Abstract
This chapter examines the “country party” theory in England and argues that it was not backward-looking and conservative as historians often claim, but rather exemplified a strong transatlantic liberal current of thought. This current is nowadays difficult to conceptualize because it rejects political modernization (centralization), while accepting the laissez-faire economics, modern Lockean individual liberty as well as cultural modernization. By concentrating mostly on their economic writings, the chapter demonstrates that Cato, Bolingbroke, Swift, and other country party thinkers essentially were indistinguishable from Adam Smith and David Hume in their renunciations of mercantilism, public debt, subsidies for corporations, and credit-paper induced false “prosperity.” What had been portrayed as their resistance to modern commerce, appears actually as their resistance to mercantilism. By using the British country party as a case study, we began to additionally flesh out in this chapter the contours of an alternative paradigm called “decoupled modernization,” which posits that political modernity in the form of a “fiscal-military state” devoted to mercantilism, must be divorced from economic, social, and cultural modernity which should be tied instead to older, medieval institutions of localism and federalism.
This chapter is to a large extent based on Jankovic, Ivan (2016). “Men of Little Faith; the Country Party Ideology in England and America.” American Political Thought, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 183–218.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael Zuckert, one of the foremost theorists emphasizing the Lockean origins of the American Revolution is critical of this interpretative shift from Locke’s abstract philosophical analysis to a hard-hitting, populist, and publicist libertarianism of the old Whigs and their American followers, a shift largely attributed to Bernard Bailyn’s seminal work (Bailyn 1967): “Where Locke and the liberal philosophers put natural rights, the opposition tradition put power, but the emphasis on power gave the whole theory a rather negative cast…Like Cecilia Kenyon’s anti-federalists, Bailyn’s opposition tradition was composed of ‘men of little faith’” (Zuckert 1996, 203). On the other hand, for the views that Locke himself was an oppositional, country party writer, see Ashcraft (1980).
- 2.
- 3.
See Gordon Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 39, no. 3 (July, 1982), pp. 401–444.
- 4.
For an extensive catalog of the old Whig writings on Walpole’s program, see Parker (1975).
- 5.
See Harling and Mandler (1993: 47–48). This study is the best comprehensive account of the evolution of the British fiscal-military state from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries covering both the wars against American and the French as well as the postwar retrenchment in the laissez-faire age.
- 6.
- 7.
See the discussion in Parker (1975).
- 8.
For a good analysis of the Bank of Amsterdam, see Huerta de Soto (2006, pp. 98–106).
- 9.
For the alleged influence of Hume on Hamilton, see McDonald (1985).
- 10.
For an excellent analysis of the British currency school, see Rothbard (1995, pp. 225–275).
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
This is an assumption shared by both Keynesian and Chicago Schools, all their other doctrinal differences notwithstanding. A canonical status in this regard belongs to a study of the Great Depression conducted by the dean of the Chicago school Milton Friedman, in co-authorship with Anna Schwartz, “The Monetary History of the United States” (1963). In this study, they argue that the reason for a severity and duration of the Great Depression was that the Federal Reserve System did not intervene vigorously enough, allowing the money supply to dwindle quickly, as the demand for money soared and banks went bankrupt: The proper course of action was to increase the money supply by lowering the interest rates and augmenting the credit.
- 14.
Cited according to Wennerlind (2011: 235–238).
- 15.
It is somewhat astonishing how the prevailing interpretations classified ‘Cato Letters’: The civic republican school had seen in them the foremost document of civic virtue declaring a war to corruption, luxury, and capitalist greed (Pocock 1975; Wood 1969): The proponents of Lockean origins of America, on the other hand, averred that Trenchard and Gordon were balanced and moderate writers who defended commerce but were not uncritical apologists of laissez-faire or as Steven Dworetz has put it: “Cato himself neither repudiated nor surrendered to capitalism. In fact, he recommended ‘honest commerce,’ which implies neither hostility to capitalism nor devotion to laissez-faire…” (Dworetz 1990: 106). But, if Trenchard and Gordon were indeed not devoted to laissez-faire, one would expect from Dworetz to offer at least some example of prudent government interventions that they advocated. But none was offered.
- 16.
Compare Hayek (1944, Chapter 10).
- 17.
For a good analysis of Smith’s critique of corporations as parts of the mercantilist economic policy, see Anderson and Tollison (1982).
- 18.
Smith here apparently exploits the metaphor of paper money as Icarus’ ‘wax wings,’ abundantly used by the old Whigs to mock the entire scheme of paper credit, and most memorably expressed in Swift’s poem, where he says: “on paper wings he takes his flight/with wax the Father bound them fast/the wax is melted by the height/and down the tow’ring Boy is cast” (Swift 1869: 593).
- 19.
Supra note 14.
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Jankovic, I. (2019). Men of Little Faith Facing the Modern State: The Country Party Ideology in Great Britain. In: The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03733-8_4
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