As noted in the May Freeman, American revolutionaries mixed classical-republican and liberal political languages somewhat indiscriminately. Republicanism posited a relation between power and property in which independent proprietors were the bulwark of liberty. English critics of post-1688 Whig mercantilism deployed republican ideas, leading many historians to paint them as “agrarians” resisting capitalism, modernization, and social change. (“Social change” routinely looms large when historians wish to discount human agency.)
John Taylor’s writings show how an anti-mercantilist critique could be a liberal critique, despite detailed agreement with more strictly republican analyses. His Inquiry (1814), for example, was a belated reply to John Adams’s Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States (1787ndash;88), in which Taylor explicitly rejected Adams’s archaic-republican “social balance” between legally entrenched social orders. For Taylor, even such republican terms as “corruption” and “virtue” had different meanings in the American context. More . . .
–A NEW article by Joseph R. Stromberg