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Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Version of the 1790's (Anson G. Phelps lectureship on early American history)

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Appleby's book demonstrates that the ascendancy of the Jeffersonian Republicans in 1800 was in itself perhaps as revolutionary as the War for Independence. The classical republican ideas of rule by virtuous elites, adherence to tradition, deference to superiors, etc all subscribed to by the Federalists were attacked as being contradictory with the aims of the Revolution.

Appleby argues very persuasively that the rise of market relations was also very destabilizing to hierarchical social and economic relations. Throughout the 18th century the idea that an economic system in which individuals acted in their own self-interest would yield a result most beneficial to the greater public gained widespread hearings. In the Republican view such a system required property-owning men free from such restraints as tariffs, excise taxes, and any other market interferences which was contrary to the mercantilist ideas of the Federalists.

The French Revolution was a catalyst in the formation of Republican political societies in the 1790s where Federalist policies were roundly attacked. Even the successful prosecution of several Republican newspaper editors under the Federalist-backed Sedition Act of 1798 could not stem the attacks on Federalist ideas of privilege and elite control. The author contends that the rise of the Republicans was nothing less than the triumph of an idea of the essential equality of all men.

The commercial enterprise in which most colonials were engaged was the production of foodstuffs for the European market. Other enterprises arose to support this increased production by farmers. This very short book ends with the election of 1800 before the rise of industrialism and such distinctions as employer versus employee. A concluding chapter would have been most welcome that addressed the Republican response to a more complex economic world. I did enjoy the book but I do believe that not examinig its ideas in the context of the 19th century is a shortcoming.

Although this book is seriously burdened with deep mistakes and mischaracterizations, it is very important for its fundamental analysis of the Jeffersonian Republicans. In sharp contradiction to the works of "Civic Humanist" republican revisionists such as J.G.A. Pocock and Lance Banning, Appleby portrays the Republicans as Lockean liberals who support natural rights and flourishing commerce. Although she mistakenly attributes these ideas solely to Locke, she is right on the mark. The thrust of this argument comes at the tail end of the work, and much of what precedes it is not worth your time. Despite the fact that she rebuts one application of the falacious Pocockian "republcan" paradigm, she does not have the background to realize that quite it is the theory itself that needs to be disregarded, not simply its applications. For instance, she accepts Pocock's absurd assertion that John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon were "classical republicans," revealing that she obviously did not examine their actual works, as they are loaded with very Lockean concepts of natural rights and individualism. In addition, she also accepts the silly idea that the civic humanist tradition prevailed in America until well into the Revolution itself. To contradict this view, it is only necessary to read the works of Bernard Bailyn, which she cites, but appears not to have read in their entirety. Lastly, she delves rather deeply into the evolution of English society and economic thought, something which might seem odd if not for her previous work on the subject. Althought much of this is interesting, she ends up setting forth a narrative that presses the social and economic influences of the age farther than is warranted. Nevertheless, this work is one of the sole pieces that can be found with an accurate and reliable account of what the Jeffersonians really stood for. Hopefully it will open the way for more work on this sadly abused subject.

Jeffersonian democratic faith was sabotaged by the Second Great Awakening and by an unparallel industrial growth: the Awakening cut dry the secular faith in human order and the industrial growth further divided workers from employers. This is what Joyce Appleby nostalgically perceived that happened after the glorious victory of American new Republicanism powerfully emerged in 1800. Her attempt to jointly explain the economic and ideological transformation experienced in the U. S. at the turn of the century have the tendency to present the two opposing political orientations as highly cohesive in themselves. In 1790s the Federalists defended the traditional concept of society of distrust in the human being in which laws are to maintain a certain social order and in which virtue was the quality of unselfish concern for community. The Jeffersonians, in the other hand, promoted the idea of limiting government and engendering egalitarian goals. One of Appleby's main contributions is the idea that the Jeffersonians were open to economic development. Indeed, economic development and political democracy complemented and reinforced each other.

Appleby's assertion rejects traditional American history. Advanced economic development has usually been portrayed as encouraged by the elitist Federalist Party for the benefit of a small socio-economic elite. The democratic Jeffersonian Republicans, on the other hand, have traditionally been identified as agrarians and as inheritors of an English country tradition. It is against this backdrop of historiography that Appleby's works makes more sense and appears to contribute. To make her point forcibly understood, Appleby make it clear that Englishmen did not "travel lightly" when they left their English ports toward America. They carried with them the ideas of a conservative society. The ideas that motivated colonial leaders were ancient ones going back to classical texts of politics. Classical theory emphasized the fragility of society; that society was composed by the talented few and the ordinary many. Appleby asserts that there were indications of strong Europeanization: to lose one's access to property at a time of rising land prices and the consequently breach among classes. And it was not until their idea of being an Englishman differed from the one held in Britain than Americans were forced to defined theirs separately. Their idea of an unselfish virtuous man evolved into the concept of self-interest benefiting society by the natural balance of collective interest. The advanced ideas of free trade that would provide the foundation for American capitalism were at the base of this Jeffersonian utopia too. Undoubtedly, Appleby's book reflects a movement against the fascination of modern liberals for the civic unselfishness of Classical Republicans.

Despite Appleby's well-organized lines of arguments, even the non-expert may notice some inconsistencies. First, the reader may be struck by the ideological (and emotional) unity Federalist had in 1790s, as presented by Appleby. How could a politicized group of leaders felt completely pessimistic about the future of their new nation at once? My understanding of James Madison's attitude toward the future was not a bright one. He believed that excess of population would lead to large numbers of poor landless, and this does not seem to compliment Appleby's Jeffersonian positivism. Secondly, even Jeffersonian positivism was not monolithic since John Taylor of Caroline was fearful of the minority self-interests. Thirdly, Jeffersonian strong opposition against the national bank and to the growth of national economy is not convincingly reconciled with their acceptance of national capitalism in Appleby's book.

This study showed a new liberalism that developed at the begining of the American Republic.Ms.Applby shows how the Jeffersonian Republicans rejected the old"country party" ideology of their English ancestors and developed a more libertarian and socially liberal view of society.She shows how the Republicans rejected the old ideas of order,deference,and class that shaped colonial society.She also points out how the Jeffesonians rejection of mercantilism began an "american" ideal of free trade,low taxes and sufferage for the common man.The study points out how the Jeffersonians combining of diverse elements:merchants,tradesmen,and wealthy plantation owners were bound not by an egalitarian ideal of equality,by by an ideal of equality of opportunity within the new american nation.Overall an excellent study.

Appleby begins this series of (Phelps) lectures with an anecdote about an 1865 attempt to create a Cambridge University lectureship in American studies. It was defeated, she says, because the dons feared the republicanism undergraduates might spread among the general public, at a time when British republicanism in the form of the Reform League looked particularly unsettling to the ruling class. Richard Cobden remarked that no "Oxford of Cambridge undergraduate...could have pointed out Chicago on a map even though it was a city that indirectly fed a million Englishmen."

Appleby shares with Cobden a sense of the importance of economic facts that was probably lacking among educated Englishmen in 1865. She argues in these lectures that both the facts of economic change and the revolutionary changes in economic thinking pioneered by Adam Smith were more legitimately the property of Jeffersonian Republicans than of Hamiltonian Federalists. In spite of a tradition that would cast Jefferson as an anti-capitalist agrarian, Appleby says the real division was between a party that looked forward (with Smith and Jefferson) to progress based on natural, rational self-interest, and a backward-looking "classical" republicanism (she doesn't mention Adams, but this seems to fit him like a glove) that believed a "virtuous" (in the old sense of politically-disinterested) elite was needed to balance the power of the interested democratic majority. This classical republicanism, she implies, was based on a no-longer-valid zero-growth (and therefore zero-sum) economy. Suspect in Europe, this Hobbesian/Malthusian vision was completely invalid in the U.S., where the frontier "stood Ricardo's iron law of rents and wages on its head."

An interesting element of Appleby's argument is that she's talking about intellectual history, not economic determinism. While she acknowledges the influence of material changes, she's really interested in the "Ideas [that] joined a group of established elite reformers to a network of political interlopers," resulting in the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800. Appleby doesn't completely sustain this point, I think; especially in the sense that she doesn't identify the chicken and the egg. But it's her characterization of the Federalists as upholders of the mainstream tradition that's most interesting. The Federalists, she says, "never lost their posture of protecting known truths about civil society. They knew that it was their opponents who were treading unfamiliar paths and they appealed to history and common sense to prove them wild visionaries." Their problem, of course, was that something was really happening that changed the game and their opponents had a better grasp of it. But that may be more because they were conservatives than because they were elitists. A function of nostalgia rather than ideology.

"Classical theory," Appleby says, "emphasized that civil society was fragile...that there were two orders of men -- the talented few and the ordinary many -- ...[and] a properly balanced constitution would balance the powers of these two groups." Colonial America, she says, experienced "pervasive Anglicization." While she admits there was a "large bulge in the center of the social pyramid," Appleby suggests that the economic security, "stability and well-being of the great majority of colonists permitted resistance to turn into rebellion and ...revolution." A desperate, violent, starving mob, she implies, would have pushed the middle class toward the British.

Appleby makes an interesting observation about our use of words whose meanings have changed over time. Liberty, she says, had three "intellectual contexts," and the one we're most familiar with today ("liberty as personal freedom") was the one American colonists would have been least focused on -- at least until 1776. "Before the Revolution," she says, "liberty more often referred to a corporate body's right of self-determination." This distinction seems to blur the difference between individual versus group rights on the one hand, and political versus economic concerns on the other. But maybe that's part of the ongoing issue with these ideas: that we're never that clear about how these various ideas about individual rights and group responsibilities ought to play together.

The book was physically in good condition, however there was a lot of highlighting in it. Other than that, it was good.

This book really is quite good. Don't listen to the other reviewer