. Miller, Defining 80.[/ref]
Although natural law rhetoric might imply that by necessity Western thinkers meant absolute poverty verging on starvation, in actual usage the normative idea of necessity was extended to all levels of society, not just the poorest. Neither classical nor patristic–let alone later–writers ever envisioned an egalitarian society where necessities were defined in the same terms for every individual. If society was a harmonious organism, it was also a hierarchical organism, well captured by the analogies of the “the body politic” and the divinely-ordained Great Chain of Being.[ref]E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Vintage, 1960); Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1964) 386-435; Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion & Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1966) 17-8; Gunn, Politics 209; David George Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1971); Sharpe 7-8. J. P. Sommerville adds a healthy caution against extending such analogies too far. See J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London: Longman, 1986) 48.[/ref] Thus, what might represent a conveniency or even a luxury for a member of the working classes could be a necessity for a member of the elite. Some medieval writers even recognized that some luxuries became necessaries over time.[ref]Schlatter 103-4; Tierney 37-8; Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988) 2-5, 17, 38-9.[/ref]
This relativistic understanding of necessity had solid roots in classical and patristic thought, but it took on a greater sociological precision in medieval times as canonists and theologians attempted to define superfluities as that level of property which an individual would be forced to give up in time of necessity, without depriving anyone of their own necessities.[ref]Tierney 34-8; John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977) 23-62.[/ref] In Thomas Aquinas’s most influential argument, he stressed the bare minimum that had to be done as a matter of precept (while to do more was always a meritorious act of charity) and the duty to give up superfluities only in time of “extreme necessity,” that is, “when a man lacked even the bare essentials necessary to sustain life”; in such a time even a man without superfluities was “bound to give up the comforts and amenities proper to his station in life (which were not technically ‘superfluities’) to save another from actual starvation.”[ref]Tierney 36, 146‑7n24.[/ref]
By the seventeenth century, attempts to define necessities and superfluities had not progressed much beyond Aquinas. John Cook in 1648 could speak of “a light necessity, a great necessity, and an extreame necessity” and how
the rich mans superfluities gave place to anothers convenience, his conveniences to another mans necessaries, his Necessities to another mans extremities, one mans less Extremities to his Neighbours greater Extremities, and to Mecanicall poore must releece Mendicant poore, rather then they should perish.[ref]Cooke 44.[/ref]
In the second half of the seventeenth century, religious leaders like Richard Cumberland and Richard Baxter believed that “each man had a right to those things which he needed to use in order to live,” which Baxter interpreted to include conveniencies:
For natural individuation maketh it necessary that every man have his own food, and his own clothing, at least for the time; and, therefore, it is usually needful to the good of the whole and the parts that each one have also their provisional proprieties; and the difference of men in wit and folly, industry and sloth, virtue and vice, good or ill deserts, will also cause a difference of propriety and rights, though these may be in part subjected to the common good.[ref]Schlatter 91-3.[/ref]
If in the medieval and early modern era, the general consensus meant nothing more than that a man with superfluities should give alms and a man lacking necessaries should receive alms, there was obviously much room for negotiation. The boundaries between superfluity and conveniency, and coveniency and necessity, both of which depended heavily on one’s station, remained inherently ambiguous.
The boundaries were even more complicated by the tendency to speak of anyone as “poor” who lacked a “competency,” by which was meant the sum of necessaries plus conveniencies required to allow one to live up to his station, or the income, wealth, or property necessary to produce such necessaries and conveniences.[ref]Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986) 1-7.[/ref] The idea of a competency, as reflected in writings from Aquinas to Baxter, far transcended the charity issue. For this was an era, as J.G.A. Pocock notes, when “‘property’‑‑that which you owned‑‑and ‘propriety’‑‑that which pertained or was proper to a person or situation‑‑were interchangeable terms.”[ref]Pocock, Virtue 104.[/ref] Although no one ever suggested that anyone simply lacking a competency deserved alms, yet in many ways ensuring a competency for citizens proved as central a goal in any definition of the common good as ensuring necessities. The importance of competency rested on many of the same natural laws and political reasons as necessity, but combined further a strong classical tradition of positive liberty that emphasized the possession of a competency as essential to providing sufficient independence and leisure to participate in community affairs and undertake community responsibilities.[ref]For classical roots, see Trever 26, 87-8, 112; Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms” 235-7; Pocock, Virtue 103‑23; Parker and Stead 21; Rahe 38-9, 94.[/ref]
At the heart of the conception of the individual and common good of every seventeenth-century Englishman, whether at home or abroad, peasant or lord, rested the notion of the right of each household to a competency. However, as with necessity, one should not presume that for these Englishmen competency implied a fixed level of wealth for every individual. Firstly, inherent in the concept were differences according to station which changed over time, space, life-cycle, and individual circumstances.[ref]Seaver 48-9; Jack 147; Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 47 (1990): 3.[/ref] Secondly, to whatever degree the Schoolmen earlier specified a “static” hierarchical image of society, by the sixteenth century a definite “progressive” notion of competency had arisen. Individuals and households should not remain satisfied with a minimum level of well-being but should aspire to take advantage of opportunities for greater wealth and consumption within the traditional economic framework. Indeed, satisfaction was condemned as indolence.[ref]Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1965) 227-8.[/ref] These beliefs reflected the early modern fear of idleness, a labor theory of wealth centered on the guarantee of the freedom of the fruits of one’s labor, and the idea that wealth acquired by greater industry not only was acceptable but should be positively encouraged. But this “progressive competency” evolved out of the tradition of Aristotelian domestic economy and remained estranged from chrematistics.
Drawing upon private law tradition, classical political theory, and Roman public law, medieval legists and canonists employed the strong link between necessity and the common good to develop the early modern theory of public law and the state, a development continued by later natural law theorists like Grotius, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Pufendorf. If the individual had a right to survive and defend himself against aggressors, then so too did the state as a key component of the common good. Indeed, while seventeenth-century Englishmen recognized that private necessity was a matter of justice and charity, their concern with the concept reflected perhaps an even greater fear of the mob driven by poverty into rebellion.[ref]Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Social and Administrative History (1926; London: Routledge, 1969) 15-7; Gunn, Politics 236; Kelly 55-81; H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Weidenfeld, 1977); Sack 92, 99-100; P. Miller, Defining 49-67./ref] Similarly, the maxim that “Necessity knows no law” was extended to give the government “a certain prerogative that made it superior, in an emergency or necessity, to the private law and private rights.”[ref]Burleigh Cushing Rodick, The Doctrine of Necessity in International Law (New York: Columbia UP, 1928) 1-25; E. Johnson, American 238; Cam et al. 15-21; Post 8-23, 112-4, 153-4, 242, 246-7, 250-4, 258, 262, 304-5, 313, 318n21, 503, 557-9; Charles C. Bayley, “Pivotal Concepts in the Political Philosophy of William of Ockham,” Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949): 199‑211; Kantorowicz 106-7, 235-7, 260, 287-8; Rahe 263.[/ref] Machiavelli differed from others only in considering the state as in a permanent state of necessity that justified any action taken by it as the price to be paid to preserve the republic.[ref]Sydney Anglo. Machiavelli: A Dissection (New York: Harcourt, 1969) 191-3, 205-7; Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 224; Rahe 263, 265, 929n57.[/ref]
The Case for Political Liberalism
That parliamentary debates in early seventeenth-century England drew explicitly on medieval ideas of public necessity and the common good reflects their continuing relevance in the years before the Civil War.[ref]G. L. Harriss, “Medieval Doctrines in the Debates on Supply, 1610-1629,” Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History, ed. Kevin Sharpe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) 73-103; C. Holmes, “Parliament” 123.[/ref] Yet traditional ideas like common good, necessity, and competency proved very flexible in practice, and in the seventeenth century the traditional antithesis between private interest and the common good began to weaken as the Crown and Parliament promoted two starkly different images of the common good: the Stuarts’ claim of Crown prerogative and necessity of state to justify extraordinary taxation to preserve national power; and Parliament’s condemnation of Crown abuse of private rights, drawing on the ancient maxim salus populi suprema lex esto.[ref]Gunn, Politics xi; P. Miller, Defining 37-48, 73-5.[/ref]
The battle between these views echoed numerous similar battles in the Middle Ages over perpetua necessitas, all reflecting the historical tendency of the state to reduce “reason of state” to a mere instrument of statecraft as it moved in the Machiavellian direction of claiming a permanent necessity to justify all acts of state, most particularly the shift from extraordinary to permanent annual taxation.[ref]Post 147, 306-7; Kantorowicz 107, 284-91.[/ref] Thomas More in his Utopia elaborated numerous creative types of abuse of the idea of public necessity, including carrying on “a make-believe war.”[ref]Thomas More, Utopia, eds. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 31-2.[/ref] During the turbulent years of the mid-seventeenth-century, a plethora of similar complaints were well captured in Milton’s lines in Paradise Lost: “So spake the fiend, and with necessity,/ The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.” And they were captured again in Oliver Cromwell’s speech to Parliament in 1654: “Necessity hath no law. Feigned necessities, imaginary necessities, are the greatest cozenage men can put upon the Providence of God, and make pretences to break known rules by.”[ref]W. Gurney Putnam, Putnam’s Complete Book of Quotations and Household Words (New York: Putnam’s, n.d.) 219a, 104b. See Gunn, Politics 32-3, 84-5, 90-1, 126-9, 205, 326.[/ref]
At the heart of the case for political liberalism lies the argument that cynicism over the divergence between rhetoric and reality during the Civil War years and a search for pragmatic solutions paved the way for the increasing acceptance of “interest” as an ineradicable part of politics.[ref]Gunn, Politics 2-3.[/ref] Whereas in traditional political rhetoric, interests had always been associated with the “particular” and “individual” which were condemned as contrary to the common good, increasingly in the seventeenth-century the idea of interest was accepted into normative discourse. Under the influence of continental ideas captured by the French proverb “interest will not lie,” the new public notion of interest evolved rapidly from a political guide for princes and statesmen into a rule applicable to all human affairs.[ref]Gunn, Politics 35-44, 206-7, 300.[/ref]
Francisco Suarez, writing for a continental audience rife with religious and political divisions, had laid out in 1613 the idea that the common good could be conceived in two different ways: “the generall state of the commonwealth, and benefit of the community” and the “common good which results from every man’s good.” During the English Civil War, when similar religious and political divisions broke out across England, several Parliamentarians (some drawing explicitly on Suarez) began focusing on the popular approach to the common good to justify their actions. Hobbes pushed the same logic to promote the absolutist cause, but many of his followers, like Harrington and Locke, used the same logic to support anti-absolutism.[ref]Gunn, Politics 15, 108, 299; Gunn, “Public Interest” 198; Dupré 695-6.[/ref] At certain points when polemics got especially hot, such as the years 1647-9 and 1659-60, discussion of the commonweal gave way to acceptance of a “union of interests.”[ref]Gunn, Politics 44-53.[/ref]
The term “public interest” began appearing more and more frequently in the years during and after the Civil War. This new term obviously drew on the heritage of the commonwealth ideology but challenged traditional notions of the common good as an entity in any way independent of the individual good.[ref]Gunn, Politics ix-xii, 1-35, 266-321.[/ref] Such an individualist understanding of public interest proved quite successful in challenging competing definitions of the common good in terms of national power and state necessity.[ref]Gunn, Politics 82-108, 312.[/ref]
There are, however, many problems with the case for political liberalism in late seventeenth- or eighteenth-century England. Regardless of the influence of Hobbes and Locke on modern thought, one should not hold up their views as typical of their times or overexaggerate their impact on seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English (let alone Virginian) thought.[ref]Gunn, Politics x-xi; Pocock, Machiavellian 445-6, 462-505; R. Johnson, “Politics” 710-1. Cf. Richard Ashcraft, “Leviathan Triumphant: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Wild Men,” The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, eds. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1972) 142-8, 169n1-2.[/ref] Scholars well acknowledge that the older language of goods continued to appear ubiquitously, indeed in the work of Hobbes and Locke themselves, alongside the newer language of interests. When merchants, entrepreneurs, and liberal political economists continued to couch schemes solely in terms of the public good and to condemn opposing interests as either “morally harmful” or “their persons degraded” and thus not subject to equal consideration in public good, they perpetuated the traditional rhetoric. So did lawyers and Members of Parliament of all persuasions when they quoted Coke on the dictum that no man should be a judge in his own “case” or “cause.”[ref]Gunn, Politics 17-8, 211‑2, 225; P. Miller, Defining 76-87, 102.[/ref] Excusing such persistence as mere “lip service to the older ethic”–required because any political argument tainted with selfish intention became quickly discredited–hardly bespeaks evidence of a normative transformation.[ref]Strauss 246-7; Gunn, Politics 59-70, 210, 281-94, 299; Rahe 511-2.[/ref]
Although advocates of transformation stress the inherent ambiguity in claims of the common good, claims of public interest were equally vague.[ref]Gunn, Politics 19-23, 210.[/ref] One cannot presume that, since the public interest is based on more concrete individual interests, the public interest would be more concrete than the common good; the idea of a public interest hardly shows how individual interests are to be reconciled, let alone maximized. Few could consistently accept contemporaneous proposals that any action undertaken in the public interest should not harm any private interests and indeed should advance them all, or that all policy decisions should be put to a plebiscite, or even that interests be somehow simply aggregated.[ref]Gunn, Politics 197, 225, 323, 327-8.[/ref]
One can also argue that, regardless of any shift in language, the basic understanding of the common good did not change drastically across the seventeenth century. On no issue did there arise a pluralist acceptance of the legitimacy of competing visions of the public interest. Furthermore, on some elements of the common good all Englishmen could agree.[ref]Gunn, Politics 299.[/ref] If Machiavelli could deny any independent importance to justice, no English speaker would deny justice as a good truly common to all citizens.[ref]Gunn, Politics 324, 336-7; Rahe 266; Dupré 698.[/ref] Similarly, Englishmen only considered legitimate those private interests that contributed to the peace and order of the kingdom, which, for many on both sides of debates, meant that only those landowners with a stake in the country should participate in determining the public interest, implicitly equating the public interest with the preservation of property.[ref]Gunn, Politics xii, 8-15, 28, 31, 107, 322-4. See also Chapter 5.[/ref] Certainly the public interest shared with the common good a concern for the welfare of the members of the community.[ref]Gunn, Politics 11-2, 15, 28, 31, 86, 107-8, 322, 324; Tarcov 130-40; Horne, Property 5, 24-8, 48-65.[/ref] Indeed, J. A. W. Gunn, one of the major proponents of the transformation hypothesis, acknowledges that the differences between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century arguments were strictly a matter of the emphasis placed on particular elements of the common good, driven more by political “circumstances” than theory.[ref]Gunn, Politics 322.[/ref] Perhaps, then, rather than a transformation, one might suggest that all of the evidence taken together simply suggests that changes in political ideology in seventeenth-century England reflected merely another stage in the evolution of a centuries-old debate about the complex balance between individual good, liberty, necessity, and the common good.
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