CHAPTER TEN

Locke and the Transformation of Whig Political Philosophy

NOT ONLY DID Locke’s Treatises differ from other Whig defenses of the Glorious Revolution, but Locke failed to set his name to the work until he acknowledged it in his will. Those two facts together help account for its relatively marginal place in English political thought in its early years. “Contrary to many textbook accounts, the early defenders of the Revolutionary Settlement” did not see Two Treatises “as an expression of the principles upon which the revolutionaries acted in 1688.”¹ Many scholars now agree that “the majority of writers who supported the Revolution failed to say that they had found the arguments they were seeking in the Second Treatise, but they also presented arguments which were very different in kind from those to be found there.”² Locke’s book became “a major authority for Whigs and liberals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” but it “was taken into the canon of Whig authorities later than many historians have supposed.”³

Nonetheless, some scholars—John Dunn, for example—overly minimize the role Locke’s book played in postrevolutionary English thought.⁴ In 1690, for example, very shortly after Two Treatises itself was published, there appeared in England a political pamphlet, Political Aphorisms, that tendered Locke that most sincere form of flattery—outright plagiarism. “Political Aphorisms contains numerous passages copied word for word from the Two Treatises. These passages are reproduced without acknowledgment, without quotation marks, without any indication whatsoever as to their original source.”⁵Political Aphorisms “reappeared in 1709 under a new title, Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” with some new materials, most of which were plagiarized from other Whig writers of the revolutionary era. In 1710 Vox Populi was again reprinted, this time with the title The Judgment of Whole Kingdoms and Nations. Vox Populi “proved to be one of the best-selling pamphlets of the eighteenth century,” as did the Judgment. “It was through the means of [the] influence [of these pamphlets] that not only Lockean principles, but also actual phrases taken from the Two Treatises, entered into the political consciousness of many Englishmen.”⁶ Despite their heavily Lockean character, Dunn altogether misses these pamphlets as indicators of the spread of Lockean ideas, precisely because they do not mention Locke by name. As a victim of unicontractarianism he does not recognize as Lockean those arguments that do not explicitly deploy Locke’s name.

Richard Ashcraft and M. M. Goldsmith appear to be the first scholars to appreciate the importance of Political Aphorisms and its progeny; if their conjecture as to the author of the pamphlets deserves any credit, then we have some suggestive evidence regarding the transition from Grotian to Lockean Whiggism. According to Ashcraft and Goldsmith, an eighteenth-century tradition attributed one of this family of pamphlets to Daniel Defoe. They find no clear evidence supportive of this attribution, although they find none against it either. They do find verbal and thematic similarities to known pamphlets by Defoe, especially his “Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England, Examined and Asserted,” a 1701 production characterized by them as “one of Defoe’s most radical and Lockean tracts.” In sum, they find Defoe a “plausible candidate” for author of Political Aphorisms.⁷

The suggestion of Defoe as author is intriguing, for, as we have already seen, Defoe penned an earlier, Grotian pamphlet in defense of the revolution. If Defoe authored both the Grotian and the Lockean pamphlets, it would suggest that an adherent of the one set of principles could easily segue into the other, despite the considerable theoretical differences between them. Several similarities between the two philosophies, as well as some important features of the practical situation in which the pamphlet were written, would help account for the ease of transition. As already noted, Grotius and Locke both give central place to rights and to contract, although their doctrines on these matters differ in many important ways. Perhaps more immediately important, the Lockean argument, once available, had certain advantages over the Grotian argument in the polemical circumstances. The Grotian doctrine requires that the revolution be defended in terms of many historically contingent and hotly contested issues. What was the character of the “original contract”—if it made sense to speak of such a thing—in English history? What powers were reserved to the people under it? Locke’s doctrine does not require any such dependence on the historically contingent in order to defend the revolution. The powers conveyed to rulers in Locke’s theory are not ascertained via actual historical investigation but via a conjectured rational reconstruction. The historically eigentlich is more or less irrelevant. Thus Locke makes available a rationale for resistance much more within the reach of all peoples, no matter what their particular histories might have held. Locke’s position, precisely because of this universality, was decidedly less appealing to some, but it held an obvious attraction for those facing the polemical task of propounding a persuasive defense of 1688 in the face of the historical ambiguities of the English past exploited by some and the theoretical countermoves exploited by others.⁸ In any case, whether Defoe was the author of Political Aphorisms et.al. or not, the basic point is the same; he initially wrote a pamphlet stamped with Grotianism, but sooner or later he started to make Lockean arguments instead, or in addition. By 1701, in “The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England,” Defoe had embraced Lockean principles. Moreover, the strong presence of Locke in Defoe’s most famous product, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, has been frequently noted.⁹

The flurry of excitement that prompted the reprinting of these various plagiarisms was the continuing controversy over the “revolution principles” of 1688–89, brought to a head by a sermon preached on November 5, 1709, at St. Paul’s Cathedral—in the heart of London, a center of Whig sentiment—denouncing 1688 and reasserting the old doctrines of “the utter illegality of resistance.”¹⁰ Not merely the location but the timing of Dr. Henry Sacheverell’s sermon was bound to make Whigs take notice: the fifth of November was traditionally celebrated as the anniversary of the arrival of William of Orange and was thus an occasion for prorevolutionary sentiment. It was as though an American orator had used the Fourth of July to denounce the Declaration of Independence. The Whigs who controlled Parliament began impeachment proceedings against him that culminated in a trial in February 1710. This trial sparked a more intense debate over the principles of 1688 than had occurred since the revolution itself. A “pamphlet war, pro and con, raged throughout this period, and indeed for many months following the trial.”¹¹

LOCKEAN WHIGGISM: “AN ARGUMENT FOR SELF-DEFENCE”

Among the pamphlets that appeared during the Sacheverell uproar was one that along with Political Aphorisms and its reprints, forms an instructive part of the story of Locke’s rise to prominence among the Whigs. The pamphlet, entitled An Argument for Self-Defence, contains many curious features, chief among which is its uncertain authorship and date of composition. The title page announces that it was “written about the year 1687, [and] never before published.” The original published version bears the date 1710. The pamphlet is prefaced by an anonymous note purporting to explain the discrepancy in dates: “You are busy at present inquiring whether any manner of resistance to the supreme magistrate is lawful, which will excuse me in publishing the remains of a manuscript discourse of a worthy person deceased”¹² (the reference to the Sacheverell controversy is unmistakable). We would appear to have, then, a manuscript written before the Glorious Revolution by an anonymous “worthy person,” now dead, published in 1710 by another anonymous (and presumably worthy) person, whom we might call the pamphlet’s sponsor. The subtitle of the pamphlet, furthermore, presents it as “offered to the consideration of the gentlemen of the Middle-Temple,” one of the inns of law in London. The invocation of the Middle Temple was especially apt in 1710, for it was a traditionally Whig establishment and some of its members were heavily involved in the Sacheverell trial, including four of the seventeen members of the Articles Committee that brought charges against Sacheverell.

It is obvious that the title of the work, written from the perspective of 1710, is the product of the sponsor, not the author. At least some of the footnotes must be likewise. For example, one note quotes a passage from a sermon delivered in 1705, well after the purported date of composition. Another note says, “If the author had been so happy as to have lived to the Revolution . . .” This note not only proves that the sponsor added notes to the text, but perhaps supplies some of the basis on which the sponsor dates its composition to 1687; if he knew that the author died before the revolution, it surely could have been written no later than 1688. Likewise, it could probably have been written no earlier than 1687, for it contains a reference to abuses by a king that might justify resistance: “There are . . . instances in which ‘tis possible for a king to betray his trust, endeavouring to subvert and extirpate the laws and liberties of his people, by assuming and exercising a power of dispensing with the laws he is to govern by, and making use of the force of the community in standing armies, against the liberty of the subject, back his own arbitrary proceedings.”¹³ The dispensing power and the use of standing armies became an issue under James II only in 1686–87, when he dispensed with the laws against dissenters and Catholics.¹⁴

The sponsor must then have composed some of the notes, but probably not all of them. Toward the end of the pamphlet, the author states, “I know I ought not to cite any more authorities; but . . .” All the earlier citations of authority appear in footnotes, and therefore the author must have written most of the notes. The sponsor apparently does not fulfill the standards of modern editorial practice, for he leaves us uncertain what is original and what has been added. There is even a passage in the text itself that must derive from later than the putative date of composition:

But to be better satisfied, that the happiness of one people becomes the envy of their neighbours; from this difference, that one has good laws duly executed, the other none at all, or at least subject to the prince’s pleasure; why are we here in England in a better condition than the subjects of France or Denmark? . . . We here enjoy the fruits of our honest industry, every one under his vine and fig tree, solicitous for nothing but the happiness of her that derives these blessings on us. In short, . . . peace and quietness [are] the effect of good laws, and a just temperament of power.¹⁵

The “her” from whom these blessings derive can, in the context, be no one other than the “prince” whose “just temperament of power” supplements the effects of “good laws.” But England had no female “prince” in 1687. Indeed, only with the accession of Queen Anne, in 1702, does this reference make sense. More than that, the entire passage, of which only an excerpt has been quoted here, points not toward 1687, with its superheated atmosphere of disorder and sense of threat to English liberty, but to the more settled and prosperous postrevolutionary period; it is hardly likely, for example, that a writer of the temperament of the author of the Argument would speak of the 1680s as a period of “success abroad,” but the decades after the revolution might well be so described.

Either our sponsor falls very far short of proper editorial standards, or, perhaps, the whole business is a kind of hoax. Although I cannot definitively rule out the first alternative, I believe the second the more likely. A composition date of 1687 can make sense for this pamphlet only if its author was John Locke or somebody who had access to Locke’s Two Treatises, for this pamphlet, no less than Political Aphorisms, Vox Populi, and The Judgment of Whole Kingdoms, contains a thoroughly Lockean argument. It is unlike any Whig writings of the revolutionary period other than Two Treatises.

The Argument for Self-Defence shares with Locke not only the superficial similarities that more standard Whig contractarian writings do, but goes almost as far as Vox Populi in its borrowing of language from Two Treatises. It begins with the same transcendent natural law principle of “no harm” with which Locke began his argument in the Second Treatise. It nonetheless derives, just as Locke did, a natural law right to use force against others. Although the author does not use the term, clearly he has in mind Locke’s “strange” executive power of the law of nature. Such a power existed, the author affirms, “before the forms of government were fixed in the world.” The law of nature mandates not political life but rather the executive power of the law of nature. Where everyone had this power was “a state of equality [that] I call a state of nature.” A little later in the pamphlet the author defines the state of nature more precisely as “such a state of equality where there is no superior power on earth, to which a man on any injury received or threatened may have recourse for relief,” precisely the way Locke defined it in Two Treatises. Therefore, for the author of the Argument, as much as for Locke, the state of nature is not primarily a condition existing in the mists of time, but rather exists wherever “two men are without this common judge.”¹⁶

The state of nature is a condition “which had abundance of inconveniences”—strikingly, the very term Locke used to so describe it. The reasons for those “inconveniences” are precisely the same as the ones Locke details in sections 124–26 of the Second Treatise, and presented in the very same order as Locke’s version. According to Locke, “self-love will make men partial to themselves.” According to the Argument, “self-love is apt to make us partial.” The solution is to “fix on some standing rule which should be the nature of right and wrong between man and man”—a clear echo of Locke’s “standing rules . . . by which every one may know what is his.” Human beings enter civil society “the better to be preserved in their lives and properties”; Locke uses almost the same words in Two Treatises: “Men . . . enter into society only with an intention in every one the better to preserve himself his liberty and property.”¹⁷

Given all the premises they have in common, it is no wonder that the author of the Argument draws the same conclusions as Locke does regarding the impossibility of absolute and arbitrary power and the legitimacy of revolution when rulers violate their trust. It is lawful, the Argument concludes, for the people “to resist unlawful force with force . . . when their laws are cancelled or in apparent danger of it; and consequently their estates, lives, liberties, and all that is valuable in this world, subjected to the arbitrary decrees of one person, armed with the force of the society.” In this, the Argument’s author briefly restates some of Locke’s main conclusions in his chapter “Of the Dissolution of Government.”¹⁸ Both authors affirm the right to resist rulers quite without regard to any specific constitutional provision or original contract.

The Argument, in sum, differs altogether from the mass of Whig writings discussed earlier; unlike them, it takes the Lockean approach to the issues of 1688. Even the brief summary presented here shows that, like Locke, the Argument endorses the five doctrines later adumbrated in the American Declaration of Independence but mostly absent from the Grotianist Whig writings more characteristic of the English revolutionary moment.

The parallels in doctrine and especially in language and terminology between Locke and the Argument are so precise that it is unthinkable that the author was not either Locke himself or someone who wrote with Locke’s text at hand. Locke surely did not write the text as it comes to us, for it contains references which postdate his death; even assuming that the sponsor added these later materials, it still seems unlikely that Locke wrote the Argument. Although the text contains many phrases similar, if not identical, to phrases in Two Treatises, nonetheless, in style the pamphlet differs quite markedly from Locke’s writings. The syntax is far simpler and more straightforward than Locke’s highly Latinate prose. The Argument employs a stylistic device that I cannot recall seeing in Locke, the conclusion of paragraphs with partial sentences that are completed at the beginning of the next paragraph. Quite apart from any consideration of this sort, the sponsor affirms that the “author” did not live to see the revolution. That of course leaves Locke out of it, if anything the sponsor says deserves credence.

It is even more unlikely that someone else wrote the Argument before Two Treatises was published. Peter Laslett has convincingly demonstrated Locke’s secretiveness with the manuscript of Treatises in the years just before the Glorious Revolution. He probably did not have the text with him in the Netherlands, but had left it behind when he went into exile, under a code name with some trusted Whig friends. If Laslett’s conjecture about the history of the manuscript is correct, very few men knew of its existence, and they and Locke considered it something dangerous, not the sort of thing to be adapting for casual inclusion in one’s papers. This was not long after the trial and execution of Algernon Sidney, an event that Locke apparently watched from a distance, and his friends from a bit closer.¹⁹ Moreover, in its reference to events from 1686–87 the text echoes parts of the Second Treatise that were most likely added after Locke reclaimed his draft on his return to England after the revolution. The Argument, in other words, mimics the entire text of the Second Treatise, which was not completed until after 1688, thus suggesting strongly that 1687 is an impossible date of composition, even by someone who had Locke’s manuscript in his desk. Of course, the possibility that one of Locke’s friends prepared the Argument cannot be entirely excluded, but the weight of probability seems much against it.

Far more likely as author than Locke or some person using Locke’s manuscript is the so-called sponsor as author himself. The Argument, I think, is a great hoax, composed, probably in 1709–10, by someone with a fine knowledge of Two Treatises and backdated to 1687. The feature of the pamphlet that ties it most clearly to the sponsor also speaks forcefully against Locke. As already noted, the title and dedication of the work must derive from the sponsor rather than the putative author of 1687, for the title is written from the vantage point of 1710. The most striking feature of the text, apart from its very Lockean argument and phraseology, is its practice of appealing to legal writers, especially writers on common law, as authorities for the arguments put forward. By far the most widely cited authority in the text is John Fortescue, author of the fifteenth-century dialogue on the common law, De Laudibus Legum Angliae. This is a book Locke refers to in passing in section 239 of the Second Treatise, but, as Laslett comments, “there is no evidence that [Locke] ever possessed or read” Fortescue or other legal writers mentioned by Locke in his published writings. The use of these writers in the Argument far surpasses anything in any of Locke’s known works; it fits perfectly well, however, with the addressees of the pamphlet, the Whig common lawyers of the Middle Temple.

Locke himself argues far more like a natural lawyer than a common lawyer. He is much more likely to invoke the authority of Richard Hooker than of Coke or Fortescue; he eschews history and precedent in favor of nature and reason. He has little use for the original contract or the ancient constitution so often embraced by Whig lawyers. The author of the Argument, in other words, manipulates a genre of literature for which Locke apparently had little sympathy, and of which he perhaps had little knowledge. And that genre just happened to be the very genre best suited to appeal to the audience to whom the pamphlet was dedicated. It is difficult not to conclude that the same person who dedicated the pamphlet to the men of the Middle Temple in 1710 also wrote it for them, and in the same year.

The strongest evidence linking the Argument to 1687 is the reference to the controversy over the dispensing power and the standing army. The former was not at issue in 1710 and the latter was no longer so clear an issue, for William had instituted a standing army and most of the Whigs had acquiesced. The historical reference is clearly to the years just before the Glorious Revolution, and that suggests the Argument was composed then. However, such references are also consistent with the hoax hypothesis. James’s use of the dispensing power and his efforts to build a standing army were among the most notable abuses charged against him, and it would require no more than passing knowledge of the events of 1687–88 to incorporate these concerns into the pamphlet in order to give it an air of historical authenticity.

But why the great hoax? That the author left the pamphlet anonymous is no surprise, for most of the pamphlet literature of the age was. A composition date of 1687 not only predates the revolution but, interestingly, also predates the publication of Two Treatises. The dating points toward a reasonable conjecture as to the purpose of the hoax. If Locke’s chief style of thinking—rationalist, ahistorical, and nonlegalist—meant that he was relatively untouched by the common law tradition, the obverse was true as well: the common lawyers found Locke’s mode of thought uncongenial, even if they shared some of his conclusions.²⁰ The author of the Argument, however, reproduces the main lines of Locke’s political theory, with one important addition—the implicit claim that this line of argument is consistent with or founded in some of the greatest authorities on the common law, Fortescue and the anonymous authors of Doctor and Student and The Book of the Mirror of Justices.²¹ The Argument, it seems, was written by someone trained in the law, most probably a member of the Middle Temple, and yet one thoroughly familiar with and sympathetic toward Locke.²² Its aim: to contribute some Lockean thoughts to the renewed debate on “revolution principles” stirred by the Sacheverell trial and, more significant in the long run, to win the lawyers to Lockean principles by convincing them of the congruity of those principles with their beloved common law writers. The careful backdating of the text to 1687, several years before Two Treatises, would leave the impression that the political principles defended therein stand entirely independent of any Lockean rationalism.

Although Locke’s philosophical style ran counter to common law modes of thinking, there were elements in Locke’s thought that made a reconciliation with the lawyers seem promising. Both Locke and the lawyers, for example, affirmed the rule of law, and tended to oppose royalist absolutism. Locke, moreover, framed his political teaching in terms of the triumvirate of rights—life, liberty, and estate—that already played a major role in the common law. By the time Blackstone became the most authoritative voice of the common law tradition about a half century later, Lockean principles had clearly made great headway in penetrating the common law mind, for Blackstone, if not a strictly orthodox Lockean, took much from his philosophic predecessor.²³

The Argument itself is part of the story of how Locke came by 1750 to be the Whig thinker, and it points toward another sphere in which Lockean principles could and did spread, the common law. It appears, in this case, at least, that the triumph of Locke was accomplished by something like a conspiracy, but however much that may have been the case here, that cannot have been so altogether. Nonetheless, it is certainly striking that among the earliest writings adopting and spreading the Lockean philosophy were these anonymous pamphlets, at least one of which, Political Aphorisms and its clones, was exceedingly popular in the eighteenth century, and which never once mentioned Locke’s name, despite their clearly derivative character.

“CATO’S LETTERS”: A LOCKEAN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

A decade after the Sacheverell controversy, the most remarkable piece of English political writing since Locke’s Two Treatises exploded on the scene. Here was testimony to Locke’s success in giving form to a major statement of Whig theory by 1720. In that year John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, writing as “Cato,” began the newspaper series known as Cato’s Letters. Itran in the press into 1723, went through several bound editions, and came to stand as a key document in the development of Opposition or radical political thought in both England and America. It was unprecedentedly popular in its own time, to judge by Cato’s own testimony in his “farewell” letter in July 1723: “I have with a success which no man has yet met with (if I regard the number of my readers, and the sale of these papers) carried on a weekly performance, under this and another title for near four years.”²⁴ Trenchard and Gordon’s estimation of their success has been confirmed by scholars. “The letters themselves were immensely popular, occasioning a huge amount of applause and criticism and ‘were to prove for nearly three years among the most troublesome thorns that pricked the vulnerable sides of the British ministry,’ ”²⁵ Cato attracted such a wide audience, and vexed the Walpole ministry so painfully, because he set his thoughts before the public in the wake of the great South Sea Bubble Scandal of 1720, a scandal that implicated political personages up into the higher reaches of the court and that Walpole did his best to stonewall. Topical as the provocation for beginning the Cato series was, Trenchard and Gordon did not limit themselves to issues immediately related to it, but allowed themselves to range over the full field of “civil and religious liberty.” Their audience, moreover, may have come to hear denunciations of the South Sea Company’s directors, but it stayed to hear the rest. Unlike many topical political writings, Cato’s Collected Letters remained a vital work for many years after the directors met their final reward (or punishment), and it appealed to readers as far-flung, and in as different circumstances, as the colonial Americans. In England Cato’s Letters remained a work with a steady, if insular, readership. As late as 1774, for example, substantial excerpts from Trenchard and Gordon went into James Burgh’s manual of reform and opposition, Political Disquisitions.²⁶

It would not be too much to say that the revolution in the historiography of the American founding captured by the phrase “republican synthesis” was triggered by the rediscovery of the role of Cato in helping shape the political vision of the Americans.²⁷ Cato was, according to Bailyn, “most important” within the Opposition tradition that “dominated the colonists’ miscellaneous learning and shaped it into a coherent whole,” giving it a “coherent intellectual pattern.” According to Bailyn, “the writings of Trenchard and Gordon ranked with the treatises of Locke as the most authoritative statements on the nature of political liberty and above Locke as an exposition of the social sources of the threats it faced.”²⁸ To support his claims, Bailyn supplied a long list of pamphlets produced by the Americans during the revolutionary era in which Cato figured as a prominent authority. Bailyn likewise discovered many instances of the extensive use of Cato without attribution, a common eighteenth-century phenomenon we have already noticed.²⁹ Pocock found the writings of Trenchard and Gordon to be “some of the most widely distributed political reading of the contemporary American colonists.” Shalhope, speaking for the synthesizers as a whole, found Cato to be “of the utmost importance in the creation of American republicanism.”³⁰

Recognition of the role of Cato is not limited to partisans of the new republican historiography, either. Forrest McDonald found that Cato was “widely read by the Americans” and was an “important . . . source of republican thought” for them. Ronald Hamowy, a critic of the republicans, nonetheless concedes that Cato had a “position of preeminence . . . as revolutionary tracts in the colonial struggle against the Crown.” Thomas Pangle, another strong critic of the synthesizers, conceded that Cato was an important bridge by which political ideas crossed the Atlantic.³¹

The republican sponsorship of Cato’s revival indicates that the issues surrounding Trenchard and Gordon are complex. Although historians sympathetic to a non-Lockean interpretation of Cato are responsible for calling him to our attention, Cato is nonetheless important to the story being told here precisely for the opposite reason, that he is a major figure in the rise of Lockean Whiggism. Nonetheless, there are features of Cato’s thought that, if not anti-Lockean, are not particularly Lockean either. It is these that have led Pocock and the others to find Cato a bearer of the very different classical republican or civic humanist tradition of political thought. This, I will argue, is a quite mistaken grasp of Cato’s thought, but the Letters do provide an apt test case for the republican hypothesis in its various forms. Cato does not stand for the triumph of republican over Lockean or liberal thought, but rather for the development of a genuine and immensely powerful synthesis between Lockean political philosophy and the earlier Whig political science. The infusion of the latter elements misled Pocock et.al. into believing Cato to be an alternative to Locke. Trenchard and Gordon were, on the contrary, above all syncretistic thinkers who were able to solidify a new kind of Whiggism by creating the aforementioned new combination. They thus produced the form of Whiggism that became authoritative for the Americans preceding and immediately following 1776.

Cato’s credentials as a partisan of the revolution are entirely unimpeachable. Trenchard had himself been one of the main supporters of William in 1688, going so far as to lend the new monarch a very large sum of money. Moreover, Cato regularly and persistently defends the legitimacy of 1688. The “late Revolution” stands on the [true] “principles of government,” which “lie open to common sense.” Only “hirelings” who would “betray” their country “for a sop” would deny the “maxims” of the revolution.³² Cato never hedges, as the Bill of Rights did, as to the deposition of James; it was no “abdication,” but rested on the “principle of people’s judging for themselves, and rejecting lawless force.”³³ He has no patience for doctrines of divine right monarchy³⁴ or absolute and unbounded submission, or absolute and arbitrary monarchical power.³⁵ The claims of the Jacobites move him only to rage. Cato can think of no better examples of factious and treacherous actions than the string of policies pursued under the Stuart monarchs.³⁶ To him James II clearly exampled a tyrant who attempted to exercise “usurped powers.”³⁷

On occasion, one finds in Cato language reminiscent of the old Whig arguments—the deeds of 1688 defended in the manner of 1688: “The late King James did . . . violate and break the fundamental laws and statutes of this realm, which were the original contract between him and his people.”³⁸ But for the most part we find a thoroughly Lockean defense. Surely there is nothing of the Grotian themes so prominent in the literature of 1688–89. Even when Cato deploys the concept of the original contract, as above, he does not use it in the Grotian way typical of the 1680s; the very question of whether a right to resistance exists at all depends not on the original contract but rather on whether the king has done something deserving of resistance, or even of overthrow.³⁹ Apart from these rather un-Grotian echoes of the doctrine of the original contract, moreover, we see nothing of the most characteristic Grotian themes. In nearly one thousand pages of essays, Cato never once betrays the kind of interest in the law of nations that forms the very core of Grotius’s concerns.⁴⁰ Indeed the central Grotian doctrine of the jus gentium never appears in Cato; accordingly absent is Grotius’s characteristic manner of treating the natural law. As opposed to the clear tracks of Grotianism in most of the literature of 1688–89, there is, in fact, no compelling reason to suspect that Trenchard and Gordon had ever read the Dutch jurist’s magnum opus. (Trenchard, a very widely read man, probably had, but Grotius leaves no stamp on Cato’s thinking.)

Cato adheres to an “unquestionably Lockean” political philosophy. As Ronald Hamowy points out, Cato’s style of argumentation is definitely Lockean, for it employs the “kind of speculative reasoning” characteristic of Locke.⁴¹ Although Cato frequently cites historical examples, he does not use history in the manner of the seventeenth-century parliamentary or Whig thinkers, as a source of standards of right, nor does he appeal to the closely related common law arguments. As striking as the use of common law authorities by the author of the Argument for Self-Defence is Cato’s failure to give them any place at all. He never once mentions the heroes of the common law, Fortescue, Bracton, and Coke, nor does he appeal to common law cases or principles. He proceeds in nothing like the manner of the author of the Argument. Cato is a Lockean not merely in the general sense that he endorses ideas of contract and so on—what Bailyn calls “the commonplaces of the Whig tradition.”⁴² He is a Lockean in the much more specific sense that he endorses the same five Lockean doctrines contained in the American Declaration of Independence but not in the non-Lockean Whig literature of the seventeenth century.⁴³

Cato’s political philosophy begins exactly where Locke’s does: “All men are naturally equal.” Locke, almost identically, begins his attempt “to understand political power right” with the observation that “the state all men are naturally in [is] a state . . . of equality.”⁴⁴ The Declaration of Independence echoes both in its “all men are created equal” passage. Locke and Cato surely understand human equality identically; in Locke’s words, it means that “all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another”; no one has authority over another by nature (or divine appointment). That is, exactly Cato’s explication of equality, too: “None ever rose above the rest but by force or consent: no man was ever born above all the rest, or below them all.”⁴⁵ Cato suggestively identifies “nature” as the “kind and benevolent parent” of humanity, an anticipation perhaps of the “nature’s God” the Declaration seems to identify as the “Creator.” Cato—in this case Gordon—appears to have Locke’s Treatises open before him as he writes his essay “Of the Equality and Inequality of Men,” for he paraphrases rather closely the immediate sequel in Locke’s text. Locke supports his claim about equality with the following reason:

There being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one among another without subordination or subjection.

That passage becomes this in Gordon’s text:

Nature is a kind and benevolent parent; she constitutes no particular favorites with endorsements and privileges, above the rest; but for the most part seeds all her offspring into the world furnished with the elements of understanding and strength, to provide for themselves.

Cato’s restatement shows a more original mind than those at work in Vox Populi or the Argument, but the connection to Locke’s text is just as clear.⁴⁶

This condition of equality, affirmed in Locke, Cato, and the Declaration, is explicitly called by Locke and Cato a “state of nature,” that state being precisely the condition in which there is no authority, no regular government.⁴⁷ Moreover, both Locke and Cato identify the original state, the natural state of equality, with a state of freedom. According to Locke, the “state all men are naturally in . . . is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions, and persons as they think fit.” Cato says much the same: “All men are born free.”⁴⁸

Cato explicitly endorses the corollary of human equality or the state of nature, government as artifact—as he titles one of his essays, “All Government Proved To Be Instituted By Men.” No government comes from nature or God. “It is certain, on the contrary, that the rise and institution or variation of government, from time to time, is within the memory of men or of histories; and that every government, which we know at this day in the world, was established by the wisdom and force of mere men.” Locke’s point in his discussion “of the beginning of political societies” is just the same; the only way that government comes to be is that men make it.⁴⁹ The result for both is the desacralization and demystification of politics. “Most of those who manage” government, says Cato, “would make the lower world believe that there is I know not what difficulty and mystery in it, far above vulgar undertakings.” This, however, is mere “craft and imposture.” In Cato’s view, government is “of all the sciences . . . the easiest to be known.” The people may be ignorant of the “principles of government,” but they are easily grasped once one understands government as artifact. “What is government, but a task committed by all, or the most, to one or a few, who are to attend upon the affairs of all?” Political society is an artifact produced by originally free and equal human beings; it follows that “the publick” is nothing “but the collective body of private men.” The public is not the corpus mysticum of Fortescue, Suárez, or Filmer.⁵⁰ No trace of Aristotelian organicism remains in Cato, nor much of theocentric natural law.

About one hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson made many of the same points, in language that contained traces of Cato’s earlier polemic. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he expressed his commitment to the Cato-like project of “arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves.” Like Cato, Jefferson called for “the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.”⁵¹ Cato, following out the implications of the thought that government is nothing but an object made for the purposes and interests of the governed, had been one of the first great champions of freedom of speech, including the freedom to speak critically of rulers. For Cato, the people have every right to look into the conduct of their governors, for the world of politics is a human affair through and through and does not reflect the hand of God.⁵²

If government is an artifact, its makers construct it for a purpose. Cato follows Locke and anticipates the Declaration of Independence in finding the standards for measuring government in the purposes implicit in its “institution”: “To know the jurisdiction of governors, and its limits, we must have recourse to the institution of government, and ascertain those limits by the measure of power, which men in the state of nature have over themselves and one another.” Cato understands the purpose behind the institution of government in the familiar Lockean manner: the securing of rights.

The entering into political society, is so far from a departure from his natural right, that to preserve it was the sole reason why men did so; and mutual protection and assistance is the only reasonable purpose of all reasonable societies. To make such protections practicable, magistracy was formed, with power to defend the innocent from violence, and to punish those that offered it; nor can there be any other pretence for magistracy in the world.⁵³

In the preceeding, Cato reproduces the essentials of the teaching on the “ends of political society” found in Locke:

But though men when they enter into society, give up the equality, liberty, and executive power they had in the state of nature, into the hands of the society, to be so far disposed of by the legislative, as the good of the society shall require; yet it being with an intention in every one the better to preserve himself his liberty and property; (for no rational creature can be supposed to change his condition with an intention to be worse) the power of society . . . can never be supposed to extend further than this common good; but is obliged to secure every one’s property.⁵⁴

Cato thus accepts three distinctively Lockean thoughts that together distinguish him from the pre-Lockean Whigs. The standards for judging government are to be ascertained from the performance of making it. The performance, however, is not some actual historical event, but a rational reconstruction of “the true original” of government, based on a theoretical grasp of the “natural condition” of humanity and of what rational beings would do in that situation. The claim is not that actual historical humankind, perhaps blinded by “monkish ignorance and superstition,” did make government in the way described. Finally, both Locke and Cato understand the end of the making in terms of rights-securing (or in Locke’s idiosyncratic terminology, the preservation of property). In Cato’s succinct phrase, “No government ought to take away men’s natural rights, the business and design of government itself being to defend them.”⁵⁵

Unlike the Whigs, who spoke in terms of the ancient constitution or of an historical original contract, history has little to do with Cato’s theory of the origin of government. The chief reason for that is the same as Locke’s: rights are inalienable, and human beings, no matter what they may actually have done, can never subject themselves or their descendants to a more extensive, absolutist, or arbitrary power. “Liberty is a gift which [human beings] receive from God himself; nor can they alienate the same by consent.” Again, Cato (this time Trenchard) must have been writing with Locke’s text open before him, for he loudly echoes Lockean language. “No man has power over his own life, or to dispose of his own religion; and cannot consequently transfer the power of either to anybody else: Much less can he give away the lives and property of his posterity, who will be born as free as he himself was born, and can never be bound by his wicked and ridiculous bargain.”⁵⁶

The natural rights for the sake of which “governments are instituted among men” also provide the foundation for political power. “Every man in the state of nature had a right to repel injuries, and to avenge them; that is, he had a right to punish the authors of those injuries, and to prevent their being again committed.” Cato thus follows Locke in affirming a natural executive power of the state of nature. “The right of the magistrate arises only from” this natural right to enforce the law of nature.⁵⁷

As should be clear from the discussion thus far, Cato also accepts the fourth Lockean doctrine enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. “Consent,” says Cato, is “the only foundation of any government.” Cato understands the consent in the Lockean and not in the old Whig way: it is not the consent of some ancestors at the beginnings of the regime, but the consent of each and every human being, for each is “born as free” as every other and can only accept the burden of government for him or herself.⁵⁸

Since government is made by consent, it can be unmade by withdrawal of consent, upon proper cause. “When [the magistrate] exceeds his commission, his acts are as extrajudicial as are those of any private officer usurping an unlawful authority, that is, they are void.” Again, Cato-Trenchard develops his theme not merely in a generally Lockean way but by directly paraphrasing his philosophic authority: “But here arises a grand question, which has perplexed and puzzled the greatest part of mankind. . . . The question is, who shall be Judge whether the magistrate acts justly, and pursues his trust?” The parallel to Locke’s formulation is apparent: “Here, ‘tis like, the common question will be made, who shall be judge whether the prince or legislature act contrary to their trust?”⁵⁹

Cato does not merely raise the question in a directly Lockean way, but he answers it in that manner as well.

If neither magistrates, nor they who complain of magistrates, and are aggrieved by them, have a right to determine decisively, the one for the other; and if there be no common established power, to which both are subject; then every man interested in the success of the contest, must act according to the light and dictates of his own conscience. . . . Where no judge is nor can be appointed, every man must be his own; that is, where there is no stated judge upon Earth, we must have recourse to Heaven.

Cato has here followed Locke not only in answering, in Locke‘s phrase, that “the people shall be judge” but in describing the act of judgment as an “appeal to Heaven.”⁶⁰

Cato, in other words, is not merely repeating “commonplaces of the Whig tradition” or employing “traditional contractual terms,” but is giving quite precisely Lockean versions of doctrines that differ considerably from those in the Whig tradition. On the important issue of dissolution, for example, Cato also follows Locke and differs from most of the Whigs. Cato refers to an instance of the “recourse to Heaven” and says of it, “The government becoming incapable of acting, suffered a political demise: the constitution was dissolved; and there being no government in being, the people were in the state of nature again.”⁶¹

Cato’s understanding of the central concept of rights parallels, even if it does not quite reproduce, the philosophic subtleties of Locke’s discussion. Although Cato has much of Hobbes in him, especially in his understanding of human psychology, he accepts the Pufendorf-Locke view that rights inherently raise a moral claim. His most important consideration of rights occurs in a letter titled “Inquiry into the Source of Moral Virtue.” His approach to morality is exactly like that of Locke and not at all akin to earlier writers. “Morality or moral virtue, are certain rules,” not habits or perfections of character, as Aristotle or Thomas would have it. Those moral rules provide for the “mutual convenience or indulgence, conducive or necessary to the well-being of society.” Like Grotius, and Locke after him, the sphere of morality is the relatively narrow sphere of social virtue, or justice. The content of morality is social, but the beginning point is not: “Every man knows what he desires himself.” In this context Cato calls attention only to the relatively harmless desires “to be free from oppression, and the insults of others, and to enjoy the fruits of his own acquisitions, arising from his labour or invention.”⁶² Visible in this list, of course, is the Lockean triad of rights.

Cato fails to mention in this place the other, less benign desires he elsewhere details, however. Men are the source of evil for each other because “every man loves himself better than he loves his whole species.” Like Hobbes, he believes that self-love takes the form of a “natural passion for superiority. . . . All men have an ambition to be considerable, and take such ways as their judgments suggest to become so. Hence proceeds the appetite of all men to rise above their fellows, and the constant emulation that always has been, and always will be, in the world, amongst all sorts of men.” Whatever any man possesses, he “would have more” and not necessarily feel bound to be too nice in how he acquired it. “Men are very bad where they dare, and . . . all men would be tyrants, and do what they please.”⁶³

Human desires, if simply left to themselves, would overturn rather than promote the “well-being of society.” The natural desires must undergo a transformation before they can become moral rights. “Since he can have no reason to expect this indulgence to himself, unless he allow it to others, who have equal reason to expect it from him,” the desires one has for oneself must be checked, in effect, for the possibility of mutual acceptance, or “mutual convenience.” Only those desires that others could “indulge” can become moral right. Desires must be trimmed to the mutually acceptable; what is left is moral right. The desire to dominate others thus cannot survive this process, but the desire to “be free from oppression” can.⁶⁴

The natural right that Cato uses as shorthand for all the others is liberty, which he understands as “the power every man has over his own actions, and his right to enjoy the fruit of his labor, art and industry.” But this power and right, subject to the process of mutual recognition, is right only “as far as it hurts not the society, or any members of it, by taking from any member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys.” More than a century before John Stuart Mill, Cato formulates Mill’s libertarian principle. “Thus, with the above limitations, every man is sole lord and arbiter of his own actions and property.”⁶⁵

The requirement of potential mutuality not only reveals which desires can be affirmed as rights, but also reveals “the common interest of all, who unite together in the same society, to establish such rules and maxims for their mutual preservation, that no man can oppress or injure another, without suffering by it himself.” The same asocial character of the desires that requires mutual recognition also requires, for the establishment of right, government with the power to rule and enforce rules in order to secure the rights so discovered. It is not enough to identify which desires can be mutually validated; there must also be a device to keep the unvalidated desires in check.⁶⁶ Human beings thus came to understand rights and the proper ground of government simultaneously.

“CATO’S LETTERS”: NATURAL RIGHTS AND THE OLD REPUBLICANISM

Despite Cato’s Lockean understanding of the issues of political philosophy, the chief sponsors of the various forms of the new republicanism claim Cato for their own. Pocock finds Cato “unmistakably Machiavellian and neo-Harringtonian.” Wood identifies Trenchard and Gordon as preservers and transmitters of “classical republican . . . ideals.”⁶⁷ If, as Pocock and Wood appear to believe, their civic humanist or classical republican tradition is very different from Lockean liberalism, then either Cato must not be one of their republicans, or he must be very confused indeed, for he is most definitely a Lockean. Although Pocock and Wood claim Cato, it must be said, neither presents a very strenuous case for classifying Trenchard and Gordon among the classical or civic humanist republicans. Indeed, it is quite easy to show that Cato does not share the core commitments of Pocock’s and Wood’s republicans.⁶⁸

Despite the long series of modifications Pocock traces in his civic humanist tradition, as it wended its way from Aristotle and Polybius to Machiavelli, Harrington, and the neo-Harringtonians, the spine holding it together as a tradition is its Aristotelian core. “Civic humanism is a type of thought . . . in which it is contended that the development of an individual toward self-fulfillment is possible only when the individual acts as a citizen; that is, as a conscious and autonomous participant in an autonomous decision-taking community, the polis or republic.”⁶⁹ It is striking, however, that Cato never says anything to this effect, and says a great deal that does not sit well with it. For example, this notion of citizenship as the arena for “fulfillment of the self” comports poorly with Cato’s acceptance of the Hobbesian-Lockean doctrine that the “natural state of man” is a “state of nature,” that is, a state without political life of any kind. That doctrine was, and was intended to be, a denial of the Aristotelian doctrine of the zoon politikon, man as political animal. For Cato, accordingly, the foundations of political life are not high and “self-fulfilling” but necessitous and defensive. Cato endorses the view of a certain “great philosopher” who “called the state of nature, a state of war” and concludes that because that is true, “human societies and human laws are the effect of necessity and experience.”⁷⁰ For Cato, government is extraordinarily important, but not extraordinarily high. Far better is the private life. “Happiest of all men, to me, seems the private man.” Human happiness requires not active citizenship but “manumission” from the many “impositions, frauds, and delusions, which interrupt” it. Happiness has more to do with liberty, understood as negative liberty, than with citizenship.

Cato nowhere endorses Pocock’s idea of liberty as “freedom from restraints upon the practice” of political life. Cato’s idea of liberty, it will be recalled, is really quite different and quite Lockean: “By liberty, I understand the power which every man has over his own actions, and his right to enjoy the fruit of his labour, art, and industry, as far as by it he hurts not the society, or any members of it.” To say that Cato does not endorse the core concerns of the civic humanist interpretation is, of course, not to deny that Cato does contain many of the elements Pocock, in his chain-reasoning way, assimilated to his civic humanist tradition. Cato clearly does contain themes such as the mixed and balanced constitution, the balance of property, the various threats to the constitution deriving from standing armies and parliamentary corruption, and, finally, the preference for republicanism itself. These elements are better understood in Cato as parts of his synthesis and extension of Lockean political philosophy and Whig political science.

Bailyn was far closer to the truth when he placed Cato among the extreme libertarians. “True and impartial liberty is therefore the right of every man to pursue the natural, reasonable, and religious dictates of his own mind; to think what he will, and act as he thinks, provided he acts not to the prejudice of another.” Private liberty is primary; “free government,” or public liberty, “is the protecting the people in their [private] liberties by stated rules.” According to Cato, “public happiness [is] nothing else but the magistrate’s protecting of private men in their property and their enjoyments.” Public happiness resolves itself into private, domestic happiness, and the public sphere itself is merely instrumental to the private. The public, in other words, is not the sphere of human self-realization, but the means to protect and preserve the private, which is the sphere of happiness, so far as there is such.⁷¹

At a deeper level yet, the entire sphere of public and private liberty serves “the great principle of self-preservation, which is the first and fundamental law of nature.” Liberty serves preservation because “where liberty is lost, life grows precarious, always miserable, often intolerable. Liberty is to live upon one’s own terms; slavery is, to live at the mere mercy of another; and a life of slavery is . . . a continual state of uncertainty and wretchedness, often an apprehension of violence, often the lingering dread of a violent death.”⁷² All this has even less to do with Pocock’s vivere civile than Shaftesbury’s or Marvell’s earlier opposition to absolutism.

In accord with his understanding of life and liberty, Cato appreciates property in the purely Lockean manner Pocock denies was part of the civic humanist tradition as modified by Harrington. According to Pocock, property for Harrington and Harringtonians was not dynamic, productive, or capitalist, but existed for the sake of political participation. Property was to provide “the opportunity to act in the public realm or assembly, to display virtue.”⁷³ On the contrary, Cato emphasizes the role of political liberty in encouraging labor and commerce, which in turn produce plenty. His understanding of the contribution of labor is not only like Locke’s, but cast in Locke’s very language. “An hundred men . . . employed [in agriculture] can fetch from the bowels of our common mother, food and sustenance enough for ten times their own number. . . . Without labor the human condition [is] abject and forlorn.” Security of property is crucial for Cato for the same reasons it is for Locke: it is the means to preservation and it is the means to induce human beings to engage in productive but painful labor. “Men will not spontaneously toil and labour but for their own advantage, for their pleasure or their profit, and to obtain something which they want or desire.” Liberty, which leaves people free to labor and in possession of the fruits of their labor, serves the cause of “making life easy and pleasant. . . . There will be always industry wherever there is protection.” Liberty also secures commerce as the means whereby people can voluntarily exchange what they do not want for what they do.⁷⁴

All the vices of commercial society that Pocock’s civic republicans excoriate are quite acceptable to Cato, including the great bugbear, luxury. It is good that people be induced “to believe, what they will readily believe, that other things are necessary to their happiness, besides those which nature has made necessary.” The freedom from necessity that human labor power can bring about soon leads, in “very quick progression,” to the so-called vices of luxury: “emulation, ambition, profusion and the love of power.” Unlike Pocock’s republicans, Cato is far from damning those developments. “All these, under proper regulation, contribute to the happiness, wealth, and security of societies.” Even without the general benefit acquisitive commerce brings with it, Cato pronounces it to be “natural to men and societies, to be setting their wits and hands to work, to find out all means to satisfy their wants and desires, and to enable them to live in credit and comfort.”⁷⁵

It should be apparent also that Cato gives no brief to Wood’s conception of classical republicanism and the organic polity. Cato is a throughgoing individualist, methodological and ontological. He has no doubt that individuals and their rights are the reality, that society, government, and political power are derivative and, in a sense, artificial. Organismic notions such as Wood attributes to his classical republicans and, by extension, to Cato would be considered by the latter to be the kind of obfuscation or “impositions” that interfere with the proper realization of human liberty.

An especially revealing test case for Wood’s conception of classical republicanism lies in his notion of that kind of public good that correlates with the republican ideal. According to Wood, “the sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed the essence of republicanism.” According to Wood, “this common interest was not . . . simply the sum or consensus of the particular interests that made up the community.” Consistent with “the traditional conception of the organic community,” he finds instead that the common good “was rather an entity in itself, prior to and distinct from the various private interests of groups and individuals.” Wood caps off his description of the chief political aspiration within the so-called Catonic tradition with the claim that “ideally, republicanism obliterated the individual.”⁷⁶

Apart from the commitment to the public good, Cato accepts none of this, as he announces in the title of one of his essays, “Every Man’s True Interest Found in the General Interest.” The common interest is not something different from or opposed to the interest of the individual, but is just what Wood said it was not, “the sum or consensus of particular interests”—so long as we qualify that with the distinction between real and long-term interest, on the one hand, and merely apparent and short-term interest, on the other.

The publick very often suffers by their not consulting their real interest, and in pursuing little views, whilst they lose great and substantial advantages. A very small part of mankind has capacities large enough to judge of the whole of things; but catch at every appearance which promises present benefit, without considering how it will affect their general interest; and so bring misfortunes and lasting misery upon themselves to gratify a present appetite, passion or desire.⁷⁷

How could it be otherwise for the Lockean Cato, in whose conception human beings voluntarily accept the bonds of political life solely for the sake of the benefits that accrue to them? “The entering into political society, is so far from a departure from his natural right, that to preserve it was the sole reason why men did so. . . . The sole end of men’s entering into political societies, was mutual protection and defence.” And Cato’s decisive response to Wood’s common good separate from and even opposed to individual goods: “Mutual protection and assistance is the only reasonable purpose of all reasonable societies. To make such protection practicable, magistracy was formed . . . nor can there be any other pretense for magistracy in the world.” “The business of government,” Cato affirms, is “to secure to every one his own,” not to require its sacrifice.⁷⁸ Because he understands republicanism as asserting an anti-individualist ideal, Wood identifies the “important” liberty in his Whig-republican tradition primarily as “public liberty.” But as we have already seen, this does not correspond to Cato’s view, in which the primary meaning of liberty is individual, and public liberty is but a means to the securing of that.

Wood’s notion of the requirements of the common good not only runs counter to Cato’s normative theory regarding the rightful ends of political power, but against his considered judgments on the motives of human action: “The chief inducement which men have to act for the interest of one state before another, is, because they are members of it, and that their interest is involved in the general interest.” Patriotism, the devotion to one’s particular polity, is collective self-interest. “Men will be men, in spite of all the lectures of philosophy, virtue, and religion.”⁷⁹ At times Cato speaks as if he decries these hard facts about human nature,⁸⁰ but the first principle of his political science requires that he make peace with them. Cato concludes his essay “Of the Weakness of the Human Mind; How Easily It Is Misled” with a paraphrase of a famous Machiavellian dictum—not the soft civic humanist Machiavelli, but the tough-minded realist: “I shall take the liberty of considering man as he is, since it is out of our power to give a model to have him new made by. . . . We must not judge of men by what they ought to do, but by what they will do.” Given “man as he is,” Cato resolves that “all wise and honest men are obliged, in prudence and duty, not only by lectures of philosophy, religion, and morals, to fashion this sovereign of the universe into his true interest, but to make use of his weakness to render him happy, as wicked men do to make him miserable.”⁸¹ Not preachments about self-sacrifice, but prudent indulgence of self-interest.

Cato goes very far in his accommodation of self-interested passion. “Dry reasoning has no force”; nor does the common moral advice to “subdue our appetites, and extinguish our passions.” Advice like that comes “from men, who by these phrases shewed . . . their ignorance of human nature.” The passional root of the human situation appears to be this: “Every man loves himself better than he loves his whole species.” Cato is perhaps more selfish than Locke: “Of all the passions which belong to human nature, self-love is the strongest, and the root of all the rest; or, rather all the different passions are only several names for the several operations of self-love.” Human beings are “naturally innocent,” yet because of the passions, they “fall naturally into the practice of vice.” Yet, Cato pronounces with all his authority, self-love is not only “the parent of moral . . . evil,” but the sire of “moral good” as well.⁸² Cato, in other words, bears little resemblance to, and has not much respect for, Wood’s self-denying and moralistic republicans.

Cato’s Lockean or even Hobbesian conception of humanity forecloses for him the kind of moral position attributed to him by Wood. Not only are human beings moved primarily by self-love, but, as Cato shows in a remarkable analysis, they are driven by nature to be thoroughly “selfish and restless.” The key is the familiar Lockean idea of pursuit of happiness. “Men are never satisfied with their present condition, which is never perfectly happy; and perfect happiness being their chief aim, and always out of their reach, they are restlessly grasping at what they can never attain. Just as with Locke, the idea of happiness constitutes human being as futural being. “His content cannot possibly be perfect, because its highest objects are constantly future.” That is to say, human beings are driven by their hopes, expectations, and anticipations; “it is the enjoyment to come that is only or most valued. . . . The only real happiness that we have is derived from nonentities.”⁸³

The present always falls short of the happiness we seek, and therefore “every man would have more.” The goods we possess are not only insufficient in themselves, but insecure in present possession. Not even “the possession of all [would] quiet the mind of man, which the whole world cannot fill.” The desires are ever expansive: “He who has most wants most; and care, anxious care . . . is the close companion of greatness.” Cato’s human nature is acquisitive, insecure, consumed by desire and anxiety. “Human life is a life of expectations and care.” Cato develops yet more strongly than Locke himself the theme in Locke that Strauss captured in the memorable expression, “Life is the joyless quest for joy.”⁸⁴

Not surprisingly, Cato draws conclusions from his conception of human nature far removed from Wood’s notion of virtuous citizenship: “Men are very bad where they dare, and . . . all men would be tyrants, and do what they please.” Cato’s politics, accordingly, is a politics not of virtue but of laws and institutions. Neither morality nor religion by themselves have much effect in making men good. Therefore, they “ought to establish their happiness, by wise precautions, and upon solid maxims, and, by prudent and fixed laws, make it all men’s interests to be honest.”⁸⁵ Good behavior requires laws with teeth, and these require government. Government, the concentration of society’s coercive power, can in its turn be a source of great danger. Cato’s ultimate solution is not the public-spiritedness of the classical republicans, but devices more familiar to those who have grown up under the theory of the American constitution.

The power and sovereignty of magistrates in free countries was so qualified, and so divided into different channels, and committed to the direction of so many different men, with different interests and views, that the majority of them could seldom or never find their account in betraying their trust in fundamental instances. Their emulation, envy, fear, or interest, always made them spies and checks upon one another.⁸⁶

On the whole, among the trinity of chief synthesizers, Bailyn’s account of the Opposition tradition holds up best next to Cato’s text. Cato does indeed reveal a concern for the opposition between power and liberty, does express suspicion of the motives of power in its dealings with liberty. On the other hand, Bailyn’s account also falls short. He asserts, for example, that Cato “insisted, at a time when government was felt to be less oppressive than it had been for two hundred years, that it was necessarily—by its very nature—hostile to human liberty and happiness.”⁸⁷ Bailyn is far too single-minded in this claim. It could equally well, perhaps better, be said of Cato that government was—by its very nature—necessary for human liberty and happiness. Let us recall Cato’s approving quotation of Hobbes: a state of nature is a state of war. “Were all men left to the boundless liberty which they claim from nature, every man would be interfering and quarreling with another; every man would be plundering the acquisitions of another; the labour of one man would be the property of another; weakness would be the prey of force.” To prevent universal warfare governments arose. “Men quitted part of their natural liberty to acquire civil security,” and Cato considers it a good and necessary exchange. Power is not unequivocally bad and dangerous, but “is like fire; it warms, scorches, or destroys.” Properly conducted, governments can make a “people great and happy.”⁸⁸ Without it, there is only the misery of endless quarrel and war. Thus Cato suspects government and governors, but he sees nothing more valuable than them.

Cato’s point is not so much to denounce any and all possible governments, but to delineate a political science that will help construct governments that warm but do not scorch. Given his pessimistic view about human nature, Cato is remarkably optimistic in his hopes for what can be accomplished with sufficient political intelligence and skill. Self-interested and mostly regardless of virtue, “men are the materials for government . . . . The art of political mechanism is, to erect a firm building with such crazy and corrupt materials,” a task about which Cato is far from despairing. “The strongest cables are made out of loose hemp and flax; the world itself may, with the help of proper machines, be moved by the force of a single hair; and so may the government of the world, as well as the world itself.”⁸⁹

The difference between free and arbitrary governments does not lie in the fact “that more or less power was vested in one than in the other.” The difference has more to do with the way power is “qualified and . . . divided into . . . channels.” The structure, not the quantity, of power is Cato’s concern; he is far from being an unrelieved enemy of power. Bailyn’s emphasis on the critical and Oppositionist themes in the Opposition literature too much ignores this side of Cato as hopeful projector of “new modes and orders,” of a political science of liberty that can teach “how free governments are to be framed so as to last.”⁹⁰

“CATO’S LETTERS”: NATURAL RIGHTS AND THE NEW REPUBLICANISM

Cato does indeed devote much more space to the presentation of the chief tenets of such a political science than Locke does. But this is no indication that Cato differs from Locke. As both Locke and Jefferson made clear, Two Treatises was not intended to be a work in political science of this sort; it was rather to be an effort in political philosophy.⁹¹ Cato’s book, twice or three times as long as Locke’s, is in a certain sense more comprehensive than Locke’s, including both the main themes of Lockean political philosophy and Cato’s political science of liberty.

The republican synthesizers have been attracted to those features in Cato’s thought that present the elements of this political science. For interpreters like Pocock and Wood, these elements express a mode of thinking about politics different from and opposed to Lockean liberalism; for Cato, they represent the means to accomplish the ends of political life as delineated in the Lockean political philosophy. The political science of liberty shows how to maintain free government, and free government, in turn, provides for private liberty and security of rights. Again, none of this has anything to do with Pocock’s vivere civile or Wood’s organic polity.

But Cato’s political science does have much to do with the older Whig political science of Shaftesbury, Sidney, Marvell, and others, including Machiavelli and Harrington, who must be freed from the Pocockian civic humanist interpretation if their relation to Cato is to be clear.⁹² He decries many of the same evils they had earlier denounced, the danger of standing armies and the corruption of Parliament among them. It was these features, rather than any direct expression of the Aristotelian idea of the zoon politikon, that initially led Pocock to identify Cato as a civic humanist of the neo-Harringtonian variety. Indeed, Cato is a striking example of Pocock’s use of his radioisotopes and chain reasoning to establish the links within his tradition of civic humanism—and a striking example of its flaws and dangers.

Cato’s concern in the postrevolutionary period, in fact, had much in common with the chief concern of the Whigs in the post-Restoration era. For the most part, Charles II did not exercise powers contrary to the (Whig) constitution, but he nonetheless subverted it, the original Whigs believed, via the informal techniques of “corruption.” Cato believed Walpole was doing the same. Cato did not claim that the court was violating formal aspects of the constitution, but rather that the ministry was, again, using informal devices of corruption to threaten the freedom of the nation.

Cato uniformly speaks with praise of the English “mixed form of government.” However, “these institutions have provided against many evils, but not against all; for, whilst men are men, ambition, avarice, and vanity, and other passions will govern their actions. . . . They will be ever usurping . . . upon the liberty and fortunes of one another.”⁹³ Those in power will attempt to increase their power. Those in Parliament, who are there to check those in power, can be, in effect, bought off by appeals to their separate and private interests. They forget the public interest, which is also their abiding self-interest, in their pursuit of their “particular” interests. Cato, like the seventeenth-century Whigs of the Exclusion days, sees that informal political mechanisms can subvert the free—that is, non-absolutist—constitutional monarchy. Facing a similar situation, Cato sweeps up the Whig political science and in doing so transforms that political science in a number of important ways. Cato’s combination of Lockean political philosophy and the adapted older Whig political science gives his thought the specific qualities that led Bailyn to identify it as different from Lockean theory and led Pocock and Wood to mistakenly identify it as opposed to Lockean theory.

Cato’s political thought is genuinely more republican than either the Shaftesbury Whigs’ or Locke’s had been. But his republican leanings must be properly understood. In the first place, they remain leanings, at most, rather than a firm goal of action. Since circumstances in England are not favorable to the establishment of a genuine republic, Cato concludes that “we have nothing left to do, or indeed which we can do, but to make the best of our own constitution, which if duly administered, provides excellently well for general liberty.”⁹⁴ His political thought is thus not a call for a new or different constitution, but a presentation of some of the means for making it “duly administered.”

Cato’s republican leanings, such as they are, have little to do with Wood’s or Pocock’s preliberal traditions. Cato derives his republicanism directly from a Lockean grasp of the philosophic level of politics:

The only secret therefore in forming a free government, is to make the interests of the governors and the governed the same, as far as human policy can contrive. Liberty cannot be preserved in any other way . . . . Human wisdom has yet found out but one certain expedient to effect this; and that is to have the concerns of all directed by all, as far as possibly can be.⁹⁵

Here Cato’s republican leanings pop out into the open: the regime where “all . . . direct the concerns of all” is surely a republic. Cato here expresses an ideal significantly different from the mixed, nonabsolutist monarchy the Whigs favored and Cato endorsed most of the time. The aspiration to make the interests of the governed and the governors simply identical stands behind Cato’s republicanism. He conceives of political society as a device for serving the interests (protection of rights) of the human beings who constitute it; Cato pointedly does not understand political society in the way Whig political scientists did, as a matter of a sharing of political power among the classes or orders of society. Cato thinks in more universalistic and abstract terms.

According to the Lockean theory to which Cato adheres, government exists for the sake of securing the interests of the governed; as both Locke and Cato frequently insist, government is a trust.⁹⁶ How better to guarantee that government secures the interests of the governed than to make the two elements the same? In affirming that, Cato does indeed go beyond Locke, who favored some version of the mixed regime. Cato modifies Locke in a republican direction, through without making any real break with Lockean principles, precisely because he takes more seriously the informal mechanisms of constitutional subversion that the Whigs identified and opposed. Cato, like the Whigs and like modern political scientists, is more dubious about constitutional formalism than Locke was; Cato sees dangers to liberty even within a formally free constitution, for the executive possesses resources to turn the guardians of public liberty from their task. He therefore calls for a deeper-going effort to guard against those dangers and points toward a republic as the best means, in an ideal world, to accomplish this goal. Cato modifies both Lockean political philosophy and Whig political science by effecting a synthesis of the two.

Probably that part of Cato’s comprehensive political science that most misled Pocock and Wood is his frequent exhortations to virtue and his occasional exhortations to pursue the public good rather than, or even at the expense of, one’s individual interest. Both Pocock and Wood derive some warrant for attaching these themes to premodern political traditions from the fact that Cato himself appeals to the examples of the ancients for models of the virtue he recommends.⁹⁷

Like his republicanism, Cato’s appeal to virtue, or “public spirit,” must be properly understood. In the first place, one must not give it a one-sided emphasis. It coexists in Cato’s political thought with two other elements of an apparently different sort. Cato, as we have already seen, is no utopian about the willingness of human beings to submit their own interests to the interests of others—he even doubts the desirability of so doing.⁹⁸ Moreover, Cato conceives of politics in the spirit of the new science, as mechanistic and deterministic. “Government is political, as a human body is natural, mechanism: both have proper springs, wheels, and a peculiar organization to qualify them for suitable motions, and can have no other than that organization enables them to perform.”⁹⁹ But Cato’s exhortative appeals to virtue make sense only if the world of politics is not so mechanistic or determinist as he suggests here.

Some may resolve these competing emphases by arguing that Cato is confused, or simply contradictory.¹⁰⁰ This is an advance over the approach to Cato that fails to notice the different elements in his thought, but it does not do full justice to him either. The presence of an exhortative dimension in Cato stands in some tension, perhaps, with these other dimensions but, most important, it enters his thought as a necessary supplement to the more dominant lines of argument we have already discussed. Virtue and public spirit are responses, in the first instance, to problems Cato perceives in the basic Lockean model, difficulties perceived, again, on the basis of his synthesis of Lockean political philosophy and Whig political science. Cato’s political science takes its bearings from two partially conflicting insights. Government is a trust, set up to serve the interests of the governed, best achieved by making the interests of the governed and the governors identical. The public interest, the honoring of the trust that is government, is the interest of each and all. Perfectly rational beings would devote themselves to the public good so understood.

Nonetheless, for a bevy of reasons that Cato analyzes in some detail, human beings too often fail to notice the connection between their individual interest and the public interest. They are easily seduced into following separate and partial interests that conflict with the public interest. The directors of the South Sea Company are, for Cato, paradigmatic cases of this, but so are members of Parliament who are bought off from the guardianship of the public interest by “side-payments,” payoffs more beneficial to them individually, or at least more tangible, than their attenuated share in the public interest.

What by artful caresses, and the familiar and deceitful addresses of great men to weak men: what with luxurious dinners and rivers of burgundy, champaigne, and tokay, thrown down the throats of gluttons; and what with pensions, and other personal gratifications, bestowed where wind and smoke would not pass for current coin: . . . I say, by all these corrupt arts, the representatives of the English people . . . have been brought to betray the people, and to join with their oppressors. So much are men governed by artful applications to their private passion and interest.¹⁰¹

Cato sees clearly, therefore, that the theoretical convergence of individual and public interest does not always occur in practice, perhaps not even under extremely well-structured institutions, a well-structured institution being precisely the one that makes for that convergence as far as possible. (“The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”) Exhortations to virtue and public spiritedness come to view at this point as necessary supplements to the system of structural self-interest Cato relies on most of the time. The realm of exhortation responds to the area of slippage between true and apparent self-interest in the large sense, a reminder of the real convergence between the individual’s interest and the public interest.¹⁰²

In part, it is an attempt to mobilize another kind of psychological mechanism than calculation of interest, whether long- or short-term. The possibility of the appeal to virtue, as something different from an appeal to enlightened self-interest, depends on one of the modes of self-love Cato identifies. “All men in the world are fond of making a figure in it. This being the great end of all men, they take different roads to come at it, according to their different capacities, opinions, tempers and opportunities.”¹⁰³ To “make a figure” means for Cato to stand well in the eyes of others—in particular, to be recognized as superior to others. The desire to win the praise of others is thus one of the more or less powerful self-interested motives that move people. That virtue, or dedication to the public good, should win the praise of others is not difficult to explain, for it is surely in the interest of each that all the others subordinate their particular interests to the common interest.¹⁰⁴ Thus Cato, despite his acceptance of an almost Hobbesian psychological account of human nature, appeals to, believes in the truth of, and finds a basis for some efficacy in virtue or public spirit.

Although he sometimes leaves a contrary impression, Cato makes clear in his most systematic statement on the subject that he does not understand it in anything like the classical manner, nor does he in fact decouple it from self-interest. In his essay “Of Publick Spirit” Cato is quite explicit in identifying the limits of his appeal to this virtue: “Publick spirit . . . is the highest virtue. . . . It is a passion to promote universal good, with personal pain, loss, and peril: It is one man’s care for many, and the concern of every man for all.” But he immediately retreats from this self-abnegating notion of public virtue. “If my character of public spirit be thought too heroic . . . I will readily own, that every man has a right and a call to provide for himself, to attend upon his own affairs, and to study his own happiness. All that I contend for is, that this duty of a man to himself be performed subsequently to the general welfare and consistently with it.”¹⁰⁵ Virtue and public spirit are less anomalous within Cato’s scheme than they might appear, for they are necessary complements to his more usual reliances.

Cato’s position seems confused, or at least confusing, because he can state that liberty is good because without it “life grows precarious”—that is, liberty is important as a means to life, a thought Locke had earlier endorsed—and at almost the same moment he can praise those for whom “love of liberty is beyond the love of life.” Cato knows and commends many “heroes of liberty” who willingly risked life for the sake of liberty.¹⁰⁶ Much of his exhortation is meant to encourage the kind of spiritedness in his readers that will, for some causes, continue to produce such willingness. His American readers certainly responded positively to this side of Cato.

Cato seems to say that preservation is the end and liberty important as a means and, at the same time, that liberty is a good for the sake of which preservation can or should be risked. This not only seems contradictory, but the latter of his two positions seems to place him outside or beyond standard images of Lockean bourgeois morality, according to which rational calculation and industry in the pursuit of comfortable preservation appear to be the moral peak. Cato’s evocation of apparently non-Lockean moral qualities is not only a response to the tension or difficulty in Lockean philosophy described above, but, more important, an underlining, an italicizing, of a dimension of Locke’s position too quickly overlooked in the standard reading of the “bourgeois” Locke.

The bourgeois Locke, or rather, to use Hegel’s phrase, the Locke who lays the groundwork for understanding the moral character of the sphere of civil society (the sphere of workers and owners—Locke is not especially a partisan of capitalists), is not the whole of Locke. That self-constituting self that endows human beings with rights that other animate beings lack; that removes human beings from the flux of being and supplies them with stability, unity, and responsibility over time; that genuinely gives them dominion over a world reduced to raw material; that self also removes them from being merely pieces in a mechanistic world, blindly seeking to conserve their own motion in preservation of their lives. They become free beings, able to give shape and form to their lives, able to suspend their desires and act on reason. Freedom is a means to preservation, but it also expresses the unique human differentiation. Human beings stand out from the rest of nature precisely as free, self-directing beings.

As Cato puts it, for human beings liberty is not only “the means of preserving themselves, [but also] of satisfying their desires in the manner which they themselves choose and like best.”¹⁰⁷ Human beings are never free simply to disregard desires, especially not the desire for happiness itself, but the very generality of the idea of happiness gives them a large sphere of self-direction. As essentially free beings, humanity always knew that slavery was not only life-threatening—actually, it isn’t always life-threatening—but was above all degrading. As Locke himself said in Two Treatises, slavery is a “vile” as well as a “miserable” state.¹⁰⁸ Human being is the being capable of freedom and thus destined to be free. Civil and political freedom, even at the risk of life, is the necessary completion or fulfillment of the Lockean philosophy of the self. Cato’s importance lies in part in bringing this side of Locke forcefully to the fore, revealing that the Lockean moral orientation is not so unrelievedly bourgeois as it is sometimes taken to be. Cato thus helps to show how, on the basis of the new philosophic and moral understanding characteristic of Lockean modernity, a certain rapprochement with an older moral sensibility is indeed possible. In this sense, Cato does give the impression that he brings into the modern world something very old, but he does so only because there is a deep ground within Lockean modernity for those apparently older moral commitments.

To many, Locke without his traditionalist veneer, the transcendent natural law, seems to leave humanity nothing but comfort-seeking mechanisms, a philosophically problematical and morally repellant conclusion. Cato helps us see how one-sided this understanding of Locke is. It is true that for Locke, human dignity no longer rests on humanity as imago dei nor as uniquely rational being. Human dignity lies instead in being a self, and therefore free. Human dignity thus understood paves the way for the new republicanism Cato portrayed and the Americans later attempted to institute.¹⁰⁹

Unlike classical republicanism, the new republicanism takes its bearings from universal human qualities, that is, personhood, and thus is fundamentally egalitarian. Each human person is recognized as a rights-bearer, a being possessing that which gives and demands value, a being possessing dignity. The new republicanism is not of necessity politically democratic, but Cato reveals something of the dynamic that pushes in that direction in his underlying yearning for a fuller republicanism than was possible in his England.

Unlike classical republicanism, the new republicanism honors labor and the works of the private sphere in general. The sphere of interaction with nature in the service of (comfortable) preservation is not only given more weight within the new republicanism than in the old, but its inherent dignity is respected; labor, production, and even consumption are no longer mere needs of the less-than-human in humanity, the merely animalic, but themselves express human freedom. Only human beings labor, and thereby reproduce in the outer world the deep truth of their inner world—the process of appropriation and transformation by which they become owners of themselves.

Cato is less confused than comprehensive. He brings forward certain implications within Locke that Locke himself had left muted, and he brings together the Lockean political philosophy with the Whig political science, thereby producing a new natural rights republicanism: popular, commercial, pacific but not pacifist, public spirited but not public at core, ambivalent about government as necessary but dangerous, egalitarian but not levelling. In a word, Cato outlines a republic that seeks a tense harmony between private individual liberty and public or political liberty—that is to say, a liberal republic.

Cato’s political thought thus has a comprehensiveness and integrity that make it an impressive achievement. When we consider further that both Trenchard and Gordon were fine and spirited writers, able to pass on to a general audience some of the results of the best philosophical thinking of the age, we can well understand how Cato came to be so successful. And with Cato’s success, especially in America, we see another step along the path toward Locke’s political philosophy becoming, for Whigs, and especially for American Whigs, what Thomas Jefferson called “the common sense of the matter.”¹¹⁰