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Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions: The American and French Cases in British Perspective*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

J. G. A. Pocock
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Extract

THIS LECTURE IS DESIGNED AS AN EXPERIMENT IN resynthesis rather than deconstruction. It is conventional for both the modern and the post-modern to assume that the dead weight of some tradition or paradigm is controlling our minds and that its burden has as our first move to be cast aside. This assumption is often justified, and we do often find ourselves under just such a necessity. But the assumption may itself become a convention, and when it does we are obliged to begin every intellectual exercise with the construction of a straw man; if there is no Old Man of the Sea we are called on to invent him. This can be tiresome and time-wasting; I have myself been cast as Old Man because someone was needed to play the part, often enough to know that it can be a nuisance. But a more important consideration is that if we regard every complex pattern of interpretation, established because it has necessarily taken time to build it up, as no more than an encumbrance to be demolished, we may end by impoverishing ourselves rather than enriching our resources of speech and written language.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1989 , pp. 81 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1989

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Footnotes

*

This is the text of the 1988 Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics on 19 October 1988.

References

1 For an earlier use of the term, see ‘Clergy and Commerce: the Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in Ajello, et al. (eds), L’Eta dei Lumi: studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, Naples, Jovene Editore, 1985, vol. 1, pp. 523—68.Google Scholar

2 Cf. Clark, J. C. D., English Society, 1660–1832, Cambridge, 1986.Google Scholar

3 Cf. ‘Thomas Hobbes, Atheist or Enthusiast? His Place in Restoration Debate’, forthcoming; a paper presented to the Hobbes (1588—1988) Research Colloquium, University of New South Wales, July 1988.

4 Jacob, Margaret C., The Newtonians and the English Revolution, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1978.Google Scholar

5 This subject is being studied by Mr John Marshall of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

6 Sher, Richard B., Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: the Moderate Literati of Edinburgh, Princeton, 1985.Google Scholar

7 Cf. ‘The Fourth English Civil War: Dissolution, Desertion and Alternative Histories in the Glorious Revolution’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1988, pp. 151—66.

8 For more on this, see ‘The Significance of 1688: Some Reflections on Whig History’, Andrew Browning Memorial Lecture, Balliol College, Oxford, 1988; forthcoming.

9 For their debate see Robertson, John, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, Edinburgh, 1986 and my The Machiavellian Moment, Princeton, 1975, ch. 12.Google Scholar

10 Pangle, Thomas L., The Spirit of Modem Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke, Chicago University Press, 1988.Google Scholar

11 For more on this theme, see ‘States, Republics and Empires. The American Founding in Early Modern Perspective’, Social Science Quarterly, LXVIII, 4, 1987, pp. 703–23, repr. in Terence Ball and Pocock, J. G. A. (eds), Conceptual Change and the Constitution of the United States, Lawrence, Kansas, 1988; The Politics of Extent and the Problems of Freedom, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, 1988.Google Scholar

12 Ohmori, Yuhtaro, ‘The Artillery of Mr Locke: The Use of Locke’s Second Treatise in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1764—76’, Hopkins, Johns Ph.D. dissertation, 1988.Google Scholar

13 Sainsbury, John, Disaffected Patriots: London Radicals and Revolutionary America, Montreal and Kingston, McGill/Queen’s University Press, 1987.Google Scholar

14 Pocock, , Virtue, Commerce and History, Cambridge, 1985, chs. 8—9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Peterson, Merrill D. and Vaughan, Robert C. (eds), The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: its Evolution and Consequences in American History, Cambridge, 1988.Google Scholar

16 Venturi, Franco, Settecento Riformatore, IV (1): La Caduta Jell’ Antico Regime; igrandi stati dell’Occidente, Turin, 1984.Google Scholar

17 The bibliography is unmanageably large. A sensible recent treatment is that of Lienesch, Michael D., New Order of the Ages: Time, The Constitution, and the Making of Modern American Thought, Princeton, 1988.Google Scholar

18 See further: Virtue, Commerce and History, ch. 10, and Pocock (ed. and intro.), Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishers, 1987.

19 Skinner, Andrew S., A System of Social Science: Papers Relating to Adam Smith, Oxford, 1979 Google Scholar; Haakonssen, Knud, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith, Cambridge, 1981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar