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The British tradition of political thought represents a complex puzzle of intellectual history. Admirers like the French political commentator Baron de Montesquieu praised the British monarchy and its system of checks and balances as the very pinnacle of freedom in his 1748 Spirit of the Laws, whereas less than a half-century later critics like British political writer and activist Thomas Paine and many of the American revolutionaries portrayed the British system as the abyss of tyranny. The irony, however, is that even those most vehemently critical of the British system of government have appealed to principles within the British tradition itself to justify their objections. Even so, these institutions and ideals have not been effortlessly achieved. They are the end products of centuries of struggles and settlements—religious and secular—that have shaped the contours of present-day Britain and left an indelible imprint on modern concepts of liberty, constitutionalism, and representative government. Both in terms of its practices as well as its principles, Britain is responsible for some of the greatest accomplishments in Western political theory.

Magna Carta, Civil War, Interregnum, And Restoration

The notion of the traditional rights of English subjects dates at least back to Magna Carta in 1215, which secured from King John certain concessions for both the feudal barons and the people and set the precedent that the monarch’s power is limited and the king himself subject to law. Although its principles were regularly violated and even forgotten altogether in the intervening centuries, Magna Carta nonetheless served as a reference point for later arguments on behalf of limited government, the rule of law, and fundamental rights retained by the people.

Magna Carta’s precedent of limited government was in stark contrast to later absolutist theories like those espoused by James I (England) and VI (Scotland). His The True Law of Free Monarchies (1603) maintained that the powers of the monarch were unlimited because they descended from God by means of divine succession. These absolutist ideas were perpetuated by his son and successor, Charles I, and undoubtedly contributed to the latter’s conflicts with Parliament and decades of religious and civil turmoil. The English Civil War (1642–1651) led to the defeat and execution of Charles I in 1651, the establishment of the Commonwealth, and, eventually, Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate (1653–1658).Although this protracted struggle between the British monarchs and Puritan-controlled parliaments was one of the bloodiest periods in English history, it was also one of the most intellectually fertile.

The defining work of this era was English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s magisterial Leviathan (1651). Hobbes’s pessimistic view of human nature and his suspicion of anarchy and civil war were undoubtedly colored by the experience of being driven into exile along with Charles II and many of his royalist supporters. While agnostic as to the question of who should ultimately be sovereign, Leviathan is the most influential statement of modern social contract theory and the natural rights thinking that shaped the British tradition for centuries to come.

According to Hobbes, sovereignty arises when individuals flee the vagaries of a state of nature and agree to alienate all of their liberties, save their right of self-preservation, to an impartial sovereign. Having authorized its power, they are bound to obey the law because the security provided by even the most tyrannical sovereign is still preferable to the state of nature’s abominable “war of all against all.” Hobbes begins his argument in Leviathan with liberal assumptions of individual natural rights but manages to turn these ideas into a defense of virtually unlimited sovereign power. For these reasons, as well as Hobbes’s irreverent treatment of Christianity, Leviathan was condemned by both Puritan advocates of consent theory and royalist defenders of the divine right of kings.

Hobbes’s writings were not the only influential political ideas during the Civil War and Interregnum. Consent theory came to the foreground in the Putney Debates (1647) between representatives of Cromwell’s Army Council and more radical segments of the army influenced by the Protestant Levellers.

The Leveller’s proposed constitution, an Agreement for the People, promised nearly universal male suffrage, reformed electoral districts, a parliament popularly elected every two years, religious freedom, and an end to debtor’s prison. The majority of the regiments of the army were eventually persuaded to accept the more conservative The Heads of the Proposals, submitted by Henry Ireton for the Army Council, which secured property rights against redistribution and upheld traditional privileges.

John Locke And The Glorious Revolution

The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 brought an end to decades of civil war. Although Charles II continued his father’s heavy-handed rule, as evidenced by the Clarendon Codes enforcing religious conformity and his dissolution of several parliaments that sought to pass Exclusion Acts forbidding a Catholic successor, his unpopularity never reached the level that had led to his father’s execution. His brother James II, who succeeded him on the throne in 1685, was not so fortunate, however, and was dethroned in 1688 and replaced by the Protestant Mary II and William III in 1689. This Glorious Revolution and the settlement that produced it were milestones in the development of English liberty. William and Mary’s assent to the principles of the 1689 Bill of Rights established Britain as a constitutional monarchy and formalized many of the personal liberties enshrined a century later in the American Bill of Rights.

English philosopher John Locke’s (1632–1704) political writings were deeply intertwined with these events. Published in 1689, Locke’s First Treatise of Government was nominally a refutation of Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), disposing once and for all of the patriarchal idea that political authority derives from the right of dominion originally given to Adam by God. After dismissing the historical absurdity that latter-day monarchs hold their title from an unbroken line of succession, Locke more affirmatively stipulates in the Second Treatise of Government that government originates when individuals in the state of nature agree to surrender some of their rights to better secure their life, liberty, and property. Whenever governments become tyrannical—ruling in their own interest, rather than the public interest—individuals have a right of revolution to alter or abolish them. Contrary to Hobbes, Locke insists that allowing individuals this appeal to heaven does not lead to perpetual civil war because individuals are inclined to put up with many petty abuses before making a revolution, and that far from devolving back into a Hobbesian state of nature pitting individual against individual, the right of revolution merely restores sovereignty to the community as a whole, who might then form a new government more to their liking. In addition to Locke’s liberal emphasis on the political value of individual consent, the Second Treatise also posits that our right to property is natural and inviolable because we have mixed our labor with the natural commons.

Although there remains some controversy about the actual date of composition of Locke’s Second Treatise, the discovery that it was in all likelihood written before the Glorious Revolution of 1688—rather than afterward as had always been assumed—gave credence to Locke’s reputation as the apostle of revolutionary politics. While few of Locke’s ideas were wholly original, his writings crystallized the theory of a social contract between sovereign and subjects from which the latter might extricate themselves based on the performance of the former, as well as the notion that individuals cannot be obligated without their consent. Locke’s writings have become a bulwark of limited government premised on individual rights to life, liberty, and property, and they did much to influence the American Revolution (1776–1783), the Declaration of Independence, and the liberal tradition in America.

Classical Republicanism And “Country” Versus “Court”

With its doctrine of natural rights, a social contract, religious toleration, and the sanctity of private property, Lockean liberalism has been one of the most important strands of AngloAmerican political thought. However, only belatedly have revisionist scholars come to appreciate that an older ideology of classical republicanism also may have shaped opposition to the arbitrary power of kings and courts. The republican James Harrington in the seventeenth century and neo-Harringtonian “Country” thinkers like Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in Cato’s Letters, and Bolingbroke in the eighteenth century were all captivated by classical, Roman, and Florentine republican authors. According to this classical republican ideology, liberty is threatened by the corruption bred in the luxury of courts and by monarchs who rule through patronage, partisanship, standing armies, faction, and the promotion of moneyed interests. By way of contrast, liberty is maintained only by cultivating austere republican and participatory virtues that are easily corrupted by proximity to absolute power. Intellectual historians and political theorists continue to debate the relative influence in the Anglo-American tradition of “classical republican” or “civic humanist” political thinking vis-à-vis more familiar Lockean or Enlightenment notions of individuals endowed with natural rights.

The Scottish Enlightenment

The second half of the eighteenth century brought a flowering of commercial prosperity and intellectual life in the major urban centers of Scotland. The most influential thinker associated with this Scottish Enlightenment was David Hume, who challenged many of the basic assumptions of social contract thinking and the idea that governments could have arisen purely from the consent of subjects. For Hume, moral traditions, laws, and justice developed over time in response to particular circumstances and the overall utility of society. Private property, justice, and the rule of law arose because they maximized predictability and minimized uncertainty. Hume’s Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), his Essays Moral and Political (1741–1742), as well as his multivolume History of England (1754–1762) were defining works of eighteenth-century philosophy.

Hume’s protégé, Adam Smith, expanded on the idea of a moral sense that was implicit in Hume’s writings. Smith’s two great works of moral philosophy, A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) describe the extended order of a market society that was the product of individual activity but not of deliberate design. The latter work in particular has had a tremendous influence on the social sciences, particularly among economists. Smith was a trenchant critic of mercantilism, protectionism, and monopoly. Smith’s fundamental insight was that nations’ wealth was created by free trade and the division of labor, rather than by their hoarding of bullion or specie. He contended that government should limit itself to the role of impartial arbiter between the various interests of society. Smith was an early defender of the policy of laissez-faire economics and the miracles of coordination accomplished by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace. Unlike many of his libertarian appropriators, however, Smith acknowledged that a market society was vulnerable to moral and intellectual deterioration among its citizenry and that governments might legitimately take steps to prevent this.

Hume, Smith, and later thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment held, first, that manners and institutions are best understood in terms of historical progress and, second, that commerce is the single most important driving force behind historical development. These ideas influenced Karl Marx’s historical materialism. In addition, the Scottish stadial view of history gave way to the distinction between “civilized” commercial societies and “barbarous” premodern nations. While Hume and Smith saw development mainly in liberal, progressive terms, Scottish philosopher and historian Adam Ferguson was an outlier in voicing classical republican misgivings about the tendency of modern commercial societies to succumb to individualism, apathy, and self-interest. In An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Ferguson complains that commerce saps the martial spirit by which liberty is maintained and that commercial societies incline toward luxury, civic malaise, and decline.

The French Revolution And The Rights Of Man

The French Revolution of 1789 and ensuing turmoil on the continent left an imprint on the British tradition. While more radical English thinkers like Richard Price and Thomas Paine embraced the ideals of the French Revolution and argued for similar reforms to the British monarchy, the metaphysical natural rights espoused by the French revolutionaries provoked a backlash in more conservative circles. Despite his long-standing reputation as a leading figure among the Rockingham Whigs and his liberal stance on behalf of conciliation with the American colonies and the Irish and Indian questions, Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), repudiated the French Revolution and the metaphysical doctrines of natural rights and social contractarianism upon which it rested.

Subsequent exchanges between Burke and Paine, whose Rights of Man (1791) was a trenchant critique of Burke’s Reflections, get directly to the heart of one of the major tensions within the British tradition, namely, a disagreement between the more empirical, institutional, or sociological understanding of liberty represented by thinkers like David Hume and Edmund Burke and the more radical social contractarian ideas that see liberty as grounded in natural law and natural rights. Neither Hume nor Burke denied the importance of the traditional liberties of British subjects. Nonetheless, both objected to the idea that one could appeal to reason or abstract natural laws to justify those liberties. For Burke especially, such universalistic appeals to reason and natural laws were liable to undermine the particular traditions on which true liberty depended. Likewise for Hume, the idea of an original contract was a logical and historical absurdity, and the only reliable guides in politics were the experience and moral practices of common life.

Another celebrated eighteenth-century exchange between British writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft and Burke captures a different dimension of this tension. Faulting Burke for his defense of tradition and opposition to the French Revolution in her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft subsequently argued in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) that all human beings—not just men—are deserving of their God-given rights and that the vast majority of societal conventions are invoked to infantilize women, to create false and unnatural distinctions, and to prevent women from acceding to their moral duties as citizens.

Utilitarianism And Reform

Arguably the single most influential thinker in nineteenth century England was Jeremy Bentham, whose philosophical challenge to custom and inherited institutions gave rise to the various nineteenth-century reform movements that did so much to rationalize and democratize Britain’s political system. Bentham’s major philosophical contribution was the doctrine of utilitarianism. According to Bentham, public policy should aim to secure the greatest good for the greatest number as determined by aggregating the utility of the various parties. Utility afforded a superior benchmark for public policy than mere custom or tradition.

Benthamic philosophical radicalism marks a departure from two key assumptions of the British tradition. First, Bentham’s emphasis on legal reform challenged the conviction that Britain’s inherited traditions are reliable supports for liberty. Whereas many appealed to British liberties as originating in an ancient constitution or feudal law—and jurists like Edward Coke and William Blackstone had extolled the common law’s congeniality for liberty—Bentham notably demurred. The common law was an “Augean stable” of anachronisms, fictions, and absurdities that needed to be purged and reestablished on more defensible rational grounds. Bentham’s second major challenge was to the idea of individual liberties as grounded in metaphysical natural rights. The notion that individuals are endowed with natural rights by virtue of their common humanity was “nonsense upon stilts.” To the contrary, as Hume, Burke, and other more empirically minded thinkers in the British tradition had argued earlier, liberties arise only from concrete political arrangements.

Both of these assumptions about liberty are shared by Bentham’s most formidable nineteenth-century legatee, John Stuart Mill. Like Bentham, Mill tried to elucidate principles of representative government, law, opinion, and political economy on rationally defensible grounds. And again following Bentham, the ultimate appeal on these issues for Mill was utility, albeit in the somewhat broader sense of humankind’s permanent interests as a group of progressive beings. As Mill argues in On Liberty (1859), although the state has a right to regulate activities that inflict concrete harms on others, it has no business interfering in matters such as speech, expression, opinion, or other actions that pertain only to individuals themselves. Liberty of thought and opinion is most conducive to the spontaneity and individuality that pull the human race forward.

The irony is that despite his theoretical and political efforts on behalf of democratizing reforms, Mill’s arguments are in important respects anti-democratic. Indeed his thought is illustrative of the fundamental tension between liberty and democracy in nineteenth-century social and political thought. Inspired by the writings of the French social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America Mill widely championed upon its publication in 1835, Mill feared the vapid conformity and collective mediocrity that arises in a democratic age. The greatest threat to liberty was no longer the overbearing influence of democratic majorities but the sociological dynamics of “tyrannical public opinion.” Even if democratic individuals enjoy legal freedoms of speech or expression, they are still subject to the powerful coercion of society itself. Thus for Mill, true or effective freedom requires more than just the absence of legal coercion. While negative liberty is a necessary condition for cultivation, progress, and development, it is not a sufficient condition, and for this Mill looks to a stimulating diversity of social conditions. Mill’s concept of liberty marks a decisive advance beyond Hobbesian or classical liberal definitions of freedom as nothing more or less than the absence of restraint.

Nineteenth and twentieth-century liberalism by and large followed in the footsteps of Mill and other theorists of positive liberty, who believed that the state had an active and affirmative role in cultivating the freedom, autonomy, and development of modern citizens. The new liberalism of Thomas Hill Green and Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, as well as various strands of Fabian socialism, are premised on similar assumptions that true freedom requires underlying power or capabilities in order to make good use of formal liberties.

Conclusion

While ideas of liberty and popular government are recurrent themes in the British tradition, there is enormous variation even within that tradition itself. Liberty is variously conceived as negative and positive, empirical and metaphysical, and as originating from sources as diverse as historical traditions and institutions, the common law, abstract natural laws and natural rights, and the participatory republican traditions of antiquity. Despite the social conflicts that gave birth to these ideals and practices, what can hardly be disputed is the profound influence that the British tradition as a whole has had on the development of liberty, constitutionalism, participatory government, and human rights in the modern world.

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