Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks. Edward Wortley Montagu

Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks

Champion of the People, Scourge of impious Ministers, their Tools and Sycophants, this book is presented by the Editor.”37

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But, if it is easy to appreciate the congeniality of Montagu’s views to Hollis personally, what at the level of practical politics did Hollis hope to achieve by sending a copy of the Reflections to Harvard? The question of whether or not—and if so, to what degree and in what manner—the example of classical antiquity conditioned the thinking and guided the actions of the Founders has long been the subject of dispute between scholars of the Founding Period. The easy acceptance of early twentieth-century historians that classical influence had been real and defining was rejected by, most influentially, Bernard Bailyn, who judged it on the contrary to be “illustrative, not determinative, of thought.”38 Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby accorded a place to classical republicanism in the early stages of the colonists’ struggle with Great Britain, before it yielded to the “modern republicanism” embodied in The Federalist. John Pocock, Lance Banning, Drew McCoy, and Paul Rahe have more recently tried to tip the balance of historical judgment further back to the benefit of classical antiquity, to the point where the most recent student of the subject can conclude:

It is clear that the classics exerted a formative influence upon the founders. Classical ideas provided the basis for their theories of government form, social responsibility, human nature, and virtue. The authors of the classical canon offered the founders companionship, solace, and the models and antimodels which gave them a sense of identity and purpose. The classics facilitated communication by furnishing a common set of symbols, knowledge, and ideas, a literature select enough to provide common ground, yet rich enough to address a wide range of human problems from a variety of perspectives.39

Nevertheless, the American republic sooner or later would embrace ideals and values sharply at variance with those endorsed by Montagu’s Reflections. It would place agriculture below commerce and industry; it would abandon aloof self-sufficiency and instead engage with the world in an imperial manner (albeit without the symbols of imperialism); it would rely more upon a professional standing army than upon the state militias; it would prize consumption, not frugality; and it would elevate private pleasure

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above public duty. Even so, Montagu’s book would enjoy its greatest longevity in America, an edition appearing in Philadelphia as late as 1806.

The French translation of Reflections allowed Montagu to step upon the stage of world history for a third time.40 Although published in 1793, the final chapter added by the translator, André Samuel Michel, applying the lessons of the book to the situation of France, suggests a date of composition some time in 1792, and certainly before the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793. Michel’s advocacy of a mixed constitution also perhaps suggests a date of composition before the abolition of the monarchy on 21 September 1792. However, although it was published in the midst of a revolution, this is the least revolutionary of texts. Counseling caution, Michel warns against a republic, against a citizen militia, against the de-Christianizing of the country, against any moves to extend “égalité” too far. The constitutionalism, moderation, and lack of fervor shown by Michel make his a rare and lonely voice in the tumults of 1793. His temperate observations on the impossibility of re-creating the moeurs of the classical republics in an affluent monarchy stood no chance against the stridency of the revolutionary cult of antiquity, which prized (or affected to prize) the austere totalitarianism of Sparta and the early Roman republic, and which was most vividly embodied in the paintings of David and the enthusiasm of Saint-Just for the pitiless severities of Lycurgus and Lucius Junius Brutus.41 Once again, Montagu found himself beached by the retreating tides of history.

***

What thoughts are prompted as we finish Montagu’s Reflections? In the first place, we cannot avoid the fact that Montagu’s political opinions amount to nothing more than a herd of the holiest cows of vulgar

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Whiggism: an absolute justification of the Revolution of 1688; a fondness for drawing contrasts between English “liberty” and French “slavery”; undeviating veneration for the “ancient constitution” of the common lawyers which had been handed down to the English from freedom-loving barbarians residing in the woods of ancient Germany; unreasoning suspicion of standing armies; and a tendency to reflect severely on the inveterate wickedness of the Stuart kings.42

There is nothing especially shameful about this. Very few of Montagu’s contemporaries were able to free themselves, even in part and temporarily, from the bewitchment of these Whiggish opinions; and none of them—not even David Hume—managed to do so completely and permanently.43 But, as Duncan Forbes explains, vulgar Whiggism has harmful consequences for historians and what we would now call social scientists, because it inhibits precisely the forms of thought on which those thinkers most rely:

It was the essence of “vulgar” Whiggism that the difference between free and absolute government was not one of degree, but of kind, an absolute qualitative difference, a chalk and cheese, sheep and goats type of distinction, which made any science of comparative politics or comparative study of institutions impossible. On the one hand was liberty, the government of laws not men, which was a feature of free governments exclusively; on the other, slavery and absolutism.44

The numbing effect of this Manichean creed on the comparative and historical areas of the mind explains why Montagu, although a student of republics, has no interest in or even apparently awareness of republicanism, and also why he is unembarrassed by any troubling doubts as to

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whether the examples and precepts he harvests from ancient history are applicable to a modern commercial monarchy, such as Great Britain in the mid-eighteenth century.

But, if we have to classify Montagu as mediocre in terms both of the substance of his political and historical opinions and of the intellectual equipment he brought to bear upon those opinions, then we are immediately confronted by the more stubborn and disturbing problem of explaining the durability of his book. After all, Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks had at least a walk-on part in the three great crises of the later eighteenth century: the Seven Years’ War, the War of American Independence, and the French Revolution. Montagu’s book illustrates that intriguing truth, that often in human affairs the most important causes are advanced by means of the most ordinary instruments.

David Womersley

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